Chapter 7
The next ferry was set to depart an hour after the twins pulled up to the docks.
Nora examined the awaiting ocean through narrowed eyes, as though squaring off with a high school bully.
The wind had picked up, its blustery fingers pulling the water into choppy waves.
She didn’t like any of it, and from the angry whitecaps foaming on the waves in the distance, it seemed the feeling was mutual.
Charlie trudged back to where Nora was leaning against her car by the dock, his hands full of to-go cups from the little café beside the ticket booth. He handed Nora her chamomile tea with honey and ripped a piece of doughnut from a paper bag held precariously between two fingers.
“You’re sure your file didn’t update again? Nothing about drowning or capsizing ferries or anything?” Nora said as Charlie plopped himself next to her on the bumper.
“Still just a plain old car accident,” said Charlie. He took another bite of doughnut and stared out at the sea. “Sure is pretty out there, huh?”
“It’s dark,” Nora said. “Nothing looks pretty in the dark.”
“Can’t see the stars if it’s not dark.”
“It’s too cloudy for stars.”
“Doughnut?” Charlie waggled the little paper-bag-swaddled pastry nub in Nora’s face.
Nora shook her head. The smell of salt and fish being dragged up from the sea by the growing winds turned her stomach.
The prospect of a boat ride didn’t help matters much either.
She never trusted boats. Humans weren’t meant to travel by water.
They weren’t meant to travel by air either, for that matter, and roads were also pretty sketchy.
No, to Nora, humans weren’t meant to travel at all, really.
They were meant to stay safely tucked away in their beds eating soup.
Maybe go for the odd walk through a familiar, well-lit park so their muscles wouldn’t atrophy.
She took a sip of her tea and promptly burned her tongue, which felt like an omen.
“I’m going to wait in the car.”
* * *
The ferry docked near a little coastal town lined with quaint Victorian storefronts, their quaint Victorian windows each framing a “closed” sign.
It was only a little after nine p.m., but between the empty streets and the deep November darkness, it could have passed for midnight.
This was almost definitely a bad idea. They had nowhere to stay and no idea where they were going.
This was how you ended up being described in the past tense as “always lit up the room” in a crime documentary.
Nora drove around the commercial area of town twice before they finally noticed a single “open” sign, dimly glowing red and blue in the window of a twenty-four-hour diner called Mermaid’s Landing.
The mermaids that landed here were definitely not the Disney kind, Nora decided.
Three motorcycles sat parked out front of the run-down diner, its hand-painted sign so weatherworn that the blond mermaid logo looked more half-fish/half-constipated zombie than the sirens of myth. Nora parked.
“Want me to handle this?” Charlie asked, reading the concern on Nora’s face. “I’ve gotta go drop some kids off at the pool anyway.”
“Okay, gross. But no, it’s fine. We’ll go in together.”
And so they did. The inside of Mermaid’s Landing was both less ramshackle and more confusing than the outside.
It seemed whoever ran the place couldn’t decide between a traditional 1950s diner feel and an homage to the ocean theme, so they simply went with both.
The scuffed black-and-white-checkerboard floor lay beneath a ceiling strung with fishing nets filled with plastic fish.
The jukebox at the far end of the diner was wrapped in artfully placed artificial seaweed.
Even the stools at the diner counter had little shark fins on the backs of the seats.
At one booth sat three men in leather vests and varying degrees of facial hair neglect, at another a teen girl in what appeared to be a life-ruining spell of quality time with her parents.
Nora approached the counter, occupied only by an older man slowly making headway on an ice-cream sundae, the stool’s shark fin peeking out from under suspendered corduroys.
The woman behind the counter, somewhere in the late stages of middle age and the early stages of complete apathy, greeted them with a blink. Her name tag read “Goldie” against the baby pink of her vintage-inspired, crab-patterned blouse.
“Hi,” Nora tried when Goldie said nothing. “We—”
“What’ll it be?” Goldie pulled a little notebook and even littler pencil from the apron on her waist.
“Oh, no, we just needed some directions.”
Goldie snapped the notebook shut with an exasperated sigh. “Can’t help you unless you order something.”
“What? Really?”
“No grub no love, kid.”
“That is definitely not how that goes,” Charlie muttered.
“Fine, I’ll take a tea,” Nora tried.
“We don’t do tea,” said Goldie.
Nora sucked in a sharp breath. “Okay. Fine. A juice, then. Now, we’re trying to get t—”
“That won’t cut it,” said Goldie.
“What?”
“Juice is two fifty. Directions cost more than that. Has to be food. No food? Just ’tude.”
“This is ridiculous,” Nora said, the frustration and fear that had plagued her all day raising her voice louder than she’d intended.
Goldie just shrugged as someone tapped Nora on the shoulder. She turned around to find the three bikers from the booth in a horseshoe around her and Charlie.
“These folks bothering you, Goldie?” said the one with the most ostentatious beard.
Goldie looked over the twins for a moment, considering. “Maybe.”
“No, no, it’s fine,” said Charlie. “We were just ordering. The Hungry Man breakfast looks good.”
“Hmm,” said Goldie. The bikers didn’t budge. “Where are you headed?”
“Virgo Bay,” said Charlie.
Goldie’s stony face eroded into something unrecognizable.
The bikers surrounding them took a step back.
The air seemed to be vacuumed out of the diner for a moment.
Even the teenaged girl with her parents looked up from her phone.
After a silence that was too long for Nora’s comfort, Goldie turned towards the kitchen.
“I’ll get that order going for you,” she said, her voice suddenly small and without edge. The bikers slunk back to their booths.
