Nantucket Red (Nantucket Blue)

by Leila Howland

“Hello?” Mom’s voice was chipper, happy to hear from me out of the blue. I imagined her in her Cape Cod T-shirt and running shorts, her heavy, golden hair falling in front of her face as she reached for the phone.

  “It’s me,” I said. I took a deep breath and gathered my courage. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

  Thirty-seven

  THE CONVERSATION LASTED ALMOST AN HOUR. She took the phone into her bedroom so that Brad wouldn’t overhear. He had officially moved in. I talked her through what happened scene by scene. For the first time in my life, her voice offered me no comfort. Each “What?” was hard as concrete, and each silence was as cold as March rain.

  “You’re going to get back in, right?” Mom asked when I’d finished by telling her about my conversation with Claudia Gonzales. “I mean, she said you were going to get back into Brown, didn’t she?”

  “I don’t know, Mom. That’s the whole thing. I don’t know. That’s why I have a hearing next Monday. Weren’t you listening?” It had been painful enough to go over the details with her once. I filled a glass with tap water and drank it down.

  “Well, you’ll just have to get a waitressing job here. It will have to be someplace you can walk to, because you won’t have a car. You’ll have to take classes at the community college. Maybe pick up some babysitting work.”

  “Stop it, Mom,” I said. The picture she was painting had me on the verge of tears. I had known she was going to be pissed off, but I hadn’t expected this.

  “This is going to be your reality, Cricket. And mine, too. This is not what I imagined for myself, either, you know. I had started to get used to the idea of starting over, just Brad and me. But it’s too late to do anything else, isn’t it? How could you do this to yourself?”

  “I don’t know, Mom, okay? Haven’t you ever made a mistake?”

  “Oh, I’ve made plenty. But this isn’t about me. This is about you. And this story you’ve told me about getting wasted and breaking into a café? Jesus, it doesn’t even sound like you, Cricket. Is this who you are now?”

  “I don’t know, Mom,” I said. “I don’t know who I am right now.” These might have been the truest words I’d ever spoken, and there was at least some calm in that.

  “Have you told your father yet?”

  “Tomorrow,” I said. I was dreading telling Dad. Snippets of the speech he had given at my graduation party kept coming back to me. The stuff about how he couldn’t be prouder of me, and the part about how they’d placed a bet on me, putting all of their money into my education, and hit the jackpot when I got into Brown. I thought of how they’d sold the minivan; I thought of the extra mortgages, the bank loans, and the vacations they hadn’t taken. Their sacrifices stared me down.

  “So, you don’t want to upset him, but you’ll upset me?” Mom asked.

  “Well, you’re…my mom,” I said.

  “Yes, I am.” She sighed. “I have to work in the morning and I don’t know how I’m going to fall asleep tonight. I’m going to have to take a pill.”

  I knew those pills. They were small and blue, and she’d taken them every night in the year after the divorce.

  “Mama?”

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry.” I curled myself around a pillow. “I’m really, really sorry.”

  “I know you are, baby.” She sighed again. “I know.”

  I debated calling Dad, but I couldn’t. I would do it tomorrow. I took a hot shower, then I watched Manhattan on the old TV in the manager’s apartment. I pulled the blankets up under my chin as the images of a big city flickered across the screen: a crowded deli; a bakery; that museum with the wide, swirling staircase; the awning of a fancy hotel; an enormous bridge over a black river; a candlelit bistro. It seemed so enchanting and foreign and far away.

  Thirty-eight

  “WAKE UP, SPORTY!”

  I blinked awake to see Liz smiling down at me in what looked like her version of workout clothes: a tank top with hot pink bra straps peeking out; cutoffs; and a pair of slip-on sneakers that were meant for skateboarding.

  “What?” I glanced at the clock. It was eight a.m. I’d only had a few hours of sleep.

  “The muffins are made, the girls have the inn under control, and we need to work out. Need to get you back in shape, don’t we? Come on,” she said, pulling me up to a sitting position. “Get moving.”

