No Love Like Nantucket

by Grace Palmer

  And she tells herself that this is all part of her healing.

  Even as she says it, she knows it is a lie. A shameful one at that, because she has stuck to it in spite of knowing that it is actively hurting her.

  But what is her alternative? Go running back to Nicolas? To Camille? To Argentina?

  No, she made her choice. She had the chance to say yes to all of those things, and instead she faltered at the crucial moment.

  So maybe this isn’t healing after all. Maybe this is punishment for her weaknesses. And if that’s what it in fact is, then she has every intention of continuing to suffer until her penance has been paid.

  Whenever that might be.

  She told Nicolas that she didn’t like being the center of attention. No one here pays a lick of attention to her, so she is getting her wish, isn’t she? She is a nobody.

  But then why isn’t she feeling better? Why is she feeling worse than ever?

  She knows the answers to these questions that are dogging her, which is a rare change of pace. Normally, she prefers to drive herself insane with questions that have no answers. These are easy, though.

  She runs because she is afraid. And she is afraid because she is running. The poison is the cure, and the cure is the poison. Nothing heals. Nothing changes.

  Three months of this have dragged by with agonizing slowness. How much more can she take?

  Every time she comes in from the cold and swears that she is going to book a flight to Bora Bora the very next day, she loses her nerve for it at the last minute. Thankfully, the money from the inn has been steady enough to give her flexibility. She could go anywhere. Why not do just that? After all, Lisbon is a nowhere place, an awful place.

  But she can’t leave it.

  Why not? Why not run from here? Of all places, why not escape this miserable dankness?

  She doesn’t know how to reason it out with herself. And when Camille calls every now and then to check up on her, she doesn’t know how to explain that to her, either.

  Toni trudges up the cobblestone road, full of switchbacks and patches of slippery sleet. Her hands are full of grocery bags, and her wrists have begun to ache from the effort.

  Why she’s chosen to stay in a small, cramped apartment at the top of the highest hill in the city is a mystery even to her. It is a twenty-minute hike just to get up or down.

  Perhaps she likes it because, in spite of the misery of coming and going (or maybe because of it), she feels safe here. The remnants of São Jorge Castle encircle her ancient apartment building. A tall, thick wall of stone barring her from the outside world. The only things it lets in are tourists and rain. It is austere and beautiful and remote, and it makes her feel like she has sealed herself off in time and space alike. Nothing can touch her here. Not her past, not her future. It is like stepping out of the flow of history and living in a little bubble that is distinct and protected from everything else.

  So when she finally mounts the hill and then the three flights of stairs to her apartment, she is stunned to find out that that bubble has been rudely popped.

  The door to her apartment is slightly ajar. Her heart begins pounding a frenetic beat in her chest immediately. She sets the grocery bags down at her feet. The floorboards groan underneath their weight.

  “He—Hello?” she stammers nervously. She pushes the door open. “João?”

  João is the name of her landlord, whom she’s seen maybe twice since she moved in here. He is an older man, dapper and stiff, who complains about every step from the ground floor up to the apartment. Dropping in on her unannounced—and letting himself into the apartment, no less—would be very out of character for him.

  But she isn’t sure who else would possibly be here.

  A predator? Someone who has watched her comings and goings, who knows that she lives alone?

  She has nothing in the way of weapons. Pulling her keys from her pocket, she tucks one between her knuckles like an old college roommate showed her years ago. She has no idea if it would do any damage whatsoever, or if she’ll even have the nerve to swing at whoever is waiting inside, but it makes her feel maybe 1 percent better that she isn’t quite so defenseless.

  She pushes the door. It swings inward on whiny hinges. “Hello?” she calls again into the musty apartment. “Who is in here?”

  Stepping through the doorway, she searches the corners of the small living room. No one.

  Then—the squeak of footsteps.

  Floorboards protesting under a heavy bulk.

  The rustle of fabric.

