Chapter 3
PANDORA’S DIARY
Woodland ciders: some serious steins
Lobsters: Very!
Not caring about your gift on Beane Island is like not caring about your birthday.
So while I don’t care about unlocking my gift or celebrating it, I still know the process.
Finding your gift doesn’t require saying mumbo-jumbo and waving your arms. It’s more internal and sensory than that.
A gift focuses on feeling your connection to the world around you—and the faint remaining traces of the long-departed true fairies in your own blood.
Deja insists that the stereotype of witches using cauldrons is based on faerie-kin trying to use eye-watering scents or tastes to unlock their gifts. That is probably also true of tales of sorcerers poring over ancient manuscripts to master hexes or shave unicorns or whatever nonsense they tried.
But I’ve never needed a real gift to feel close to my fae ancestry. There is power in laughter, beauty, and music. That is magic enough to me. And yes, there is power in sex too—at least before some prick announces that you aren’t good enough for him.
My point is, I’ve always found it simple to connect to what feels like magic.
Though sometimes, upon arriving home, I need to remind myself of that fact.
Sometimes seeing the impossible, enchanting marvels on Beane almost makes me forget my resolve.
I catch myself daydreaming about possible gifts: like breathing saltwater or transforming my eyelashes into butterfly wings.
After getting dressed for the lobster bake, I decided to work on my List of Magical Moments. Despite the fact that I don’t need a gift, I want to celebrate the full range of my life on Beane, from normality to magic.
Without further ado, Diary, I present to you Pandora’s List of Magical Moments.
Reconnect with old friends, the most important part of the summer.
Embrace the island, the magic of “normal” nature. Dad’s garden, the woods and the coast, the wildflowers and the ocean breezes.
Lobster bake! Which I will thoroughly enjoy, now that I know Leo won’t be there.
Convince Grumpy Bruce the lobsterman to shape the clouds into baby hedgehogs.
Sail around the island. One of my first memories, as a toddler, and about a dozen of my best memories, as a teenager.
Join Jamar, who owns the pizza place in the village, on one of his lucid dreaming adventures, where he guides you on skydiving and river rafting trips while you sleep.
Camp on the beach. Ask Philip to build a boulder shelter, snag a basket of Sheila’s food, and bring thermoses of Dennis’s strongest elixirs and a dozen kinds of edibles and host a bacchanalian blowout.
Help Deja in the shop. Help Dad in the garden and Mom in the Inn. Help Sheila in the kitchen and—I know I’ll forget the details but I hope I’ll remember the feelings.
Play in a trio with a gifted harpist and violinist, to lock in memories of myself performing at gift-enhanced levels even though I’m not gifted.
Faithfully keep this diary all summer. By next year, I won’t be able to read anything related to faerie-kin, but I’ll still have a record of the best parts of a wonderful, normal summer.
The first item would take all summer, so it was time to focus on the second: embrace the natural magic of the island.
I’d already done that a bit while gardening with Dad, but I went outside and stood in a deer bed in the tall grass and gazed at the ocean, watching the buoys bob and the water sparkle.
I didn’t need a gift to feel my connection to Beane Isle deeply, I just needed to open myself to my surroundings, my childhood, my feelings.
Even if I lost my faerie-kin memories this year, I’d still embrace the way the island relaxed my mind and expanded my soul. I smiled as a golden dragonfly zoomed past, and thought of Deja and Shrig’s uncle. I hoped he saw a minor gift like that as a blessing, not a curse.
Back at the house, I loaded Sheila’s pies into my old red wagon from Dad’s shed then trekked across the blueberry field to the Carters’ house.
The early evening sun was still high in the sky and the sea air smelled of summer memories.
The ocean murmured while the wheels squeaked and the handle joggled in my grasp.
I let myself in the Carters’ side door without knocking, like always, and found Leora in the kitchen surrounded by corn on the cob, fingerling potatoes, sugar snap pea salad, and plenty of garlic bread.
I’ve always loved how different Leo’s house is from ours.
It’s more contemporary and practical, instead of an inviting inn.
The interior is white with tall ceilings and heated concrete floors.
The furniture and art are modern and the colors remind me of a Matisse painting.
Unlike the peeling paint in the Inn that my mother constantly covers with her magic, the walls are freshly painted bright white, no doubt due to the piles of money Leo is making selling valuable tomes.
