chapter thirteen
People are everywhere.
I hold tight to Peach’s hand as we follow Mama onto the pebbly sand of Sterling Cove, this curl of beach at the north end of town where most of the tourists hang out—there are just enough rocks and evergreens in the distance to make it feel like you’re in Maine, just enough wide-open sand to run around and splash in the cold surf.
And, apparently, build gigantic bonfires that the entire town can crowd around, wielding sharp pokers with flammable sugar puffs on the ends. Almost everyone is barefoot and it’s nearly dark, just a hint of golden light left in the western sky and the dark gray ocean roiling in the east. It’s a disaster waiting to happen, if you ask me.
“Happy Solstice!”
A white lady in a yellow sundress with jet-black hair down to her waist smiles and dances past us. Literally, she dances, removing three circles of flowers from her arms and dropping them into Mama’s hands as she twirls by.
“Thank you!” Mama calls back, smiling as she places one on Peach’s head, then one on her own. The third she simply holds out to me. I pinch it between my thumb and forefinger like it’s a smelly dead fish.
“Put it on, Hazey!” Peach says, holding out her mint-green sundress and swirling around me like she’s at a ball. I have to admit the white flowers in her hair are pretty. She looks like an adorable little fairy. I plop the flowers onto my head and promptly sneeze, which makes my sister laugh.
“Oh, you think that’s funny, do you?” I ask, picking Peach up and twirling her around, which makes her laugh harder.
I feel Mama watching us for a second, a soft smile in her eyes. The flowers look beautiful in her hair too. She and Peach are in nearly matching green sundresses. And Mama’s got on some makeup—mascara and a little blush that makes her cheeks sparkle. Some coral-colored lip gloss. Perfume. I try not to think about why, tell myself that she doesn’t need a reason to put on makeup and scent and dress up. She can do it for her, just like I’m wearing cutoff jean shorts and a navy-blue Wonder Woman T-shirt for me.
“Let’s find Claire and Lemon, huh?” she says, taking Peach’s hand.
“My fruit friend!” Peach says, happily going with Mama into the fray.
I follow and we weave through the revelers, dodging costume mermaid tails and sparklers creating shimmering trails through the darkening sky.
I see them before Mama does. Lemon and Claire. They’re standing by the water, alone. Claire is in a sundress too, though it’s too dark now to tell what color from this distance. Something light and airy and summery, no doubt. But Lemon is dressed just like me, a cream-colored tote bag hanging from her shoulder. She’s talking a mile a minute, which is no huge surprise, but she doesn’t look happy. She looks… upset. Her shoulders are tense around her neck, and her eyebrows are smooshed together in a frown. Claire bends down so they’re eye level and cradles Lemon’s face between her hands, swiping at Lemon’s cheeks with her thumbs as though wiping away tears. She says something, pressing her forehead to Lemon’s. Lemon folds her arms and nods, but she still looks about as miserable as I feel.
“Oh, there they are,” Mama says, spotting them just as Claire straightens up and tries to pull Lemon into a hug. Lemon’s not having it, though. She steps back, shaking her head in a way that makes Mama stop in her tracks. Her eyes narrow on the scene, and she glances around like she’s looking for somewhere else to go—our cottage would be good, if you ask me—when Claire sees her and waves.
“Hey, happy Solstice!” Claire calls, her voice artificially bright. Lemon turns her head in our direction super fast, her eyes wide and startled, then starts wiping at her face.
“Same to you,” Mama says, but she doesn’t move. “Everything all right?”
Claire nods. “Fine, fine. We were just—”
But before she can finish her sentence, Lemon starts walking away down the beach so fast her bare feet kick up the already-foamy water, tote bag bouncing against her hip.
Claire watches her for a second, shoulders drooping, and Mama hurries toward her.
“I’m sorry,” Claire says, swiping her red fringe out of her face.
“What happened?” Mama asks.
