“It’s not as creepy in daylight,” I assure Bo, passing my father’s old sailboat, the Windsong, bobbing on the other side of the wood dock, sails down, unmoved for the last three years. My father didn’t name the boat. It was called the Windsong when he purchased it ten years ago from a man who moored it south of Sparrow in a small seaside harbor. But the name Windsong had always seemed fitting, considering the voices that rise up from the sea each summer.
Otis and Olga trot after me, and Bo falls into step behind them.
The island is shaped like a half-moon with the flat side facing inland and the opposite side curved by the endless waves crashing against its banks. A two-story, robin’s-egg-blue house—where my mom and I live—stands near the lighthouse, and a collection of smaller buildings are scattered across the island, built and torn down and added on to over the years. There is a wood shed and a toolshed and a greenhouse long since abandoned, and there are two cottages that serve as living quarters—Old Fisherman’s Cottage and Anchor Cottage—and I lead Bo to the newer of the two, a place where staff was once housed, cooks and maintenance men, when such people were required to keep this place up and running.
“Have you always lived on the island?” he asks from the darkness as we follow the winding, sometimes broken wood-slated path up through the interior of the island, the air foggy and cool.
“I was born here.”
“On the island?” he asks.
“My mom would have preferred to have had me at the hospital in Newport an hour away or at least at the clinic in Sparrow, but out here fate is determined by the sea, and a winter storm blew in, covering the island with a foot of snow and making the harbor a complete whiteout. So she delivered me at the house.” The dizzying swirl of alcohol still thumps through me, and my head feels roomy and unfocused. “My dad said I was meant for this place,” I explain. “That the island didn’t want to let me go.”
I may belong here on the island, but my father never did. The town always hated that an outsider purchased the island and the lighthouse—even if my mom was a local.
Dad was a freelance architect. He designed summer homes along the coast, and even a new library up in Pacific Cove. Before that, he worked at an architectural firm in Portland after he and Mom got married. But Mom always missed Sparrow—her hometown—and she wanted desperately to move back. Even though she had no family here, her parents were long dead and she was an only child, it had always felt like home to her. So when they saw the listing for Lumiere Island for sale, including the lighthouse, which was going to be decommissioned by the state—no longer of use since Sparrow was not a large shipping harbor anymore—they both knew it was exactly what they wanted. The lighthouse was a historic structure—one of the first buildings in town—and local fishermen still needed it to navigate into the harbor. It was perfect. Dad had even planned to renovate the old farmhouse someday—fix it up when he had the time, make it ours—but he never got the chance.
When he disappeared, the police came out to the island, filed a report, and then did nothing. The townspeople didn’t rally together, didn’t organize search parties, didn’t climb aboard their fishing boats to scan the harbor. To them, he had never belonged here in the first place. For this, a part of me hates this town, this place, and these people for being so callous. They fear anyone and anything that isn’t them. Just like they feared the Swan sisters two hundred years ago . . . and they killed them for being different.
We turn right, away from the glowing lights of the main house, and walk deeper into the unlit center of the island, until we reach the small stone cottage.
ANCHOR COTTAGE is written in letters formed out of frayed fishing rope then nailed to the wood door. It isn’t locked, and thankfully when I flick on the light switch just inside the front door, a floor lamp across the room blinks on.
Otis and Olga zip past my feet into the cottage, curious about the building, which they’ve rarely had the opportunity to explore. It’s cold and dank and there is a mustiness that can’t be cleaned away.
In the kitchen I flip on the switch beside the sink and a light shivers on overhead. I kneel down and grab the power cord for the refrigerator and plug it into an outlet in the wall. Instantly it begins to hum. A small bedroom is situated just off the living room; a peeling wood dresser is against one wall and a metal bed frame sits beneath a window. There is a mattress, but no pillows or blankets. “I’ll bring you sheets and bedding tomorrow,” I tell him.
“I have a sleeping bag.” He drops his backpack on the floor just inside the bedroom doorway. “I’ll be fine.”
“There’s wood inside the shed just up the path if you want to start a fire. There’s no food in the kitchen, but we have plenty up at the main house. You can come up in the morning for breakfast.”
“Thanks.”
“I wish it weren’t so . . .” I’m not sure what I want to say, how to apologize for it being so dark and mildewed.
“It’s better than sleeping on the beach,” he says before I can locate the right words, and I smile, feeling suddenly exhausted and light-headed and in need of sleep.
“See you in the morning,” I say.
He doesn’t say anything else, even though I stand mute for a moment too long, thinking he might. And then I turn, my head swaying, and slip out the door.
Otis and Olga follow me out, and we trudge up the slope to the main house, where I left the back porch light on.
THE ISLAND
The wind is constant.
It howls and tears at siding and rips shingles from roofs. It brings rain and salt air, and in the winter sometimes it brings snow. But for a time each spring, it carries in the lurid and seductive voices of three sisters held captive by the sea, aching to draw out the girls of Sparrow.
From the black waters of the harbor, their song sinks into dreams, permeates the brittle grass that grows along steep cliffs and rotting homes. It settles into the stones that hold up the lighthouse; it floats and swirls in the air until it’s all you can taste and breathe.
This is what cajoles the weak-hearted from sleep, pulls them out of bed and beckons them down to the shore. Like fingers wrapped around their throats, it drags them into the deepest part of the bay among the wreckage of ships long abandoned, pulling them under until the air spills from their lungs and a new thing can slip inside.
This is how they do it—how the sisters are freed from their brackish grave. They steal three bodies and make them their own. And this season, they do it swiftly.
FIVE
I wake with the choking sense of seawater in my throat. I sit upright, fisting my white sheet in both hands. The feeling of drowning claws at my lungs, but it was only a nightmare.
My head throbs, temples pulse, the lingering taste of whiskey still on my tongue.