Page 20

SIXTEEN

The sea is darker than I imagined, waves thundering against the rocky shoreline.

I walk along the stormy waterfront, past cafés and taffy shops and bed-and-breakfasts, the rain soaking my hair. I feel adrift, with nothing more than the clothes I’m wearing and the hope of starting over.

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 her eyes 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, a grayness 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 try not 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 in Peter 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 know once more would 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.

I wanted this town to heal me. I thought it would feel different by now.

I ran away, but he’s still here.

After sunset Margo insists I eat dinner with her on the deck just off her kitchen. She’s given me two full boxes of clothes, which I take gratefully. Oversized sweaters, cotton shirts, and linen pants that she must have worn in her younger years.

She tells me stories about the town: a history that is riddled with myth and death and the unknown. And I start to wonder if most towns have their own legends. “Heartbreak is a powerful thing,” she says. “It casts spells and conjures up dangerous magic—I’ve seen it happen. Never stand in the way of someone with a broken heart,” she warns. “It can curse a whole town. Never underestimate what heartbreak can do.”

Heartbreak can destroy a whole family, I think.

I ask her about finding a job in town, but she tells me that most locals are wary of outsiders, and it’ll take some time to earn their trust before they’ll give me work. But Margo offers to pay me to help her in the garden—where she grows produce in a square plot of land, as well as inside a small greenhouse, then sells what she harvests at a weekly farmers market in town. The labor of gardening has gotten harder on her aging joints, so in the morning I work beside her, pulling up weeds, watering, and thinning out the dead leaves until it’s ready to be harvested. One afternoon she eyes me from across an overgrown lavender bush and asks if I have experience tending a garden, because I seem so familiar with the plants. I tell her we grew only flowers back home.

A cursed, awful variety.

On a rainy Friday afternoon Margo knocks on my door and hands me a small package. At first I’m certain she’s mistaken—it can’t be for me—but then I see my brother’s small, abrupt handwriting on the box. I wrote to him after I arrived, mailing the letter to the guitar shop, to tell him where I was. It was a simple letter, not much more than a note letting him know that his twin was still alive, because the betrayal was still heavy inside me.

I’ve tried to imagine Archer returning to our house… to find it gone. Only a muddy scar in the ground where it once sat. The garden flattened. Our lives carried away with the storm. But he is strong, resilient.

Now I carry the box to the kitchen counter and cut it open.

Inside I find a folded piece of paper.

I kept these buried beneath the pine tree where we used to have the rope swing.

I’m sorry I hid them from you.

—Archer

Below the note, held together by a rubber band, is a stack of envelopes and postcards.

All from Mom.

He lied when he said he’d thrown them away, when he said he’d never read them… because every envelope has been opened, every letter pulled out and read in secret. Because even if he hates her, he couldn’t destroy them, couldn’t sever the only connection to her.

He kept them buried in the ground, maybe in a coffee tin or box, because they’re undamaged. Not eaten through by beetles or damp from the rain. They even survived the storm and the flood. Buried beneath the pine in the far east corner of our property, on higher ground, where Dad built us a rope swing when we were five or six.

Staring down at the letters, I wait for the anger to stir up inside me again, but it doesn’t come.

I understand why he did it, and my heart aches, knowing the guilt he’s surely carried—the burden of keeping these a secret—all because he wanted to protect me.

I forgive him before I’ve even climbed into bed and opened the first letter.

With the window pushed up in its frame, listening to the Pacific crash against the sand far below—instead of the awful shushing of tulip stalks swirling in the wind—I start from the beginning, from the oldest letter Mom sent, right after she first left. Slowly I fill in the last three years of her life.

At first, she apologizes often, writing to tell us that she made a mistake, that she shouldn’t have left without a word. That she’ll return home soon.

