The Summer of Lost Letters

by Hannah Reynolds

  “Okay, fine. But even if I don’t learn anything—don’t you think it’s weird she went to Nantucket and never mentioned it? It’s weird she was in love with some fancy rich dude and we’ve never heard about it. And why would some rich guy steal a necklace?”

  I knew the general progression of my grandmother’s life: She’d left Germany at four years old, traveling first to Paris, then to the States via a steamship. A Jewish family in Upstate New York took her in until she turned eighteen, at which point she moved to the city. She married my grandfather, another German Jew, moved back upstate, raised three children, and retired to West Palm Beach. Was widowed. Got dementia. Moved to a nursing home. Stopped recognizing her family. Died.

  The only time I’d seen Mom cry was when we got the phone call about O’ma.

  “What does it matter?” Mom said. “If she’d wanted us to know about this man or Nantucket, she would have told us.”

  “Bull. You’re just mad she didn’t tell you, so you’re pretending you don’t care.”

  Mom looked startled, then pressed a kiss on my temple. “Thank you for your diagnosis, Dr. Schoenberg.”

  “I’m right, you know. So you don’t mind if I try to talk to him?”

  “Go for it.”

  Over the next few days, I dived deep into Edward Barbanel’s life. He’d grown Barbanel from a successful local accounting firm, already one hundred years old in the 1950s, to a massive multinational organization, though still privately owned. According to a wedding announcement in the New York Times, Edward had married the same year he’d sent his last letters to O’ma, writing Don’t do anything stupid. I love you. On his eightieth birthday, he handed the running of the company over to his son.

  It turned out it was very, very hard to get in touch with the chairman of the board of an exceedingly wealthy company. Emails, phone calls, DMs all went unanswered. However. Wills and ways.

  “I talked to Ms. Chowdhury at the library,” I told my parents over breakfast, two weeks after the box arrived. “Her sister-in-law knows someone with a family friend whose daughter owns a bookstore on Nantucket. She said she might be able to get me a summer job there.”

  Mom practically spit out her coffee. “What?”

  “That was a very long list of people,” Dad said. “Did you remember all of them or make some up?”

  “Since I can’t get in touch with Edward Barbanel, I thought I’d go to him.”

  “You’re not going to Nantucket for the whole summer.”

  Dad sighed. “No one ever listens to me.”

  “Why not? I need a summer job.”

  “Not in Nantucket.” Mom’s voice rose several decibels. “Don’t you think you’re being a little extreme? What about the library? You like working there!”

  “Think of what a good college essay this would make. You know how competitive scholarships are.” I’d need a full ride to afford a private college, and while my grades were decent, a good essay could set me apart. Especially if I showcased how my devotion to studying history was so strong, I’d spent my entire summer digging into primary sources about my family. Hopefully that kind of dedication would impress the admissions boards—because honestly, something needed to. Scholarships weren’t exactly flying off the shelves for prospective history majors.

  “Honey . . .”

  Okay, I might not get a scholarship no matter what, but I didn’t want to hear it. “Niko and Haley and Brooke aren’t home this summer anyway. What’s the point of staying?”

  Mom’s face cleared as though she’d been struck by understanding. “This is about Matt, isn’t it? Abby, I know you’re upset—”

  “Oh my god, Mom, not everything is about some stupid boy.” Though admittedly, I really didn’t want to see Matt, especially after his gracious offer to be “casual” post breaking up with me.

  Dad wisely picked up his tea and retreated from the room.

  “Are you sure? You read the letters two weeks after you and Matt broke up. You’re fixated on them. You can’t run away from things, Abby.”

  My stomach clamped up, squeezing tight around the hurt inside of me. “I don’t want to talk about this.”

  “Abby, honey—” Mom’s face melted and she reached for me.

  I evaded her touch. “I’m seventeen. I’m funding this and leaving for college next year anyway. I’m not doing anything dangerous.”

  “I don’t understand why you care so much about this!”

  “I don’t understand why you don’t! It’s a huge gap in O’ma’s life.”

