EIGHT
The orchard looks different. Pruned and tidy, like a manicured English garden. It reminds me of how it used to be in summers past, when ripe fruit would hang bright and vibrant beneath the sun, beckoning the birds to pick at the ones that had fallen to the ground. The air always smelled of sweet and salt. Fruit and sea.
In the early morning I walk down the rows. The three burned stumps send out thin strands of smoke even though they are now nothing but piles of ash.
I wonder how late Bo stayed up, watching the last of the embers turn black. I wonder if he slept at all. I walk to his cottage and stand facing the door. I lift my fist, about to knock, when the door swings open, and I suck in a startled breath.
“Hey,” he says reflexively.
“Hi . . . sorry. I was just about to knock,” I stammer. “I came to say . . . good morning.” A dumb explanation. I’m not even sure why I’ve come.
His eyebrows screw into a confused line, but his lips form an easy half grin. He’s wearing a plain white shirt and jeans that sag low over his hips, and his hair is pressed to one side like he’s just woken up. “I was coming out to check on the trees,” he says. “Make sure they didn’t reignite in the last couple hours.”
“They’re only smoldering,” I tell him. “I was just up there.”
He nods then extends his arm to open the door wider. “You want to come inside? I can make coffee.”
I step past him, feeling the warmth of the cottage fold over me.
Otis and Olga are already inside, curled up on the couch as if this was their new home. As if they now belonged to Bo. There is no fire, but the windows are all open, a warm breeze purring through the cottage. The weather has shifted, turned mild and buoyant—the air blowing in from the sea stirs up the dust motes and scares away the ghosts. Every day that he’s here on the island, in the cottage, I can feel the space changing, becoming brighter.
Bo stands in the kitchen, his back to me, and turns on the faucet in the sink, filling the coffeepot with water. He’s tan after a week outside under the sun. And the muscles in his shoulders flex beneath the thin cotton of his shirt.
“How do you like your coffee?” he asks, turning around to face me, and I quickly flick my eyes away so he doesn’t catch me staring.
“Black is fine.”
“Good . . . because I don’t have anything else.” I wonder if he bought coffee grounds in town before I invited him out to the island. Brought it with him in his backpack? Since I doubt there was coffee here when he moved in.
A stack of books sits on the low table in front of the couch and more books are lined up on the floor, all pulled from the shelves. I pick up a book resting on the arm of the couch. Encyclopedia: Celtic Myths and Fables Vol. 2.
“What are all these?” I ask.
Bo dries his hands on a kitchen towel then walks into the living room. Otis wakes up and begins rubbing a paw over one ear.
“All the books in here are about legends and folklore,” he answers.
I run a finger over a row of books on the bookshelf beside the fireplace. The spines are printed with titles like Native American Legends of the Northwest, How to Break an Unwanted Curse, and Witches and Warlocks: A Guide to Understanding. They are all like this—a library of books on topics of the unnatural, the mystical, similar to what’s happening in Sparrow. Collected by someone and stored in the cottage . . . but who?
“You didn’t know?” Bo asks. Coffee begins streaming into the glass pot behind him, the warm roasted scent filling the room.
I shake my head. No, I didn’t know these were in here. I had no idea. I sink down onto the couch, touching the page of a book left open on one of the cushions. “Why are you reading them?” I ask, closing the book with a thud then setting it on the coffee table.
“I don’t know. Because they’re here, I guess.”
Olga hops down from the couch and coils herself around Bo’s leg, purring up at him, and he bends down to scratch gently behind her ear. “And what about the Swan sisters—do you believe in them now?” I ask.
“Not exactly. But I also don’t believe people drown themselves for no reason.”
“Then why are they drowning?”
“I’m not sure.”
My foot taps against the floor, my heart thuds inside my rib cage—a scratching at my thoughts. So many books. All these books. Placed here—hidden in here. “And what about the singing from the harbor—how do you explain that?”
“I can’t,” he answers. “But it doesn’t mean it won’t eventually be explained. Have you seen those rocks in Death Valley that move across the desert floor on their own? For years people didn’t understand how it happened. Some of the rocks weighed over six hundred pounds, and they left trails in the sand as if they were being pushed. People thought it might be UFOs or some other bizarre cosmic event. But researchers finally discovered it’s just ice. The desert floor freezes, and then strong winds slide these massive boulders across the sand. Maybe the Swan sisters’ legend is like this. The singing and the drownings just haven’t been explained yet. But there’s some perfectly logical reason why it happens.”
The coffeepot has stopped sputtering behind him, but he makes no move to walk back into the small kitchen.
“Ice?” I repeat, looking at him like I’ve never heard anything so absurd in my life.
“I’m just saying that maybe someday they’ll discover that none of this has anything to do with three sisters who were killed two hundred years ago.”
“But you’ve seen firsthand what happens here; you saw Gregory Dunn’s body in the harbor.”
“I saw a body. A boy who drowned. That’s it.”
I tighten my lips together. My fingernails dig into the fabric edge of the couch. “Did you really come to Sparrow by accident?” I ask—the question piercing the air between us. Splitting it apart. It’s been nagging me since he showed up, a needle at the very base of my neck, a question I’ve wanted to ask but felt I shouldn’t. Like the answer didn’t matter. But maybe it does. Maybe it matters more than anything else. There’s something he’s not telling me. A part of his past or maybe his present, a thing that rests between the ribs, a purpose—a reason why he’s here. I sense it. And although I don’t want to push him away, I need to know.
The sunlight through the window spills over half of his face: light and dark. “I already told you,” he says, his voice sounding a little hurt.
But I shake my head, not believing. “You didn’t just come here by accident, because it was the last stop on the bus. There’s another reason. You’re . . . you’re hiding something.” I try to see into his eyes, into his thoughts, but he is carved by stone and brick. Solid as the rocks bordering the island.
His lips part, his jaw tenses. “So are you.” He says it quickly, like it’s been on his mind for a while, and I shift uncomfortably on the couch.
I can’t meet his eyes. He sees the same thing in me: a chasm of secrets so deep and wide and unending that it bleeds from me like sweat. We both carry it. A mark on our skin, a brand burned into flesh from the weight of our past. Perhaps only those with similar scars can recognize it in others. The fear rimming our eyes.
But if he knew the truth—what I see what I peer through Olivia Greene, the creature hidden inside. If he knew the things that haunt my waking dreams. If he saw what I saw. If he saw. He’d leave this island and never come back. He’d leave this town. And I don’t want to be alone on the island again. There have only ever been ghosts here, shadows of people that once were, until he arrived. I can’t lose him. So I don’t tell him.
I stand up before our words tear apart the fragile air between us. Before he demands truths I can’t give. I never should have asked him why he came to Sparrow, unless I was willing to give up something of myself. Otis blinks at me from the gray cushion, stirred by my movement. I walk past Bo to the door, and for a moment I think he’s going to reach out for me, to stop me, but he never actually touches me, and my heart wrenches. Spills onto the floor, seeps into the cracks between the wood boards.
A burst of bright morning sun pours into the cottage when I open the door. Otis and Olga don’t even attempt to follow me. But before I can pull the door closed behind me, I hear something in the distance, beyond the edges of the island. There is no wind to carry it across the water, but the stillness makes it audible.
The bell at the marina in Sparrow is ringing.
A second body has been found.