TW: Mention of suicide

Author’s Note: Ahhhh, finally at the end!

The storm was over, but its traces were far from gone.  Tree limbs littered the wet, ragged grass and the sky was still a sickly gray, though perhaps a bit more yellow than before.  The sea seemed to be content for now.  It had at least welcomed the gulls back to its shores.  They squawked with indignation.

“It was just a trick of the light,” Elsie insisted.  “The sun can’t turn red.”

“But it did,” said Jenny solemnly, pushing one of her wet tendrils of hair from her face and behind her ear.  “We both saw it.”

Elsie frowned.  “Did you see lightning strike the Hag of Beara’s rock?”

“No.  Did it?”

Elsie nodded.  “I think so.”

Jenny bit her cheek.  The idea of the sky accosting the Hag felt sacrilegious.

Absentmindedly, Jenny ran her hands over the grass she and Elsie sat upon.  Both of them were already soaking wet and likely to catch a cold, so a little dew could hardly harm them.  Jenny considered asking Elsie if she wanted to go down to the shore.  But there were things that needed to be said first. 

“I didn’t mean to tell my mother about Dr. Larson.”

Elsie stopped wringing out her hair.  “No.  You did.”  She looked at her.  “Thank you,” she said, as her attention went back to her wet hair.

Jenny held her hands in her lap, tracing circles on her palm, imagining she was drawing a ruby sun.  “Why have you been avoiding me?” she asked, sounding whinier than she had wanted to.  Now that the danger had passed, she could feel old anger boiling up inside of her.  “I thought that you hated me; I thought that I’d ruined the only…and when I couldn’t find you today, I thought…”  She swallowed.  “It wasn’t fair.”

Elsie looked down.  Her fingers traced the trim on her dress.  “No,” she said.  “It wasn’t.  I’m sorry.  I just—didn’t want to talk about things that mattered.  And I knew that if I talked to you, I would have to.”  She folded the end of her dress over, letting the water drip off of it slowly.  “My mother looked like this.  With her hair all wet, and her dress transparent and sticking to her.  She looked like a ghost.”

Jenny squinted at her cousin, shading her eyes from the lukewarm brightening sun.  “What are you talking about?”

Elsie stared ahead.  “Ten years ago, my mother tried to drown herself.  It was here.”

The wind whistled like a wolf. “Elsie…”

Elsie shook her head.  “We don’t have to talk about it.  I was just…thinking about it.  I don’t know why I even said anything.”  Elsie’s eyes started to water, but rather than cry, she gave a mirthless laugh.  “I hate her for dying.  That’s so stupid, isn’t it?”  Elsie closed her eyes, letting her tears roll down her face without a sound.  “She didn’t mean to, but she left me all alone.  And it’s awful being alone.  It makes you do mad things.”

“I know,” Jenny said.

Elsie looked at her cousin again, then smiled sadly and gazed at the ground, at the clump of grass she had been gripping in her fist.  “Well, I was right then, wasn’t I?  We do know each other.”  She took in a breath.  “Thank you.  Because of you, I’m not alone anymore.”

Jenny smiled back; she could have said the same.  But something was still nagging her, stopping her from rejoicing in their survival and repaired friendship. 

“Don’t leave,” Jenny said.

“I have to.”  Elsie pressed her lips together.  “I want to return to the Retreat.  To really get well.  I’m not sure if they can help me all that much, but I think I can help myself.  Besides,” she said, “we’ll see each other again.  I’m certain.”

Elsie stretched her arms behind her, her back relaxed yet poised.  “After all, I’ll have to come back when I’m ready to start my Hag of Beara poems again.  As of now, they’re quite ruined.”

Jenny hadn’t even thought about Elsie’s manuscript, or that half of it was still gripped in her left hand.  With horror, she realized that Elsie was right.  The ink was hopelessly smeared by both her fingers and the rain.   “Oh Elsie, I’m so sorry—”

“Don’t be,” Elsie interrupted.  “I did the same to mine.”  She held up a mess of wrinkled papers, the words on them reduced to illegible squiggles.

“But you worked so hard on them!  Aren’t you upset?”

“A little.  I was never quite happy enough with them, though.”  She smiled at Jenny.  “I could never get them to be quite as good as your story.  And surviving an apocalyptic storm does put things in perspective.  Living might matter more than poetry.”

Jenny laughed.  “That doesn’t sound very much like you.”

“I hope it will someday.  Maybe someday, I’ll be as wise as you.”

I’m not wise, Jenny almost said.  If she were wise, she wouldn’t have had so many problems; she would have known what she wanted in the world.

But I do know, she realized, looking up at the white birds that circled the sky.  All that she wanted, all that she had ever wanted, was to live like a seagull—going wherever the wind guided her, flying against it when it suited her, but always certain that she had a shore to return home to.  That wasn’t so very impossible.  She already had a beach.  And she felt lighter than before.  Elsie was right: originality did require effort.  And Jenny was prepared to beat her wings against the force of any storm.   

“Well, I’m sorry that I won’t get to read them,” said Jenny, rubbing her thumb along the edge of a ruined page.

Elsie wiped her face, leaving a smudge of ink on her cheek.  “They’ll be better the second time.  I think that I may need to do some living in order to get them right.  After all, the Hag did an awful lot of living, and I’ve done frightfully little.  But I wish you could have read them too.  I think that you’re the only person that I’d really want to read them.  Too bad I only ever showed them to Frederick.”

“You let him read them and not me?!”

Elsie laughed at Jenny’s shock.  “I wanted his opinion.”

“Well, I have much better opinions than him.”

“I think I realize that now.  But I’m afraid you’ll just have to wait.”

The two stared at the sun, settling behind the cold clouds.  I can wait, Jenny thought.  In the meantime, there would be enough to keep her busy.  Clothes to clean, stories to tell, potatoes to grow.  Perhaps the storm had even done the crops some good.  Some good can come from just about anything. 

Jenny felt the good luck bone in her pocket.  She was proud to have given it a second life, no matter what its first one had been.  She fiddled with it, running her finger along its smooth surface, as she watched the cloud-scarred sky begin to fade to a pale, untouched blue.  Only after a storm will that happen, she thought.  Only after a storm will the sky be that clear.