Spells for Forgetting, page 6
A tap on the glass broke the silence and the door cracked back open. Matthew Bard stood on the other side, looking between us sheepishly. “Hey, Leoda.”
“Hey, honey.” She forced a smile.
Matthew hesitated before he returned his attention to me. “Sorry. Tractor’s stalled out again. It’s on row sixty-eight.”
I let out a relieved breath, getting to my feet, and Matthew ducked out when Leoda scowled at him. She was a dog with a bone and that never ended well.
“We need to deal with this, Dutch.” Her tone took on a warning as I stepped past her.
I stopped on the other side of the door. “There’s nothing to worry about. Just let this blow over.”
Her mouth flattened as she looked up at me. She didn’t like it, but she knew I was right. Stirring things up wouldn’t do any of us any good. The sooner August was gone, the better.
I fit my hat back onto my head and walked toward the open doors, where Matthew was waiting in the farm truck. Exhaust billowed out of the tailpipe, filling the cold air with a haze, and Kate looked up from the crates on the floor of the barn, her eyes squinting against the light.
But for a moment, the flash of sun lit her hair blond. Her eyes blue. And in the fraction of a second, it wasn’t Kate standing there. It was Lily.
When I blinked, she was gone.
Nine
AUGUST
The path I’d worn down through the woods coming and going to Zachariah Behr’s place as a kid was invisible now. I waded through the ferns and the thick undergrowth, finding my way through the trees until I spotted the corner of the cabin’s roof.
The land was wilder than I’d ever seen it, and the house was threatening to be overtaken completely by the vines that snaked down the branches and fell like a curtain over the exterior walls.
Zachariah had lived alone in this corner of the woods since before I was born and other than the Blackwoods, he was the only neighbor we’d ever had. My mother had taken on the job of looking after him, and back then, he would have been out on the water fishing this time of day. But when I crossed the tree line and the little house came into view, smoke trailed up from the chimney and the chickens hadn’t been let out yet. He was home.
My eyes roamed the woods around me before I followed the sound of metal clanging to the far side of the house, where the scrap lean-to shed faced the creek. The barn it was built onto was nothing more than a skeleton of wood, but the shed was still standing, its roof rusted over.
Zachariah sat on a metal stool that had lost almost all of its paint, hunched over the blades of his push mower that were laid out across the workbench. The tilted surface was littered with jars and tin cans filled with different sized screws, nails, and bolts. An empty beer bottle here and there.
His long johns were a dingy white beneath the dark blue elastic suspenders that reached over his broad shoulders. There wasn’t much hair left on his head, though its remnants were combed.
The rotary file that was clutched in his huge hand stilled midair when he heard my footsteps. The old man still had his hearing, at least.
“Was wonderin’ if I’d see you,” he said, keeping his back turned to me.
I couldn’t tell if his meaning was that he’d hoped he would or that he’d hoped he wouldn’t. I decided I didn’t really want to know.
“How are you, Zach?”
He started with the file again, scraping it down the blade at an angle. “Got no complaints.”
“You look good.”
He finally set the file down and shifted on the stool. His thick white eyebrows turned up on the ends roughly as he looked at me. His gaze studied the line of my shoulders. The shape of my face. The last time I’d seen him, I was a kid.
His bottom lip stuck out, but he didn’t say whatever he was thinking.
“Jake says you’re still the caretaker over at the cemetery,” I said.
He nodded once, leaning into the table as if his back hurt.
“What do I need to do to…”
“I’ll take care of it,” he said, cutting me off.
So he knew. Hell, the whole town probably knew by now. But I couldn’t hear any hint in his voice of whether the news about my mom meant anything to him. Maybe she’d already been dead to him a long time.
“I’ll have it done in a few days.” He grunted.
I waited for him to say something else. Anything. There was always a storm in his dark blue eyes.
I pulled my phone from my back pocket. “Let me give you my number and you can—”
“I don’t need it.”
There probably wasn’t even a phone line installed in the house, I realized. And that wasn’t how people did things here.
A drop of rain hit my jacket and I looked up to the treetops, where the gray had returned to the sky. By the time my gaze fell on him again, Zachariah was already turned back around on his stool, file in hand.
“Well, thanks.”
I waited another moment before I backed out of the shed, my hand gripped more tightly on the phone than was necessary. I’d been well versed in the cold shoulder before I left, but after living in the outside world for so many years, the sting of it felt fresh.
Anywhere but Saoirse, I was just a normal person, but I’d never been normal here. Not even before Lily. I’d always been the heir to the orchard. Henry’s grandson. The last Salt.
Bernard Keller was waiting at the end of the driveway when I got back to the cottage. He was parked on the shoulder of the road, standing on the other side of the gate, like he was afraid to open it. If I had to guess, I’d say the superstitions of the town had kept anyone from venturing too close to the cottage since I left.
When he saw me, he went rigid, shoulders straightening under the jacket he wore. It was at least a size and a half too small and his auburn hair was blown over his forehead.
The buttons of his shirt pulled as he inhaled a tight breath. “August,” he said, in a poor attempt at a greeting. My name was hollow in his mouth.