  “Why don’t we compromise and go for a weekend?”

  “Mom, I don’t want to be here this summer!”

  She froze. Her voice came out soft and small. “Oh.”

  Regret rose immediately. We were twined together, Mom and I, our emotions rising and falling based on the other’s. “I’m sorry. Just—I want to find out more about O’ma. Don’t you? Aren’t you a little bit curious?”

  She shrugged one shoulder, a gesture reminiscent of her mother. “She didn’t tell me, so I don’t know why I should care.”

  I wasn’t buying her cavalier act. You’re far too proud, E had written. Maybe O’ma hadn’t been the only one.

  I’d spent my entire life watching how hurt Mom became whenever O’ma stonewalled her. Their relationship had been strained in a way ours had never been, filled with tense silences and it doesn’t matter and how morbid. Maybe Mom really believed what she’d told me: maybe if O’ma hadn’t wanted to tell her, she didn’t want to know.

  But I didn’t believe it. I knew my mother; I’d seen the look in her eyes when we read the letters. O’ma mattered so very, very deeply to Mom. And while she might be too proud to seek out her mother’s past, I didn’t have to pretend not to care. I could do this for her. Go to Nantucket. Find Edward Barbanel. Find out about O’ma’s past.

  And at the end of the day, what could my parents protest? A nice summer job at a nice bookstore in a nice town? One of Mom’s colleagues even had an aunt on Nantucket with a room to rent (or at least a bed in a room, if I didn’t mind sharing). So my parents drove me to Hyannis for the ferry (Dave came, too, but he mostly played video games). Mom asked over and over if I’d packed my toothbrush and my vitamins and my acne cream until I burst out I wasn’t an idiot, and she looked horribly sad, and I felt like a monster. They stood on the ferry dock and watched me go. Dad wrapped his arm around Mom’s shoulder, and she leaned into him. For the first time, they looked small. They waved and waved and I waved back, unsure of what would happen if I turned away before they did, if it would be better or worse to snap the cord.

  Two

  The high-speed ferry sliced through the Atlantic. I tipped my face up, savoring the heat soaking through my skin, the way the back of my eyelids turned red-gold. Salty wind tangled my hair above my head, then whipped strands into my mouth. A bright, cerulean world surrounded me, all endless ocean and cloudless sky.

  A small secret: Mom was right. I did run from things.

  Hard to stop, when the act of being in transition made me happier than anything else. I could leave things behind: I had no weights, but no new expectations. The world around me felt charged with potential. I could start again. Anything could happen. Something would happen.

  Something to distract me from Matt, ideally.

  In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been blindsided by his decision to break up. “I need to concentrate right now, you know?” he’d said on the last day of February break, when we were out eating burrito bowls. “Harvard’s so picky, especially for kids from in state. They want diverse candidates, like from Kansas.”

  “From Kansas.” Two seconds before, we’d been making plans to see the latest blockbuster. Now I watched him shovel rice and beans into his mouth, while my own meal sat like lead in my stomach. He was breaking up with me because of valedictorians from Kansas?

>   “And I need to be doing more interesting stuff, like the start-up internship. I don’t have time to date. I like you,” the only boy who’d ever seen me topless said. “But, you know.”

  I’d thought we were going to get married. I barely believed in the institution of marriage, and I’d still thought we’d stand beneath a chuppah. “Sounds like you’ve made up your mind.”

  He nodded, then pointed at the chips left in my platter. “You gonna eat those?”

  “Go for it.” I pushed them over. “Great, well, uh, thanks for letting me know. I’ll see you in Psych tomorrow.”

  He spoke mid-crunch. “You don’t have to go. We can talk about it, if you want.”

  “What would we talk about?” My forehead started sweating. I hadn’t even known foreheads could sweat. “You made a decision. Good for you, I’m glad you know yourself so well that you know you don’t want to date me. Great. I don’t want to date someone who doesn’t want to date me, so . . . we’re not dating anymore. Bye.” I awkwardly scooted out of the booth, walking away with as much grace as I could manage.

  Perhaps pride was a heritable trait.

