I.
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea.
from “Annabel Lee”
by Edgar Allan Poe
Summer Solstice
On the island of By-the-Sea you could always smell two things: salt and magic.
The first was obvious. It came crashing ashore in the blue waves; it sat heavy and thick in our hair and our clothes; it stained our bedsheets and made our pillows damp.
The second—the scent of magic—was harder to pin down.
It floated behind my mother as she carried a woven basket out to the herb garden in the middle of the night (when picked under moonlight, rosemary became so much more than just something that goes well with eggs).
It gathered up in the corners of the Fernweh Inn, mixed with the dust and the cobwebs that collected in the guest rooms during the nine months the inn sat (mostly) empty.
And it poured off my sister on the night of the summer solstice, when she stepped up onto the ledge of myattic bedroom window and unceremoniously pushed herself away, jumping into the night air with all the grace of a poorly trained ballerina.
Oh—don’t worry.
She’ll be fine.
Of all the stories about my family, the Fernweh women on the island of By-the-Sea, there are two that no one will ever forget. One is the story of how my sister, Mary, and I were born. And the other is the story of the summer we turned eighteen. This summer.
You would never know by looking at my sister that she was the type of girl who could jump from a fourth-story window and float gently to the ground on a warm and windless summer night, landing perfectly between two of my mother’s enormous, prized-possession bleeding hearts, trampling not a single blade of grass beneath her bare feet. And yet here we were: A warm and windless summer night. My sister’s dress floating around her like a ghost made out of cotton and lace. A fall that should have killed her. A fall thatwouldhave, if she weren’t a Fernweh. My mother’s bleeding hearts, untouched, and my sister dropping her sandals on the grass and sliding into them while looking back up at me, an obnoxiously pleased expression on her face, the scent of magic so strong and sharp (like ashes, like shadows, like dirt) that I actually sneezed.
“Bless you!” she called up merrily.
From above, leaning out of the window, I rolled my eyes.
“You’re so fucking dramatic,” I said.
Mary kissed the air in my general direction.
It took me a few minutes longer to make it down to the grass; we couldn’t all float through the summer air. I had to crawl down the lattice that ran up the side of the house, avoiding the thorns of the roses that vined skyward and always made my bedroom smell so sickly sweet. When I finally jumped the last few feet and landed beside her, she had lain down in the grass. She was pretending to be asleep.
“Asshole,” I said, and kicked her with the toe of my sandaled foot.
“Jealous,” she replied.
“Joke’s on you when you get a grass stain on your ass.”
“Mom has grass-stain potion,” Mary said, and held her hand out to me. I grabbed it hard and pulled her up. She smelled like cinnamon as she smiled at me. “Doesn’t this just feel like a night of limitless possibility?” she said, suddenly serious, holding her arms open to the night like she could embrace it.
“Sure, Mary. Whatever you say.”
She laughed and pushed me away, and I followed her as she turned and darted across the lawn. I paused at the edge of our property, turning only once to see how creepy the Fernweh Inn looked at night. It was all shadows and thingsthat caught the corner of your eye. Real stuff of ghost stories. I’d always loved it.
“Keep up, Georgina,” Mary called as we made our way down Bottle Hill and away from the ocean, toward the center of our island.
Oh, By-the-Sea, our home: just a handful of people with their own presumably good reasons for wanting to live on the grayest and rainiest and arguably most depressing island this side of our great mainland. (This side was east. I imagine if this side were west it would be all sunshine and palm trees and tan, muscular boys with wet suits rolled down to their waists, carrying surfboards on their shoulders as they walked barefoot down the sides of small coastal highways.)
“This is pointless. Everything is pointless,” I said. I wore shorts, and my legs were already being eaten alive by mosquitoes. “Did you bring a citronella candle?”