“Hi, Mr. Keller.”
I didn’t know what else to call him. All of my interactions with Bernard had been in my grandfather’s office when he handled legal matters for the orchard. He was the only attorney on the island and he’d been commissioned by the town council to step in when my grandfather came down sick one summer and refused to see a doctor.
The job mostly consisted of Bernard badgering him to deal with things that he’d let lapse or ignored altogether, like a kind of net under the business that would catch the town if my grandfather died. Most people had been sure that he would. But I hadn’t been that lucky. By summer’s end, the illness had gone, and we were stuck with him.
“Jake said you need someone to deal with some property matters?” Bernard hooked one thumb into his belt, tapping a fence post with the other hand.
“Yeah.” My brow pulled as I studied him. He was fidgety. Nervous, even. “I’m only here for a few days, but I’m planning to sell the cottage. Can you handle it?”
“Sure,” he answered, a little too loudly. “I can do that.”
“Good. I’ll get you the paperwork and keys before I head back to the city.”
“No problem. Just drop them at the office with Claudia and she’ll see to it.”
I stared at him, eyeing the red glow of his skin. There were a few beads of sweat at his temple despite the cold. He looked like he was about to piss himself.
“If that’s all, I’ll be going then.” He let go of the fence.
I watched as he fumbled with the keys and walked back to the car. Once the engine was started, he reached into his jacket and pulled a handkerchief free. He swiped it across his brow before hitting the gas more heavily than he’d meant to, and the back tires spun in the mud, sending a spray of it behind him as he pulled out.
A single bolt of lightning flashed over the treetops and I looked up, watching it spiderweb across the sky like the tangled roots of a tree. The electricity of it was buzzing in the air, and it rose sharply as my eyes fell to the other side of the road.
Everything stopped when I saw her. The biting cold crept over my skin and the woods fell silent, snuffing out the sound of the wind racing through the trees.
Across the road, Emery Blackwood stood beside the truck in the gravel drive, a set of keys clutched in one hand. Her breath fogged in the air, her chest rising and falling beneath the waxed canvas jacket.
Every muscle in my body tightened, holding me in place, and I swallowed against the painful lump rising in my throat. I’d spent countless minutes of my life imagining this exact moment. I’d played it over and over in my mind, painting the image of her from every memory. But now that I was standing there, no more than thirty steps from the person who’d haunted me for the last fourteen years, I had no idea what to do.
She stared at me, unblinking, and the color seemed to drain from her face, her lips parting. The wind pulled a strand of her dark hair across her cheek from a half-unraveled braid. The shape of her face was different now, missing the softness of youth, but she was somehow more beautiful.
She took what looked like an involuntary step backward and my fists tightened in my pockets as I searched frantically for something to say. But I couldn’t stop staring at her. It was a moment split down the seams, clumsily stitched closed by fourteen agonizing years.
The set of her mouth wavered for a fraction of a moment before she clumsily reached for the door of the truck, yanking it open. I watched, frozen, as she climbed inside and the engine roared to life. Before I’d even drawn another breath, she was disappearing down the road.
I’d hoped, I’d prayed even, that she wouldn’t be here. That she would have left long ago like we’d planned to. Before everything went to shit. But she hadn’t.
That feeling that had climbed between my bones when I stepped off the ferry wasn’t just the island or the orchard or the night that everything changed.
It was Emery Blackwood.
Ten
EMERY
I wasn’t sure anymore which were memories and which were dreams. I’d lost track of that a long time ago.
The hours had ticked by slowly as I worked, keeping one eye on the window. It took most of the day for me to realize that I was waiting. Half-hoping, and at the same time, terrified that August would reappear. The tremor in my hands hadn’t left since I’d stood across the road from him, and once the shop was closed, I stayed, working late into the night on receipts and anything else I could find to do.
Knowing he was back was one thing. But seeing him, replacing the memory with something real, was another.
There were many nights I’d been so hungry for him. I’d imagine him coming back. Climbing through my window and into my bed. I would curl into a ball beneath the quilts in the dark with my eyes closed, because when they were closed, I could see him. Sometimes, I could feel his hands on me. As I drifted into sleep, I could hear his voice. The rasp it took on when he woke, his laugh, the way my name sounded on his tongue. I’d imagine him touching me, my face pressed into the pillow and the sound of my own breathing like the sea in a storm until I opened my eyes and remembered he was gone. That he was never coming back. And the sound of my cries would turn bitter and broken.
Sometimes I would wake and for just a moment, I’d believe that he’d really been there. Because I could still feel him on my skin. Smell him in my sheets. But the remembering always found me. It was in the charred remains of the orchard and the silent island. The scars that covered my father’s face. The emptiness in my life where Lily had once been. And then I’d close my eyes again, hot tears sliding down my temples, and turn back into the darkness.
It was nearly midnight when I showed up on my grandmother’s porch. If there was a key to the old house, I’d never seen it. No one on Saoirse locked their doors, even after Lily.
I crept down the pitch-black hallway, to the room I’d slept in as a little girl, and fell asleep on top of the made bed with my jacket still zipped and boots still on. Here, I’d only been Emery—Albertine’s granddaughter. Not the girl who’d loved the boy who killed Lily Morgan or the girl who lied to protect him.