  A horn blew, and people rushed to join me at the rail. A stretch of land had surfaced on the horizon, and soon we could make out a haze of details: tiny gray houses, heaps of green trees, the spikes of steeples. Our ferry curved around a sandy point crowned by a squat lighthouse, then pulled into a painfully picturesque harbor. Dozens of different kinds of boats bobbed on the water, and seals warmed themselves on wooden docks. Above us, gulls cried out, soaring through a blue sky dotted with cotton-like clouds. People geared up to disembark.

  Nantucket. Summer home of some of the wealthiest people in America. Home sweet home for the next few months.

  The stream of passengers carried me onto the docks, which merged seamlessly with the cobblestone streets of downtown. Leafy trees lined the sidewalks and American flags waved. Clothing boutiques and ice-cream shops stood shoulder to shoulder, and the people strolling through the quaint downtown looked sun-touched and happy.

  I clutched my suitcase handle tightly as I rolled it past well-dressed mannequins and nautical bric-a-brac, under hand-lettered signs hanging from horizontal posts. Nantucket seemed like an Epcot version of America, both beautiful and bizarre. I was Alice down the rabbit hole, Lucy through the wardrobe, Dorothy not-in-Kansas-anymore. I’d googled the island, but it still hadn’t wholly prepared me.

  It had given me the island’s general history, though: Originally settled by the Wampanoag, Nantucket had boomed in population in the early 1600s when people on mainland Massachusetts fled disease and invasion, coming to the island for safety. But the British soon followed them, and the majority of the Wampanoag on the island died from disease by the 1760s. Then the Quakers came, then the whaling industry, then the wealthy, who stayed and conquered.

  I’d always loved history, but I hadn’t realized you could seriously study it until this year. It seemed too easy, like I’d be getting away with something. Like—you could go to school to read stories about people from the past? That was wild. Literally all I wanted was to go on Wikipedia deep dives about ancient societies and women rulers and the Belle Époque. I’d read everything Stacy Schiff and Erik Larson had ever written. The idea of writing a college essay actually appealed to me, if it meant I could write about family history.

  If, you know, I found something to write about.

  Following the directions on my phone, I turned at a beautiful brick mansion, then walked down progressively smaller streets until I reached a narrow lane. Gray-shingled houses stood close together on either side of it, surrounded by small lawns and rosebushes. There was an inherent coastal air to these weatherworn homes, with their American flags and signs saying All You Need Is Love and the Beach and Home Is Where the Beach Is.

  I paused at a house with a wooden plaque that read Arrowwood Cottage. Tiny white flower buds were carved in the corner. I jumped my suitcase the three steps to the porch, took a deep breath, and pressed the doorbell.

  An older woman answered, her silver-streaked gray hair cut in a bob, her purple tunic flowing. Blown-glass baubles dangled from her ears. “Hello.”

  “Hi. Mrs. Henderson?” I’d met her niece—my mom’s coworker— a handful of times when I’d been dragged to college functions. The vague similarity in their features put me more at ease. “I’m Abby Schoenberg.”

  “Yes, of course. Did you just arrive?”

  “Yeah. Yes. I took the ferry from Hyannis. My parents dropped me off.” I followed her inside. To the left lay the kitchen, open and airy; to the right a living room, shelves filled with books. A golden retriever jumped up from a rug, barking sharply and hoisting her floppy ears high. She had a coat like browned butter and the long, awkward legs of a dog not yet full-grown.

  “That’s Ellie Mae,” Mrs. Henderson said. “Come on, Ellie, she’s a friend.”

  The golden barked again, then trotted forward and shoved her nose at the front of my shorts. I fell into a defensive crouch and caught her narrow head. She had gentle eyes and tufts of fur behind her ears and knees. “Hi, girl.”

  She licked my face and panted at me with her terrible dog breath.

  Mrs. Henderson laughed. “She’s the worst guard dog in the world.”

  I’d met many of the worst guard dogs in the world and loved them all. “How old is she?”

  “Eighteen months. Do you like dogs?”