But then her letters begin recounting her travels—sailing across the Atlantic, perhaps the same route that Fern Goode took all those years ago. She describes eating in small patisseries and wandering cobblestone streets through ancient seaside towns. Sometimes she mentions how much we would love it where she is, or that she hopes to return to Cutwater in the following season for a visit, for our birthday perhaps. But then her letters will stray, postcards sent from towns like Marseille and Valencia, or describing the month she spent on the island of Sardinia, and she forgets about her promise to return home. Sometimes she mentions him . The man she says she loves, who rescued her.

Oak’s father.

But she never says his name. Never reveals the truth about who he is—that he left behind a son who would find himself drawn to the Goodes, just like his father.

She is a woman who got as far away from her old life as she could. She ran from it.

And maybe, in some ways, Oak’s father saved her from a fate even worse if she’d stayed.

Because I think her life in Cutwater was slowly destroying her.

Just like it was destroying me.

Still, I swing between bitterness and envy as I read her words, touching the photos of sun-bleached coastlines. I’ve never wanted to be like her, and yet everything about her life is what I’ve craved.

Freedom, untethered by a single thing.

Maybe I’m more like her than I’ve ever wanted to admit.

In one of her more recent letters, sent only a month ago, she describes watching a sunset over the Mediterranean, how a dog was barking nearby, and a woman was laughing, and how she felt completely alive. She ended the letter with: If you don’t risk getting hurt, then you’ll never feel a thing. If you don’t risk breaking your own heart, how will you ever know what’s real or not? I was wrong when I used to tell you to avoid love. I was afraid. Because if there’s one thing worth fighting for in this life… it’s the person you can’t live without.

I fall asleep with the late-afternoon sun still suspended in the sky, and I dream of him, while my mother’s words spin back and forth inside my mind. I dream he comes to the cottage, and we wade out into the sea, the sun winking off our salty skin, his lips pressed to mine.

I wake and throw back the bedsheets—hating the torment of my dreams.

Hating the days I can’t get back.

Time is cruel. It does nothing to wipe clean what I want to forget.

Days inch by, the hours coated in mud. Slow and merciless.

I tuck Mom’s letters back into the box, folded away, because her words won’t leave me.

I was wrong when I used to tell you to avoid love.

I don’t know what to feel. What to trust.

The evening is calm, the tide low. But my heart is a violent storm. So I dress quickly, needing to be free of the cottage, and I walk outside in my bare feet.

I could make my way down to the beach, stroll along the shoreline, but I don’t want to hear the sea. I’m craving something else. Silence. A place to curl up and hide.

The sky is overcast, heavy and gray, and a few drops of rain begin to soak the ground. I walk to the small greenhouse and slip inside, breathing in the wet, mossy scent. I stand among the plants, and the tears start to fall.

I want to shout, I want to scream until there’s no air left in my lungs, but I don’t have the strength. And there is no one to hear my pain. No one to mend me back together. I wipe at my eyes, angry for all the hurt still tangled up inside me, and through the blur of my tears I see someone walking up the stone path, toward the greenhouse. I quickly draw in a breath, not wanting Margo to see the tears in my eyes.

She pauses outside the door, and I think she’s going to turn away, head back to her house, but then the door pushes open, and my heart stops beating.

It’s not Margo.

The outline is too tall, too familiar.

He looks like the boy who ripped my heart in two. A boy from a town far away from here.

I must still be asleep in bed, letters scattered across the quilt.

He lifts his head, eyes as dark and paralyzing as I remember them.

Steady and sure, green and painful.

My mind has cracked, split in half, because he can’t be real—he’s a hundred miles away. The salt air is unkind and unfair. Maybe this town is haunted after all, crowded with legends and lore and cruel ghostly memories, just as Margo said.

But he takes a step into the greenhouse, the door closing softly behind him, soft droplets of rain scattering from his shoulders, his eyelashes. And every cell in my body knows that it’s him.

All my thoughts drain out of me.

He looks just as I remember: Dark jeans, a little rumpled, like he’s been traveling for a whole day. Hair damp from the rain, mouth trembling with all the words he wants to say.

