Nantucket Blue

by Leila Howland

“Yeah.” The house was huge; it looked like it could hold at least four of my mom’s house. But that’s not what was making me sweat through my white blouse. Next to a Mercedes, a silver Porsche Cayenne, and a red Volvo with a Hotchkiss sticker (Parker’s boarding school) was the Claytons’ land yacht. Jules was here. My heart pounded.

  “Hey, this is just money,” George said. “Don’t let it intimidate you, okay?” Then he opened the door and stepped out, balancing as he gathered his satchel and notebook. I could hear kids’ voices coming from the backyard. There was obviously a pool, because I heard cannonball splashes and girls laughing. It sounded like fun, like what I’d had in mind for myself when I came here. Shit, shit, shit.

  George closed the car door with the butt of his crutch and headed up the front steps. He had just reached the front door and was about to knock when I noticed his phone on the seat.

  “George, wait,” I said, hopping out of the car and jogging to him with the phone.

  “You’re the best,” he said as I pressed it into his hand.

  “I’ll be waiting for your text,” I said, and walked quickly back to the car I’d left running.

  I heard Jules’s unmistakable laugh: the confident, contagious one that always made me feel we were at the center of the world. I felt sad in a bottomless way—like a plane dropping in turbulence, an elevator plummeting to the basement. I hurried into the car and drove away, my palms sticky and my breath sharp and shallow.

  Twenty-nine

  WHEN I PULLED INTO the Carmichaels’ driveway after an hour of driving around Nantucket with the radio blaring as I tried to get my head together, I saw Jules following Parker into the house. She was barefoot, wearing a yellow bikini, with a short white towel fastened around her hips. She was hopping on one foot and pounding the side of her head as she tried to get water out of her ear. I winced as I drove up. She looked up, squinting. Our eyes met. We both froze. I was going to have to get out of the car now. I couldn’t just sit there. I parked, trembling. I took a deep breath and stepped out of the car.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked as I approached her. I saw her eyes darting over my body, taking in my business casuals.

  “I have an internship,” I said. “With a journalist. And he’s here.”

  “The guy who’s interviewing my dad?” Parker asked. She was dripping with pool water. She dabbed her face and stuck a towel-covered finger into her ear, grimacing as she screwed it in. Parker was so confident about her place in the world she could do that kind of thing in public. I looked at those rock-hard thighs. Parker looked like she could kick her Volvo over to Martha’s Vineyard.

  “How’d you get an internship?” Jules asked.

  “It’s a long story,” I said.

  “The book is about the whole American royalty thing, right?” Parker asked. I nodded, smiling. “What do you do for him?”

  “Basically, I just help keep him organized; I get him whatever he needs. Sometimes I give him feedback,” I said. “You know, on the writing.” I figured on some level this was true. Just the other day he’d asked my opinion about an interview.

  Jules was staring at a rock. With one pointed foot she traced an arc in the Carmichaels’ spongy green grass. It was bright, uniform grass, the kind that’s bought and then unfurled on the ground like bolts of fabric. “It’s your birthday in a few weeks,” she said, shielding the sun from her eyes, squinting at me.

  I nodded. “My eighteenth.”

  “Whoa, you’re old,” Parker said. “No wonder you have an internship. I feel better.” She snorted. “For a second there I was like, should I have an internship?” She picked at a bud on the branch of a tree and decimated it with her short fingernails. “But I’m only sixteen.”

  “You’ll be seventeen in September,” Jules said, not even looking at her. Was she standing up for me?

  “Bitch,” Parker said, like this was her little pet name for Jules. “C’mon, let’s get ready. I don’t want to be late meeting Jay.”

  Jules and I had eighteen conversations with our eyes.

  “There you guys are,” said Zack, who emerged from the backyard in his bathing suit. He must’ve seen me before I saw him, because he didn’t look surprised. He smiled as he jogged over. Now it was my turn to study rocks. Ever since Zack and I had started making out, my body had taken on a life of its own. My breath was unpredictable, my skin capable of burning up in an instant and searing my hairline, and there was this lightness that occasionally took me over, making me feel like I was made of balloons. He shook out his hair, spraying us all with little beads of water. Jules pushed him absentmindedly and he pushed her back. Why did he have to be her brother?