  “Adore them. My grandmother has a beagle.” My dad’s mom lavished her dog with even more indulgence than she did me and my brother.

  “I’ve always had goldens, but one of my good friends has hounds. You should see her dog point.” She smiled fondly, then waved me up. “I’ll give you the grand tour.”

  Ellie Mae trotted faithfully after us as Mrs. Henderson showed me the house. Along with the kitchen and living room, the first floor had a dining room and office. The latter opened into a fenced backyard. On the second floor, she pointed out her own bedroom and her late husband’s study. She smiled self-deprecatingly. “Sometimes I think about turning it into another rental, but I haven’t had the heart.”

  To reach the third floor, we climbed a narrow staircase with steps sloping downward in the center. This floor was a single hall, light spilling in from windows on both ends. Mrs. Henderson pushed open a door. “Here we are.”

  White walls brightened a tiny room with a slanted ceiling. A braided oval rug, blue and white, lay on the pale wooden floor. One of the two twin beds had been neatly made up with white linens and a comforter, while clothes covered the disheveled second. A nightstand with a turquoise lamp stood under the window between the beds.

  “This used to be the maid’s room, when the house was first built. I’ve tried to make it a little nicer, though.”

  “It’s great.” I rolled my suitcase to the free bed, and looked out the window. I could see Mrs. Henderson’s yard, filled with purple flowers and a delicate bird bath, and the neighbors’ yards, too, since the cottages were so close together. “Thanks so much.”

  “The bathroom’s across the hall—you and Jane will be the only two using it. The other room up here is for storage.” She handed me a key. “Welcome to Nantucket.”

  After she left, I hung my dresses in the hall closet and lined up my shoes below the bed. I tucked Horse, my childhood companion, under the covers. The site of a ragged stuffed cat on my new roommate’s pillow comforted me.

  I’d done it. I was here.

  Now what?

  Muted merriment floated in through the open window. At home, only the unchanging song of crickets filled summer evenings, a more calming noise than this one, which tugged at my chest and made me feel like I should be out there, laughing and shrieking and living.

  Okay. I was only feeling weird because I was lonely, which would go away after I started my job in two days. No reason to start wondering if I’d m
ade the right choice. Of course I’d made the right choice. I’d spent the last three months holding on to the idea of Nantucket like it was a lifesaver. You couldn’t long for something—lust for it—then feel hollow as soon as you achieved it.

  Could you?

  I felt like I’d abandoned Mom.

  I knew I hadn’t, technically; she had Dad, who was fairly competent at humaning (not too competent; if I asked him a particularly thorny question while he was walking, he would literally stop walking in order to think, and I’d have to go back and retrieve him). And Mom had her temple friends and college bestie and friends from her Children of Survivors group and the parents of my friends who she’d befriended. And she had Dave, my brother, I supposed.

  Come to think of it, Mom had a lot of people. Only sometimes I didn’t think she realized it. Sometimes she seemed to think she was all alone.

  She wasn’t, of course. Even if none of those others had existed, she had me.

  Except I’d left her.

  “Get yourself together,” I muttered, sinking down into my new bed. Shoulders back. Deep breaths. I considered calling Mom, but she’d sense my panic. Then she’d panic, and we’d descend in an escalating spiral of panic. So I sent her a cheerful selfie instead and called Niko.

  My best friend’s face filled my phone, framed by a Stanford dorm room. “Hey! Are you there? How is it?”

  “So beachy, you wouldn’t believe it, and there are roses everywhere. Wait, are you wearing lipstick? Are those bangs?”

  “Badass, right?” Niko turned her head so I could admire her high-low cut and the straight shot of bangs across her forehead. “I’m reinventing myself.”

  “You look amazing.”

  “I know. I figured no one here knows I’ve never worn lipstick in my life, so why not. Did you know people put on a lip primer before they put on lipstick? What the hell?”

  “How’s Palo Alto?”

  “Everyone bikes everywhere, and no one jaywalks, and they call highways freeways, which is cute. How is bougie island life? Are you wearing cardigans and pearls yet? Is everyone white?”