THE SEA
Three sisters arrived in Sparrow, Oregon, in 1822 aboard a fur trading ship named the Lady Astor, which sank later that year in the harbor just beyond the cape.
They were among the first to settle in the newly founded coastal town, and they strode onto the new land like thin-legged birds with wavy caramel hair and pastel skin. They were beautiful—too beautiful, the townspeople would later say. Marguerite, Aurora, and Hazel fell in love often and typically with the wrong men—those whose hearts already belonged to someone else. They were coquettes, temptresses, and men found them impossible to resist.
But the townspeople of Sparrow found the sisters to be much more: They believed them to be witches, casting spells on the men to make them unfaithful.
And so at the end of June, when the moon was nothing but a thin shard in the overcast sky, stones were tied to the sisters’ ankles, and they were dropped into the ocean just beyond the cape, where they sank to the bottom and drowned. Just like the ship they arrived on.
ONE
I have an old black-and-white photograph taken in the 1920s of a woman at a traveling circus floating in a massive tank filled with water, blond hair billowing around her head, legs hidden by a false mermaid’s fin made of metallic fabric and thread to look like scales. She is wispy and angelic, with thin lips pinched tightly together, holding her breath against the icy water. Several men stand in front of the glass tank, staring at her as if she were real. So easily fooled by the spectacle.
I think of this photograph every spring, when murmurs begin to circulate through the town of Sparrow about the three sisters who were drowned beyond the maw of the harbor, past Lumiere Island, where I live with my mother. I imagine the three sisters floating like delicate ghosts in the dark shadows beneath the water’s surface, mercurial and preserved just like the sideshow mermaid. Did they struggle to stay above the waterline two centuries ago, when they were forced into the deep, or did they let the weight of each stone carry them swiftly to the cold, rocky bottom of the Pacific?’
A morning fog, somber and damp, slides over the surface of the ocean between Lumiere Island and the town of Sparrow. The water is calm as I walk down to the dock and begin untying the skiff—a flat-bottomed boat with two bench seats and an outboard motor. It’s not ideal for maneuvering in storms or gales but fine as a runner into town and back. Otis and Olga, two orange tabby cats who mysteriously appeared on the island as kittens two years back, have followed me down to the water, mewing behind me as if lamenting my departure. I leave every morning at this time, motoring across the bay before the bell rings for first period—Global Economics class, a subject that I will never use—and every morning they follow me to the dock.
The intermittent beam of light from the lighthouse sweeps over the island, and for a moment it brushes across a silhouette standing on the rocky western shore atop the cliff: my mother. Her arms are crossed in her knobby camel-colored sweater wrapped tightly around her fragile torso, and she’s staring out at the vast Pacific like she does each morning, waiting for someone who will never return: my father.
Olga rubs up against my jeans, arching her bony back and raising her tail, coaxing me to pick her up, but I don’t have time. I pull the hood of my navy-blue rain slicker up over my head, step into the boat, and yank the cord on the motor until it sputters to life, then steer the boat out into the fog. I can’t see the shore or the town of Sparrow through the dim layer of moisture, but I know it’s there.
* * *
Tall, sawtooth masts rise up like swords from the water, land mines, shipwrecks of years past. If you didn’t know your way, you could run your boat into any of the half-dozen wrecks still haunting these waters. Beneath me lies a web of barnacle-crusted metal, links of rusted chain trailing over broken bows, and fish making their homes in rotted portholes, the rigging long since eaten away by the salty water. It’s a graveyard of ships. But like the local fishermen chugging out through the dreary fume into the open sea, I can navigate the bay with my eyes pinched shut against the cold. The water is deep here. Massive ships used to bring in supplies through this port, but not anymore. Now only small fishing boats and tourist barges sputter through. These waters are haunted, the seamen still say—and they’re right.
The skiff bumps against the side of dock eleven, slip number four, where I park the boat while I’m in class. Most seventeen-year-olds have driver’s licenses and rusted-out cars they found on Craigslist or that were handed down from older siblings. But instead, I have a boat. And no use for a car.
I sling my canvas bag over my shoulder, weighted down with textbooks, and jog up the gray, slick streets to Sparrow High School. The town of Sparrow was built where two ridges come together—tucked between the sea and mountains—making mudslides all too common here. One day it will likely be washed away completely. It will be pushed down into the water and buried beneath forty feet of rain and silt. There are no fast-food chains in Sparrow, no shopping malls or movie theaters, no Starbucks—although we do have a drive-through coffee hut. Our small town is sheltered from the outside world, trapped in time. We have a whopping total population of two thousand and twenty-four. But that number increases greatly every year on June first, when the tourists converge into town and overtake everything.
Rose is standing on the sloping front lawn of Sparrow High, typing on her cell phone. Her wild cinnamon-red hair springs from her head in unruly curls that she loathes. But I’ve always envied the lively way her hair cannot be tamed or tied up or pinned down, while my straight, nut-brown hair cannot be coaxed into any sort of bouncy, cheerful configuration—and I’ve tried. But stick-straight hair is just stick-straight hair.
“You’re not ditching me tonight, are you?” she asks when she sees me, tenting both eyebrows and dropping her cell into her once-white book bag that’s been scribbled with Sharpie and colored markers so that it’s now a collage of swirling midnight blues and grassy greens and bubblegum pinks—colorful graffiti art that has left no space untouched. Rose wants to be an artist—Rose is an artist. She’s determined to move to Seattle and attend the Art Institute when we graduate. And she reminds me almost weekly of the fact that she doesn’t want to go alone and I should come with her and be her roommate. To which I’ve skillfully avoided committing since freshmen year.
It’s not that I don’t want to escape this rainy, dreadful town, because I do. But I feel trapped, a weight of responsibility settled firmly over me. I can’t leave my mother all alone on the island. I’m all she has left—the only thing still grounding her to reality. And perhaps it’s foolish—naive even—but I also have hope that perhaps my father will return someday. He’ll magically appear on the dock and stroll up to the house as if no time has passed. And I need to be here in case he does.
But as our junior year comes to an end and our senior year approaches, I’m forced to consider the rest of my life and the reality that my future might be right here in Sparrow. I might never leave this place. I might be stuck.
I’ll stay on the island, reading fortunes from the smeared remains of tea leaves in white porcelain cups just like my mom used to before Dad vanished and never came back. Locals would steer their boats across the harbor, sometimes in secret under a ghost moon, sometimes in the middle of the day because they had an urgent question they needed answered, and they’d sit in our kitchen, fingers tapping on the wood-block table, waiting for Mom to tell them their fate. And afterward they’d leave folded or crumpled or flattened bills on the table just before they left. Mom would slide the money into a flour tin she kept on the shelf next to the stove. And maybe this is the life I’m destined for: sitting at the kitchen table, the sweet scent of chamomile or orange lavender tea settling into my hair, running my finger around the rim of a mug and finding messages in the swirling chaos of leaves.