My ears begin to ring.

“Lark.” Four little letters fall from his lips. Four letters that turn my beating heart in on itself. My body sways, and I reach for one of the planter boxes to keep me upright.

Four letters I never thought I’d hear him say again.

“Archer told me where to find you.” He breathes, and every exhale is like the wind. “I knocked on the cottage door, but when no one answered, I started to leave. Then I saw someone standing out here.”

There is a hum in the air, a numbing silence, as if the sound of the ocean fades from my periphery, fades from the world, and we are standing in a glass house, soft rain against the roof, the sea roaring silently behind us.

“I’m sorry,” he begins. “I shouldn’t have let you get out of my truck that day. I shouldn’t have watched you go. I never should have said goodbye.”

He shakes his head, and every part of my skin is vibrating. Every inch of my mind is crumbling.

“I didn’t mean to keep that tulip—I mean, I wasn’t trying to… I didn’t believe in it, I didn’t know what any of it really meant. I just knew I wanted to be near you.”

He risks a step closer to me. But I hold up my hand.

“Stop, Oak,” I say, because I’m afraid of what will happen if he touches of me. I’m afraid of everything that happens next.

His mouth looks unsteady, and I wonder if there’s a paperback book in his pocket, I wonder if he drove here or took the train, I wonder about all the little details, because I want to hold on to this moment before it’s all ripped away. “We can’t trust this,” I tell him, my voice broken and blistered.

“But the garden is gone.”

I nod, agreeing. “But I don’t know if it fixed anything.”

His eyes sway over me, like they’re lost at sea. A sailor searching for a harbor. “I don’t understand most of this—the history of your family, those tulips—but I know why I came to find you. I know that I lost something once, and maybe it’s too late, maybe there’s no second chances. But I had to try.”

I look to the windows, watching the rain streak the glass, trying to catch my breath. Trying to catch the past. Make sense of everything that’s happened. “How can we ever know if what we feel is real?” I shake my head. “How can we be sure that our thoughts are our own? How can we trust anything?” The air feels heavy in my chest. “I’m afraid we’ll just keep losing each other again and again. That we’ll keep making the same mistakes. That fate will always push us apart. And we’ll keep hurting each other, until there’s nothing left of us.”

He nods, sinking his hands into his jean pockets. “I’m afraid too,” he admits. “But I’m more afraid of what it will feel like if I walk away. I’m afraid that if I go back home, every second in that cold house will feel like a lifetime spent wondering what would have happened if I’d risked something with you.” His eyes fall to the floor, and he looks uncertain of his own words, his own thoughts. “But I’ll go. I’ll turn around and never come looking for you again, if that’s what you want.” Tears well at the edges of his eyes, and I swear I can almost see the pulse of his heartbeat thumping at his throat. “Tell me what you want, Lark. And I’ll do it. I’ll do whatever you ask me to.”

The rain falls harder, thundering against the greenhouse, blurring out the sky. Blurring my memory of the past. My eyes flick to the door, the path back to the cottage. My escape. I could tell him to leave; I could stuff my heart back down deep. I could pretend I don’t think of him every day. I could lie and tell myself I’m better off without him—better off not knowing if it was tulips all along, or if the curse was broken the instant the flood carried the garden away. Convince myself that what we had is over, gone with the shifting seasons. That we both hurt each other too much to ever go back.

“Lark,” he says softly—and each time he says my name, it rips me open a little more. It wedges itself between my ribs and reminds me how much I’ve missed hearing his voice against my skin.