Claire’s eyes fill then. She shakes her head, then laughs in that way that means it’s not funny at all, like she’s holding back a sob. “The cake. I messed it up.”
“The cake?” I ask.
“I shouldn’t have made it at all,” Claire says. “I knew she didn’t want one. She never does, but I thought… it’s been three years, and she’s thirteen today. It’s special. But she just…”
Claire trails off, a fresh wave of tears rivering down her cheeks.
A sinking feeling pulls my stomach toward my feet.
“It’s her birthday?” I ask.
Claire nods while Mama rubs her back, unsurprised. They must’ve talked about it today while they were together. Of course they did.
She needs a friend. So do you.
“She didn’t tell you, did she?” Claire asks.
I shake my head, gazing off down the beach, where Lemon’s form is getting smaller and smaller.
“Hazel, why don’t you and Peach go check on Lemon?” Mama says, her eyes still glued to Claire, her hand still on her back.
“What?”
“You heard me. Take Peach and go. We’ll meet up with you later, okay?”
I’d really rather not leave Mama and Claire alone again, but before I can think of what to say to get Mama to let me stay—maybe that, for whatever reason, Lemon probably just wants to be alone—Peach takes off down the shore.
“I’ll save Lemon for you, Mama!” she calls over her shoulder, making Claire sob-laugh again before sinking down onto the sand.
“Peach, wait!” I say, but of course, she doesn’t. “Mama, I—” I start, but of course, Mama’s already sitting next to Claire. Their shoulders press together as they gaze at the sea. They start talking, low and quiet so I can’t hear them over the noise of the party, and I feel like I’ve been dumped onto an island while they row away in a boat for two.
I turn from them and start running. I’m careful not to touch the water as I rush to catch up with my sister, who’s splashing at full speed through the shallows. I squint into the growing dark and spot Lemon’s form still walking, still edging the ocean and the land. It’s a weird scene—the nearly black ocean to her right, firelight and laughter and celebration to her left, the three of us stuck somewhere in the middle.
Lemon walks fast. By the time I catch up with her and Peach, the party is at least a quarter mile behind me, a soft quiet closing in all around me as the noise and firelight fade. She’s sitting in the sand, Peach smooshed up against her side, facing the calm sea. It’s completely dark now, the only light a full moon glazing silver over the water. It’s pretty secluded here. I only see one house, an old two-story Victorian with a wraparound porch and a widow’s walk set up on the rocks right behind where Lemon’s sitting, all its windows dark, like no one’s lived there in decades.
“Hey,” I say.
Peach is the only one who glances at me. Even in the dim moonlight, I can tell she’s got the single most pitiful look on her face, and she pets Lemon’s arm like she would a cat and then leans on her shoulder. Lemon just sits there, but every now and then, she wipes at her face and sniffs. It should be a sweet scene—my little five-year-old sister trying to soothe some unknown wound in this near stranger—but something in my gut clenches.
I back up a few feet, as though Lemon’s sadness was something I could catch. Except looking at her in the moon’s dim glow—the way her tears are pouring down her cheeks and she looks furious about it, her eyebrows all wrinkled up and her mouth curved into a frown, like she’s held her sadness in for so long and can’t believe it’s bursting out now—I’m pretty sure I already have it.
I take a step closer.
Then another.
Finally I sit down on Lemon’s other side and tuck my legs up to my chest, dropping my flower crown into the sand while I try to think of something to say.
Happy birthday is the first thing that comes to mind, but the happy doesn’t fit. It doesn’t fit at all. So instead I look out at the dark swath of calm sea, Lemon quiet and sad beside me. I wait for my own Sadness to well up, and it does, but it’s more like a gentle current, a soft hush-hush sound in my head, rather than the ice-cold tidal wave I usually feel.
“I guess you heard,” Lemon says after a few minutes. She presses the heels of both hands to her eyes, releases them with a huge sigh.
“Yeah,” I say.
