I squeeze my eyes closed.
I open my mouth, gulping down the sea. It tastes like salt and absolution. Like letting go. And then, drawing inward from the cold, is massive warmth. My body is no longer numb. It feels like I’m lying in a hollow of beach grass under an afternoon sun, watching clouds bounce lazily across the sky. The warmth is so real that I open my eyes again, and then I’m swallowed by it.
PENNY TALBOT
I have forgotten the day. The hour. But I feel bitterly cold and I draw in a breath like it’s the last and the first. My ribs ache.
Arms around me, tugging me onto a boat. The wind racks my ears, the rain makes me shiver. I’m huddled at the stern, a blanket over my shoulders. “Where am I?” I ask, and a faint voice shouts over at me, words I can’t seem to understand. The dark sky spins above me.
The dock beneath my feet.
The long march up the walkway.
And then the cottage I haven’t been inside of in years. A fire starting low and then growing warm and bright. I sit on the floor. Books everywhere. Again a voice and a face I don’t recognize brings me hot tea, and I drink it carefully, warming my insides. How did I get here? Everything is a dream I’m not sure I want to remember.
But then I do remember. The boy crouched beside me, his face. I do know him. From the marina, looking for work. And then the party on the beach. He saved me from Lon Whittamer, who tried to pull me into the water. And then we sat beside the bonfire and talked. His name is Bo. He’s cute. And the singing from the harbor chased us all the way back to the island. I told him he could stay here in the cottage, that I’d give him work for the summer. And here he is. Drenched, worry lines punctuating his face.
“Did the singing stop?” I ask.
“The what?” he says.
“The Swan sisters. The singing. Have they all returned yet?”
He pauses a moment, his expression pulling at the edges of the scar by his left eye. Where did he come from? I wonder. There is kindness in his eyes. But he shouldn’t be here in Sparrow. It’s too risky. “Yeah,” he finally answers. “The singing stopped. And I don’t think we’ll ever hear it again.”
I fall asleep on his couch. A blanket tucked over my shoulders. And each time I open my eyes, he’s still awake, staring into the fire like he’s looking for something, or waiting for someone.
“What happened to me?” I ask as dawn inches through the windows.
He turns around, sorrow scribed into the features of his face. The coolness of morning slips through the cracks in the doorway, making me shiver even with the fire roaring behind him.
He squints at me, like it pains him just to look at me. A deep, wretched heartache. But I’m not sure why. “You’ve been asleep for a while,” he tells me. “Now you’re awake.”
I look down at my hands, curled together in front of me. On my left index finger is a pink scar, nearly healed. At least a week or two old. But I don’t recall how I got it. I can’t seem to find the memory in the trenches of my mind. So I tuck my hands back inside the blanket and push the thought away.
I know there is more meaning in his answer than what he’s willing to reveal. But my head still feels foggy, my body wanting to drag me back into my dreams. So I ask one more question before I drift off. “What happened to you?”
“I lost someone I loved.”
THE HARBOR
Some places are bound in by magic. Ensnared by it.
The town of Sparrow may have possessed slivers of magic long before the Swan sisters arrived in 1822. Or maybe the three sisters brought it with them across the Pacific. No one would ever know for sure. Their beauty and unluckiness may have been its own kind of spell, spun together in a rugged place like Sparrow, Oregon, where gold washed down from the mountains and the sea pulled ships under when the moon was full and the tide vengeful.
Magic is a tricky thing. Not easily measured or metered or weighed.
Even though the Swan sisters will never again return to torment the small town, their enchantment still resides in the sodden streets and the angry winter winds.
The morning after the summer solstice, a local fisherman steered his boat out into the harbor in search of crabs rolling along the seafloor. The tourists had begun their exodus from the bed-and-breakfasts, loading into cars and boarding buses. Returning home.
The Swan season had ended. But what the tourists and locals didn’t yet know was that there would never again be another drowning in the town of Sparrow.
Olivia Greene would wake the following morning atop the lighthouse on Lumiere Island. She would recall only fragments of the party the night before and assume she drank too much and passed out on the cold stone floor, her friends having abandoned her.
Gigi Kline, who had been missing for several weeks but reappeared unexpectedly at the summer solstice party, would wake up on the rocky shore of Lumiere Island, her feet halfway submerged in the water and three toes swollen and frostbitten, unable to be saved. After having fled into the harbor the night before, Aurora circled back around to the shore, easily evading capture from the mob of mostly drunk Sparrow High students. She was watching the boats drift farther away, her arms hugging her chest, soaking wet, about to slip back into the water and relinquish the body she had stolen, when she collapsed right there on the rocks.
Neither Aurora nor Marguerite Swan ever made it back into the water. Because at eleven fifty-four, their sister Hazel Swan dove into the sea and drowned herself, severing the two-centuries-long curse in a single act of sacrifice.
Aurora and Marguerite vanished from their stolen bodies like a wisp of sea air, a rivulet of smoke finally extinguished for good.
But still, unknowingly, the following morning a local fisherman navigated his boat among the wreckage of sunken ships, drifting over the very spot where the three Swan sisters had been drowned two hundred years ago. And in that place, bubbles rose up to the surface. Usually caused by crabs knotted together, moving among the silty bottom. But not this time, not on this morning.
What he saw was something else.
Three bodies, dressed in gossamer-white gowns that clung to their ashen skin, drifted together with the current. He pulled them aboard his boat, unaware of what he had just discovered. They were not skeletons, not chewed apart by fish and salt water; it was as if they had been drowned that very morning.
The Swan sisters’ bodies had finally been recovered.
And when they were carried ashore and laid on the dock in Sparrow, people gasped. Children cried and women cut off locks of the sisters’ hair for good luck. They were beautiful. More stunning than anyone had ever imagined. More angelic than any portrait or story had ever described.
The curse of the Swan sisters had been broken.