No Love Like Nantucket

by Grace Palmer

  Just then, a chord of music strikes, a bit louder than anything else thus far this evening. Nicolas glances up at it, then back down at Toni. “A little dance, perhaps?”

  She pretends to weigh his offer for a long moment before smiling back. “Fine,” she says, “but nothing fancy! Lord only knows how this dress will respond to one of your more outlandish flourishes.”

  “Don’t tempt me,” he says.

  She stifles a laugh as they make their way to the space being cleared for a makeshift dance floor. As the music builds up and a handful of couples find the space, Nicolas takes Toni in his arms.

  It’s a slow song—decidedly not a tango—and Nicolas keeps his promise of nothing fancy. It’s nothing much of anything, actually, more of a slow sway back and forth with their torsos pressed together than what Toni would call dancing.

  But that’s just fine with her. Nicolas’s smell, his bulk, his warmth—those are the things that matter to Toni in this moment. He’s gazing down at her with those liquid gray eyes and the hint of a smile playing at the corner of his lips.

  “Stay with me,” he says. It’s a husky whisper, barely audible, and yet it sends an outsized chill skimming over the surface of her skin.

  “What?” she whispers back.

  “Stay with me. Here. Don’t go back to America.”

  Toni’s jaw falls open. She knows she ought to close it (her mother’s voice in the back of her head is crowing, “You’ll catch a fly if you keep your mouth open like that!”) but hearing Nicolas implore her to stay in Argentina with him is…

  Well, she was going to say that it was a shock. But is it?

  Of all the frightening thoughts she’s entertained over the last eight months in Buenos Aires, that might be the most intimidating of all.

  Love is one thing. Love is malleable, adaptable.

  But staying down here? That is a binary decision. Either she does it, or she does not—there is no compromising. It would mean so many things—giving up on the idea of Nantucket as her home; selling the inn; embarking on an adventure where all the rules have truly been tossed out the window, like jumping out of a plane with only faith instead of a parachute.

  Is she ready for that?

  I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know. Her thoughts are a helplessly broken record.

  Perhaps the wildest thing of all is how possible it all feels. She could say yes; she could stay. She could sell the inn and forgo the plane ticket home that has been sitting in the back of her head practically since the moment she left Nantucket.

  She rests her cheek on Nicolas’s chest. His heart beats steadily, comforting her like a mother’s lullaby. Her eyes catch something in the crowd—a flash of silver hair, a dimpled smile, a teasing wink. Then it’s gone.

  But she could swear that it was her brother.

  Her heart lurches again. It’s in a permanent state of lurch these days, for reasons good, bad, and inexplicable.

  Perhaps she’s known for a long time, deep in her bones, that a moment like this might be coming. A decision point.

  That is a terrifying proposition.

  Doesn’t it feel possible, though? Is she holding her future in her hands? Could this man—this frustrating, courteous, handsome, utterly unpredictable man—be what she has been missing for so long?

  I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.

  “I…”

  “Say yes,” Nicolas urges quietly. “Stay with me.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What is there not to know? I love you, Toni. I want you to stay with me. I want you to be with me.”

  Suddenly, this all feels like too much. Are the walls caving in? Is it hot? Why is her vision swimming and why are her hands trembling and why can’t her lips and tongue form words to say what she wants to say: that she does want to stay with him; she’s just so scared of severing all the threads that tie her to her past?

  If she could just say that, he’d get it—she knows he would. Say something, she screams to herself internally. Just say you’re scared! He’ll get it. You know he will.

  But she can’t. Her lips won’t work. The words keep getting stuck in her throat.

  “Will you stay, Toni?” he presses again. There’s almost a kind of gritty desperation in his face and voice now. He’s pleading with her in a way that she knows must be tearing at the very definition of who he is as a man.

  She was only partly joking about the crown—there is so much about Nicolas that is truly regal. So for him to beg her like this? It’s unprecedented.

  And shouldn’t she understand that that means he wants this badly? That when he said he loved her, he really meant it?