  A soft cough—deep, masculine.

  And Nicolas rounds the corner from the kitchen.

  He looks somber when they make eye contact, no hint of a smile anywhere near his face. Toni gasps and drops the keys, which clatter on the bare wooden floor. She claps both hands to her mouth in shock.

  “Hello, Toni.” His gray eyes are placid and still, like a frozen lake’s surface. He keeps his hands folded together in front of him.

  “Are you…are you real?” she asks quietly.

  He chuckles. “Well, I certainly thought I was. Do I not look real?”

  “You do. That’s why I’m asking.”

  “I see.” He nods. “Why wouldn’t I be real?”

  She gulps past a dense knot in her throat. “I just…I thought I might be dreaming or something. Or going crazy. I don’t know.”

  Nicolas tilts his head to the side. “Crazy?”

  “I…Never mind. What are you doing here, Nicolas? How did you get into my apartment? How did you know where I was?”

  He rocks back on his heels as he clears his throat and mutters something.

  “What?”

  “I said, Camille told me where you were. And your landlord, João—”

  “I know my landlord’s name,” Toni snaps. She is feeling a sudden lash of anger move through her.

  “I told him…that I was surprising you.”

  “That feels apt.”

  “I’m glad you agree.”

  “No,” she blurts, shaking her head. “We are not doing this. We are not just bantering like everything is normal, like you didn’t just show up in my apartment like a burglar. This is not a happy little surprise. I almost stabbed you, you know!”

  Nicolas glances down at the keys, sprawled sort of sadly on the floor where Toni dropped them. “Somehow, I think I would’ve been safe,” he remarks dryly.

  “No,” Toni says again. “No, no, no. Go away. Go home. Leave me alone.” Her voice is thick with unspent emotion, and it feels like she’s been shaking her head from side to side forever.

  She marches to the front door and holds it open.

  “That is the exit.”

  “I see that.”

  “You’re not exiting.”

  “No.”

  “Nicolas, you need to go.”

  He steps towards her. She backs away instinctively as if he really were a burglar with bad intentions.

  It’s a good thing she does that, too, because for a moment there, she got a whiff of his cologne, and it made her heart throb so painfully that she thought she might start spilling the tears she’d been holding back since the second he stepped out from her kitchen.

  Back here is safe. Maintain distance from him. From everything he’s brought with him—memories, baggage, roads not taken.

  But there’s only so far to back up. Her shoulder blades make contact with the wallpaper, and she knows that there is no more room to retreat.

  Nicolas takes another tentative step towards her. He reaches out a cautious hand as if to stroke her cheek, but when she flinches, he drops it. Instead, he sticks his hand into the inner pocket of his jacket and withdraws something.

  It’s a bundle of envelopes tied together with twine. He offers it to her.

  “What is this?”

  “It’s for you,” he says simply.

  She takes it, being careful not to let their fingertips touch. She has this unreasonable fear that if they make even
the slightest bit of contact, she will dissolve into a puddle and never find her way back to normal ever again.

  Taking it and undoing the string knot, she sees that the envelopes all have her name on them.

  She looks up at Nicolas. “What are these?”

  He doesn’t blink or look away from her. “I wrote you a letter every day since you left, Toni. I didn’t send a single one. But I wrote them, and I decided yesterday that I thought you should have them.”

  “What do they say?” she asks. Her voice is husky and trembling.

  “The truth.”

  “What truth?”

  He hesitates again, though his eyes don’t lose an ounce of their intensity. Then, slowly, he moves towards her, crossing that invisible line that’s the only thing holding Toni together. The last of her castle walls.

  And this close, where she can smell him and feel his warmth and notice every little pockmark and scar and hair on his face—where she can touch him if she chooses to, where his eyes have so much depth, and his lips look pillowy-soft—this close is a danger she cannot run from. A spotlight she cannot escape.

  He is looking at her as if she is the last person on earth.

