Chapter 24
Twenty-Four
Grace steps out of the pharmacy and into the heat. Everything feels too hot. Too bright. Too much. Despite her attempts to breathe through her feelings, her heart isn’t beating right. How could it? Too many opposing emotions have shown up all at once for it to know what to do.
She slides on her sunglasses, pulls her hat down to block out the light, then takes a seat on the curb, the asphalt warm on the back sides of her thighs.
Grace fumbles through the brown paper bag in her lap, not even bothering to look into it.
Instead, her fingers blindly dig down and pull out a box of Band-Aids.
She tears one open and slaps it on her heel, knowing that at this point it’ll hardly do a thing.
Why didn’t Birdie tell her? All those calls from Maine. The brief early-morning conversations. The late-night check-ins. Not a single word. Never so much as a hint.
A few moments later, and with her thoughts racing, Grace hardly even remembers getting back on the bike.
All she knows is that she’s moving and pedaling again.
Up the boulevard, past blue hydrangeas and shuttered porches and little shops she’s been in a hundred times.
By the time she reaches the amusement pier, her stomach queasy from all the motion of the morning, she’s not even really sure why she’s there.
Grace hops off the cruiser and walks with it.
The tires clunk over the old wooden slats as she moves.
The boardwalk always feels abandoned during the daytime—the ring toss and big wheel games 216shuttered until evening, the snack stands that sell buckets of fries and funnel cakes preparing for a busy night, the Ferris wheel and other rides all turned off.
Up ahead, Grace sees her.
She’s alone, just like every other time they’ve crossed paths this week, sitting outside the old fortune teller booth and staring at the ocean.
This time, Grace doesn’t question if she’s really there.
She doesn’t tell herself she’s hallucinating or dreaming or imagining.
While so many of her memories on this island have blurred, this moment she remembers almost perfectly.
Cece. Thirty-one years old. What was, up until this present week, her last visit to Sea Drift. A few weeks later, she’d be married and moving on.
Although Grace walked past this booth dozens of times, always intrigued by the wooden sign that swayed above the entrance—Madame Mermaid: See Your Future and Plan for It!—and the beaded curtains that concealed the one small window and glass door, she’d only ever stopped at it one time.
“That’s a silly waste of money, Cece,” Birdie used to say as the two of them strolled past, licking ice cream cones on their way to the rides, little-kid Grace asking a million questions.
Can she really see the future? Maybe she can tell us a winning lottery number!
Can we go in so I can find out which teacher I’ll get in the fall?
“She’s just a fake, love,” Birdie always explained.
“For better or worse, no one really knows what life has in store for them.”
Cece doesn’t seem to notice Grace at first, her gaze locked on the waves.
This version is more polished than the others.
Her hair is still sun-kissed from a week at the beach, but it’s brushed back into a smooth, loose twist. She wears a nice linen shirt and leather sandals—simple, stylish, grown-up.
The nameplate necklace hangs between her collarbones, the gold plating catching the light.
On her left hand, a diamond engagement ring hugs her finger, which she 217keeps touching and twisting, like maybe she’s afraid it’ll disappear if she doesn’t.
“There’s a bit of a wait,” Cece says when Grace slides onto an empty chair on the opposite side of the door from where she sits. “Someone just went in.”
“Are you waiting, too?” Grace asks and looks out at the water, both of them studying the horizon.
“I already went.” Cece rubs her ring. “A little bit ago.”
Out on the boardwalk, seagulls peck at French fries smashed between the wooden planks.
“How’d it go?” Grace asks, cautious not to say too much.
Although she doesn’t recall whether she talked to another potential customer in this moment (Maybe?
Possibly? Is that even how this all works?), she remembers with crystal-clear clarity why her thirty-one-year-old self came here. “Did you get the answers you wanted?”
“Hard to say,” Cece admits. She crosses her legs. Her linen top rises as she indulges in a long inhale. “I’m not entirely sure what answers I was hoping to get.”
A moment passes. Cece doesn’t say anything else.
