Chapter 1
There’s an old joke on Mercy that there are three ways off the island—by bridge, by boat, or by burial.
It’s usually told by leather-skinned bartenders and fishermen to tourists sporting brand-new floppy hats, as a playful way to warn them that boat and bridge really are the only routes off—and if a storm blows through, you’re stuck.
But it doesn’t matter. Party line is that Mercy Island is so wonderful, you’d rather die than leave.
I, on the other hand, would rather die than return.
It’s hard for me to say that. And at face value, it makes no sense.
Mercy Island is a sleepy, breezy island off the coast of Georgia, its weeping willows, oaks, and magnolia trees draped with Spanish moss, its buildings covered in crawling jasmine and ivy.
The sunsets inspire daily hobby artists to set up camp en plein air with watercolors and tumblers of wine to capture the rich scarlet, luminous gold, hot pink, and streaking periwinkle that reflects on the calm, ever-cool water.
When you lay down your towel for a day at the beach, your bag, fingernails, and clothes will go home with a fine dusting of the butter-soft sand that peaks like meringue all over the shore.
When it’s hot, it feels like a Tennessee Williams play—a sort of madness wreaking havoc on its residents as they press ice cubes to their collarbones and let old wire fans blow their hair into a new shape.
When the temperatures climb like that, people tend to get closer, rather than farther apart, though you’d think it’d be the opposite.
Bands play and people dance, their thin cotton slipping off shoulders and up thighs, condensation from cold drinks leaving wet rings on every surface, strings from bikinis softly denting freshly baked skin and hiding tan lines.
Summers are endless here. The undisputed annual star, as the chilly, rainy gray days of winter and dewy, drizzly days of spring feel like nothing more than opening acts.
Fall, with its crisp air and shattering leaves, is like the morning after a wedding.
Warm in the afterglow, but a little melancholy now that the big moment is over.
I used to love Mercy Island. And I hate that I don’t anymore.
Hate that. If Babe hadn’t died, I wonder just what it would have taken to get me where I am now: in the back of a car on the way from the airport, anxious nails scraping into the leather handle of my carry-on bag, on my way back to Birdsong.
When I learned she was gone, I’d felt numb. The most sadness I felt at the time was caused by the fact that I felt nothing, and knew I should. I kept waiting for it to hit me.
I’m still waiting for it to hit me.
“Can you— Sorry, could you pull over really quick? Right there, at the gas station?”
The driver looks at me in the rearview mirror.
“I’ll be quick.”
I get out and hear the familiar buzz of the turquoise neon sign that says SANDY’S GRAB N GO, followed by a listing of the gas prices—all staggeringly low way out here.
An icy wall of air-conditioning pummels me as I walk inside.
The bathroom doorknob still rattles, I see, its housing having been loose since I was at least fifteen years old.
I feel immediately like I’ve stepped into my own memories.
I haven’t thought about the buzzing sign or the rattling doorknob in years, not consciously, and yet I know them so deeply.
I’m not even over the bridge yet, and I already can’t believe this has all been sitting here, as it was.
I’m not so vain as to have imagined that it all crumbled into ash when I sped out of here that night, almost never looking back, but … also I kind of am?
I plant my hands on the porcelain sink and stare at my reflection.
I look like I’ve just been released from intensive care whenever I get off a plane.
My undereyes are gray, my skin is sallow and pale, and my hair is a rat’s nest. People at work would never believe it.
They’re used to seeing me as I am every single day, with my straightened red hair pulled back in a neat ponytail, my chef’s coat unmarred by even a single fleck of sauce. I never let the late nights show.
Look at me now.
My breath comes in nervous shudders I can’t quite explain, and I make an effort to breathe calmly through my nose and then out through my mouth. My back teeth grind as they do all day and all night, despite the attention I try to pay. I consciously relax my jaw. Redo my hair. Straighten up.
“It’s fine,” I say to my reflection, like a neurotic woman in a Nora Ephron movie, which I kind of am right now. “It’s fine.”