“It’s weird, I know. Not wanting to celebrate your birthday.”
I shrug. “I won’t leave the house without this nerdy fanny pack around my waist. Doesn’t seem all that weird to me.”
Lemon laughs, just like I hoped she would. “Good point. What’s the deal with that thing, anyway?”
I brought it up, so I should’ve known she’d ask about it. I wait for some panic to flare, the Sadness to swell up like a tsunami, but none of that happens. Instead, I look Lemon right in the eye and I tell her a kind of truth. “Just makes me feel safe.”
She stares at me for a few seconds but doesn’t say anything else. Finally, she looks out at the sea. “I hate my birthday. The only thing good about today is your mom and my mom.”
I frown, a pinch in my heart. “What about them?”
She shrugs and waves toward where Peach and I just came from. “That they’re hanging out. That… your mom’s here. She makes my mom smile. A lot. Even on bad days. Have you noticed that?”
I look away, look at the water, the rolling waves and the moon spreading silver over the currents. I have noticed. Or at least I’ve noticed Mama’s smiles. Smiles I haven’t seen in two years. Even when Claire’s not around, Mama’s smiling. Unlike Lemon, though, I don’t feel a good thing rise up in my chest.
I just feel scared. For Mama. And for me, for Peach. For Mum and our family.
I feel… hollow.
I don’t say any of this, though. I can’t say it to Lemon, not tonight, so I just hmm and keep looking at the water.
“She made me a mermaid cake,” Lemon says. “My mom. That’s why we were fighting back there.”
“You don’t like mermaid cakes?”
A few more tears drip from her eyes. “No, I do. I love them. It’s really beautiful, too. Three tiers and different shades of blue icing. Dark on the bottom and then lighter and lighter as you go up.”
“Like the ocean zones,” I say.
“Yeah. Exactly. Then there’s this really pretty mermaid, all made out of icing, on the middle layer. She’s swimming, other little icing fish all around her, her hair bright red like ours. Like we’re the mermaid.”
“We…?”
Her face crumples up again and Peach pats her arm some more. I just wait, figuring she’ll keep talking if she really wants to. When I’m in the middle of the Sadness, quiet works best. Some things, there just aren’t any words for. Some things are too big to pin down with a sentence.
“Remember Immy?” Lemon asks.
I search my brain for the name. “Um…”
“The girl who did the mermaid paintings? The ones that look just like you?”
A memory flares from the first day at Ocean Club, Kiko saying Immy was their best friend. “Oh. Right. Your friend who’s—”
Not around anymore is what I almost say. That’s what Kiko said about Immy. She’s not around anymore. But she never said what that meant exactly—did she move away or drop Lemon and Kiko and Jules as her friends?—and I never asked.
But suddenly I know. I know with one hundred percent certainty. It’s so obvious now, the Sadness hanging on Lemon like a heavy winter coat in summer. Jules fumbling over saying Immy was an artist and then saying she is, that weird past-and-present question when you talk about someone who’s died. Immy’s not around just like Mum’s not around. She’s gone and nothing will ever make her come back.
“The four of us were best friends, me and Immy and Kiko and Jules,” Lemon says. “We’d always come to the Solstice Fire, every single year since we were kids. I mean, Immy and me came to the Fire every year of our lives, but then we met Kiko in kindergarten and Jules in second grade and ever since then, it’s been the four of us.”
She smiles, her eyes distant, like she’s remembering.
“That last year,” she goes on, “we sneaked away from the Fire and came here.” She juts her thumb back toward the Victorian behind us. “Immy always loved this place, always wanted to explore it at night. It’s locked up tight, but Kiko has this weird ability to pick any lock she comes across, so we went through the back door and into the kitchen, because it’s the only door that doesn’t have a dead bolt, then walked all around with our flashlights and looked at all the old stuff and hunted for ghosts.”
I glance back at the house, its windows like dark maws gaping at us. “Doesn’t anyone live there?”