I fell into a restless sleep, and that was when the nightmare returned.
A star-filled sky. A roaring black sea. The sound of screaming.
After Lily, the dream had found me every night without fail. But it had been years since I’d woken with the cold trail of tears stinging my skin.
I breathed, waiting for my vision to adjust to the warm light coming through the window. I could still taste cold salt water on my tongue, but the house was quiet. I sat up slowly, letting the vision recoil in my mind until it was no more than a tiny blot of black. I’d lived with it long enough to know it was never really gone.
I swung my legs over one side of the bed and blinked until my eyes cleared. The room had been my mom’s when she was young, and then mine when I stayed at my grandmother’s. After the fire, the four walls were a refuge, where I’d hidden from the world. It felt that way again now.
My grandmother was standing barefoot at the stove when I trudged into the kitchen, her cotton floral robe wrapped around her small frame. She stirred the wooden spoon in a small pot with one hand and flipped a brown griddle cake with the other. Her absent gaze drifted across the kitchen, but her ear was turned in my direction, acknowledging my entrance.
“Morning.” The word was innocent, but it was spoken in a careful tone. She’d been born without sight, but my grandmother always saw more than I wanted her to.
“Morning, Oma.” I said softly.
The butter smoked on the cast iron, making the morning light hazy, and I went to the window, shimmying it up and letting the sweet, rain-soaked air inside. The sun was already well above the trees, painting the woods in a dusty, warm hue despite the downpour. It made the rain sparkle in the air like fairy dust.
“Heard you come in last night. I have a pot of coffee with your name on it.” She pointed an elbow toward the corner of the stove, where the spout of the percolator was still steaming.
I poured us both a cup and set them on the table as she stacked the griddle cakes on the butcher block. It was a rhythm I knew. One I could predict. She poured the blueberry sauce into the green chipped beehive bowl on the shelf and I pulled the carafe of syrup from the fridge.
“I promise I didn’t come up here to make you feed me.” I sank back into the chair.
She followed the counter with one hand until it ended and found her way to the table, sitting down across from me. There was a knowing smirk on her lips. “I thought you liked my griddle cakes.”
“I do.” I smiled, setting two on each of our plates.
“So? What’s up?”
“Nothing.”
I answered too quickly, but my grandmother was a patient woman. She picked up her knife, feeling for the butter dish and scraping a thick mound of it off the top. I watched as she smeared it over the cakes, sipping my coffee.
Through the arched doorway to the kitchen, I could see the glow of the fire in the living room. The wood beam mantel was littered with shells, dried flowers, and half-burned candles. A perfectly oblong stone wrapped tightly and knotted with jute twine. At the mantel’s center sat The Blackwood Book of Spells, its dark leather cover worn and soft. The thick tome was filled with rituals, charms, and lunar magic that had been passed down in my family the same way The Herbarium was. As a child, I would sit before that fire and flip through the thick pages, breathing in the smell of old ink and dried mugwort that was pressed between the pages. Too many of those memories had Lily in them.
“Nixie called up yesterday afternoon,” she said, finally.
I closed my eyes, pressing a finger to my temple. She wasn’t letting me off the hook that easily, and I could always count on Nixie to rat me out.
“She said our boy is home.”
I stared at her, taking a breath before I answered. “He’s not our boy, Oma.”
She set her chin on her folded hands. “Have you been to see him yet?”
“No.” The edge in my voice hardened the word and I pushed the tangled hair back from my face. It wasn’t exactly a lie. I’d seen him, but I hadn’t gone to see him.
“Why not?”
“Because I can’t,” I said, swallowing. “You know I can’t.”
Everyone on Saoirse believed that August killed Lily and got away with it. I’d be lying if I said there weren’t times that I’d wondered if it was true myself. But the reason I couldn’t go see him was more complicated than that. For fourteen years, my life had been defined by questions I didn’t have the answers to. And I wasn’t sure if I even wanted them anymore.
“I didn’t see you at the meeting last night.” I picked up my fork, pushing the blueberries around the edge of my plate.
“You know these hips. My bones get tired after sundown. I’m getting too old for town business, anyway.”
I smiled at that. Albertine wasn’t too old for anything.
“The Morgans weren’t happy Jake’s letting him bury Eloise here,” I murmured.
She lifted one eyebrow. “Well, Leoda’s always had a knack for putting her nose where it doesn’t belong.” She folded her hands together on top of the table. “I’m just glad Lily’s parents aren’t here to suffer through all this fuss.”
Sometimes I went months without thinking about Oskar and Leah Morgan. They’d moved to the mainland a couple of years after what happened, and I’d been ashamed of how relieved I was when they went. There were reminders of Lily everywhere and I was happy to be rid of two of them.
“You should go see him,” she said, gently.
The sound of her voice made me suddenly feel like I was going to cry. August’s face came back to me, the way it looked as his eyes locked with mine across the road. The way his jaw clenched tight. I bit down on my lip to keep it from quivering and took a sharp sip of coffee, sniffing.
