Chapter Two
I wake up afraid, a knot in my belly that tightens all at once, forcing me upright. It is early, just the faintest of cool light spilling into the room I share with Sélie.
I find her sleeping soundly, her shining hair cascading over the side of her bed like a golden-red waterfall.
She’s fine. She’ll be tired today, perhaps—the three of us found our way into a bottle of whiskey last night—they drank in solidarity with me, as I nursed my regret.
My head aches already. But something feels wrong.
It’s not the acrid aftertaste of my non-audition… but something else.
Unsettled, I ease myself up out of my bedcovers and quietly pad across the cottage to Aven’s room.
“Aven?” I whisper, pushing her door open. I’m greeted with a pang of emptiness as I spy the boots still standing near the dresser, waiting for a man who will never come home to her, to any of us.
It’s unusual to find her bed empty—she rarely leaves it when home, ever since Darius died. But the room is dim and musty, the curtains closed, the marriage quilt undisturbed, like she didn’t even sleep.
I don’t bother with shoes or a dressing gown—I leave the cottage, biting my lip in worry as I step outside.
The air hangs heavy with salt and strangeness, the way it always does in The Pins.
Yet it’s not the lingering scent of fish and flowers from the market or the garlic paste old women swipe across their sills to keep out bad spirits—the stench always seems to drift, even outside of town—but the hint of something else I sense, more a knowing than a smell.
The chilly morning breeze whips against my face, making me suck in a breath.
The somber gray waves of the sea soften upon the shore into thick caps of white.
I search our land with my eyes until I narrow in on a figure in a nightgown standing waist-deep in the water.
My sister’s bare arms are wrapped around herself as she inches forward, deeper into the sea.
I yell for her, racing down the rocky path, littered with sharp stones that dig into my already-battered feet, until I reach the shore. I keep going.
“Aven!” I kick up the water as I rush to her side, the cuts on my toes stinging from the salt. My heart stutters when she glances over. Will I ever get used to that haunted look in her eyes? Will she ever lose it? I grasp her to me. “What are you doing?”
She stares off into the distance, at the seam where the sky grazes the water. “Corliss?”
“Yes?”
“The ocean hides things.” She turns to me again, and I wince at the expression on her gaunt, white face.
Yesterday was, relatively speaking, a good day. She had her downs at the shop, but she’d smiled. She’d laughed, even, when we were a few drinks in last night. Once—then caught herself, immediately sobering. Already I can tell today will be bad. It is already worse than bad.
I swallow hard. “Come on, love.” I reach up and push the dark tangles out of her face then tug on her elbow gently, pulling her from the water. “You’re cold.”
“Why am I here?” Her voice is dull, hollow, though she allows me to draw her body against my side and walk out to dry land.
She turns to me, blue eyes imploring, hands wringing.
“What am I doing?” For a moment the scent of blood seems to come off of her quivering fingers, as though we didn’t wash it all away.
It was on her hands that evening. Pouring from her. Into my palms. Afterwards, I moved the rug in her room, to cover the stains that ruined the floorboards—but we all know. We all remember.
I lift my eyes to the sulky sky, as though I’ll find answers there. The clouds above us streak like smoke, threatening rain. Despite my fondness for moody weather, I can’t help but shiver. It is all so unfair, what she’s lost.
“Let’s go to the house. Sélie will be worried if she wakes up and finds us gone.”
Aven nods at that. We climb up the makeshift path, nightgowns swishing, rivulets of water running down my legs as we make our way to the cottage, beach at our backs.
It seems a lifetime ago that we lit a bonfire on this same beach to welcome 1870, Aven’s cheeks flushed, Darius at her side—their babe in her blooming womb.
Sélie and I were both tipsy, chipped mugs of champagne in our hands as we toasted the new year, huddled together under a wool blanket near the heat, snow falling on our hair.
Not a lifetime, just mere months ago, and yet happiness had been snatched from all our hands since then.
The wishes we burned in the fire that night—the dreams we had for our new year—are still buried under the sand.
Or maybe they’ve been washed away. Washed away, like Darius was.
The sea took his ship just three weeks ago, all the poor men aboard lost forever.
And then the baby—only days after we got the news.
