It’s dark by the time we get to Portland. The downtown is a compact network of tight turns, old houses, and light stretching out of bars and doorways, like elongated golden legs. Owen has fallen asleep; I barely touch his knee and he comes awake. Almost immediately he grimaces, as if the pain has come awake too.
He brings a hand to his face and then, thinking better of it, drops it. Instead he sits forward, elbows on knees, spine hunched gargoyle-style.
“This is it,” he says. “Follow the coast a few miles north, you can’t miss it. There’s a sign. At least, there used to be.”
For the past hour we’ve been silent, stilled by the slowly descending dark, like people being drowned by increments. We used to talk about going to Portland to visit Georgia Wells’s old house. One of Brynn’s favorite theories about the ending was that it wasn’t an ending—that Georgia had written extra pages but for whatever reason had been forced to conceal them.
Now we’re here to fix a different kind of ending. I know I should be grateful that at last we know the truth about Owen and where he was that day, and that even Brynn seems to accept it.
But I can’t. I just feel afraid. Suddenly, this seems like a very bad idea.
I press my nose to the window as we pass out of the city, trying to make out silhouettes in the dark, but all I can see is the glitter-eyed image of my own reflection. A few miles out along the coast the headlights pick up a sign pointing the way to the Wells House.
“Turn right here,” Owen says, and Wade does, the light skittering off a badly kept dirt path. Trees crowd either side of the lane, ghastly trees with distorted limbs and squat, knobby trunks, trees with leaves like spiked fronds, trees I’ve never seen in my life.
The lane ends at a gravel parking lot, empty of cars. Wade’s headlights seize on a sign that says Welcome to the Georgia C. Wells House and another that says Absolutely No Smoking! Wade cuts the engine and we all climb out. After being in the car for so long, I’m surprised by how warm it is. The air is sticky and heavy with the sounds of tree frogs and crickets.
A flagstone path cuts from the lot to the main house, only partially visible in the dark, and half-concealed behind more of those Frankenstein trees with scissored leaves and squat trunks. It’s a small Cape Cod house, gray or brown—hard to tell in the dark—with a weather vane on the roof, pointed toward the ocean. We’re all so still. For once, even Abby has nothing to say.
I feel suddenly overwhelmed. This is where Lovelorn was written. In a way, this is where it all started.
Is that why Summer made Owen take our pages here? Because she wanted them to lie where they had been born? Like a person killed at war, shipped overseas to be buried in his hometown?
“I don’t get it.” Brynn crosses her arms. In the moonlight, she looks very pale. “It’s like a museum or something?”
“A nature center,” Owen says. “She donated the house after she died.”
“I didn’t think that anyone remembered her,” I say. I’m surprised to feel my eyes burning, and I look down, blinking quickly. The gravel under my feet throws back the moon, sheer white, practically blinding. The book, I knew, was old long before Summer got her hands on it. It was written when Summer’s grandmother was a girl and had been passed down to Summer’s mom. It’s the only book that dumb-ass could read, Summer used to say, spitting on the ground to make a point about what she thought of the mom who’d shoved Summer into foster care when she got tired of pretending to be a parent.
And sure, we found some other fan sites about Lovelorn—Lovelornians, the communities called themselves—most of them dedicated to that famous ending and why on earth she would have been allowed to publish a book that wasn’t finished. Some people said she’d gone crazy. Others said she’d had a heart attack. Still others speculated that it was a code, a secret message about a sequel they were sure she was still planning to write. But most of the sites had gone inactive after her death. I guess no one was going to wait around for a ghost to finish a sentence.
“Not as a writer,” Wade pipes up. Brynn looks exasperated. “She was a famous environmentalist. An arborist, too. Trees,” he clarifies, when Brynn shoots him a look. “She has over two hundred species of trees on her land. She asked to be buried here, on her own property.”
Owen is transformed by shadows into a stranger. The wind lifts the hairs on the back of my neck. “Summer didn’t tell me what to do when I got here. Just that she thought Return to Lovelorn should go home.”
Even though it isn’t cold, I wrap my arms around my waist. Feel the ribs and the space between them. Body, tissue, blood, bone. All of it so easily damaged.
“What did you do?” Brynn’s voice is loud in the silence.
Owen doesn’t seem to have heard. He’s already starting across the gravel, toward a second path, this one winding not toward the house but into a thick copse of trees, these with leaves that look almost jointed, like fingers.
“Come on,” he says. “She’s back here.”
We go single file down a path that winds deep into the trees. It feels like maneuvering through the dark of a backstage, surrounded on both sides by the rustle of tall curtains. Brynn and Abby hold their cell phones like torches, lighting up the sweep of vaulted branches; the ribbed undersides of leaves crowding overhead; the ghost-white look of the grass and the occasional placard staked in the ground, reminding visitors not to litter or stating the scientific name of the various species of trees. Magnolia stellata. Acer griseum. Names like magic spells, like songs written in a different language.