  Why can’t she accept that?

  Why won’t you let yourself be loved?

  Toni looks up into Nicolas’s eyes. “Nantucket is my home,” she says in a meek, trembling voice.

  Nicolas blinks, taken aback. “What?”

  “I…can’t…”

  “You don’t live there anymore.”

  “It’s my…It’s home. I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  “You…” He blinks again.

  And then Toni sees it, something she hasn’t seen since the night she had drinks with Nicolas and they played that silly questions game together. She sees the shield slide back over his gaze. It hardens right before her eyes, and it’s the most complete and subtle transformation she has ever seen in her life.

  He isn’t her Nicolas anymore.

  He becomes, at the snap of her fingers, the man in the airport who thought she was a drunken idiot for questioning whose luggage he was holding.

  Icy. Cold. Distant. Gone.

  “You are stuck in the past,” he snaps. “And you refuse to step a single toe into the future.” He lets her hand drop. Then he steps away from her, leaving her on the dance floor.

  Every inch of separation feels like a chasm that will never be crossed again. Every second without his touch feels like an ice age in and of itself.

  Toni knows it at once—this is how it feels to truly be heartbroken.

  15

  Nantucket, Maine —July 4, 2000

  The Fourth of July dawned bright and clear, a classically beautiful Nantucket day.

  Toni felt miles better than she had when she woken up yesterday morning. No hangover to speak of, and she didn’t let herself get railroaded into wallowing in her grief for the first thirty minutes of the day.

  Which isn’t to say that she sat bolt upright the second her eyes opened and started singing Disney songs to the birds outside her window, either. Not by a long shot. But given how she’d been feeling ever since she saw that pair of women’s shoes in the front hallway of her home in Atlanta, she wasn’t likely to complain about starting the day in a bit of a better mood.

  That being said, it was hard to decide what she ought to be feeling. Was it wrong to be happy? How soon was too soon to move on? Should she be excited or fearful, grateful or miserable? Lots of questions with very little in the way of answers.

  One decision that did seem relatively easy to make: Those were all problems for a future Toni. Right-here-and-now Toni didn’t need to be worrying about any of them. For one day at least, she could just enjoy her home, her family, and perhaps a wine cooler or two, while they went down to the beach to celebrate with the rest of the folks gathered on the island for the day’s festivities.

  As was her custom, Mae was up before everybody, already elbow-deep in whipping up banana pancakes and bacon for breakfast.

  “Good morning, sunshine!” her sister-in-law chirped as Toni came downstairs after a quick brush of the teeth and wash of the face. “How’d you sleep?”

  “Like a log, a rock, and a baby all combined into one.”

  “Well, that’s wonderful to hear! If only I were so lucky. I just can never get a good night’s rest when Henry’s gone.”

  Toni nodded sadly. “I do wish he was here. He better at least be catching some big fish.”

  “Knowing him,
he’s probably a few beers deep and shooting the breeze with the other wise guys while someone’s poor nephew does all the hard work.”

  “That does sound frighteningly familiar. Speaking of someone doing all the hard work, let me help you with something. Can I set the table for breakfast?” Toni asked. She didn’t wait for an answer, knowing that Mae was liable to balk. Scooping up handfuls of flatware and plates, she laid out spots for herself, Mae, and all the kids to eat together.

  When that was done, she assembled a couple of canvas tote bags with beach supplies—towels, sunblock, snacks—and set them by the front door, along with Brent’s toy wagon and an umbrella for them all to sit under.

  The plan was to hang out at the beach for most of the day until the sun set, then watch the fireworks from their perch there. Despite the miles of beach available on the island, it could be quite hard for latecomers to find a good spot to view the show. Mae and Toni knew that it was better to hit the beach early and stake out some primo territory.

  As long as all the kids were adequately fed and watered—and, just as importantly, the adults had sufficient supplies in the way of alcoholic beverages—today had all the makings of a glorious, relaxing day. Toni had a book in mind that she’d been meaning to get to forever. Maybe she’d finally crack it open. Or maybe she’d let Brent coax her into waging an impossible war between his sandcastles and the tides. There was no wrong option, really.

