“I’ve never been on a cruise,” said Nadine.
“So I sold my place in Falmouth after a year,” Hank said, forging ahead. “I rent a condo now. And I bought the house on Nantucket. It has a fireplace. I love it out here.”
“You love Nantucket, too, Marlo,” said the woman next to them. She was talking to her dog again. “Don’t you, Marlo? Don’t you love Nantucket?”
A man with red hair walked by. There was a comb in his back pocket. “Aren’t you a good boy?” said the woman, scratching her dog’s belly. “Aren’t you a good, good boy?”
“So that’s my saga,” said Hank. “What’s yours?”
“Oh, you know,” said Nadine.
“No,” said Hank. “I don’t.”
“Well,” said Nadine, “what have you heard?”
“Jim Morgan’s daughter,” said Hank, sitting back in his seat. “Difficult as a kid. Crazy in high school. Always looking for trouble. Ran away with a guy who came through town on a Harley-Davidson. Called her dad from Sturgis, wanting money to come home.”
Nadine smiled. She had met Sammy after the Senior Dinner Dance, which had been held on a spring Saturday night under a tent overlooking Old Silver Beach. Tiny white lights twinkled along the edge of the canvas fabric, and the temperature was a perfect seventy-five degrees. The strains of “Wonderful Tonight” played as Nadine’s date, Liam Baker, spun her too fast. Over his shoulder, Nadine saw a girl she barely knew crying by the punch bowl. She saw Lily dancing with Dennis, trying to look happy as Dennis, too drunk, staggered around the parquet floor.
“This is perfect,” whispered Liam in Nadine’s ear. Poor Liam, who thought they would get married and stay on Cape Cod forever. Suddenly Nadine couldn’t bear it: Liam’s overpowering cologne, the crying girl, Lily pretending so fiercely. The sun set, an orange orb, and the gap between the reality of imminent heartbreak all around her and the cheery illusion of a perfect summer night was too wide for Nadine to straddle. She twisted free of Liam’s embrace and ran. She ran until her legs wore out, and then she sat on the back porch of someone’s empty summer house and watched the stars. She fell asleep on a teak lounge chair.
In the morning, walking home, she saw Sammy parked by the side of the road, smoking a cigarette. He was short and ugly. He was real. When he offered to take her for a ride, she accepted. As they sped around the Sagamore Rotary and then over the bridge toward freedom, Nadine pressed her cheek to his leather jacket and held on tight.
“Oh my God,” said Nadine. “Hank, who have you been talking to?”
“Wrote about the biker underworld for the school newspaper. Wins some contest—”
“The Young Writers’ Fellowship,” murmured Nadine.
“Heads to Cambridge, never looks back. Turns out she’s not just crazy, but brilliant.”
Nadine smiled and looked at Hank. “I hang out at The Captain Kidd,” said Hank. “Jan the bartender went to school with you.”
“Jan Hallnet.”
“Yes.”
Nadine looked down. “Did he tell you about my mother?”
Hank didn’t answer. An older man wandered by, leading a sheepdog on a leather leash. The sheepdog stopped next to Marlo. “Who’s this?” said the man.
“This is Marlo,” said the woman.
“This is Roady,” said the man. The dogs sniffed each other.
“So,” said the man, “how old is Marlo?”
“We don’t know,” said the woman. “My daughter rescued him from a farm. They were going to shoot him. He ate the eggs and scared the chickens. Maybe around eleven. But he acts like a little puppy.”
“Roady here is five,” said the man. “I got him from a breeder in Wellesley.”
“Don’t you?” said the woman. “Don’t you act just like a little puppy?”
Hank moved close to Nadine. She could smell him, and it was a comforting smell, like butter, like gingerbread. “No,” said Hank finally. “Jan didn’t tell me about your mother.”
“Oh,” said Nadine. A woman made her way to the bathroom, sipping from a bottle of beer. Jeff moved to another window. The sun broke through a bank of clouds and spilled across the waves. Nadine leaned over and kissed Hank. He kissed her back.
“Hey, hey,” said the man with the dog. “What have we here? Somebody falling in love right here on the slow ferry?”
Ten
It was dark by the time they pulled into Nantucket Harbor. From the outdoor deck, Nadine and Hank watched the island come into view: the row of neat houses with windows lit, cargo trucks lining up, readying for the shipments of food and fuel. The wind was fierce, and when Hank put his hands in his pockets Nadine slid her right hand inside the warm wool of his coat, entwining her fingers with his. Hank looked at her and smiled.
“We can grab a burger in town,” he said, “and then take a cab to the house. I’ve got an old Volvo there. Hope it starts.”
“Great,” said Nadine.
“Or there’s the Straight Wharf. A little snazzier. Candlelight, et cetera.”
“No,” said Nadine, “a burger’s fine.”
They lined up above the metal staircase leading off the ferry. Pink-faced passengers wrapped in mink and North Face parkas stood elbow-to-elbow with heavyset women gossiping in Jamaican patois. At the ferry dock, construction workers waited for the last ship out, empty lunchboxes in hand. Nadine and Hank strolled across the gangway, then past a lively taco stand and a bicycle rental shop, closed for the day.
“Come,” said Hank, leading her by a basket museum and a whaling museum, then into town, where the streets were made of cobbled stone and holiday lights twinkled from every lamppost. “How are you feeling?”
“I’m okay,” said Nadine, though she felt completely dislocated, even anxious. “This is beautiful. Really. I guess I thought the streets were paved with gold.”
Hank laughed. “Quaint isn’t cheap,” he said.