“Uh, the directions?” Charlie called at Goldie’s retreating back, but she didn’t turn around. “The hell was that? All I said was ‘Virgo Bay’ and they scattered. What is this, a town of Capricorns or something?”
The old man at the counter chortled into his sundae.
“Let’s go,” Nora said, defeated. “We can find a place to stay for the night and try again elsewhere in the morning.”
Charlie shrugged and started following his sister away from the counter when the old man turned around. “What do you want with Virgo Bay anyway?”
The twins stopped. “We’re looking for some friends of our father,” said Nora.
“In Virgo Bay?”
She nodded.
“You’d really be better off looking elsewhere. It’s not an area for tourists. The locals…they’re an odd bunch. Keep themselves to themselves. Don’t welcome outsiders. That kind of behavior, well, it makes it feel like there’s something to hide. Talk to your old man, maybe he can help.”
“He’s dead,” Nora said matter-of-factly.
“I see.” The old man patted his cheeks with a cloth napkin covered in embroidered jellyfish. “And he was from there?”
Nora nodded. “Yeah, he spent his whole life up here until he and our mom met.” She didn’t know why she was telling the man this.
It was just wasting time. But there was something about his face, warm and well creased and worn red with a lifetime of exposure to the wind and sea, that made it feel worth a shot. “Martin Bird.”
Something flashed behind the man’s watery eyes before disappearing into the flecks of soft hazel.
“Bird, you say? Hmm. Well, I grew up a few towns over from there. Never went to Virgo Bay myself, don’t really remember exactly where it is.
I haven’t been back in a good long while and I don’t remember much these days.
But I can get you to the area if you like. ”
Nora looked at Charlie, her chest swelling with her longtime enemy: hope.
“That would be amazing.”
“You got a pen and paper?”
“Notes app,” said Charlie, holding up his phone.
“Fine, fine. But you really should know before you set off, Virgo Bay is not your average town.”
“What do you mean?” Nora asked.
The man sucked his teeth, his eyes drifting to the middle distance as he seemed to consider his words. Finally, he looked back at the twins. “You start with a left at that stop sign by the convenience store. If you see the bakery, you’ve gone too far.”
* * *
The road ahead seemed endless, carved into hillsides and nestled between evergreens along the wild coast. Nora kept her jaw clenched, Charlie’s case file still etched in her head.
Car accident. That’s how he was slated to die.
And though they’d left the highway, they would be in the car for another good few hours before they reached the approximate area of Virgo Bay.
And with the file changing seemingly arbitrarily, any road seemed like a risk.
This drive couldn’t be over soon enough.
But then what? Two strangers, who might not even still be there, would miraculously take them in?
They’d stay off the roads forever so Charlie couldn’t be killed?
It all seemed like a long shot, but it was the best they had.
Charlie let out a gurgle from where he slept in the passenger seat.
Nora took a quick look over at him. The way his brow hung close to his eyes like hers did.
The way his nose curved up like hers didn’t.
The full lips that matched hers and the soft jawline that squished into his neck just slightly, while hers was taut.
They were so different, and yet they were made of the same ingredients.
She could see that, even when she didn’t want to.
Her old life was gone. Her job lost, her apartment a compost heap of rotting houseplants and groceries she never had the chance to eat, but as she listened to the rhythmic breathing from her brother’s perpetually ever-so-slightly-plugged nose, she decided maybe that was okay right now. That maybe it was worth it.
The hours ticked by and the effects of the nap Nora had stolen at the motel began to dissipate. Her mind traveled back to the truck on the highway, the drowsy driver nearly bisecting her little car, and she gave her thigh a pinch.
“Do you know I spy?” Nora asked Jessica, eyeing the bird in the back seat through the rearview mirror.
“The first five digits of pi are three point one four one five,” squawked Jessica.
“I’ll take that as a no. Well, Charlie definitely wasn’t your first owner, was he? The only pie he knows is served with ice cream. Where did you come from?”
“Shit, shit,” squawked Jessica.
“Now that’s more like Charlie. Can you give me something more than that?
” Nora caught herself and sighed. “Am I actually having a conversation with a bird?” She decided she was.
There wasn’t much else to keep her awake.
“Hmm. Are you from a pet store or something? Who left you with my brother? I mean, leaving Charlie in charge of anything is never a good idea. So it can’t have been someone who knows him well, unless it was a prank.
It’s weird though, right? To just leave someone a bird?
Do you remember their name or anything about them or when you last saw them or—”
Jessica suddenly let out a blood-curdling shriek, as if someone were hacking her to death right there in her cage.
Charlie, suddenly awake, shrieked with her in alarm just as a rabbit hopped onto the road to the left of the car.
In a flash, Nora knew she would swerve off the road.
She could see the car sailing right and into the boulders bordering them.
She could see it all so clearly, as if it were already happening.
She would swerve right and Charlie would die.
She turned the steering wheel left.
The rabbit leapt to the right and hopped off towards the forest beyond the boulders as the car skidded off the road and onto the grass, crashing through a stake of wood, the street sign it held flying up onto the windshield and over the car as the impact forced them to a stop.
Airbags tossed Nora’s head back and threw her hands off the steering wheel.
By the time the dust had settled, the front hood was smashed and steaming, the car unwilling to start.
Nora quickly gave Charlie a once-over. His nose was bleeding from the airbag, but he seemed otherwise unharmed.
For the second time that night, he didn’t die.
For her part, Nora’s wrist was throbbing, but there was no time to think about that now.
“We need to get out of the car in case the engine catches fire.”
Charlie held one hand over his nose, attempting to stop the bleeding with a pinch, and grabbed his duffel bag and Jessica’s cage with the other. They exited the smoking car, and Nora promptly burst into tears.