  “Hello, Cricket. How are you?” he asked. He sounded stiff and formal.

  “I’m fine,” I said. I thought you worked on Tuesdays. I could feel myself making a weird expression. He looked good in his trunks. God, did he look good. He was pale but strong. The sun was glistening off of his wet skin. I knew that body now. My heart was like a dog, hopping and pulling on the leash, like it wanted to jump up and lick his face.

  “Is that your journalist?” Jules asked. I turned, relieved to see George come out of the front door, his satchel swinging awkwardly at his side.

  “I gotta go,” I said, turning on my heels and jogging to meet George.

  “Do you know those kids?” George asked as we climbed into the Jeep and I started the engine.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Kinda.” I looked in the rearview mirror, expecting Zack to be the one watching us go. But he and Parker were gone. It was Jules who was watching me drive away. She looked frozen, standing on the edge of that perfect lawn in front of that perfect house. Her eyes were wide, mouth half open, like she was stopping herself from running after me.

  Thirty

  “THAT WAS SO WEIRD TODAY,” Zack said that night when he crawled in my window. “You were so nervous. You were sweating.”

  “But you don’t think she caught on, do you?” I asked. I was sitting on my bed in a tank top and the girlie boxers I wore as pajamas.

  “No way,” he said. “She has no idea.” I sighed and closed my eyes. Inside I tuned to the relief channel, but quickly switched to the guilt channel and back to relief and then guilt again. I hadn’t been able to get Jules out of my head. The worst part was how badly I wanted to share with her what was happening to me. I wanted to tell her how I wasn’t doing that thing that I do with guys, making mental notes of who had called or texted whom last, always keeping score and trying to stay on top. I wasn’t planning out what I would say to Zack in advance or practicing lines that I thought might make him like me more. I was just being me. I wanted to tell her how I was actually enjoying making out, not just because it reassured me that a guy liked and wanted me, but because it felt good. And I wanted to know how she was. I wanted to hear her stories. The guilt channel was on full blast now, hissing its fuzzy reception. How to make it stop? I promised her, silently, to stop this with Zack.

  “I’m too old for you,” I said, sliding down the bed, away from him.

  “I know. A whole eighteen months or something. You’re corrupting me.” He slid closer. “Have you ever had sex?”

  “No.” I pulled back, examining his face. “You have?” He nodded, laughing at my shocked expression. “Valerie?”

  “She is French,” he said.

  “Were you in eighth grade?” He nodded. “Eighth grade?”

  He snaked his hand around my waist, but I pushed it away.

  “Does Jules know?”

  “No.”

  “Did your mom know?”

  “No.” He put a hand on my knee.

  “We shouldn’t be doing this. We really shouldn’t.” I stood up and walked to the other side of the tiny room.

  “Don’t say that,” he said, following me. He kissed me. I pulled away.

  “But we can’t keep doing this. I was thinking about what you said about the wall around Jules. And I feel like I looked over the wall today for li
ke a second, and I saw how sad she really is. And if we keep doing what we’re doing, I’m just going to be heaping more sadness on her.”

  “Okay, well…” He let go of my hand. “Let’s get away from the bed. Let’s go somewhere,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But I need you to put on as many clothes as possible.”

  “Oh, I know,” I said, remembering George and the shiver. I grabbed a sweatshirt. “Let’s go see the ghost.”

  I told him about George getting the chills, as we headed out to the white cross in the land yacht. We drove by a few times, seeing if one of us would get the chills, but nothing happened. So we just parked in front of it. We sat and waited for something to happen, for the temperature to drop or a ghostly pair of bell-bottoms to strut past the headlights.

  “Where does Jules think you go at night?” I asked as we waited. The air was soft and still and full of summer. The crickets were loud.