He pulls his hands from his pockets, shoulders dropping, like he wants nothing more than to reach for me, to sever the space between us. “It wasn’t a summer thing for me….” His eyes are shivering, hands trembling at his sides. His mouth a broken line. “It never was. I didn’t mean that when I said it, in the truck. I was just trying to convince myself. Make it true. And it wasn’t the tulips; it wasn’t because you’re a Goode. It was none of those things. We were like Peter and Wendy, tangled up in a fairy tale—in a town with too many lies. But we’re not in Cutwater anymore.” He glances around us, at the rain, the walls of the greenhouse, the sea beyond. “There are no cursed tulips growing nearby, no rumors about your family. We’re just two people… without a past. Without parents to warn us of their mistakes. We can make our own….”

He swallows, and I allow my eyes to tip into his.

“We could take a risk, Lark.” He smiles a little, the tiniest shift of his mouth. “We could start over. From the beginning. No more secrets, no more tulips, no more curses. No memory of who we used to be. Only this… right now. We get to decide what we believe, what we want to leave behind. I don’t care about anything before this moment.” I can see the tears breaking against his eyelids. “I don’t want anything from that old life, that town, that past. It’s meaningless. We write our own story, not what anyone else tells us it should be. You and me , Lark… this is all I want. All I’ve ever wanted. And I let it slip away, I let you walk away, and I’ve regretted it every hour, every minute, since. You’re the only thing I’ve ever really cared about. The only thing I want to protect.” He wipes at his eyes. “I’d do anything to take back everything that happened. To do it differently. I know I screwed up so many times. I kept things from you, I lied, I was an idiot. But I’ll gladly spend the rest of my life apologizing. I’ll spend the rest of my life telling you that I’m sorry and that you are the only thing that matters. The only thing I don’t want to lose. You, Lark… you’re all I want.”

My chest barely draws in a breath, tears dripping from my chin. I’ve spent too many nights awake, pretending I would eventually forget him—my heart drowning in every memory.

I’ve betrayed myself, fooled myself into thinking I could start again, in a new town, and leave him behind.

Curse or not, I can’t shake him from my mind, my flesh, my lungs with every inhale, and now he’s so close, I could touch him. All the words choke in my throat, all the fear breaking apart inside me, leaving only one thing, only one thought: I love him. Undeniably. Stupidly.

The wind changes direction outside, blowing open the door behind Oak, swelling against my thoughts, pulling me free of myself—a girl shedding her old, useless flesh. Scales and curses and all.

Only one word finds its way to my tongue.

“Oak.” I step forward, the wind gusting through the greenhouse, and I slide my fingers through his, touching his palm, which feels like the river behind his house, like it belongs to a boy who I’ve spent too many nights, too many hours, trying to forget.

But I don’t kiss him.

I lead him through the open door, closing it behind us, and we step out into the rain.

We follow the stone path up to the cottage and duck inside.

Rain falls against the roof; the moon rises over the sea. And I let myself forget who I used to be.

In the tiny, square living room, Oak’s eyes don’t sweep around the cottage, they don’t survey the place I’ve made my home, they are settled roughly on me. Like he’ll never look away again.

I pull my sweater over my head and let it fall to the floor. A puddle of rain at my feet.

He is still, and I am still. But I am no longer afraid.

Of anything.

Especially not him. Not love.

Oak watches me with lightning in his eyes, a shuddering crack of relief and hope and love all twisted together. I lift up onto my tiptoes and I press my lips to his, careful at first, like I will break him. I trace the shape of his mouth, slowly, and his hands find my waist. I sink into his arms, fingers through his dark hair, the scent of the river laced across his flesh. His hands scrape over my skin, but the need is different this time; this is desire that takes a lifetime to unravel. A thousand years will never be enough. We will need longer to etch each other’s bodies and bones to memory. Lips like paintbrushes, fingertips the only way to chart a course.

Flames snap and hiss in the fireplace, heating our pinked skin, and I kiss the soft place beside his ear, drawing him to me, closer, closer , but it’s never enough.

I want this moment to last.

Today and every day after. Until there are no days left.

He moans against my flesh, his hands pressing me to the floor beside the fireplace, as if we could sink into the soil beneath the cottage, until I am a girl made of dirt. Until we are both tangled up in the earth and the crashing sea.

