Chapter 19 #2
Yasmin’s eyes filled with fresh tears. She stared at me, her lip wobbling, unable to speak.
I shook my head and lowered my voice. “You need to leave.”
Nate touched Yasmin’s arm. “You can stay at my place, babe.”
I pointed to the stairs. “Pack your shit. Go to Nate’s and then go home to your family and leave me the fuck alone.”
Yasmin sobbed once, then twirled dramatically and ran up the stairs. She stomped her feet as she went, then threw open the door so hard it banged against the wall. Nate watched her go, then turned back to me, hesitating.
I sighed. “Help her pack, please.”
He nodded.
Before I could stop the words, I added, “Thank you.”
***
Eventually, the silence in the house got to me.
I called to her a few times, but Annabelle never reappeared.
She really was gone. All through my confrontation with Yasmin, I’d wondered if she might reappear and chide me for my childish behavior, but she stayed away.
I wasn’t sure if she could see us but decided it didn’t matter anyway.
With broken cups littering the kitchen floor that I couldn’t look at without feeling a fresh wave of spite and no one to cook dinner, I left.
At dinner, I ignored messages from Brooke about the library video and the upcoming show.
I ordered a burger at the distillery where Nate and Yasmin had their first date.
It tasted like nothing. I drank three in-house craft beers that were so light I couldn’t feel anything until halfway into the third.
Using the distillery’s Wi-Fi, I purchased a plane ticket back to New York and sent an email agreeing to all of Seymour’s terms. I told him to bring the paperwork and a notary to the house on the thirty- first so I could sign everything and be done with it.
My mouth tasted sour with sadness and Michigan craft beer.
As I walked back to Abaddon on the cycling path, I stopped at a particular patch of darkness, somehow knowing that I’d stopped at Annabelle’s cove.
It was just a place.
I didn’t believe that, though. The night was breezy and bright with moonlight.
I felt incredibly alone. The nightlife downtown was in full swing, with many of the island’s tourists and locals filling the bars and restaurants or walking from fudge shop to fudge shop.
I stood in the spot where I was convinced Annabelle had died, feeling the hole in my chest growing again.
After the unfamiliar heaviness of a full heart, its reemergence felt refreshingly familiar.
I was alone again. So, what? It’s how this was always going to end. I was kidding myself by thinking I could have more.
The moon was half full, so I walked further onto the rocky beach than I had before, using its light for a guide.
Annabelle’s letters hadn’t offered any clues about her death.
They simply stopped. On the last day, she wrote about going to the market to find ingredients for a new recipe.
There wasn’t any final letter announcing her intentions.
Linda had cautioned me not to jump to conclusions, saying that we couldn’t know how—or why—she stopped writing.
But I knew. Annabelle had come to this cove, alive.
Then she returned, bound to the island forever, as a spirit.
I ached for her, but she didn’t feel strongly enough about me to cross over the divide between us. She would remain tethered to the house no matter what I did or how much I cared. I turned to go. With my back to the lake, I picked my way back to the path, but something made me turn.
Annabelle stood in the lake, a shining beacon of white submerged in the dark water.
She faced away from me, looking out toward the bridge with the water up to her waist. Like before, she wore a thin white gown.
It was long, floating on the surface around her body while she was as still as a lighthouse, shining and immobile.
Seeing her here, when she wouldn’t appear at home, plunged a knife into my heart. It felt wrong. I was seeing the hidden parts of Annabelle, the past she kept hidden behind a smile, when what I wanted was all of her.
I rushed forward as she stepped further into the water.
“Annabelle!”
I scrambled as far as I could go on the black rocks of the shoreline, trying not to slip and fall. I was wearing boots with rubber soles, but they were fashionable boots meant for being seen, not clamoring on a beach full of jagged rocks and the icy cold water of the Great Lakes.
Now in the water up to her chest, she turned.
Annabelle’s face was drawn and sad, the thin line of her mouth holding no hint of a curve.
The laughing, teasing, plump lips that I longed to see lift into a smile were instead pressed together, painfully tight.
They were as white as her face and hair.
Her usually joyful face instead held the haunted look of a tortured soul.
“Annabelle!” I shouted, plunging into the water. The shock of the cold registered distantly in my mind, but I pushed it aside.
But the ghost didn’t seem to see or hear me.
“Can you hear me? Marley!”
I splashed forward, my shoes filling with water and weighing me down, like I was wearing sand-filled socks on my feet. The water was up to my knees now. My feet slipped over the algae-covered rocks. Throwing my arms up for balance, I wildly flapped them in the cool night air.
Ahead of me, Annabelle silently walked further into the lake.
“Annabelle!” I yelled again. What was she doing out here? Was it really her? “Marley!”
The tails of her white gown floated on the lake’s surface, dragging behind her like a sodden wedding train. Annabelle sank deeper into the dark water, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to reach her before her white-blond curls went under.
“Marley!” My voice broke. It became a grinding, desperate thing, clawing at my throat. “I need you. Stop!”
She kept going, disappearing into the freezing black water, unmoved by my shouts, which dissolved into the whisper of waves lapping at the shore.
I stood in shock while the sting of the cold night air pricked my skin.
“Marley,” I whispered one last time, knowing I’d receive no answer. She was gone.
When the numbness in my feet turned into pain, I carefully waded back to the rocks. I stood for one last moment on the shore, looking out at the empty water.
There was no sign of Annabelle.
No ghostly white gown swirling around her body. No pale blue eyes staring at me in horror. No open mouth, gasping. Just the dark lake and the bright disc of the moon.