  “She doesn’t know I’m gone. No one knows I’m gone.” He slapped a mosquito on his arm.

  “What about your dad?”

  “Jules is so out of it right now, and with my dad, it’s like an actor is playing him. A bad actor. They won’t even say her name. It’s like living with people who are only half here.”

  “I know what that’s like,” I said, thinking of Mom and the way I could look into her eyes and see she was somewhere else, somewhere very far away that I didn’t know about. It made me want to scream at her. Life was happening here in front of her, not in that faraway world. “I know exactly what that’s like.”

  I pushed the seat back and dangled my feet out the window. We sat there in silence for a bit, each of us in our own world. The image of Jay’s face came to my mind. I could hear him telling me off. I could hear myself telling Jules I thought his brother was a loser. My whole body tensed as I remembered it. I wish I’d never told Jules anything. What about my other secrets, the other things I shouldn’t have said but did because I’d trusted her? Forget girls who died decades ago; words were ghosts. They were what haunted me.

  “I don’t think the ghost girl is going to show,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Ghost girl’s not into us. Let’s go someplace better.”

  We went to Steps. The moon was three-quarters full—bright, glowing, shining on the black ocean. The waves were low and calm. We rolled up our jeans and walked in up to our ankles. The water was warm, holding the memory of the sun.

  “That’s it, I’m going in. I have to,” Zack said. I watched as he lifted his sweatshirt and T-shirt off his head in one move. He was so lean and strong.

  “In your underwear?” I asked.

  “Hell, no,” Zack said, and unbuttoned his jeans. I covered my mouth with my hands. He met my gaze and pulled them down, with his boxers, over his hips. There it was! I’d felt it, but I hadn’t seen it. “Oh my god,” I said, not realizing I was thinking aloud.

  “Feast your eyes.” He laughed. Then he beat his chest and let out a war cry.

  “Zack!” I laughed, intoxicated.

  He turned around, faced the ocean. Boy butts are so different, so compact. “Woo-hoo!” He whooped, ran into the waves, and dove under. “It’s perfect,” he said when his head popped up. “You have to come in. It’s beautiful.”

  “I can’t,” I said, remembering my promise to myself about Jules.

  “Your loss,” Zack said. “It’s amazing in here.” It looked amazing. He looked amazing bobbing up and down in the silvery black water. I thought of Mom’s words to Emily Dickinson: What is life, if not for living? I took a deep breath, then stripped off my clothes and ran in, covering myself with my hands until I was in the water. I slipped under a gentle wave, and when I came up, Zack was in front of me. He was smiling but serious, and I felt my cheeks brighten. He took my hands and pulled me close to him.

  “Come to me, mermaid,” he said.

  “La le loo-loo la lee loo.” I floated my legs up, dipped my head back, and sang an off-key mermaid song. I felt like the moon itself, all lit up. Then I noticed little lights around us in the water.

  “Oh my god, what is this?” I asked. The water was sparking, glowing, like there were fireflies underwater.

  “Phosphorescence,” he said, splashing the water to make it glow.

  “It’s crazy.” I ran my hands through the water, trying to catch it, then kicked my legs up and floated around on my back. I wasn’t made of bones anymore. I was made of starfish and moonlight and phosphorescence. I started laughing for no reason at all.

  “What?” Zack asked, treading water, his hands leaving trails of light.

  I put my feet back on the bottom and laughed again. I’d never felt so full, so bright, so completely alive. “I think,” I started, but then ducked back under, finishing the thought underwater so that I’d get to say it, but he wouldn’t hear. I think I’m in love.

  Thirty-one

  “HONEY, I DON’T SEE THE NEED for me to come to Nantucket. You’re doing just fine, and it’s only a few more weeks until the summer’s over.” Even through the phone, I could tell Mom was distracted. She was probably playing computer hearts. I sat on the back steps of the porch, sipping lemonade from a fresh batch Gavin had just made. I used Mom’s distraction as an opportunity to skim my notebook for key words and phrases I’d copied from the diary.