  “Open the letters, Toni,” he says.

  She looks down and does as he says because if she keeps looking in his face, then she will fully melt, and there is no telling what will happen after that. Nicolas stands silently across from her. She can tell that he wants to touch her badly, but she can’t bear the thought of that yet.

  So she tears open the first one and reads it.

  Dear Toni…

  She’s crying by the time she’s done. She lets it fall to the floor, a fluttering paper snowflake with elegant longhand on it, and opens the second.

  Dear Toni…

  This, too, floats downward and settles at her feet.

  The third—Dear Toni…

  Dear Toni…

  Dear Toni…

  Three months’ worth of letters that talk about love and fear and forgiveness and hope and all the things that rattle Toni Benson down to her core. Three months’ worth of letters talking about the things that frighten her. She’s touched this hot stove before—she knows how badly it burned her hand, and that is why she has run.

  But Nicolas has followed her, and he’s given her these words, and now he’s standing in front of her with eyes blazing and hands in his pockets, and there is only one more letter to read.

  She opens it with trembling fingertips. This one is not like the others. Her name on the front is written in professional calligraphy, all swirling and intersecting like ironwork.

  She withdraws a gleaming placard from inside it. The father of the bride requests your presence at the wedding, to be held…

  It lists the details and the name of Nicolas’s daughter and her fiancé.

  She looks up at Nicolas now. Her face is a battlefield of spent tears, and she doesn’t trust her voice to work properly.

  But he must sense that, because he smiles—sort of a sad smile, almost melancholy, but with happiness in it too, or at least something that maybe could become happiness if it got the right amount of sunshine and rain—and finally does what he has so clearly wanted to do since the second he first conceived this harebrained plan.

  He reaches out and touches Toni.

  His fingertips on her neck are like ten points of fire. Her skin flushes beneath his touch, and she lets her eyes fall closed to hold back the few tears that haven’t yet been spilled.

  “Toni,” he whispers in a deep rasp. “I meant it when I told you I loved you. And if you don’t want to stay with me, I get that, and that’s okay. I will learn to live with it. We are not defined by the things we have lost, remember?” His eyes flash with something like mirth. “But I couldn’t bear losing you without trying at least once more. So that’s why I’m here. To try again.”

  She doesn’t know what to say. What is one supposed to say in a time like this? She opens her eyes and looks at him again. Her bottom lip is shaking, perilously close to bursting loose in big, wracking sobs.

  It feels like the crescendo of a tango—far more emotion concentrated in one beautiful, agonizing note than there ought to be. How can one heart bear all this at once: Henry and Jared and the inn and running and Nantucket and Lisbon and Buenos Aires and her mother and Mae and Brent and Eliza and Holly and Sara?

  A memory leaps into the forefront of her brain: a photograph that once hung on the wall of the home she shared with Jared. In it, she is walking her bicycle down the beach access towards the waves. The wind is tousling both her hair and the simple white dress she’s wearing. A thick, white-daubed lighthouse looms in the background.

  She used to think the Toni in that picture was heartbreaking lonely as she turned her back on everything and looked mournfully into the distance.

  But maybe that was wrong. Maybe that Toni knew sunshine was still a ways away, but it was coming eventually. She just had to have the patience to make it there.

  And maybe this is it. Maybe, saying yes to this gray-eyed businessman with the strong hands is her sunshine. Maybe she doesn’t have to run from him, from it, from hope, from love. Maybe she can let him love her, and she can love him in return. Maybe it isn’t too late in her life to do those things. Maybe she isn’t broken. Maybe she won’t be afraid anymore.

  It’s a lot of maybes.

  But, as the letters float around her ankles in the soft, whispering breeze coming through the cracked-open window, the maybes feel solid and real and possible.

  She reaches up and touches Nicolas’s face. His stubble rasps underneath her fingertips.

  “I’ll come to the wedding,” Toni says. The last of the tears finds its way down her cheeks, but that’s okay. Everything is okay.