She shakes her head. “The historical society took it over forever ago. That’s the Lancaster House.”
“The Lancaster…”
Lemon nods. “Anne Lancaster. Where Rosemary Lee lived before she…” She waves her hand at the ocean.
A chill crackles in my chest. I turn all the way around and gaze up at the house with new eyes. I press my palms into the sand on either side of me, close my fists around the cool grains. She walked here. Right here, maybe even on this very spot. Paced up and down this beach, searching for her family. This is where she was right before she…
I gaze back out at the water, that chill pulling up goose bumps all over my body.
“It’s pretty freaky inside,” Lemon says. “I mean, at night with flashlights, sure, but I’ve been there during the day, too, and it’s like you can feel her. Or feel something, at least. A lot of people think it’s haunted.”
“By Rosemary?”
Lemon snorts a laugh. “How can she be a ghost and a mermaid at the same time?”
“I don’t know, it’s your weird town.”
She smiles, just a little. “The ghost is Anne. Story is, she could never forgive herself for letting Rosemary go out alone that night, so she stays in the house, waiting for her to come home.”
“Right? Immy loved it, though. The ghost, the mermaid. All of it. We all did.”
“Do,” I say.
“Huh?”
“You do love it. Right?”
Lemon’s eyebrows dip into her eyes, but she nods. She sniffs and a tear drips down her cheek. “She’s my sister.”
I blink at her. “Wait, what? Who?”
“Immy. Imogene.”
Peach perks up at that. “Like me and Hazey are sisters?”
Lemon wipes at her face. “Yeah. I mean, sort of. Except me and Immy? We have the exact same birthday.”
My eyebrows pop up into my hair. “You mean…”
“Yeah,” Lemon says. “She’s my twin. I’m older. Born four and a half minutes before she was. Now I’m even older. Every year, I just get older.”
I watch her, eyes glazed over a little like she’s not even really talking to me, just saying stuff that’s true, stuff that’s hard. A cold, clammy feeling settles in my stomach. Her weird behavior all day makes even more sense. The awkward dance between her and Kiko and Jules at the aquarium.
“What happened to her?” I ask quietly. So quietly, I’m not sure Lemon even hears me. So quietly, I’m not sure I want her to hear me.
But I know she does, because her eyes narrow a little and her lower lip wobbles. “Brain aneurysm,” she says, just as quietly.
My heart trips, my breath coming in little, insufficient wisps.
“One minute she was there,” Lemon says. “And the next she wasn’t. She just… stopped.”
“You weren’t… you weren’t with her, were you?”
Part of me hopes she was, just so someone else gets it, but then a fresh wave of watery guilt fills up my lungs, because what a horrible thing to wish. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, being right there when the person you love most in the world leaves it forever.
Lemon’s eyes narrow and she breathes in really slowly, lets it out even slower. “No,” she finally says. “She died in her sleep. I was in the room right next to hers, probably dreaming about something stupid, totally clueless that my sister was…”
I reach out and squeeze her arm. I do it without thinking, because I need to do something.
“After about a year,” she says, “my dad left and moved to Georgia. He and Mom… they just weren’t…” She shrugs and picks at a thread on the hem of her T-shirt. “Plus, Mom said he felt a lot of guilt. He’s a doctor. Did I tell you that?”
I shake my head.
“A gastroenterologist, a stomach and digestive doctor, so it’s not like he specialized in brain stuff. Plus, aneurysms don’t show a lot of obvious symptoms. She’d had a headache for a couple of days before, but headaches, most of the time, are just headaches, you know?”
I nod, thinking of all the headaches I’ve had. Mama’s had, Peach.
“Anyway,” she says. “My dad, he didn’t know how to handle it living here. But I think I reminded him too much of my sister, of everything that happened, so…”
“So he just left you?”
Lemon shrugs again, but a tear slips down her cheek. “It’s okay. I see him at Thanksgiving and I go down there and stay with him and his new wife for two weeks every August.”