  “But, Mom?” I said into the phone.

  “Yeah?”

  “‘What is life, if not for living?’” I was hoping she would recognize her own quote.

  “Is that from that Weight Watchers commercial?”

  “No. It’s from something else.”

  “Well, I don’t see what it has to do with me coming to Nantucket, especially since I get seasick on boats.” Yeah right, I thought. In the diary, she and Lover Boy had been on numerous boat trips. There was a ferry ride to Cape Cod for a stolen night in a motel, into which they checked in as “Mr. and Mrs. Donald Duck.” There was also a zippy cruise in a Boston Whaler out to Tuckernuck Island, not to mention a secret sunrise sail. Mom’s computer zinged with a hearts victory.

  “Mom, are you sure you have seasickness? Are you sure that you’re not inventing that?”

  “Excuse me, but I think I know whether or not I get sick on boats.”

  “Then take a pill!” I said.

  “Watch your tone, please,” she said.

  Gavin knocked on the sliding glass door and made a “keep it down” gesture. I gave him the okay signal. I hadn’t realized I’d yelled.

  “Sorry, Mom. I just want you to picture this.” I glanced at the notebook, skipping over any boat-related notes. “Dunes. Sunsets. Lobster. Cisco Beach. Beer.”

  “Beer? I don’t drink beer,” she said. “What’s this about? Oh no. Have you signed me up for some singles’ thing? I told you—”

  “No, Mom. I just want you to come out here for my birthday,” I said. “It’s only a week away.”

  “You were nine the last time you wanted me around on your birthday.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m going to college next year so maybe I’m feeling sentimental.”

  “Well, that’s very sweet. But I’m afraid I’d come all the way out there and you’d just want to be with your friends, not boring old Mom.” Boring old Mom? I was staring at the words “nude beach” in her diary. “How about when you get back, we go out to Sue’s Clam Shack? Are you sure there’s no one that you want to see out here?”

  “The only person on Nantucket I want to see is you, and I’m going to see you in just a few short weeks.” Zing! A hearts success.

  “I just want you to think about it. Promise me you’ll think about it.”

  I hung up and opened the book, wishing I could find the right words, the ones that would lure her back out to this island, this unlikely rock of love. The problem was that in the diary she was more specific about what she and Lover Boy had done to each other’s bodies than where exactly they’d been. I wasn’t about t
o recite those passages to her. I could barely read them without wanting to barf. A page caught my attention—she’d written in a circle around a poem.

  Dear Emily,

  Right now I’m sitting in front of the library, where I’ve come to escape Aunt Betty, who was lecturing me on the importance of knowing how to properly set a table. She thinks my parents haven’t taught me any feminine charms. All I want to do is think about last night with Lover Boy. On one hand, I’m confused because he canceled our last date. He said he needed to work on law school applications and it gave me a weird feeling. It’s still only summer and he’s barely mentioned law school this whole time! On the other hand, I wonder if I’m being paranoid. He cares so much about his future. He has big dreams. I want him to follow his dreams! And it was just last week when he told me that he loves me, and I knew it was true when he said it, the way you just know. He loves me!

  I’m listening to the crickets as I write this. And I just realized that I’m writing here on your poem about the cricket. I love that crickets are here in this magical time, when it’s not night or day but some in-between time. I’m deciding right now that when I want to think of a day with magic in it, I’ll think of this day. I will say to myself: Cricket. It will be my secret code word for magic or love or both.

  Love, K.

  My name. Mom had always said that I got my name because I used to chirp in my crib. But that wasn’t the whole truth. I read the poem.

  The cricket sang

  And set the sun,

  And workmen finished, one by one,

  Their seam the day upon.

  The low grass loaded with the dew,

  The twilight stood as strangers do

  With hat in hand, polite and new,

  To stay as if, or go.

  A vastness, as a neighbor, came,—

  A wisdom without face or name,

  A peace, as hemispheres at home,—

  And so the night became.

  I wasn’t just Mom’s daughter. I was her word for magic.