Of course, with Leonard’s gift for cabinetry, the kitchen is a dream of custom-designed white oak cabinets, a hammered steel sink, and an artisan tile backsplash. Today, the white stone counter of the island in the kitchen was laden with food, paper plates, lobster crackers, and bibs.
“Pandora!” Leora said, giving me a hug. “I didn’t know you were coming.”
She looked frazzled, with her glasses steamed and her dyed red hair plastered to her forehead, but happy. Seeing the brightness in her eyes pleased me and I reminded myself to check on her later. Once the party was in full swing, she often got a little flustered.
“Surprise!” I said, returning the hug.
“I’m glad you’re here. Now it’ll be a real lobster bake.” Her expression flickered. “Like when you and Leo were kids.”
“Plus I brought Sheila’s pies,” I told her. “Where do you want them?”
“On one of the tables outside. Everything is labeled, you’ll see where.”
Though Leora doesn’t have a gift, she’s a natural at hosting.
We never could’ve pulled off the lobster bake without her.
She even hand-draws little signs so you know where to put the strawberry rhubarb and chocolate cream, along with the lobster, the cracking tools, and the bibs.
I don’t understand how she and my mother are so close: I count myself lucky if Mom doesn’t just frisbee pies through an open door.
Leora wiped her hands on the apron she wore over a white linen blouse and jeans and began weighing pats of butter before placing them in dainty dishes. “Why do I always agree to host this thing?”
“Because you’re brilliant at throwing beautiful parties,” I said, checking over her shoulder for signs of Leo.
I knew he’d said he wasn’t coming, but I also knew I couldn’t trust him.
Happily, I didn’t see a stack of weirdly expensive books or a laptop open to inscrutable messages from European antiquarian dealers. “Also, your house is nice and private.”
For reasons of tradition—and a hint of blood-hunger—most faerie-kin communities throw caution to the wind while enjoying some local delicacy or activity.
Fae weren’t all grace and glamour, after all: they were predators.
We are only the faintest echoes of them, but on Beane Isle lobster is our weakness—and we are a little frightening when we eat it.
Enough to scare off any normal witness. Legs are cracked and sucked dry, butter is splattered, claws are stripped clean, and grunts of ecstasy are encouraged.
We wouldn’t look out of place in a Viking movie where victorious warriors return from battle to a raucous feast. The way they ripped meat from the bone with their teeth, we tear into lobster claws, and shout for steins of woodland cider.
We are just as wild and unrestrained—except with magic instead of axes.
“What else can I do to help?”
“Hm. Well, Leo’s not coming this year, so I’ll put you to work. Leonard and your dad are on the beach, their hands full of charcoal and seaweed.”
I tried not to show my relief when she confirmed Leo wasn’t coming and offered to take the corn and potatoes down to the beach.
Dad and Leonard do this the traditional way.
They set up rocks, fire, and seaweed, then lay the lobsters on top.
They add the corn and potatoes next, then another layer of seaweed and saltwater and wet burlap blankets to seal the whole thing in until everything is perfectly steamed.
Leora jumpstarted her career as a magazine writer when she wrote about the lobster bake for a Maine magazine.
Since then, she’s written more articles about Beane Isle, but mostly she contributes restaurant and garden and lifestyle reviews from around the coast. Occasionally she gets comped a night at a hotel and she takes my mom along.
Unsurprisingly, that has gotten them kicked out more than once: my mother is a wonderful innkeeper but an abominable guest. Instead of horrifying Leora, this is somehow the key to their friendship.
I reloaded my wagon with corn and potatoes and headed to the beach, where I found Dad, Leonard, and their friend Philip loading lobsters onto seaweed.
Leonard is bald and wiry, with bushy eyebrows, and he was wearing a straw fedora with a navy and pink lobster ribbon band.
He has a wonderfully grizzled face, full of character and affection.
Philip, on the other hand, is mostly gray.
Not just his hair, but his soul. He’s an old friend of both my and Leo’s parents, but he still recedes into the background like tan at a beige convention.
You’d think that going unnoticed was his gift.
“Hey, Pandora!” Leonard said, greeting me with the wave of a lobster. “Your dad said you were in town.”
“I like your hat.”
“Let me look at you! Aw, you’re almost as pretty as your mom was at your age.”
“Gee, thanks,” I said, though Mom had been kind of a knockout.
“Well, she wasn’t incubating a forehead egg.”
He meant my black fly bite. I gave him two thumbs up.