SEVEN
For three awful weeks, tourists and locals will accuse nearly every girl of being a Swan sister. Any offense, any deviation in behavior—a sudden interest in boys they used to despise, spending too many nights out late, a twitch or flick of an eye that seems out of place—will make you a suspect.
But I know who the sisters really are.
Heath gives us a ride across the harbor, and when we reach the island, we all say a swift good-bye, and then Heath chugs back to town.
Bo and I don’t speak as we walk up the path, until we reach the place where the walkway splits. A mound of old buoys and crab pots that have washed ashore over the years sit just to the left of the walkway. A decomposing heap. A reminder that this place has more death than life.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “We never should have gone out there.” I’m used to the gruesome shock of death, but Bo isn’t. And I’m sure he’s starting to consider leaving this place as soon as possible. And I wouldn’t blame him if he did.
“It wasn’t your fault.” His eyelashes lower, and he kicks a pebble from the walkway. It lands in a patch of yellow grass and vanishes.
“You should get some sleep.” We’ve both been awake all night, and the delirium of exhaustion is starting to feel like a freight train clamoring back and forth between my ears.
He nods, removes his hands from his coat pockets, and heads up the path to Anchor Cottage. He doesn’t even say good-bye.
I won’t be surprised if he starts packing as soon as he gets back to the cottage.
Mom is already awake and listening to the radio in the kitchen when I walk through the back door. It’s a local station that announces storm warnings and tide reports, and today the host, Buddy Kogens, is talking about the body that authorities pulled from the water early this morning.
“This town is black with death,” she says morosely, facing the kitchen sink, her hands gripping the white tile edge. “It’s saturated with it.” I don’t answer her. I’m too tired. So I slip out into the hall and upstairs to my bedroom. From the window, I see Bo moving up the path, almost to Anchor Cottage near the center of the island. His gait is slow and deliberate. He looks back once, as if he feels me watching him, and I duck back from the window.
Something nags at me. I just can’t put my finger on it.
* * *
The afternoon sky shatters apart, revealing a swath of milky blue.
Last night we found Gregory Dunn’s body in the harbor.
This morning we watched the sunrise from the pier as his body was brought ashore.
Day one of the Swan season: one boy dead.
I slip from bed, rubbing my eyes, still groggy even though the sun has been up for hours, and dress in an old pair of faded jeans and a navy-blue sweater. I take my time. I stand at the dresser, not meeting my own gaze in the mirror on the wall, running my fingers over a meager collection of things. A bottle of old perfume—Mom’s—which I bring to my nose. The vanilla scent has turned sharp and musty, taken on the tinge of alcohol. There’s a silver dish filled with pebbles gathered from the shore: aqua and coral and emerald green. Two candles sit at one corner of the dresser, the wicks hardly burned down. And hanging by a length of yellow ribbon from the top of the mirror is a triangle piece of glass with flowers pressed between it. I can’t dredge up the memory of where it came from. A birthday gift, maybe? Something Rose gave me? I stare at it, the small pink flowers flattened and dried, preserved for eternity.
I turn and lean against the dresser, taking stock of the room. Sparse and tidy. White walls. White everything. Clean. No bright colors anywhere. My room says little about me. Or maybe it says it all. A room easily abandoned. Left behind with hardly a hint that a girl ever lived here at all.
Mom is not in the house. The floorboards groan as I walk down the stairs into the kitchen. A plate of freshly baked orange muffins sits on the table. That’s two mornings in a row she’s made breakfast. The two mornings that Bo’s been on the island. She can’t help herself, she won’t let a stranger starve, even though she’d easily let herself or me go hungry. Old habits. The social decorum of a small town—feed anyone who comes to visit.
I grab two muffins then head out onto the front porch.
The air is warm. Calm and placated. Seagulls spin in dizzying circles overhead, swooping down to the steep shoreline and snatching up fish caught in the tide pools. I catch the silhouette of Mom inside the greenhouse, walking among the decomposing plants.
I peer across the island to Anchor Cottage. Is Bo still inside? Or did he pack his bag and find a way off the island while I slept? A knot tightens in my stomach. If I find the cottage empty, cold, and dark, how will I feel? Despair? Like my gut has been ripped out?
But at least I’ll know he’s safe, escaped this town before he wound up like Gregory Dunn.
A noise draws my focus away from the cottage. A low sawing sound—the cutting of wood. It echoes over the island. And it’s coming from the orchard.
I follow the wood-slat path deeper into the island, but before I’ve even stepped into the rows of perfectly spaced trees, I can tell that things are different. The wood ladder that normally rests at the farthest row against a half-dead Anjou tree, protected from the wind, has been moved closer to the center of the grove and has been positioned beside one of the Braeburn trees. And standing on the highest rung, leaning into the thicket of branches, is Bo.
