Embers & Echoes by Karsten Knight Page A

than a few weeks old at the time, swaddled in an old stretch of canvas and wailing your little lungs out. The story goes that you had a mighty fever, that until theybrought you below deck and out of the sun, your little body was burning up with a raging heat.
    You wouldn’t be able to appreciate the irony until thirteen years later.
    When the lobsterman brought the girls to the Whitney farm (he never went to the authorities), Papa didn’t consider how the color of your skin might change the way the neighbors treated the Whitneys. He didn’t care that you and Violet were both girls; the farm was small, easy enough for Papa to manage without any strapping young sons. He just wanted a legacy in this world beyond his toils in the field before he ended up in the family plot across the road.
    Mama did eventually grow to love you, though not in the unconditional way that your father did. She grew to love the sixth sense you seemed to have when it came to baking, how you knew exactly when the chicken or the bread or, on those lucky nights, the casserole had cooked properly. She grew to love the way that Violet’s outlandish stories made everyone laugh, without realizing how that same skill would eventually allow Violet to blossom into a masterful liar.
    Little Gracie was a different story, one that made even your buoy rescue sound like a typical adoption.
    You were ten at the time. Papa always told you not to play hide-and-seek in the cornfields, but you played anyway. You had just found a gap in one of the cornfield lines and wiggled your way through, not botheringto think of what Mama would say about the dirt clumps on your dress.
    You heard rustling through the stalks in front of you. Knowing that Violet would soon catch you, you decided to get the better of your older sister by scaring her first. So you plunged through the leaves and hurled through the last row of stalks with a battle cry, prepared to strike.
    You nearly stepped on the baby. She crawled—no, slithered—soundlessly, naked, through the dirt, weaving between the stalks. Even as your foot came down next to her, she didn’t even look up at first to see what monster the foot belonged to.
    But then her eyes tracked up and saw you, and she rolled onto her back and gurgled. She had the same clay skin as you and Violet, the same sharp eyes, and even the beginnings of the same ebony curls you would never be able to control on humid summer days.
    Without knowing where she came from, or how she ended up in this field, you knew one thing for certain.
    The girl your adoptive parents would eventually name Grace was, just like Violet, your blood sister. And she’d found her way from faraway shores to the bowels of Maine to reunite with you.
    Now the three of you sit with Papa at the squeaky little table with just the light of the setting sun filtering through the open window. These days you’re the remainder of a strange and eclectic family that once felt whole but was left disjointed and sterile when you found Mamain the barn. It’s like the one woman who’d always felt like the odd one out had somehow been a linchpin to your family’s happiness.
    “You’re awful quiet,” Papa says in the thick Maine accent the three of you somehow failed to adopt when you learned English. “All three of ya.”
    In the silence that follows, you and Violet exchange a look over the corn and potatoes. Grace gurgles. For a four-year-old, she’s always acting more like she’s two, and even though she does talk on occasion, you wonder whether she’s really all there.
    “Just at the end of my wick from playing out in the fields,” Violet lies. She reaches for the butter. “I think I got a bit sunburned on my neck too.”
    This at least gets Papa to chuckle. “My island girls—a darker shade than the Maine natives, but still not impervious to the sun.” His grin fades when he turns to you. He hasn’t smiled at you in a long time. Does it have something to do with the fact that