I buy an electrolyte water on the way out, just to have bought something, and feel equally knocked sideways when I exit the building as when I entered, finding myself facing the responding wall of humid Georgia air.
Thick with the stinging scent of brine, the song of cicadas, and the damp, green heat of this part of the South.
“Thanks,” I say when I get back in the car. And then, as I do too often, I add, “Sorry.”
“All good,” says the driver.
The tires heave back into motion, guiding us out of the small lot, down the narrow road, and then to Mercy Bridge.
I used to roll down the window for this part, whether I was a kid in the back seat, or eventually a stringy teenager with my leg on the dash of my old Jeep, music blasting and being carried off out of the rushing air and into the sea spray.
I lean back against the headrest now, eyes shut, hand now gripping the smooth surface of my phone.
I would give anything for a distraction, and yet this is the only time in history I can remember a restaurant group chat being completely silent.
Really? No one needs to know where the bag of linens is hiding?
No one is having trouble with the ever-broken ice machine?
I swipe on my phone screen, slipping through the habitual scroll of all the usual apps. It’s not much better in my phone. More doom, gloom, clickbait, and gossip. But it’s better than looking out the window.
I don’t need to. I know what’s out there.
There’s one long road that goes through the island, one artery, and off it, there are small, winding lanes, its capillaries, that lead to the tree houses that perch there on top of dunes and the little bungalows that huddle down amidst the sea oats.
For every beautiful house covered in flowers with clean white trim, there is another with a wacky mailbox and a yard full of whimsical junk that has long since desaturated from sun-bleaching.
“You ever been here before?” asks the driver, and I realize for the first time that he has a strong Georgia accent, the one some people say is disappearing in this part of the South.
“Yeah,” I say. I don’t know how to quickly explain my relationship to the place, so I add, “I used to come every summer.”
“Did you now? Well, welcome home.”
“Thanks.” I shift in my seat.
“Where you visitin’ from?”
“New York.”
“Oh-ho! City girl, huh? You gonna come back to the old hometown, fall in love with an old flame, and give up life in the big city?”
I give a polite laugh. “Only if we also bake enough muffins to save the inn!”
He cracks up. “You watch those movies too? I love ’em, man. My wife got me into watching ’em—”
He goes on, talking about his love of formulaic romances and holiday movies and I listen absently, jiggling my foot, feeling grateful for his slow, unhurried, fifteen-miles-an-hour crawl.
He’s matching the island’s pace. This is the kind of place where dogs run off-leash and children chase rogue soccer balls into the street. Outdoor cats live twenty years.
We drive past the center of town now and I only let my gaze briefly face out toward the warm, buzzing energy of a Mercy Island summer night.
In even that flash, I see the huddles of rubber-limbed teenagers laughing out loud and the contrasting wind-bitten old men with their glasses of whiskey, surely chatting about the same things they do every day.
I do a double take at a barefoot woman dancing and can just barely catch the song that’s playing, even through the glass. “Brown Eyed Girl.” For a split second, my brain had clocked her as my mother.
I crack the window, beginning to crave soaking it in, but also starting to feel like I can’t breathe.
“You my-y, my brown eyed girl,” I hear a group, somewhere, singing along off-key.
“—anyway, that’s my take on it. World’s hard enough as it is, sometimes you gotta take a load off and watch a little somethin’ with a happy ending.”
“I agree,” I say. “I don’t even know the last time I sat down to watch a movie.”
“You kidding? Sounds like this little vacation is comin’ at the perfect time for you, Big City Girl.”
I don’t correct him to tell him it’s not a vacation. I don’t drag him into my stress by saying this is probably the one place on earth where I can definitely not relax. Instead, I sigh and lie, “You’re right about that.”
My breath catches as we move into the last stretch. The hundred heartbeats, as Babe used to say. Town is a hundred heartbeats from Birdsong. Usually I’d say she’s right, but my heart has been thrashing with the same intensity it used to when I was in college, shotgunning Red Bull vodkas.
