It feels ominous, and my skin prickles with the knowledge that something has shifted.
I’ve never been good with change.
Fishing my phone from the pocket in my cardigan, I hem and haw for a moment about calling my sisters and finally settle on texting them. I can handle this, or at least start handling this and there is no reason to freak them out and ruin their nights.
Ivy: No worries, but I have a thing I need to talk about with you
Rose replies back nearly immediately.
Rose: If it’s about the pot in the sink it needed to soak. I had a pasta sauce indiscretion
I start to type out a response. It’s not about a pot in the sink, but we’ve talked about that, if you just — and I delete it.
Ivy: It’s about what’s going on with the town. Something happened at the lighthouse tonight
Rose: Please tell me you kissed Caleb and you’re going to make babies
My cheeks go hot, and I glare at the message.
Posey: Rose, shut up. Ivy, just tell us what’s wrong
Ivy: There is something in the bay. There was a ward on Watchmere Light, and something happened to it, and now there is something out there. I don’t know what it is.
Hazel: I’ll be home tomorrow morning. I can help
I knew she was coming, of course I did, but Hazel has never really been helpful. More like needing help. The baby of us four, none of us
can hold it against her, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
Ivy: I’ll get your room ready for you, we can’t wait to see you!
Rose: Please tell me you’re not bringing another random dude home
Posey: Rose, shut up. Hazel, no dudes.
I bite back a scream and fight the urge to cry or go scrub Rose’s burnt sauce pot that’s in the sink.
Rose: I’m on the way home as soon as I finish this last lesson
Posey: I’m closing shop, be there as soon as I can
I don’t cry. I don’t go to the kitchen and take out my stress on the pot. Nope. I shove the phone back into my pocket and walk upstairs. Past the second floor landing where all our rooms are and the big window seat that looks out across the water. Up the second set of stairs to the attic, where we hardly go anymore.
Well, I suppose my sisters might, but I haven’t been up here in years.
Not since our grandmother moved out, deciding to retire to the Caribbean and let the four of us “do our own thing” as she put it.
It still smells like her perfume up here, which should be impossible. But there it is: white oud and a whisper of amber, parchment and ink and fragrant black tea.
The thing about living in a magical house is that the things that should be impossible never really are.
And the smell of my grandmother’s perfume immediately conjures her in my mind’s eye. A halo of steel grey hair, fine lines around her lips and too-bright eyes, the lingering smell ofsunscreen she’d lather on us from the time we were babies to when we were probably old enough to do it ourselves but she’d still do it anyway.
My heart aches, and I rub at it for a moment, caught off guard by the strength of her memory.
I should call her, too. See what she knows.
But I know our grandmother, and I know whatever this is, whatever is happening here… she’d want us to figure it out on our own.
