“Maybe two hundred years is enough.”
She blows out a quick breath through her nostrils. “You want to give up eternal life?”
“It’s not eternal,” I say. Marguerite and I have never viewed our imprisonment the same way. She sees it as our good fortune, a lucky draw of the card that we should live on for centuries, indefinitely perhaps. But she didn’t lose anything the day we were drowned. I did. She wasn’t in love with a boy who loved her back—not real love, like what Owen and I had. With each passing year we spent beneath the waves, each summer we rose again to claim our revenge on the town by taking their boys and making them ours, we lost a part of who we once were. We lost our humanity. I watched my sisters’ cruelty grow, their ability to kill sharpen, until I barely recognized them.
My wickedness grew too, but not to a place I couldn’t come back from. Because there was a thread that bound me to who I used to be—that thread was Owen. The memory of him kept me from slipping completely into the dark. And now that thread ties me to Bo. To the real world, to the present.
“We’ve spent most of our lives trapped in the sea,” I say. “Cold and dark and miserable. That’s not a real life.”
“I block it out,” she rebukes swiftly. “You should too. It’s better to sleep, let your mind drift away until summer arrives.”
“It’s not that easy for me.”
“You’ve always made things harder for yourself.”
“What does that mean?”
“This thing you have with that boy, Bo. You’re only dragging out the inevitable. Just kill him and get it over with.”
“No.” I turn to look at her, a shadow settled over her face beneath the domed umbrella. “I know you tried to lure him into the harbor.”
Her eyes twinkle, as if delighted by the memory of almost drowning the boy I love. “I just wanted to help you finish what you started. If you like him so much, then take him into the sea, and you will have him for eternity.”
“I don’t want him like that. His soul trapped down there just like ours.”
“Then how do you want him?”
“Real. Here—on land.”
She laughs loud and full, and a man and woman strolling past us turn to look at her. “That’s absurd and not possible. Tonight’s the last night to make him yours.”
I shake my head. I won’t do it. “I’m not like you,” I say.
“You’re exactly like me. We’re sisters. And you’re just as cold-blooded as I am.”
“No, you’re wrong about that.”
“Have you forgotten about Owen? How he betrayed you? Maybe if he hadn’t spoken up about the mark on your skin, you wouldn’t have been found guilty. You wouldn’t have drowned with us. You might have lived a normal life. But no”—her lips curl up at the edges, a wolf baring her teeth—“boys cannot be trusted. They will always do whatever they can to save themselves. They are the cruel ones, not us.”
“Owen wasn’t cruel,” I snap. “He had to tell them about the mark.”
“Did he?”
I bite down on the rage building in my chest. “If he hadn’t, they would have believed he was one of us, helping us. They would have killed him.”
“And yet he died anyway.” One of her eyebrows arches upward.
I can’t stand here anymore, listening to Marguerite. She’s never known real love. Even her infatuations with men when we were alive were all about her: the attention, the pursuit, the satisfaction of winning something that wasn’t hers to start with. “Owen tried to save me that day, and he lost his life. He loved me,” I tell her. “And Bo loves me now. But you wouldn’t know what that’s like because you’re incapable of love.”
I turn away from her and start up the sidewalk.
“Did you hear?” she calls after me. “Our dear sister Aurora has been sprung from her jail in the boathouse. It seems someone decided she was innocent after all.”
I look back at her over my shoulder. “She’s not innocent,” I say. Marguerite squirms inside Olivia’s body. “None of us are.”
*
The dock is slick from the rain. Waves push into the marina at steady intervals, a ballet choreographed by the wind and tide. I climb into the skiff and start the motor. A few persistent rays of sun break through the dark clouds, spilling light over the bow of the boat.
Tonight, the summer solstice party will happen on Coppers Beach, marking the end of Swan season. But I won’t be there. I’m staying on the island with Bo. I’m staying in this body—whatever it takes, no matter how painful, I’m going to fight it.
Yet I have the acute, anxious feeling that something bad is stirring out on those waters, in that approaching storm, and none of us will be the same after tonight.
SHIP
The Lady Astor, a 290-ton merchant ship owned by the Pacific Fur Company, left New York City in November of 1821 for its five-month passage around Cape Horn and up the west coast to Sparrow, Oregon.
It carried mostly supplies and grain to be delivered to the rugged western coastline, but it also carried two dozen passengers—those brave enough to venture west to the wilds of Oregon, where much of the land was undeveloped and dangerous. Aboard the ship were three sisters: Marguerite, Aurora, and Hazel.
Four months into the voyage, they had encountered mostly storms, dark seas, and sleepless nights when the ship rocked so violently that nearly everyone aboard, including the crew, was ill with seasickness. But the sisters did not clutch their stomachs and heave over the side of the boat; they did not press their palms to their eyes and beg the ocean to cease its churning. They’d brought herbs to sooth their swirling stomachs and balms to rub into their temples. And each evening they walked the deck even in the rain and wind to stare out across the Pacific, yearning for the land that would eventually rise up on the horizon.
“Only a month remains,” Aurora said on one of those nights as the three sisters stood at the bow of the ship, leaning against the railing, the stars spinning bright above them in a clear, boundless sky. “Do you think it will be how we’ve imagined?” she asked.
“I don’t think it matters what it’s like, because it will be ours,” Hazel mused. “A new town and a new life.”
They had always craved to leave the hurried panic of New York City, to leave behind the reminder of their callous mother, to start anew in a land so far away, it could have been the moon. The west, a place said to be uncivilized and brutal. But that’s exactly what they wanted: a territory so unfamiliar that their hearts raced and their minds whirled with fear and excitement.
“We can be anyone we want,” Marguerite said, her wild, dark hair unspooling from its pins and cascading out behind her.
Aurora smiled, feeling the salt wind on her cheeks, and closed her eyes. Hazel stuck out her tongue to taste the sea, imagining a perfume that smelled just like the open ocean—crisp and clean.