He didn’t leave after all. He didn’t do the smart thing and flee when he had the opportunity. Relief swells inside my chest.
“Hey,” he says down to me, holding on to one of the low branches. The sun makes long shadows through the trees. “Is everything okay?”
He takes several steps down the ladder, his hat turned backward on his head.
“Fine,” I answer. “I just thought maybe you’d . . .” My voice dissipates.
“What?”
“Nothing. I’m just glad you’re still here.”
He squints and wipes at his forehead. “You thought I would leave?”
“Maybe.”
The sunlight catches his eyes, making the dark green seem like pieces of emerald glass, an entire world contained within them. His gray T-shirt sticks to his chest and arms. His cheeks are flushed. I watch him a moment too long.
“Have you slept?” I ask.
“Not yet.” He smiles from one side of his mouth—his mood seems to have lifted slightly since this morning. While I was curled up in bed, sheets pulled over my head to block out the sun, he’s been out here working. Sleep probably seemed like an impossibility after last night, after what he saw. “I wanted to get started on the orchard.” He hooks a wide-toothed handsaw over a low, crooked limb then climbs down the ladder, brushing his hands across his jeans.
I hand him one of the freshly baked orange muffins. “What are you doing exactly?”
He cranes his head up to the tangled limbs above us, squinting. The scar beneath his left eye pinches together. “Cutting out any new growth. We only want the oldest limbs to stay because those are the ones that produce fruit. And see how some of the branches grow straight up or down? Those also need to go.” He blinks away from the sun then looks at me.
“Can I help?”
He sets the muffin on a rung of the ladder then lifts the hat from his head and scrubs a hand through his short hair. “If you want to.”
“I do.”
He drags out a second ladder from the old woodshed and finds another, smaller handsaw. He places the ladder against the tree next to the one he had been pruning and I climb carefully to the top, a little unsteady at first as it wobbles beneath me. Once I feel settled, I realize I’m shrouded by a veil of limbs, hidden in a world of branches, and then Bo climbs up behind me, standing one rung down. He extends the handsaw up to me and then wraps his arms around my waist, gripping the ladder to keep me from falling.
“What do you see?” he asks, his voice at my neck, my ear, and I shiver slightly at the feeling of his breath against my skin.
“I’m not sure,” I say truthfully.
“The trees haven’t bloomed yet,” he explains. “But they will soon, so we have to take out all the branches that are crowding the older limbs—the old wood, it’s called.”
“This small one,” I say, tapping it with my finger. “It’s growing straight up from a thicker branch, and it still looks a little green.”
“Exactly,” he praises. And I lift the saw, holding it to the limb. On my first stroke across the branch, the saw slips out, and I lurch forward to keep from dropping it. Bo tightens his arms around me, and the ladder teeters beneath us. My heartbeat spikes upward. “The saw takes some getting used to,” Bo adds.
I nod, gripping the top of the ladder. And then I feel the sharp stinging in my left index finger. I turn my palm up so I can examine it, and blood beads to the surface along the outer edge of my finger. When the blade slipped, it must have cut into my skin where my hand was holding the branch. Bo notices it at the same time, and he leans closer into me, reaching around to grab my finger.
“You’re cut,” he says. The blood drips down the tip of my finger and plummets all the way to the ground, six feet below. I notice Otis and Olga sitting in the swath of sun between rows, orange-and-white heads titled upward, watching us.
“It’s okay,” I say. But he yanks out a white handkerchief from his back pocket and presses it to the cut, staunching the bleeding. “It’s not that deep,” I add, even though it stings pretty good. The white fabric turns red almost instantly.
“We should clean it out,” he says.
“No. Really, I’m fine.”
This close, with his face directly beside mine, I can feel each breath as it rises in his chest, see his lips move as he exhales. His heart is racing faster than it should. Like he was worried I might have just cut my entire hand off, and it would have been his fault for allowing me to wield a saw.
He lifts the handkerchief away to inspect the cut, leaning into me.
“Do we need to amputate?” I ask lightheartedly.
“Most likely.” His eyes slide to mine, the corner of his mouth lifting. He tears off a small strip of the handkerchief, holding my hand in his, then ties the narrow piece of fabric around my finger like a makeshift tourniquet. “This should keep the finger from falling off until we operate.”
“Thanks,” I say, smiling even though it still burns. My lips so close to his I can almost taste the saltiness of his skin.
He slides what’s left of his handkerchief into his back pocket and straightens up behind me so that his chest is no longer against my back. “It’s probably safer with just one person on the ladder,” he amends.
I nod, agreeing, and he climbs down, jumping the last couple feet to the ground and leaving me weightless atop the ladder without him.