I love him.

And I say it against his ear. I confess it, and I’ll never take it back.

The night is starry and rain-soaked, and we lie awake, my head against the slope of his chest.

“I won’t say goodbye to you ever again,” he whispers into the night, a promise, an incantation made of the truest kind of magic. His arm stirs, and he pulls me closer, eyes fluttering closed. I breathe him in, listening to his heart.

But after the night has deepened around us, I rise from the floor, slowly, gently, so I won’t wake him. I wait for the old kettle on the stove to heat, then place tea leaves into a mug, and I watch him sleep. My insides hum.

I pull my sweater back over my head and step into my shorts. I want to walk out into the rain, I want to feel the cold drops against my burning flesh, I want to make sure it’s real: Oak, the storm, all of it.

But I feel something in the pocket of my shorts.

A thing I forgot about.

It was so long ago now, the start of tulip season. Oak pulled me away from the mob at school, then plucked a tulip petal from my hair. I pressed it into the pocket of my favorite shorts, forgotten, folded away.

But now I extract the single tulip petal.

It’s flattened and dried, preserved. Kept safe and untouched. It didn’t die with the others in the garden when the flood carried them away. A petal that’s been tucked in my pocket all this time.

My eyes flash to Oak, his skin coppery in the firelight, breathing softly while he sleeps. I hold the petal in my palm, the last of a destroyed crop. Perhaps the last of the Goode family magic.

I cross the small living room to the fireplace and look down at the flames, considering.

With the garden gone, I started to believe, to hope, that the curse had been carried away too. But I’ve had a tulip all along. Hidden. Even when Oak stood before me in the greenhouse and spoke about love and fear and forgetting the past.

I should burn it, drop it into the fire and watch it turn to ash.

But… I don’t .

Because I love him so much that it hurts. And now I wonder, I fear… that this single tulip might be the only thing keeping him here.

I didn’t want love this way— like this —a lie. But maybe it’s all I will ever have.

All I deserve.

I’m bound to these tulips, whether I like it or not.

Because the pain I’d feel if I lost him again is more than I can bear.

So, with the rain pattering against the roof, I slide the tulip petal back into my pocket, and I sink to the floor, curling myself up against his chest, pressing my mouth to his sleeping lips. This boy I won’t lose again.

“I love you,” he whispers, half-asleep, half-mad with love.

I tuck my face against his neck, knowing a dried tulip takes up a small, imperceptible space between us. “I love you,” I say back.

Because I do, more than anything.

And maybe it’s wrong—keeping the tulip. But I don’t care anymore. I’ve always believed I might be the villain of my own story: Lark Goode, a girl you shouldn’t get too close to, or you’ll tumble into a love you won’t be able to find your way out of.

I was dangerous from the start, from the moment I was born into that house, wailing and shrieking, my twin brother beside me, the tulips blooming in the garden out back.

Love has always held more meaning for the Goodes: Love cursed us and spit us back out; it bit down on our bones and broke us into splinters. It made fools of us, lovers of us, filled us with regret and superstition and a thousand moments in the arms of those who loved us for reasons they didn’t understand.

But maybe this is true of everyone—even those without the Goode last name. Perhaps this is just what love is: a thing meant for fools. For anyone brave enough to slip into its madness.

But now I choose love and madness. I drink it down.

Because what other choice do I have?

This thing between us is a perilous kind of love. The kind that should have broken us—defying all logic and reason. And this is why I won’t lose it. Because it’s mine. Messy and tangled, like the roots of a garden left to grow wild and untended.

This love was one I tried to resist. But it found me all the same.

I don’t know if the tulips were ever truly to blame, or if they were simply a legend spun over the years until it became truth. Maybe the dried tulip petal in my pocket has no power, no meaning, but I won’t take the risk.

Like Mom said in her letter: If there’s one thing worth fighting for in this life… it’s the person you can’t live without.