Anger clouds into my chest. Anger and a little fear. But Mama would never do that. She’d never do that to me. Ever.
Would she?
She left California, just like Lemon’s dad left Maine. And half the time, I feel like she doesn’t really want me around, like I remind her too much of what happened. Fear spikes through me.
“He called this morning,” Lemon goes on. “Sent me a check in the mail. It’s fine. The worst part is that I’m a teenager and Immy’s not. She never will be. She’ll always be ten. But I’ll just get older and older, having all this… this life that she never will.”
I swallow hard, tears pooling in my eyes. I don’t bother to wipe them away. The Sadness is too big, too much. I can’t stop it from spilling over, reaching for the Sadness in Lemon. Because how many times have I felt this exact same thing? Every birthday I have, every holiday, every time I eat something I know Mum loved, every time pink streaks through a sunset, there’s this little prick of misery.
Every time I think that I might want a friend, I’m hit by this feeling that, if I’m happy, that must mean that Mum didn’t matter. It must mean I’m fine without her and how can you ever be fine without your favorite person, the person who loved you most, accepted you most, made you laugh and think and feel brave?
“My mum,” I say, and that’s all I can get out before my throat goes thick and I have to breathe, breathe, breathe to keep from losing it right here and now.
Lemon lifts her head to look at me. “Your mum?”
Peach gets up and then crawls into my lap, wrapping her arms around my neck and her legs around my waist, her belly pressed to mine. Her flower crown tickles my face, so I slip it off and lay it carefully in the sand. Then I hold her close, rubbing her back and resting my chin on her shoulder. My sister knows and notices so much more than she talks about. I forget that.
“Our mum,” I say, then I swallow some more. Breathe some more. Finally, the Sadness works its way out again, but there’s this… release, too. Just saying her name out loud.
Mum.
Mum.
“She’ll always be thirty-seven,” I say.
Mum will never see Peach grow up—or me, for that matter—and she’ll never paint again and she’ll never kiss Mama again or make her laugh or hike in Claremont Canyon or eat a fresh avocado from the tree in our backyard. She’ll never do any of that ever again. Mama will never have her wife back and Peach will never have her mum.
Because of me. Because I couldn’t save her.
“Hazel,” Lemon says, and that’s it. Just my name, softly spoken through a sigh. But it’s enough. She reaches out her hand and grabs mine, laces our fingers together to rest on Peach’s back. I look at her, look at my sister, and I feel all our Sadness mingle together like tides from different lands meeting in the middle of the deep blue sea. And before I know it, it’s all spilling out of me, everything Mama and I never once talked about.
“You were meant for this,” Mum said, waving her arm at all the blue, both sea and sky.
We’d just set off from the Mendocino shore in Mum’s navy-blue double kayak. The Mendocino coast is beautiful, all blue Pacific and rocky arches stretching over the water, little coves and wide-open sea. It’s about a four-hour drive from Berkeley. We’d driven all morning and planned on staying in a little inn in the town after our kayaking adventure.
Adventure. That’s what Mum called it. That’s what she always called these trips she and I’d been taking for the last year and a half, ever since I’d become pretty obsessed with marine biology. The Mendocino coast hosted lots of marine life throughout the year—blue whales, orca, California sea lions. You were almost guaranteed to see something. The first time we ever went, we kayaked through a pod of harbor seals. Literally paddled right through them as they all lay on their backs, tiny whiskered faces lifted to the sun.
I was never happier than I was right there, with Mum, floating on the sea.
“Tell me the story again,” I said as we paddled out into the sunlight zone, the sun shimmering in and out of the water. An hour ago, when we’d first come down to the beach, the sky had been completely clear, but now, clouds started to drift over the sky, playing peekaboo with the sun. The wind was calm, but every now and then, it would stir the waves and cause our little kayak to undulate up and then down, like it was traveling over a hill. I wasn’t scared. There was no reason to be scared with Mum.