He scales back up his ladder, and we work side by side, sawing away the unwanted limbs on each tree. I’m careful to keep my fingers out of the way, and soon I feel confident with the saw. It’s a tedious, slow process, but gradually we work our way down the first row.
This becomes our routine.
Each morning we meet in the orchard, moving our ladders to a new row. Bringing the fruit trees back to life. I don’t mind the work. It feels purposeful. And by the end of the week my hands have a roughness like I’ve never felt before. My skin has browned, and my eyes taper away from the midday sun. It hasn’t rained once all week, and the summer air feels light and buoyant and sweet.
On Saturday we collect all the sawn limbs and pile them at the north end of the orchard. And just after sunset we set them ablaze.
The sooty night sky sparks and shivers, the stars dulled by the inferno we’ve created on land.
“Tomorrow we’ll cut down the dead trees,” Bo says, arms crossed and staring into the fire.
“How?” I ask.
“We’ll saw them down to stumps then burn them out from the ground.”
“How long will that take?”
“A couple days.”
I feel like I’ve been suspended in time this last week, protected from a season that comes each year like a violent squall. In moments, I’ve even forgotten entirely about the world outside this little island. But I know it will find a way in. It always does.
* * *
It takes three days to trim the two dead apple trees and one pear tree down to only stumps. And by the end of the third day, my arms can barely move. They ache just lifting them through my T-shirt in the morning.
We walk through the orchard, examining our hard work—today we will torch the three tree stumps—when Bo stops beside the single oak tree at the center of the grove, the one with the heart cut into the trunk. It looks like a ghost tree, white moss dripping from the limbs, two hundred years of history hidden in its trunk. “Maybe we should burn this one down too,” he comments, surveying the limbs. “It’s pretty old and not that healthy. We could plant an apple tree in its place.”
I press my palm against the trunk, over the etched heart. “No. I want to leave it.”
He lifts a hand to block the sun.
“It feels wrong to cut it down,” I add. “This tree meant something to someone.” A gentle wind blows my ponytail across my shoulder.
“I doubt whoever carved that heart is still alive to care,” he points out.
“Maybe not, but I still want to keep it.”
He pats the trunk of the tree. “All right. It’s your orchard.”
Bo is careful and precise before he lights the three dead trees on fire, making sure we have several buckets of water and a shovel at each tree in case we need to dampen the flames. He strikes a match and instantly the first stump ignites. He does the same to the next two trees, and we watch the flames slowly work their way through the wood.
The sun fades, and the flames lick upward from the tall stumps like arms reaching for the stars.
I make two mugs of hot black tea with cardamom then carry them down to the orchard, and we stay up to watch the fires burn through the night. The air is smoky and sweet with apples that will never bloom because these trees have reached their end.
We sit on a stack of cut logs watching the fires burn for nearly an hour.
“I heard your mom used to read tea leaves,” Bo says, blowing on his tea to cool it.
“Where did you hear that?”
“In town, when I was looking for work and found the flyer. I had asked someone how to get to the island, and they thought I was looking to have my fortune read.”
“She doesn’t do it anymore, not since my dad left.” I lean forward and pull up a clump of brittle beach grass at my feet then roll it between my palms to crush it, feeling the broken fibers before I scatter the fragments back across the ground. I have a memory of my dad walking across the island, kneeling down occasionally to pull up a gathering of dandelions or clover or moss, then rubbing them between his worn hands. He liked the way the world felt. Loam and green. The earth giving up things we often ignored. I wipe the memory away with a quick closing of my eyes. It hurts to think of him. Pain skipping through my chest.
“Do you read tea leaves?” He asks with a quirk of an eyebrow.
“Not really.” A short laugh escapes my throat. “So don’t get your hopes up. I won’t be revealing your future any time soon.”
“But you can do it?”
“Used to. But I’m out of practice.”
He holds out his mug for me to take.
“You don’t fully believe in the Swan sisters, but you believe that fortunes can be seen in tea leaves?” I ask, not accepting his mug.
“I’m unpredictable.”
I smile and raise both eyebrows at him. “I can’t read the leaves with liquid still in the cup. You have to finish it and then the pattern of leaves left inside is where your fortune lives.”
He looks down into his mug like he might be able to read his own future. “Spoken like a true witch.”
I shake my head and smile. It’s hardly witchcraft. It doesn’t involve spells or potions or anything quite so intriguing. But I don’t correct him.
He takes a long drink of his tea and finishes it in one gulp, then extends it out to me.
I hesitate. I really don’t want to do this. But he’s looking at me with such anticipation that I take the cup and hold it between both palms. I tilt it to one side, then the other, examining the whirl of leaves around the edges. “Hmm,” I say, as if I were considering something important, then peek at him from the corner of my eye. He looks like he’s moved closer to the edge of the log, about to fall off if I don’t tell him immediately what I see. I lift my head and look at him fully. “Long life, true love, piles of gold,” I say, then set the mug on the log between us.