Rather, she gazes ahead while lost in a thought she hasn’t shared.
Grace waits and then almost gets up to leave, wondering if this is it, that the point of this particular encounter is not to talk or to learn some lesson, but to simply see this version of herself again.
The one who was standing on the edge of everything, the whole future she’d been plotting so close that she could touch it with her hands.
“I’m getting married,” Cece suddenly says out of nowhere.
“In October. The venue’s gorgeous. It’s this rooftop, all glass-enclosed, in Lower Manhattan.
You can see the Hudson River and Jersey City.
It’s beautiful.” While she talks, she never turns her face.
“Adam.” Her lips break into a smile. “That’s who I’m marrying.
He’s great. Kind. A gentleman. Good job.
Stable. He even folds laundry.” She laughs.
“We’re going to start looking at houses in the suburbs in the spring. ”
“That all sounds . . . nice,” Grace tells her.
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“I know. That’s why I’m completely terrified.
” She twists the ring again, slower this time.
“I have absolutely everything I ever wanted. At least, I’m about to, anyway.
And instead of bubbling with happiness, I’ve just been a nervous wreck that it won’t work out.
That someone will pull the rug out from under me. That it’s all just one big trick.”
“Why do you feel that way?” Grace asks, even though she already knows the answer. Remembers those worries like they were blooming in her mind just yesterday.
“Because I don’t know what I’d do!” Cece exclaims, loud enough to scare off the gulls.
She rubs her face, laughing, but obviously also a bit embarrassed.
“This is my big happy ending, you know?” Her voice is lower this time so she doesn’t frighten any more wildlife.
“What if it all doesn’t pan out the way I’ve envisioned?
I think I’d just completely break, turn into a puddle or something. ”
The warm breeze picks up, bringing with it a new thought for Grace.
What if she just tells her? Not only who she is but also what she knows.
Encourage her to get up and run away. Warn her that all her perfect plans will shatter, and that in a not-so-far-off future, she’ll be forced to start her whole life all over again.
Before Grace can say any of this, though, Cece begins to speak. “I asked Madame Mermaid the dumbest question,” she admits. “As if coming here wasn’t the dumb part, right?”
“What’d you ask?” Grace remembers the feeling of this day, but not the semantics.
“She was reading my tarot cards, and before she pulled one, she told me to ask something, and that the card she picked would provide the answer.” Cece waits, like she’s still absorbing some of what Madame Mermaid said.
“I asked whether I’d be happy. In the future, you know?
If she saw a version of me that was just . . . content.”
“What’d she say?” Grace asks, looking at this once polished version of herself. “What card did she pick?”
Cece bites her bottom lip before she responds. “The Fool.”
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Grace remembers the card now. The way Madame Mermaid traced her finger across its illustration—a man dressed like a court jester who stood on the edge of a cliff, a knapsack tossed over his shoulder.
“She said it marks new beginnings,” Cece continues.
“That the person who pulls it is at the start of a long journey, one they’re equipped for but that they need to travel alone.
” She stops, thinking about Madame Mermaid’s words and quietly laughs.
“And then she gave me this.” Cece pulls a small blue card from her pocket.
“It’s a twenty-percent-off coupon for my next reading.
Apparently, if I want to know more about the long journey, I’ll need to come back.
” Cece reaches out her arm and passes the coupon to Grace.
“Here. You can use it for your reading,” she tells her.
“I doubt I’ll ever find myself here a second time. ”
Grace accepts it, one more small token of where and who she’s been.
Right after she does, the door between them swings open.
The cluster of bells hanging from it jangles.
Another patron walks out, looking satisfied to have had someone tell her, even if it’s a lie or just pretend, that her future will turn out as bright as she believes.
“Perfect timing.” Cece points to the door. “Looks like you’re up.” She stands then, ready to walk toward the life she’s so hoping will work out. “I’ll see you around,” she says, and starts to move up the boardwalk.
“You won’t,” Grace shouts before she gets too far.
