Low Tide

You fall asleep thinking about last night's texts, the way she typed, the pauses between messages that felt longer than they were. You wake up at 4:40 to one more.

Juniper Vale: Low tide is 5:14. Wear boots. Don't speak to me before coffee.

You don't own boots. You own sneakers with holes in them. You wear those.

The salt flats are a mile north of town, a wide gray plain of wet sand and black rock that the sea abandons twice a day. The sky's just beginning to gray at the edges. The cold comes up through your shoes immediately.

Juniper's already there, a tall black figure against the pale water, a lantern at her feet and a basket on her arm. Her hair is tied up in a knot that's coming loose in the wind. Her boots are excellent.

She looks at your sneakers. She looks at your face.

"I said boots."

"You said don't speak to you before coffee."

Wordlessly she hands you a thermos. It's coffee, black, so hot it hurts, and you're so grateful you could cry. You don't say thank you. You figure that counts as speaking.

"Moon-salt," she says, once you've had half. "It crusts on the north side of the rocks after a waning moon. It's the first thing we'll need. You scrape it into the jar. Don't touch it with your bare hands."

"Why not?"

"Because it's for you, and I don't want any of your nonsense in it." She hands you a jar and a silver spoon. "Go."

It's slow and freezing and strangely peaceful. The salt is pale gray-white, fine as flour, glittering faintly in the lantern light where it's caked on the rocks. You scrape. She scrapes. The gulls wake up and start complaining.

"Can I ask you something?" you say.

"You can ask."

"What exactly are we making?"

"A cure."

"That's not an answer."

"It's an answer. It's just not the one you want." She moves to the next rock, boots finding the dry patches without looking. "There are pieces. The salt is one. There will be others. You'll get them when you need them."

"Do you always talk like a fortune cookie?"

"Only to people who stole from me."

"Bought," you say. "I bought it."

She glances back. In the lantern glow, with the wind pulling strands of hair across her face, she looks like something painted on the prow of a ship, and you have to look at the rock instead.

"You realize," she says, "that you can't lie, and you keep insisting on that. Which means you actually believe it."

"Because it's true."

"Hm." She almost smiles. "Annoying."

She steps onto the next rock. It's slick with green weed. Her heel goes out from under her.

You don't think. You drop the jar and lunge, and you get one arm around her waist and the other on her elbow, and for a second you both teeter on the edge of the tidepool with the cold black water waiting below. Then your feet find the sand and you're holding her up, her back against your chest, her breath short.

She smells like rosemary and smoke and the sea. Her head tucks under your chin. You can feel her heart going, quick, through the layers of wool.

"You can let go, Ethan," she says.

You let go.

She steps away and straightens her coat. Her cheeks are pink. It's the cold. It's probably the cold.

"Thank you," she says, stiffly, to the rock.

"You're welcome." You pick up the jar. Most of the salt survived. "You're very graceful for someone who almost died in four inches of water."

"Four feet. It's deep there."

"Sure."

She shoots you a look. And then she laughs, short and surprised, like she didn't mean to, like the laugh got out while she wasn't watching the door. It's low and a little rough and it goes straight through you.

She cuts it off. "Scrape, Ethan."

The sun comes up as you're finishing. The light turns everything gold, the sand and the water and the edges of her hair, and you sit on a dry rock to drink the last of the coffee. She sits on the next rock. Not close. Not far.

"How did you learn all this?" you ask.

"My grandmother." She's quiet for a moment. "Hester Vale. She raised me after my mother left. She had a shop on Wharf Street, Vale & Daughters, where the parking lot is now. Everyone in town went to her. For headaches, for heartbreaks, for warts. She knew everything."

"What happened to the shop?"

The wind picks up. A gull lands nearby, considers you both, leaves.

"It burned. Six years ago, on Samhain. She was upstairs." Juniper's voice is perfectly level. "The fire department said it was the wiring. It wasn't the wiring."

"What was it?"

"Somebody." She stands abruptly and brushes salt from her coat. "We're done. Take the jar home. Keep it in the dark. Two o'clock at the shop, and don't be late."

"Juniper."

She stops, back to you.

"I'm sorry," you say. "About your grandmother."

You can't lie. She knows you can't lie. So she knows exactly how much you mean it. You see it hit her, see her shoulders go tight and then, for a breath, loosen.

"Prudence was her best friend," she says, without turning around. "For sixty years. You should know that, living in her house."

Then she walks away across the flats, lantern swinging, getting smaller against the gold.

You go home, put the salt jar in the pantry, and do something you've been avoiding: the parlor bookshelves. Prudence's photo albums take up three whole shelves, leather-bound, labeled by year in faded ink.

You pull one marked with a date eight years back and flip through. Prudence in a garden hat. Prudence on the porch, holding a cat. And then a photo on the porch of a different shop, a sign above the door reading Vale & Daughters in gold.

Four women stand on the steps. Prudence. Beside her, a tall woman with a crown of white braids and Juniper's exact eyes: Hester. On the bottom step, Juniper at twenty, hair down to her waist, laughing at something off-camera, so luminous it hurts to look at. You've never seen her laugh like that. You'd give a lot to.

And next to Juniper, an arm slung around her shoulders, a fourth young woman.

Slim. Pale hair. Elegant hands.

You can't see her face. Someone has taken something sharp and scratched it out, again and again, so hard the paper is torn through.