One of his eyebrows lifts. He glances at the mug then at me. I try to keep a straight face, but my lips start to tug upward. “Very astute reading,” he says, smiling back then laughing. “Perhaps you shouldn’t make a career of reading tea leaves,” he says. “But I do hope you’re right about my future on all accounts.”
“Oh, I’m right,” I say, still grinning. “The leaves don’t lie.”
He laughs again, and I take a sip of my own tea.
Sparks dance and writhe up into the sky. And I realize how at ease I am sitting here with Bo. How normal it feels. As if this were something we do each evening: set trees on fire and laugh together in the dark.
I don’t feel the gnawing at the base of my skull that usually plagues me each summer—a ticking clock counting down the days until the summer solstice and the end of the Swan season. Bo has distracted me from all the awful things lurking in this town, in the harbor, and in my mind.
“People used to say that the apples and pears that grew on the island had magical healing properties,” I tell him, tilting my head back to watch the waves of smoke spiral upward like mini tornados. “They thought they could heal ailments like a bee sting or hay fever or even a broken heart. They would sell for twice the normal price in town.”
“Did your family used to sell them?” he asks.
“No. This was long before my family lived here. But if the orchards could produce edible fruit again, maybe we could sell it.”
“By next summer, you should be able to harvest ten to twenty pounds from each tree. It’ll be a lot of work, so you’ll probably need to hire more help.”
He says “you,” like he won’t be around to see it.
“Thank you for doing this,” I say, “for bringing them back to life.”
He nods and I touch my index finger, now wrapped with a Band-Aid. The stinging is gone, the cut almost healed. But it will probably leave a tiny scar. My gaze slides to Bo, to the scar beneath his left eye, and I have to ask, “How did you get that?” I nod to the smooth, waxy line of skin.
He blinks, the scar puckering together, as if he feels the pain of it again. “I jumped out of a tree when I was nine. A branch cut me open.”
“Did you get stitches?”
“Five. I remember it hurting like hell.”
“Why’d you jump out of a tree?”
“My brother dared me. For a week he had been trying to convince me that I could fly if I had enough speed.” His eyes smile at the memory. “I believed him. And I also probably just wanted to impress him since he was my older brother. So I jumped.”
He tilts his head back to look up at the sky, sewn together with stars.
“Maybe you didn’t have enough speed,” I suggest, smiling and craning my head back to look up at the same stars.
“Probably not. But I don’t think I’ll test the theory again.” His smile fades. “My brother felt terrible,” he goes on. “He carried me all the way back to our house while I sobbed. And after I got stitches, he sat beside my bed and read me comics for a week. You’d think I lost a leg, he felt so guilty.”
“He sounds like a good brother,” I say.
“Yeah. He was.”
A breath of silence weaves between us.
Sparks swirl up from the charred tree trunk into the dark. Bo clears his throat, still staring into the flames. “How long has that sailboat been sitting down by the dock?”
The question surprises me. I wasn’t expecting it. “A few years, I guess.”
“Who does it belong to?” His tone is careful, as though he’s unsure if he should be asking. The focus has quickly shifted from him to me. From one loss to another.
I let the words tumble around inside my skull before I answer, conjuring up a past that lies dormant in my mind. “My father.”
He waits before he speaks again, sensing that he’s venturing into delicate territory. “Does it still sail?”
“I think so.”
I stare down into the mug held between my palms, absorbing its warmth.
“I’d like to take it out sometime,” Bo says cautiously, “see if it still sails.”
“You know how to sail?”
His lips part open—a gentle smile—and he looks down at his feet like he’s about to reveal a secret. “I spent almost every summer sailing on Lake Washington growing up.”
“Did you live in Seattle?” I ask, hoping to narrow down the city where he’s from.
“Near there.” His answer is just as vague as the last time I asked. “But a much smaller town.”
“You realize I have more questions about you than answers.” He was built to conceal secrets, his face revealing not even a hint of what’s buried inside. It’s both intriguing and infuriating.
“I can say the same about you.”
I draw my lips to one side and squeeze the mug tighter between my hands. He’s right. We’re deadlocked in a strange battle of secrecy. Neither of us is willing to tell the truth. Neither of us is willing to let the other one in. “You can take the sailboat out if you want,” I say, standing up and tucking a loose strand of hair back behind my ear. “It’s late. I think I’ll head up to the house.” The flames burning in each stump have been reduced to hot embers, slowly chewing through the last of the wood.
“I’ll stay up and make sure the fires are out completely.”
“Good night,” I say, pausing to look back at him.
“Night.”