Cece turns and looks over her shoulder, her face tilted at an angle. “I won’t what?”
“Turn into a puddle,” Grace clarifies. “If things don’t work out. You’ll survive it.” She lifts her leg, crossing her ankle over her knee, and smooths the curling edges of the Band-Aid over her foot. “You might be a mess along the way, but you’ll find your way through.”
Cece shakes her head. “You say it like you know me.”
“Maybe I do in my own way.” Grace shrugs. “I remember that time in my life, too.”
Behind Cece, a young couple appears, strolling along and taking in the summer view.
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“Were you scared?” she asks Grace, and when she does, loops her finger around her necklace chain. “Back when you were in my shoes.” Her cheeks lift. “Metaphorically, I mean.”
Grace lets herself remember. Adam. Her first book. The life she always wanted, the one she gave up so much along the way to find.
“I was,” Grace tells Cece. “I was afraid, just like you.”
The couple walks past, arms linked, their faces happy.
“Good to know I’m not the only one, then.
” Cece stuffs a hand in her shorts pocket, turns to take another quick look at the water.
“It’s funny,” she says, shifting their conversation.
“I’ve been coming to this island my whole life.
” She laughs at something private. “I used to be in love with this boy I knew down here.” A pause.
“Ray.” She laughs softly. “Every summer, it felt like it was just me and him.”
“What happened?” Grace asks, though she already knows, has already lived it.
“He knew my past,” Cece says, her gaze still set on the sea. “Eventually, we reached a point where I needed someone who wanted to know my future. My real future, the one that involved more than just a few days spent lounging in the sand.”
“Do you feel like you found it, then? Your future?”
Cece pulls in a big breath and looks down at her shimmering ring. “I do,” she says, not yet knowing that Adam would only know a piece of it, and that finding love was not always the same thing as finding yourself.
I hate winter, Ray said one summer night. The two of them. This boardwalk. The scent of funnel cake. Laughter from the rides. Neon lights. Both of them weeks away from their senior year of college. One last twelve-month stretch before real life began.
Grace laughed. Lucky for you, it’s currently ninety degrees.
I’m serious, Porter. Ray set down the bucket of fries they were sharing, took her hand, threaded his fingers through hers. I’ll miss you this year.
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It was something they never said, just quietly felt, like a heartbeat you knew was there but didn’t acknowledge each time it pulsed.
The fact that, every year, the moment they drove west over the bridge and then off in the opposing directions of their real lives, something inside both of them broke and didn’t feel repaired until the sun shone warm again.
I’ll miss you this year, too, she said. But it’ll go fast. We’ll blink and be back here.
Grace looked at him then. The boy she’d known forever, now broader, taller, with a voice so deep it still sometimes surprised her that it belonged to him.
She often wondered if he thought those things about her.
If he could see the ways she’d changed, even as they continued to return to this place.
If he cared. Or if, like her, he just carried the years with him like souvenirs.
Things will be different when we come back here next August, he’d said. Life will be different, you know?
She did.
But for the rest of the night, as they enjoyed each other’s company beneath the distant glow of the Ferris wheel, she tried not to think about it.
Instead, she just kept telling herself that no matter what happened—no matter who either of them became—they’d continue to return to each other, to this place, as inevitably and constantly as the seasons.
Back in the present moment, the breeze shifts off the water, the air suddenly warm and cool at once.
“So what are you going to ask?” Cece poses, circling back on their conversation.
Grace looks at her, confused.
“Madame Mermaid,” Cece clarifies. “For your reading.”
“Oh.” Grace laughs. “Right.” She sets her foot back down, the wound on her heel still there but at least covered for now. “Same as you, I guess.”
Cece nods. “Makes sense.” She shrugs. “Sort of a universal question, right?”
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The door opens again. A woman wearing too many scarves and far too much thick blue eyeliner steps out and looks around. “Anyone else ready to hear what life has planned?”
Cece turns to Madame Mermaid and then to Grace. “Good luck,” she tells her. “Hopefully she’ll pull a better card for you.”