  “You’re going to work out with me?”

  “I’m going to damned well try. It’s about time I lost some weight. Wine and cookies add up.” She grabbed the flesh around her middle and jiggled it. I laughed. “Oh, you laugh, but by the time we get you back into Brown, I’m going to look like Pippa Middleton.” She sucked in her stomach and struck a pose.

  “Liz, I only have a week. Six days now.”

  “Then we’d better get working, hadn’t we? Up you go. Get on your trainers. We’re going to go for a run. Look, I even brought you breakfast.” One of her famous cranberry-orange muffins sat on a napkin on the coffee table next to a steaming cup of coffee. “You’re going to need fuel. We should run at least a mile. Maybe two.”

  “Okay,” I said, not having the heart to tell her that a mile wasn’t very far at all.

  There was a knock at the door. I turned to see Jules’s face pressed up against the window.

  “Her!” Liz said, narrowing her eyes and grabbing Gavin’s rain stick from the closet. She shook it menacingly as she opened the door. “You’re not welcome here!”

  “Jules didn’t send it,” I said, jumping in front of Jules. “Liz! She wants to help me. It wasn’t her. I promise.”

  “Were you going to hit me with that?” Jules asked, holding her lacrosse stick in front of her face in self-defense.

  “Yes,” Liz said, raising the rain stick up like a baseball bat, “and I still might.”

  “Liz, she has nothing to do with it.” I seized the rain stick.

  “Do you have proof?” Liz’s eyes were wild behind her thickly mascaraed lashes.

  “Yes,” I said. “We found the video attached to an e-mail sent from her brother’s account.”

  “Zack sent the movie? Bastard! They’re all bastards, the lot of ’em.”

  “It was my brother’s girlfriend, Parker,” Jules said. The word girlfriend landed like a brick. Jules met my eyes. “His mean, nasty girlfriend.”

  “Is this true?” Liz asked me. “Parker sent it? The Carmichael girl?”

  “A hundred percent,” I said.

  “Shady family, they are,” Liz said.

  “Now that we’ve narrowly avoided an assault,” Jules said, “are you ready to work out, Cricket?”

  “Actually, we were just about to go for a run,” Liz said.

  “I was going to…” Jules started, but I cut her off.

  “We’re all going running together,” I said.

  “I say we go to Altar Rock,” Jules said as she stretched her hamstrings.

  “But that’s miles away,” Liz said.

  “That’s kind of the point,” Jules said. “Cricket needs to get her endurance up.”

  I put a hand on Liz’s shoulder. “Head home whenever you feel like it.”

  We were barely out of town when Liz, red-faced and panting, said, “Tell you what, mates. I think I’ve exerted myself enough for today. I’ll go home, get some refreshments, and meet you at the rock. In the car.”

  “You did well for your first run, Liz,” I said, jogging in place. “You’ll go a little farther each day.” It was a Miss Kangism.

  Liz headed back toward the inn. Jules and I picked up the pace. Even though I was a faster sprinter, we were pretty evenly matched when it came to distance.

  “What’s up with Ben?” Jules asked.

  “We broke up yesterday. I don’t really want to talk about it.” Could I even call it breaking up if we’d
never actually been together?

  “Rough day,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. How’s Jay?”

  “Awesome,” she said. Out of my peripheral vision, I could see her beaming. I had a weird premonition that they might get married one day, even though it had been Jay’s and my wedding that we’d joked about back before everything happened with Zack. “I’m going to see him in Boston on Friday, and I’m staying for a few nights. I can’t wait, if you know what I mean.” She meant sex.

  “And what’s going on with your dad?” I asked, changing the subject.

  “Still officially single,” she said, and we high-fived.

  Several miles later, after Liz had passed us in her car, with the radio blaring, Jules pointed down a dirt road, and we followed it toward what looked like a water tower. We’d been running for another five minutes or so when she said, “Race you to the top of the rock!”