The gates at the end of the drive are thrown open, as they have been for so long that ivy chains them to the wall and ground. A gas lamp flickers above the brass sign that bears the house’s name above the year it was built, 1912. Every carving dark behind a thick patina.
Boomboomboomboomboomboomboom.
What is wrong with me? Seriously, with this level of anxiety, you’d think I’m marching toward my own funeral.
I’m being ridiculous. It’s just a house. It’s just a sister. It’s just a celebration of life, as the invitation had said. It’s just a will.
There’s no reason to be so nervous. The past can’t crawl through time and suck me back in.
I know that. It’s hardly more than a day trip.
It’s eight o’clock now, that gives me four hours left of Friday, then tomorrow (I’ll try to sleep late, for once), then my flight out on Sunday night.
That’s … what, like less than forty-eight hours?
You can’t even properly prepare a roast chicken in that amount of time.
And I’ll be sleeping for at least some of that.
Maybe. If I can get my brain to turn off.
“Wait a minute,” he says. “You’re staying here? I didn’t recognize the address, I’ve been to a party here before!”
“That sounds about right.” Joyful memories start threatening to resurface then, and I struggle to let them. They’re too marred, too tainted by the worse ones that surround them. I bend to look out the window, up at the sight of it. Then to myself, I mutter, “Hooo-ly shit.”
Surrounded by a stretch of jade-green grass, tinted cornflower blue by the twilight, covered in vines, its stucco the color of sunburn.
Birdsong.
A house with a name really has no choice but to be filled with ancient memories and secrets, doesn’t it?
“There’s a real nice lady lives here, dang, what’s her name. Something cute. Babs? No that’s not it.”
“Babe,” I utter my mother’s name for the first time in as long as I can remember.
“Babe!” He gets out of the car and opens my door. “That’s it. She’s a good one. You tell her Joe Bixby said hello to her, okay?”
I’m shaking, ears ringing, I can barely hear him.
He gets out my suitcase and I hoist my carry-on duffel over my shoulder.
“You’ll tell her for me, won’t you? I’m sure she won’t remember me, but anyway.”
I then look at him, really, for the first time.
He has a kind face. As before, I’m not going to correct him now.
And not just because I don’t want to say the words out loud.
I haven’t told anyone yet that she died.
But because I don’t want to ruin his night.
No reason to tell him the nice lady who lives in the pink house is dead and gone.
“It’s not like Babe to forget somebody.” It’s the truest thing I can muster.
He won’t accept the cash tip I try to hand him, despite my insistence. He tells me to have a fun weekend and goes on his way.
After a moment, his car has wound around the rest of the driveway, and I’m left alone.
I smack at a mosquito on my ankle without looking and unclench my jaw as I stare up at the wraparound porch, its glowing light, and the weathered screen door.
The storm door is open. There’s nothing but a few steps between me and whatever this weekend is about to be.
The foyer light is on and it casts a warm glow onto the entryway rug that will always be embedded with sand, no matter how many high-powered vacuums run over the fibers.
The light is always on when someone is expected to arrive.
It was always the first clue that you were welcome.
Whether you were a guest coming over for one of Babe’s famous dinners, or one of us rushing back from a sudden downpour or tiptoeing in after a late-night bonfire, the light would be on and only turned off if the house was closed to the world for the night.
I can’t help but feel warm at the sight of it.
But then, like clockwork, that warmth is followed by a hollow feeling.
A feeling that says, There’s a reason you haven’t seen it in so long.
After one glance behind me to see if I could run and catch Joe again, flee this whole thing, I pick up my bags and climb the steps and cross the threshold.
Instinctively, I put my foot out behind me to catch the screen door, the spring having always been broken, so it usually slapped shut.
But it yawns slowly closed, the hydraulic hinge repaired.
I’m sure Babe had it done in the last few years, but it feels like a sign that she’s gone, and that things are already changing.
I hear voices quiet at the sound of my arrival. Whoever they are, they know I’ve arrived—and that means whatever happens next has already begun.