Kioni shook her head, my offer to help only giving her momentum to push through with determination. “I have it.”
“Do you talk to them?”
We’d reached a plateau, and Kioni’s shoulders sank with relief. “Not really, no.” She blew a wayward black curl from her face. “Winnifred talks to me the most, or really, talks to herself. ‘Kioni, isn’t this dress beautiful? It is, yes.’ ‘Oh, Kioni, fetch me a carafe of water.’ ‘Kioni, the ivory silk or lace? Ah, the lace, will do,’” Kioni mocked in a light and bubbly voice undoubtedly foreign to her lips. “They leave the daily schedule posted in the breezeway, so I don’t have to speak with them. For anyone else, I’m sure it seems like an awkward situation, but it has always been this way.”
Rolling hills stretched out for miles around us. We meandered through cornfields, passing a scarecrow tied to planks of wood in the shape of a cross. A crow perched over the straw hat, flapping its wings and crowing into the somber afternoon skies. To our right, rows of apple trees led the way to the white plantation home in the distance, and we followed the property line until we arrived at a small cottage hidden inside a hill.
My scooter rolled to a stop just as Kioni swung her leg off her bicycle’s banana seat and pushed through a gate no higher than three feet that was attached to a wooden fence enclosure. Green moss covered the front of the cottage and outlined two small windows and a curved, wooden door. Something enchanting you’d only find in a storybook. As I stood beside the scooter, my mouth fell open in awe.
“I’ll be out in a second,” Kioni called out, walking past the black pot hanging over an unlit fire pit to her front door.
Minutes passed in eerie silence as I waited, and when Kioni returned, she had a cotton tote hanging from her arm and a tumbler cupped in each hand.
“My bibi says hello.” She smiled, walking the stone path toward me. “She whipped up spiced mulled apple cider. Says you can’t carve a pumpkin without it.”
“I think your grandmother hates me,” I admitted, thinking about the time she had forced me out of her shop after the very vague yet brutal psychic reading. The same reading that had led me to jump off the sea cliff.
Kioni laughed. “She’s very passionate about her work and gets intense when emotional. If she was dramatic, it only means she cares.” She passed the gate and asked for me to take the blanket from her bag, lay it out. “We’ll carve it right on the wagon. I have a feeling if we manage to get the beast off, we won’t be able to get it back on.”
I agreed, opening the blanket in front of the wagon before taking a tumbler from her hand. “Is it just you and your grandmother?”
“No, my mother’s here too. Not right now, but most likely still working over at the Goodys’.”
“So, you both work for them?” My face pinched, finding myself being nosy, but questions had always flown from my lips without thinking first. “Sorry, I don’t mean to be so intrusive.”
“Fallon, it’s fine,” she insisted. “I know it seems weird, living all the way out here alone with the Goody family, but really, they live with us. My ancestors were here first before they took the land right out from under us. To‘settle the inconvenience they’d caused,’the Goodys made a deal with my great, great grandmother. We can stay in our cabin as long as we tend to the farm and living quarters.” She shook her head, released a breath. “It’s not ideal, but Bibi was able to open her business.” She plucked the carving tools from the tote bag and spread them out around us as she continued, “My family has been in this cottage for over two hundred years, maybe even longer. It’s our home. We pick and choose our battles but stand our ground because our home is our home, as a home should be,” she explained as if rehearsed or had been told the same thing her entire life.
Kioni cut a circle around the pumpkin’s stem, and together, we scraped out the pumpkin, sifting the sticky and stringy guts and seeds into a plastic bag for later to make pies and pumpkin dishes. Once Kioni’s pumpkin was finished, we moved on to my smaller sized pumpkin, repeating the same steps.
We spent the rest of the afternoon carving, drinking our refilled hot cider, and talking about everything between Gramps’ health and me jumping off the cliff to a missing River Harrison.
“It’s not everyday people just go missing. I mean, the town is like four miles wide. Where could she possibly go?” Kioni asked, bewildered. “Her parents showed up at my bibi’s shop, trying to find answers.”
“Did she find anything?”
“No,” Kioni answered, and her voice sounded more like a question, as if she couldn’t believe it herself.
If River Harrison was dead, she would have come to me. But she hadn’t. Maybe she wasn’t dead. Maybe she left town.
But when I asked Kioni about it, she said, “It’s possible. After all, she was a flatlander and could leave whenever she wanted. But she loved it here. I don’t see any reason why she would want to leave.”
Her comment tangled my thoughts, spinning and spinning them together in a chaotic mess. I lay back over the blanket and looked up into the gray clouds as the fall winds bit my cheeks. “I don’t ever want to leave this place,” I whispered, surprising myself.
Kioni lay onto her back beside me. “Then don’t.”
At that moment, I wanted to tell Kioni about Julian. I wanted to be the girl who could talk freely about the man I was in love with, confirm that everything I felt was perfectly normal. I’d never had a mother or a girlfriend. I’d only had Marietta, who told me bedtime stories about the kind of love that only came out at night. The kind Julian and I shared, and the place where it all needed to stay. In the dark.
So, I kept my mouth shut.Maybe one day, I thought.
“Lie Lie Land,” Kioni whispered at my side. “The place we go when the world gets too loud. A quiet place inside our minds, a wild imagination filled with what-ifs and what-could-be.” I turned to face her, and Kioni’s eyes were closed as her silky locks blew over her porcelain cheeks. She must have felt my gaze because she turned her head to face me and opened her eyes. “Don’t go to Crescent Beach, Fallon.” She’d said it with worry as if it were a warning or a plea. Or something in between.
“I wasn’t planning on it.” In fact, I’d forgotten about it until she’d brought it up. “I get a strange feeling when I’m around Sacred Sea. Notgoodstrange, either. I guess I was so desperate to have friends or feel closer to my dad, you know, because he was part of Sacred Sea. I thought being around them would help me understand, but it only made me even more confused. I thought I knew my dad, but I can’t see him being anything like them.”
“Because he was not,” Eleanor stated, and I pushed myself up on my elbows to see her standing behind the closed gate. “Tobias was a good man, Moonshine. One of the only things good in Sacred Sea. Hold on to the memory you have of him. It is the right one.”
She reminded me so much of Marietta, and emotion tugged at my heart. I nodded.
“I am off to work now,” she said as she passed by us. “Fallon, you should sleep here tonight.”