  Ahead of us, Liz waved. She was shouting something at us, but I couldn’t understand her. The wind was swirling in my ears as I put all of my frustration and anger into the last one hundred yards, leaving Jules in my actual dust.

  “Jesus, you’re fast,” Jules said when she reached the top seconds after I did and we collapsed in a heaving, sweaty pile. I pulled out my iPhone and checked the pedometer. Five miles. My face was burning up. I was happy to see Liz and her gallon of fresh lemonade.

  “Well done,” Liz said, pouring us each a cupful.

  I drank it all in three swallows. “Thank you,” I said, savoring the sweet, tart liquid. “Liz, you are the best.”

  “This is awesome,” Jules said, as she tossed back her second cup and went for a third.

  The top of this rock was the highest point I’d ever been to on Nantucket. I could see a scalloped harbor. A stretch of low, rugged land. In the distance were scattered several shingled houses, and beyond them lay a faint stroke of ocean. My phone rang. “It’s my dad.”

  “Get it,” Jules said.

  “I can’t. I can’t tell him.”

  “You have to,” Liz said. And when I didn’t make a move, she leveled a stern look at me. “Cricket, now.”

  I answered the phone. “Hi, Dad.” I said, and held my breath. I put the phone to my ear and walked several paces away from the girls.

  “Your mom called me this morning,” Dad said. “She told me what happened. Sweetheart, what are you going to do?” His sympathetic tone surprised me.

  “Just tell me that you’re mad,” I said, gazing out at that small harbor, so perfect it looked like a painting, with three sailboats gliding across it. “Tell me how disappointed you are.”

  “Yes, I’m disappointed. But I’m more worried,” he said. “This could be one of those big mistakes.”

  “Sometimes it feels like everyone’s allowed to make mistakes but me.”

  He laughed.

  “What?”

  “I’m laughing because it’s true. If there’s ever been a model student, a model kid, it’s you. But as far as mistakes go, you picked a big one.”

  “Did you ever make a big mistake?” I asked. My chin was trembling.

  “Did I tell you about the time I failed my only daughter?”

  My throat tightened. I closed my eyes. “No.”

  “There were so many times I should have been there for you and I wasn’t. You were always so on top of things that I didn’t think you needed me. But every girl needs her dad. I didn’t ask you to be in my wedding. I devoted all of my time to my new marriage. Not getting into college? That seems like small potatoes when I think about my mistakes.”

  “You didn’t fail me, Dad,” I said, as I mangled the branch of an innocent shrub. “I failed myself.”

  “But when you came to me last summer, and you were so angry, I should’ve talked to you then. I shouldn’t have let you leave that house.”

  I wiped away tears. Last summer, he had pretty much ignored my eighteenth birthday but thrown a hoedown for his stepchild, Alexi, who was turning six.

  “I don’t think I was a very good party guest,” I said.

  “I should’ve wrapped my arms around you,” Dad said. “I should’ve told you that I loved you, sweetie. You needed me, and I wasn’t there. And I’m sorry.”

  “I need you now,” I said quietly.

  “I’m here.”

  “I have this hearing and I have no idea what I’m going to say. I’m going to have to write a speech and explain to the coach. I can’t say that I was just being stupid. But that’s what it was. I was being stupid. At the wrong time and in the wrong place.”

  “Well, why did you do it?” he asked. “Why did you get drunk and break into a sandwich shop?”

  “I was working so hard,” I said. “I hadn’t had a real day off since I got here.”

  “You haven’t really had a day off since you started high school,” Dad said. “But you’ve never done anything like this before. So, I ask you again, why?”

  Why had I done this? I’d had a perfect opportunity to get drunk and be rebellious with Jules before the summer began, at Jay’s house, when everyone was going to break into the secret Brown bowling alley. But I hadn’t wanted it then. So what had changed?

  “I found this list,” I said. I hadn’t been able to tell Mom about Nina’s list. She resented Nina. I knew it would’ve made her sympathize with me less, not more.

  “What list?”