“Again?” she asked, navigating us from the front of the kayak. “Don’t you ever get sick of hearing about your triumphant entrance into the world?”
“No way,” I said, and she laughed.
“All right, fine, I never get sick of telling you about it, either.”
“See? It’s good for us both.”
She smiled at me over her shoulder, then rested her paddle on her lap. I did the same. I always took my cue with paddling from Mum. For safety, she’d told me more than once.
“Once upon a time,” she started as we bobbed on the water, “there was an extremely pregnant lady in a warm October who just had to go swimming in the sea.”
“Because you were so hot?”
“So hot. Like, center-of-the-sun hot. And pools grossed me out for some reason. All that bacteria and toddler pee.”
I laughed at that point, like I always did.
“So Mama took you to Santa Cruz.”
“That she did, even though I was about to pop and it was an hour away from home.” Mum picked up her paddle again and steered us toward a rocky arch. I paddled too, the current resisting my efforts so much, my biceps ached with the effort.
“It was glorious, though,” Mum said. “So cold. I’d never normally swim in that freezing water, but with you, it was like you were pulling me in. And then—”
“I got jealous and wanted to see the ocean too.”
“That you did, my darling. The moment I ducked under that water, you decided you just had to show up so you could be in the sea with me. Take in all that beauty, wonder all those wonders. Just like you were meant for the sea.”
I smiled at this, like I always did. I wasn’t actually born in the sea. Mum started feeling weird in the water, some small contractions, and she and Mum made it back to Berkeley so I could be safely born in the Berkeley Medical Center. Still, the way Mum told the story, it felt like I was born in the sea, or at least like it called me into the world.
We went quiet after that, paddling toward the arches and rock formations where the waves were always a little rougher. Never too rough, though. Mum could always handle it. She’d been kayaking since she was just a little older than me. That day, though, the clouds swept over the sky so fast, whipping the current into swirls and figure eights. It wasn’t supposed to rain—Mum always checked the weather—so I didn’t think much about it while Mum paddled this way and that around the foaming ocean, directing me left and right, letting out a laughing whoop every now and then.
I laughed with her.
For a while, it was just fun, an adventure, periods of wild waves and then little moments of calm. We looked for sea lions and whale flukes peeking out of the deeper waters. We talked about how we were both craving fish and chips for dinner and there was a place in downtown Mendocino called Fiddleheads Café that made the best Mum had ever had.
But then, when we got on the other side of the cove, rock formations rising up out of the water like giants, it was like the ocean shifted.
Grew restless.
Or angry.
At what, I didn’t know. But suddenly, Mum’s shoulders grew tight. White water foamed around the rocks, wind whirring through our hair and ears. A huge wave swelled in front of us, rising up and up and up…
“Get your paddle out of the water, Hazel!” Mum called back to me.
I hesitated, the wind stealing her words and mixing them up. When I finally realized what she’d said, it was too late. The water yanked my paddle right out of my hands. The kayak veered left, tipping the whole world on its side.
“Hang on, baby!” Mum yelled. Her paddle worked furiously, dipping over the right side of the kayak, then the left, but nothing seemed to help. It felt like we were in the center of a whirlpool.
And right there, just behind me, I could still see the shore.
Mum yelled something else. I couldn’t hear it, whatever it was. And she never got a chance to say it again. Our kayak tipped… tipped… and finally dumped us into the sea. The water was cold—freezing—shock blasting through my whole body like I’d stuck my fingers into an electrical socket. I flipped and somersaulted, then pain like I’ve never known ripped across my face. I tasted blood, saw red, my shoulder slamming into the rocks that had just moments ago seemed so gentle, so quiet.
I spluttered to the surface, trying to yell for Mum, trying to find her, trying to find a paddle, anything.
But there was nothing. Just me, my own blood draining into the sea, and an empty kayak smacking against the rocks.