Marion hadn’t slept all night.
Instead, she sat on the floor beside her bed and acclimated herself to the moth.
Since she’d somehow appeared back in her room, sweaty and aching and doubting her own sanity, the moth hadn’t left her side. She’d crawled to the bathroom, not wanting to dirty the floor, cleaned off her feet in the bathtub, and applied bandages to every scrape, then put on a pair of clean socks and hobbled back down the hallway.
The moth followed, fluttering unevenly beside her shoulder. When she returned to her spot on the floor next to her bed, the moth alighted on her knee. Its wings sighed open and closed like paper-thin lungs.
At first Marion thought: I will smack this moth off my leg, like I would any bug. I will crush it under my palm and toss it in the toilet.
But if she did that, she would be left alone, with no one and nothing else who understood that she had transported herself from the forest to the cliffs to an alien beach and back to her bedroom.
She said it aloud, the words feeling fat and unfamiliar on her tongue:
“Something’s happening to me.” Instead of smacking away the moth, she extended a finger. “Do you know what it is?”
The moth climbed aboard. Where it stepped, tiny coins of warmth bloomed on Marion’s clammy skin. She raised her finger so she could look at the moth’s eyes. Rimmed with white fur, they stared black and unblinking at her.
Marion watched them until her frantic heartbeat slowed.
Then she laughed, tears rising fast. “I’m talking to a moth.” She lowered her finger. Agreeably, the moth fluttered onto her knee. “I’m losing my mind.”
She climbed into bed, desperate for sleep. Sleep would cleanse her brain of the images she couldn’t erase—the Mortimers’ horse running with its broken leg and then throwing itself over the cliffs. The snowy beach. The smoking piles of bones.
But when Marion closed her eyes, that was all she could see. She tried for hours, but she couldn’t quiet her brain, and her bed felt like stones under her sore limbs.
At last she opened her eyes and saw the moth perched across the room on her desk chair. Watching her.
“All right,” Marion said. It was late morning, nearly noon. She sat up, returned to the floor. The moth floated down to meet her. Marion waited until it touched her knee, then nodded and took a long, steady breath. Trapped in her throat was a hysterical laugh, which made steady breathing difficult. But whatever. Never mind.
“Doesn’t matter,” she whispered. She thought of the snow-covered, sand-covered beach. The strange amber water, the lavender sky.
How had she gotten there the first time?
She glanced at the moth. “Do I have to go scare another horse or something?”
For answer, the moth began cleaning its antennae with its furry front legs.
Marion sighed. “Great. Helpful.”
She leaned against the footboard of her bed. The thin metal post dug into her back, and with a jolt she remembered the electrical charge that had surged up from the ground and slapped her between her shoulder blades. It had told her to run after the charging horse. It had told her, Go.
She looked back at the moth. “Do you know what that was? What it means?”
The moth stared, its wings quivering so fast they became a blur. The slight whisper of wing against wing made words Marion couldn’t understand.
She closed her eyes, her heart drumming fast, trying to re-create the previous night—how the air had felt against her skin, what frantic thoughts had blazed through her mind, what emotions had seized her as she watched the horse stagger.
Memory pictures formed behind her eyes—the black forest, the black night, the salt in the air, the crash of nearing waves, the horse’s terrified cry.
A buzz tingled Marion’s bare legs. The fibers of the rug itched and scratched. Sawkill Rock stretched vast and unmovable beneath her, but Marion was not afraid of it. Its existence was a comfort. It was a seal basking belly-up in the water. It was ancient and tired and it reached up for Marion’s legs with tender tendrils, like a song traveling on invisible currents.
How had Charlotte described it, that first day on the ferry?
It’s like this . . . this thing, perched out there on the water.
The bone cry arose, faintly, like the sound of approaching traffic—power, contained and far away, but coming up fast.
Marion welcomed the sound. She imagined her body opening to receive it. She was not a girl of dense muscle and clumsy bones. She was a network of air-filled tubes, of inflating balloons. She was a symphony warming up before the big night.
The moth fluttered away, leaving Marion’s knee cold. She had the sudden, unshakable feeling that the Rock was watching her. Against the glass of her window tapped a branch from the fat oak tree outside.
“Hello?” Marion whispered.
The charge humming along the rug detonated, zipped up her spine, and planted itself at the base of her skull. The world shifted, like a cube squeezing through another cube to emerge whole and immense on the other side. Marion’s breath caught in her throat, trapped between realities.
She opened her eyes.
She was no longer in her bedroom, nor was she on a foreign beach with cities in the sky.
She was downstairs, in her kitchen, on the breakfast table, of all places, beside the fruit bowl. In front of her was the window over the sink, which looked out over the twin giant oak trees and the hammock and, beyond, Kingshead.
Marion sat, legs crossed, trying to catch her breath. The hair on her arms stood up; the old static-balloon trick. The bone cry remained, shriller now, discordant. Urgent.
She wasn’t sure if she wanted to laugh or cry. “What the hell.”
A woman’s voice called out from outside: “I’ll come check on you after I shower! We’ll have lunch, all right?”
Then the moth appeared, diving down from the ceiling to thump against the window—again, and again, and again.
At first Marion just stared at it. The moth, the trees, the sea, the horse.
Sawkill Rock.
Disparate pieces? Or one and the same?
The back of Marion’s neck still tingled from where the charge had hit her.
She scrambled off the table and hit her knee on a chair. “Stop!” She raised her cupped hands, moved them between the moth and the glass. The moth climbed up her fingers and pressed its antennae against the window.
Marion followed its gaze:
First, Val and her mother, jogging up the running path toward Kingshead.
Oh, Val. Marion tried to remain unmoved by the sight of Val—her hair in a long golden braid, her arm muscles glistening with sweat, her face bright and open. Val was not to be trusted. Val was a mark.
But Marion couldn’t help it; heat floated up her body to greet her fingertips. Everyone thinks I live this charmed life, Val had said, just before Marion had kissed her, her eyes luminous with tears, but the truth is . . .
What, Val? Marion should have said. Tell me your truth.
Marion’s mother lay beyond Val, sleeping in the hammock. And beside her . . .
The bone cry’s crescendo smacked Marion in the chest like a hammer.
Beside her mother was Marion herself. Stroking her mother’s hair, holding her close, gazing furiously after Val.
The world slowed. The moth fluttered at Marion’s ear.
Zoey’s words returned to her: Not-Marion.
Marion slammed her hands against the window, screamed, “Mom! Wake up!”
The not-Marion in the hammock sat up, whipped her head around to stare. In the glare of the sun, her eyes flashed round and white.
She jumped out of the hammock, nearly sending Mrs. Althouse toppling to the ground, and ran for the woods.