  I told Dad about Nina’s picture, about Rodin and Paris, about driving a stick shift. I told him about Sadie and the photos of people dancing on the beach. I told him about Campari and the Amalfi Coast with Alison Huang. Dad listened on the other line, saying, “Uh-huh,” and “Hmm.”

  “Nina went to Brown, didn’t she?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You know, it’s not every student who gets a list like that and does that kind of research. It took creativity and passion and some original thinking. Sounds like Brown material to me.”

  I felt space open up inside me. The light of possibility. The glow of hope.

  “You’re right,” I said. I would use the list to defend myself. I would tell the story of how I’d followed it as an example of why I was exactly Brown material. “Are you going to tell Rosemary and Jim?”

  “Do you want me to?”

  “No,” I said. “Not unless we have to.”

  “Then I won’t tell,” he said.

  “You won’t tell Polly?” I asked. I held my breath.

  “I won’t tell a soul,” he said. “And let me know if you need help. I am an English professor, you know.”

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  I climbed back up the rock where Jules and Liz were sunning themselves like lizards.

  “I’m going to use the list to defend myself,” I told them, as I poured myself another big cup of lemonade. “I’m going to go through it and explain how I followed each step and how it led me to the moment at Something Natural.”

  “That’s perfect,” Jules said, propping herself up on her elbow.

  “Actually, that’s brilliant,” Liz said. “You can talk about how you wish to take art classes about Rodin.”

  “And a class about the history of the car?” Jules said.

  “You think they offer ‘the history of the car’ at Brown?” I asked.

  “Why not?” Jules shrugged.

  “Anyway, it’s all true,” I said. “It’s not bullshit.”

  “This means you have to go to New York now,” Jules said, “to learn about Woody Allen.”

  “I can just watch the DVDs,” I said. “I can watch them until I draw some meaning from them.”

  Liz squinted into the sun. “But that’s a place you can actually go.”

  “Besides,” Jules said. “I don’t know what you’re going to learn from watching Manhattan. It’s really creepy h
ow he dates that young girl.”

  “What about the last thing on the list?” I asked.

  “There was another thing?” Jules asked, sitting up straight.

  “Oh, yeah, I didn’t tell you,” I said. “It was ‘See Saint Francis from altar.’ I figure it was something she wanted to see on her wedding day.”

  “Cricket. We’re at Altar. Right now. This is Altar Rock.”

  “Is Saint Francis a church?” I asked. “Is it a church you can see from here?”

  “I have no idea,” Jules said. “I’ll ask Dad.”

  I took another look around. I felt so close to the sky. I could see for miles. I could see that glistening, pristine harbor; fields of low, green shrubs forked by winding, sandy paths; a pale stripe of ocean. But no churches, no crosses, no saints.

  Thirty-nine

  “WHAT’S HAPPENED NOW, THOMPSON?” Karla asked when I knocked on the door of her office. She was looking over purchase orders and working out some numbers on an old-fashioned adding machine. “Did you rob a bank?”

  “Not funny,” I said. “I’m here to get my paycheck.”

  “It’s in here somewhere.” She handed me the stack of envelopes with staff names written on them. I paused when I saw Amy’s full name—Amelia Garcia—then continued on to find mine.

  “How come no one told me Ben and Amy used to be engaged?”

  “Why would that be a topic of conversation?” Karla said, looking up. “Especially since there’s nothing going on between you two?” She raised an eyebrow. I shrugged. “Love and business do not mix. Trust me.”

  “But you hired her after you hired Ben?”

  “She happens to be my favorite niece. I’ve never been able to say no to that girl. Anyway, I don’t see how this is your business. Is there something else you need? I’m kinda busy.” She gestured to her piles of paperwork.

  “Yeah. I’m just confirming that I have Saturday, Sunday, and Monday off.” I needed to be back in Rhode Island on Saturday in order to be well rested and ready for the scrimmage at nine a.m. on Sunday, and Monday was my hearing at Brown. “Because of my mistake? I mentioned it last week?”