Grief can’t just be swept away and driven out. Grief sticks. Grief is walking past our front garden and seeing all the flowers that died overnight, trying not to see the tiny gravestone that stands off the back of the cottage. I’ve never felt so helpless.
When we reach the top of the hill and step onto our front path, laid with brick by our own hands years before this, I catch a pinpoint on the horizon, way off in the hilly distance.
The old Colehart Mansion that Loueva warned us of.
I stare for a moment at the isolated place, rather than letting my eyes pass over it as I usually do. Chills wash over me.
As much as I tell myself there’s no logical reason to be afraid of a decrepit house or a funny wind, I can’t help the unsteady feeling lurking within me.
Around me. It’s everywhere. I tighten my grip on Aven, the vines on my tattooed arm twining around her, anchoring her, so she doesn’t float away.
Behind us, down below, the waves fling themselves at the shore, as though aching along with my sister.
The wind whispers against my neck, something secret and horrible. However, the more I try to make sense of the words, the more they slip away from me. Everything feels wrong, and I hurry Aven along until we are almost running the rest of the way to the cottage.
It is still too early, so instead of waking Sélie, we change out of our wet nightgowns, and I tuck myself into the big bed alongside Aven, throwing an arm around her trembling body.
I lay still, listening to her breathing settle as she falls asleep again.
I feel myself drifting off after her, the salt-air scent of her curling around me.
I dream of the sea, a ship, Darius’s face. He is grinning, teasing me and Sélie, his rough hands splayed over Aven’s growing belly. He looks happy. I blink and he is gone.
I blink again, and so is Aven.
A clanging wakes me, banging sounds coming from the kitchen.
Pushing myself out of the bundle of covers, I manage a weak yawn, my brain slow to wake. It’s late, I can tell by the sun peeking out where the curtains don’t quite meet. We should be at the shop by now, I realize guiltily.
“Aven?” I call, climbing out of her bed. I head directly to the kitchen to see how she’s doing, presuming she’ll be making coffee, or a cup of tea for herself.
Standing by the stove, alone, Sélie looks up, frowning. “She’s not out here. I thought you both were asleep in her room. I was going to wake you shortly.”
Something in my middle tightens, clenches. Without a word, I turn, run out of the cottage, to see if Aven’s standing in the sea again. I curse myself for falling asleep. What have I done? Where did she go?
Sélie chases after me, her face drawn, afraid. I shake my head at her, at those big, worried eyes.
“She’s not here,” I whisper, my gut turning inside out, as I search the ocean, violent now, the white foaming up as each wave crashes, roars, screams. “She’s gone.”
Door to door, business to business, we go—desperately seeking our beloved sister.
All morning, all day, Sélie and I, some friends of Aven’s, Darius’s younger cousin—the rest of the Winter family off in Manuette, far too distant to help us.
There are old schoolmates that show up to search and ask questions, vendors that know us, customers with sympathetic eyes, lawmen who take pity on us.
“…will get a word out to surrounding cities…see if anyone’s noticed a woman of her description…You said nothing’s missing? No money?” Constable Elden prodded me when I first went to him this morning, as I paced on the street.
I paused, feeling sick. She didn’t even take shoes. She took nothing but the fresh nightgown I’d helped her into when she woke too early, after she went into the sea.
My ears rang, and I shook my head at his question.
I wouldn’t believe anything but that she would be returned, safe and sound.
That she just needed to be found. And so, we search on.
The constable and his crew head up the outskirts of The Pins—including the sea surrounding our home, including the houses along the edge of town, including the Colehart Mansion.
Meanwhile, I’ve found myself with Sélie at the heart of town, begging anyone for a sign of Aven, for a whisper of where she might be.
If anyone has seen her, if they know where she could have wandered off to.
Hours in and the answers are not forthcoming, but I can’t say the same for the rumors that I keep catching in whispers. They cling to me like burrs.
“I heard she walked into the water this morning…”
“Well, losing her husband and baby only days apart…poor thing.”
“Poor Corliss and Sélie, now. How much loss can one family handle?”
I hate them for voicing what Sélie and I can’t.
I should hate the ocean too, for what I fear it has taken, yet there’s a part of me that cannot—that will not—believe that she would have left us, left the world of the living.
I’m not naive—I know some of her wanted to.
But I can’t live without her. I refuse. So, she must return.