And as we walk, a strange feeling comes back to me. A change—in the air, in the texture of the dark—and a rhythm that emerges from the nonsense pattern of cricket song and the faint susurration of the leaves in the wind. Lovelorn, it says. Lovelorn.
My lungs ache as though with cold. Every breath feels thin and dangerous. And then, just as I’m about to say go back, Owen says, “Here it is,” and the trees relax their grip on the land, leaving us on a long, open stretch of lawn that runs down toward the beach. I hadn’t realized how close we were to the water: a silver-flecked expanse disrupted by a strip of dark and rangy islands.
There are a half-dozen picnic tables set up near the tree line and a stone seawall dividing the grass from the beach. A stone angel, darkened by weather, stands guard over the lawn. Even before we cross the lawn and Wade crouches to light up the inscription at its base, I know that this is it: Georgia C. Wells’s final resting place.
Wade reads:
“The kiss of the sun for pardon,
The song of the birds for mirth,
One is nearer God’s Heart in a garden
Than anywhere else on earth.”
“Dorothy Frances Gurney,” he finishes.
For a minute we just stand there, looking out over the water. The ocean is calm tonight and crawls soundlessly over the gravel on the beach. The moon cuts itself into tiny slivers on the waves.
“Not a bad place to be dead,” Abby says. “You know, relatively speaking.”
Owen hoists himself up onto the stone wall. For a second he stands there, silhouetted, his hair silvered by the moon, and I think that he too could be an angel—wingless, bound to earth. Then, without a word, he drops.
We all crowd forward to the wall, leaning over to see the way the land abruptly drops away, as if someone has just excavated it with a giant scoop.
This side of the seawall is six, maybe eight feet tall. In places it has been shored up with netting. Owen has landed between the rocks that go tumbling down toward the beach, splintering slowly into smaller and smaller bits until they’re sucked into the waves to become sand.
“What are you doing?” Brynn whispers, even though there’s no one around to hear us. But it feels wrong to shout over somebody’s grave. I remember how Summer used to tell us to hold our breath when the bus went past the Episcopal church on Carol and its narrow yard, brown with churned-up mud and patchy grass and the accidental look of its crooked graves. She said that the dead were always angry and the sound of breathing infuriated them with jealousy, that they would come for us in our sleep if we weren’t careful. And now she’s buried there among the other tumbledown gravestones, in a cheap casket her foster parents picked out, cinched and stitched and stuffed into clothing she would have hated.
Another vengeful spirit. Another soldier for the angry dead.
Owen doesn’t answer. He’s still picking his way between the rocks, some as large as golf carts, moving parallel to the seawall. For a moment he disappears in the shadows. Then he reappears, pedaling up one side of an enormous rock, keeping low and using his hands for purchase, until he reaches a surface beaten flat by the wind and can stand.
“Owen!” Brynn tries again to get his attention, but he ignores her.
Now he’s feeling along the seawall, like a blind person trying to get his bearings in a new room, working his fingers through the bright orange netting that’s doing its best to girdle the wall in place. In places whole chunks of the wall are missing, gap-toothed black spaces crusted with lichen and moss. Other portions of the wall have been recently rebuilt. The stone is newer, a flat gray that reflects the moon. I wonder how many years it will take before the wind and the ocean swallow the whole thing.
Owen has gotten an arm through the netting. From here, it looks like the wall has his arm to the elbow and is sucking on him like a bone. Slowly, as he works it, one of the larger stones shimmies outward. A final grunt, and then he crouches, freeing something from beneath the tight foot of the netting. With his shoulder, he shoves the stone back into place.
Then he drops down to the beach and darts toward us through the shadows, tucking the plastic-wrapped object under his arm like a football. He has to find a new way up to us. The rocks, knuckled against one another, form a rudimentary staircase. Even so, he has a hard time getting back over the wall.
“Here.” He passes up a small box, straitjacketed in plastic and duct tape, before heaving himself over the wall, teetering for a second on his stomach with his legs still dangling over the beach before Wade gives him a hand. He sits up, breathing hard, his face sheened with sweat, his black eye worse than ever. “Go ahead,” he says. “Open it.”
I kneel in the grass. The plastic is wet and slicked with dirt. A beetle tracks ponderously across its surface. I flick it into the grass. My fingers are clumsy and I realize they’re shaking.
“Let me.” Brynn shoves me aside. We’ve all gone quiet. Even the wind has disappeared. There’s no sound at all but the tape protesting as she pries it loose, revealing the lockbox, the secret that Owen spent five years protecting. Even Brynn hesitates before she thumbs the latches loose.
Inside, the pages have been rolled and bent to fit the box. They are, miraculously, dry. For a second, I imagine they still smell faintly of apple shampoo. Brynn loosens the whole bundle of them—dozens and dozens of pages—smoothing them out on a thigh.
Under the moonlight, the title page plays tricks with the eye and seems itself to be glowing.
Return to Lovelorn, it says.