  The kids came trundling down the stairs in short order once the smells of breakfast wafted up to them. Brent held Holly’s hand like the little angel that he sometimes pretended to be, while Eliza did her best grumpy teen face and Sara strove to mimic it.

  But by the time everyone sat down and was happily occupied with buttering and syruping their pancakes, it was smiles all around. Mae and Toni sipped their coffee—which they yet again declined to share with Sara—and nibbled.

  “So, Mr. Brent,” Toni said, “what are we building at the beach today?”

  His eyes lit up at once. He didn’t hesitate as he exclaimed through a chewy mouthful of pancake batter, “The biggest sandcastle ever ever ever!”

  “Bigger than your dad?”

  “Twice as big!”

  “That’s dumb. You can’t even reach that high,” Sara snapped a little peevishly.

  Toni turned her sights to her sassy-beyond-her-years niece. “Well, why don’t you help us out, then?”

  “I’m going to lie out and tan,” she said with a haughty tilt of the chin.

  Toni hid a smile behind another gulp of delicious coffee. Sara wanted so badly to be grown up. It felt a little ironic, in the light of everything that had brought Toni here—all she wanted for herself was to go back to that age when the only thing that mattered was getting a tan like the cool older girls.

  But there was no convincing Sara that adulthood maybe wasn’t all she envisioned. And no point in trying, either. Toni remembered well how stubborn she’d been at that age, how desperately she’d wanted the same things that Sara wanted now. That was just life, and there was no way around it that Toni was aware of. The grass is always greener on the other side of the hill.

  “And you girls?” Mae inquired of Holly and Eliza.

  Eliza shrugged. “Gonna read my book. Then Suzanne and I are going to get ice cream downtown.”

  Holly said, “Mrs. Franklin said that it was okay with her if I hang out with them. Amy and I have a lot to talk about. She broke up with her boyfriend yesterday.”

  “Oh dear,” Mae said with an amused smile. Toni chuckled along with her. She remembered that too—the ceaseless and all-consuming drama of thirteen-year-olds diving headfirst into the throes of young love. That part of girlhood, she did not miss at all. But it made her laugh to see how seriously Holly took it.

  “So, can I go?”

  “Yes, honey,” Mae agreed, “but not the entire day, okay? And you need to be back with us for the fireworks. It gets to be a madhouse down there once it’s dark out, and I don’t want to have to go shaking down strangers to find my missing children. Besides, you’re all much too good-looking to end up on the side of a milk carton, okay?”

  “Yes, Mom,” they all grumbled in unison.

  After they’d all cleaned up from breakfast, they got changed into their swimsuits, gathered up the rest of the things they’d need for the day, and headed out to scout for the best spot.

  There were already a decent number of folks out who had the same idea as the Bensons. But there was room aplenty yet to choose from, so Mae and Toni had no problem staking out a nice spread of sand on which to arrange their things and plunk an umbrella into the ground so they didn’t get roasted alive by the day’s hot sun.

  From there, the rest of the day meandered to and fro like a gentle wave. Toni did a little bit of everything—drank wine coolers with Mae, built sandcastles with Brent, laid out alongside Sara and convinced her to divulge some of the burgeoning gossip that was occupying her tween brain. She even read a few pages of her book before succumbing to the kind of lazy nap that Nantucket summer days were specifically engineered to induce.

  She woke up to a dying sun, feeling pleasantly crisped and blearily content with the state of the world. She licked her lips, tasted salt, and realized she hadn’t thought about Jared even once since they’d set out from the house after breakfast. Small blessings, indeed.

  Mae was just starting to get nervous when Holly and Eliza finally arrived back from their respective social obligations. Eliza was finishing off a delicious-looking ice-cream cone. Holly looked to be brooding over the day’s latest episode of teen drama.

  “Did you girls have a good day?” inquired Toni.