  Nicolas smiles. “Good.” He has a tear of his own glistening in the corner of his eye, like a precious diamond. She watches as it falls, dampens her thumb, and hangs there for a moment.

  Then she steps closer into his embrace and rests her head on his chest. And together, they begin to sway back and forth. A slow, careful dance, one without steps or any discernible rhythm, but a dance nonetheless. It is warm in here, and it smells nice, and Toni feels safe.

  She is still scared. She figures she will always be a little bit scared.

  But that is the thing of it—as long as she is here, being scared isn’t such a scary thing at all.

  17

  Nantucket, Maine —July 4, 2000

  Toni felt like she was on the verge of a panic attack. People everywhere, a crush of them on all sides, slick with sweat and sunscreen and the fumbled drippings of beers knocked out of people’s hands by the endless passersby.

  And still no sight of Sara.

  She called her niece’s name as she pushed through and past and around people.

  “Sara! Sara!”

  Her voice didn’t last long before she went hoarse. But the cacophony of partygoers drowned her out anyway, so it didn’t much matter if she kept yelling or not.

  She wondered how and why all this was happening. In an alternate universe, she was happily camped out under the umbrella next to Mae, watching as the first of the fireworks burst overhead.

  But that universe was not this one. In this one, as that first firework loosed its crackle and boom over the cheering folks gathered shoulder to shoulder on the sand, she began to feel a creeping sense of desperation growing beneath her unease.

  What if she didn’t find Sara?

  Despite her young age, the girl was bold and confident, and she would probably—probably—be fine. But the possibility that maybe she wouldn’t be fine was lit up like a neon sign in the back of Toni’s mind anyway, as she thought it must for all women of a certain age who feel responsible for young children.

  A million hideous possibilities existed for a girl lost in a crowd, and Toni forcibly kept herself from entertaining any of them. The one time her resolve broke, she pictured Sara’s smiling face on the side of a milk carton with “MISSIN
G” plastered underneath in urgent letters (like Mae had joked about at breakfast), and she almost had to stop to be sick.

  But somehow, she managed to shuffle that nightmare scenario off to the side and focus on the task at hand.

  She zigzagged up and down the beach in the direction Sara had gone. She went from the soft sand at the foot of the hills, all the way down to the water’s edge, splashing impatiently as she kept going.

  “Sara! Sara! Sara!”

  No sighting. No response.

  A few people turned to look at her curiously. Her mood stuck out like a sore thumb. Everyone else was relaxed, laughing, well on their way to drunk. But with every step she took away from Mae and the rest of the Benson children, Toni felt more and more nervous. She felt lost. And not just lost physically. As she kept weaving higher and lower, she realized that the sunny mood with which she’d begun the day was a lie. She wasn’t past her sadness, not by any stretch of the imagination.

  For crying out loud, it was just three days ago that she’d discovered the supposed love of her life shacking up with someone else in the home they shared! And she thought she was doing better? Ha! Self-delusion, it turned out, was a joke with endless mileage.

  But something else had happened in that short time span since fleeing Atlanta, too. Something that seemed—at first blush, at least—maybe a bit more promising.

  It felt to her like her grief had sharpened up, if that made any sense whatsoever. It wasn’t that same shapeless, all-consuming black cloud that it had seemed at first. It had a form, and now that it had a form, it could be dealt with. Maybe not defeated—not yet—but caged up? Yes, maybe. That might just be doable.

  Toni wasn’t sure whether to blame the sun or the long day or the not insubstantial number of wine coolers she’d consumed, but as she pondered the subject and her voice calling Sara’s name grew ever more strident, those twin dilemmas—finding her niece and caging away her grief—seemed to merge into one, until it seemed to her that solving one would be the same as solving the other.

  She needed to find Sara. That was the key, the simple, achievable task that would be the stand-in proxy for fixing everything else that seemed so utterly broken.