I couldn’t sleep on the train—my thoughts were too heavy—but I crave rest now, and at the end of town, I rent a room at a tiny motel—a cheap, one-bed room with a view of the rain-soaked parking lot. I fall into bed, and I sleep for a full day and night. A deep, unending slumber that feels absolute, the kind I might not wake from.
But the next morning, my eyes peel open, the room smelling of the sea, and an aching hunger clawing at my stomach.
I leave the motel and walk back down the waterfront to a small coffee shop facing the Pacific. Only a handful of customers are seated inside, and no one notices me when I walk to the counter. No one looks up from their lattes or cell phones. I am a nameless girl. Without a past—at least not one they know.
I smile a little to myself, unsure how to feel.
After ordering a lavender scone from a young girl who smiles politely, without fear or disgust or hunger in her eyes, I scan the cork bulletin board near the door. I read through paper notices for lost cats and waitresses wanted and lawn mowers for sale. Until I spot a handwritten note:Single-room cottage for rent. Must like dogs.
I ask the girl behind the counter if I can use the shop phone, and I dial the number. A woman answers. She tells me that the cottage is small, located behind her house, but it faces the sea—I just have to be willing to endure her two large dogs that often roam over to the cottage, and a baby grand piano that she likes to play late at night.
I tell her I don’t mind at all. And I can pay two months up front.
It’s nearly everything I’ve got. But at least I’ll have a place to stay until I find work.
Following her instructions, I leave the edge of town while nibbling on the scone and walk until I reach a driveway overgrown with blackberry bushes that leads me along a small bluff. At last it comes into view: a two-story, gray-shingled house that looks like a layered cake, overlooking the ocean.
Margo, the owner, meets me in the gravel driveway with a warm smile and a cup of hot cocoa. I nearly sink into her arms with relief—this stranger. But she feels like a momentary safe harbor, and her smile is full-cheeked and easy. She is a short woman, with cropped gray hair and hands that are always moving: fussing and fixing. Her two dogs, Palo and Lox, follow us around the side of her cake house, down a short dirt path through the windblown trees, to where the small cottage sits atop the bluff, facing the gray sea.
“I’ve never rented it before,” she tells me, the soft corners of hereyes wrinkling. She smells of cloves and rose water and sea salt. “We kept it for friends and family when they came to visit. But when Lonnie passed last year, I thought…” She stalls on the words, glancing out to the ocean, her cheeks flushed in the damp air. “It just made sense to make a little money each month. And I figured it might be nice to have some company.” She flashes her hazel eyes at me, kind but strong. “I worried I wouldn’t find the right person, but when you called, I just had a sense about you.”
I cringe. If she knew who I was, she might think twice about renting to me. But as she unlocks the front door of the cottage, she makes a comment about superstition and folklore, and she hopes I don’t mind a town filled with “legends and a few unshakable curses,” because apparently I’ve just wandered into such a town.
I tell her I’m used to these kinds of things, and she nods gravely, like she’s seen her fair share of heartache in this town.
“Looks like you could use a few belongings,” she says, nodding at my lack of a suitcase or anything to unpack. “I think I can find you some clothes I’ve kept boxed in the attic. Probably not your style, but enough to get you by.”
“Thank you.” I feel like I could cry, but I hold it back, not wanting to collapse in front of this woman I just met.
She leaves me alone in the cottage, and I walk to the front windows overlooking the crashing sea. In the distance I can see an island and a lighthouse at its center, a beam of light circling steadily around, warning ships of its rocky shores.
This place feels steeped in something new, something I don’t yet understand, but already, strangely, it feels like it could be home.
Two days pass, rain falling against the cottage each morning, agrayness in the air I’ve never known before. But I light a fire in the small fireplace and curl up on the tiny checkered couch, trying not to think of him.
My insides feel rusted and corroded, like a juniper tree with heartrot—an awful decay inside the trunk, so that when you cut it open, there’s nothing inside. Only a hollowed-out center.
If you cut me in half, would you find the same?
At night, before bed, I bathe in the old claw-foot tub, the medicine cabinet stocked with handmade soap and honey-mint shampoo. And I trynot to think of him. The memory of his hands like an apocalypse on my skin that will never be scrubbed away.
Thankfully, when I stand at the bedroom window, there are no tulips swaying out back, no family history haunting the corridors of this cottage, no risk of uninvited love.
Sometimes I sit beside the fire, notebook folded open in my lap, my pencil trying to recall the likeness of Mom: the sad arch of her blue-green eyes; the distinct wave of her hair, the way it sometimes coiled at the ends; the soft shape of her lips—the same curve as mine. But I find it harder and harder to draw her to mind, the memory of her sliding away, just like the tide.
She is a woman I’m losing bit by bit every day.
In the evenings I follow the narrow path that meanders down to the beach, finding bits of broken shells and sea glass buried in the sand. I walk barefoot from one end of the beach to the other, through tide pools and rocky inlets, each step an effort to push him away.
I beg the sea to take him from me, to draw out the memory of his hands, his eyes, and bury it out in the deep. I beg for some relief.I watch the waves skim across the beach, the sun settling against the sea, copper and shades of apricot, until stars tiptoe out from the carpet of black—a night sky that somehow seems different from the one back in Cutwater. I find the brightest star, then swing my gaze to the right, finding the nearest one, just like inPeter and Wendy: “Second to the right, and straight on till morning.”
I fled the real world and came to Neverland.
So why do I still hurt?
Why does every part of me still ache in a way I’m certain will never heal?
Tonight, with the sky smeared in colors of lavender, I start back toward the cottage—wanting only to touch him one last time, slide my fingers along his collarbone, up into his dark hair. But I knowonce morewould never be enough. A hundred times isn’t enough. I crush my eyes closed, but I see only him,green eyes, so I peel them open and blink out at the sea. “Please,” I whisper to the ocean—an incantation, a plea from a girl who’s so desperate, she’s hoping for a bit of real magic, the kind that lives only in the sea, that exists only in a place like this. The night wind coils over me, smelling of lost loves and faraway wishes tucked in glass bottles, then set adrift.