  “Mhmm,” was all Eliza had to offer. For her part, Holly didn’t even respond. She just plunked down and looked preoccupied beyond her years. Toni chuckled and decided to leave her to it for the time being.

  Soon enough, darkness had stolen over the sky. People had kept coming down the beach entrances in a steady stream throughout the day. Now, it was packed, with other families and groups verging in on all sides of the Bensons’ patch of beach.

  A murmur and the accompanying feeling of excitement raced through the crowd. There must’ve been some sign that the fireworks were beginning soon. As if they’d heard the news, the flow of new foot traffic to the beach seemed to double at once. It felt crowded all of a sudden, with folks swirling everywhere Toni looked.

  Off to Toni’s left, she saw Sara run up to Mae and poke her to get her attention. “Mom, I just saw Lindsay, and she said that her family has sparklers at their house! Can I go watch the fireworks with them?”

  Mae shook her head. “No, honey. Stay here with us. It will be impossible to find each other in the dark.”

  “Oh come on! Please?”

  “Darling, I said no.”

  Sara stamped a foot into the ground. “You never let me do anything! Whatever. I’m going anyway.”

  Mae started to say, “Sara, wait—”

  But there was no stopping the headstrong girl as she turned tail and fled. She slipped between a pair of sunburned men and vanished into the crowd.

  Toni turned to look at Mae at once. She could see the terror written in her sister-in-law’s face. “Stay here with the kids,” she said. “I’ll go look for her. Don’t worry.”

  Then she took off after Sara.

  16

  Lisbon, Portugal—April 4, 2019

  THREE MONTHS LATER

  It is another cold, gray day in a long line of cold, gray days.

  Lisbon in April is far more frigid than it has any right to be. The rain won’t stop, nor will it fully commit to actually raining. It just keeps up at half flow, a perpetual drizzle that feels like someone ten stories up is spitting on Toni’s head again and again.

  “This isn’t weather,” she grumbles. She means that it isn’t weather like they have in Nantucket. Back home, when it rains, it rains. When it snows, it snows. And when the sun shines, it really shines, and lights up the shores and the smi
les of everyone lucky enough to be there.

  This—this half-measure garbage—is irking her down to the core.

  It makes the whole city feel damp and chilly and unfriendly. Which—not that Toni is much of a psychologist—is probably more of a comment on her own mental state than it is on Lisbon itself.

  She knows why she’s feeling the way she’s feeling, like how a heavy drinker knows the thing that draws him to the bottle is the same thing that makes the drinking necessary in the first place. The poison becomes the cure awfully fast if you let it.

  Toni’s curse is the itch to fly from everything that has ever put her in the spotlight. She’s done it again—she’s run from Argentina just like she ran from Nantucket. But unlike Buenos Aires, Lisbon held no handsome stranger waiting to steal her luggage and sweep her off her feet. In fact, the terminal where she landed was strangely empty and quiet. More like a mausoleum than an airport. It gave her a weird sense of disquiet that hasn’t left her in the three months she’s been here.

  Why here? Picking Lisbon wasn’t the same sort of fortuitous lining-up-of-the-stars that accompanied her choice of Buenos Aires last year. She just needed to be gone, to be far from Nicolas—his hands, his eyes, his country. Crossing the ocean seemed like a safe first step.

  So Lisbon it was. The wine was good here, or so they said, and that had been enough for Toni to buy the ticket and board the plane.

  But the cheerful city of red-tiled roofs that the postcards promised didn’t look so cheerful in the January grimness of her arrival. In fact, the whole place has looked downright unwelcoming. Windows stay shut up against the cold, and people hurry down the sidewalks without making eye contact.

  So Toni does the same. She keeps her eyes down. She half-heartedly mumbles, “Obrigado” (which she learned was Portuguese for “thank you”) to the servers at the restaurants where she eats or the grocery store where she buys her food. She doesn’t dance. She doesn’t drink wine. She mostly stays inside and reads books that don’t bring her pleasure anymore.