On Broad Street, after a store specializing in French cookware, Hank stopped. “Here we are,” he said. “The Brotherhood of Thieves.” He opened the door to a warm underground restaurant. “This was a hangout for whalers back in 1840.” In the dim space, a fire blazed and people sat around wooden tables. “Two for dinner,” Hank said to the teenager in a polo sweater and cargo pants who stood behind a wooden reservation stand. The boy’s overgrown hair and burgeoning beard testified to his decision to stay on-island for the winter.
“Forty-five minitos,” said the boy. “Maybe an hour.”
“How about a drink?” said Hank, inclining his head toward a bar where men in knit hats and baseball caps watched television intently.
“Sure,” said Nadine. She took a few steps, then said, “You know, I’m going to go get some fresh air, actually.”
“What?” said Hank. “Are you okay?”
“Just some air,” said Nadine, as she rushed past the host and to the door. Awkwardly, she yanked it open and the cold wind hit her. She started to walk. Something about the dark space, the rumble of voices, the tinny sound of the television. She turned a corner and saw a church, sat down on the steps. Underneath her jeans, the stone was cold. Nadine felt her temples throb. It was something about the fire, the smell of meat. Memories rushed forward, vivid and painful.
During her summer in Cape Town, Nadine often drove from her manicured neighborhood to Sunshine township. With her housemates and fellow reporters, she drank beer at a bar called the Waterfront, listening to the Moonlights and JC Cool on the jukebox. Some nights, the tinny sound of soccer games won out over the music.
Nadine was working on a piece about the parents of boys who had run away from home to join the Mandela United Football Club. The “club” was really a gang that roamed the township streets, using fear and brutality to stamp out resistance to the antiapartheid cause. Rumors had begun to spread about Winnie Mandela, the wife of jailed leader Nelson Mandela who would later be released and elected president of South Africa. Winnie, it was said, was housing young men in her mansion. The men
called her “Mommy” and carried out any orders she gave, no matter how illogical or violent. Nadine was having a hard time finding people willing to speak out against the Football Club, and finding proof of Winnie’s involvement was simply impossible.
Still, Nadine loved talking to her subjects for hours, drinking tea and picking the locks of their minds. She was always amazed at how much people would tell her, a stranger, even as she held a pen in her hand. They seemed so eager to be seen, to be recognized. But Nadine had to listen carefully for the narrative beneath the façades they constructed for themselves.
Sometimes Nadine felt interviewees pulling back from her, as if they thought she could not understand their reality, or might judge them. She used her own secrets then, handing over personal tidbits like bargaining chips, creating a sense of intimacy that almost always led subjects to reveal deeper truths about themselves.
Nadine relished the drive home with pages of scrawled notes. She would pour a glass of wine, play some jazz, and type on her antique Olivetti—she had bought it in a Station Street pawnshop—finding the arc of the story in the process. The hiss of the fax machine, the thrill of snapping open a paper to see her name, the way people lit up when they realized she had written an article they had read and thought about: Nadine loved it all.
But then there was the night they heard gunfire outside the Waterfront. A large bottle of Castle beer in front of her, the lights in the bar going dark, the music stopping abruptly. There were shots, and then screams. Around her, the murmur of voices speaking in Xhosa.
Nadine didn’t have to go outside. Her work was slow and cunning. But the photographers stood in the dark, wrapped their cameras around their necks, and raced toward the action. Nadine sat in the warm shebeen, her hands pressed to her eyes. The gunfire stopped, and there was an eerie silence from the garbage-strewn streets. Something made her stand up, leave the bar. Notebook tucked in the pocket of her shorts, she ran outside, cutting through dirt alleys. And then the gunfire started again.
It hadn’t been a premonition that had made her run outside. It had been the silence. Now, on an island far from war, she was enveloped by terror.
“Nadine?” Hank sat next to her on the church step. He looked concerned as he bent down to see her face.
“My head,” said Nadine. Her hands were shaking. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m sorry, I’m just feeling…”
“Continuing headaches are completely normal after head trauma,” said Hank. “Maybe this trip was too much for you.”
“No,” said Nadine. “I’m fine. Just some air, you know?” She looked into Hank’s eyes, and watched him decide whether or not to believe her.
“How about a burger?” she said, her voice controlled.
“There’s soup at my house,” said Hank.
“Really,” said Nadine. “I’m fine. Maybe I just need some food.” He nodded warily. She smiled, and took his arm as they walked back to the restaurant, wrapping around him tightly. She did not think of Maxim, the way his lips had felt on her skin. She did not think about returning to Nutthall Road the next day, staring at Maxim’s clothes abandoned on the floor.
Eleven
For four days, Nadine woke early in Hank’s guest bedroom. The winter sun streamed through the panes of the upstairs windows; even when Nadine closed the white shutters, the light worked its way underneath her eyelids. Besides the hissing of the steam heat, the house was utterly quiet. Nadine’s dreams—which had always been blissfully blank—were filled with images like shrapnel: the clay Madonna on a sick child’s bedside table, the knot of skin where a Haitian boy’s ear had been. Ann’s wedding ring, nestled amid Jim’s spare change in a glass dish on his dresser in the Surf Drive house.
In her pajamas, Nadine made coffee and drank it in on the front porch, looking over the large yard, which led to a dirt road and then the beach. The yard was made for dogs and children, thought Nadine, but there was only Hank and his fragile patient, drinking coffee, wrapped in a scratchy red blanket. By the front door was a row of fishing rods and a green plastic tackle box.
In the afternoons, they would read in the living room. They had visited Nantucket Bookworks and bought each other books for Christmas. Hank was working through War and Peace and Nadine was revisiting Cry the Beloved Country. They sat at opposite ends of the couch, propped up by pillows. Once in a while, Hank would read a sentence to Nadine, or she would look up to find him focused on her, not his reading.
“What?” she said once, catching him staring.
“Oh,” said Hank, “I just hit a boring part. You thought I was gazing at you?”
“No,” said Nadine, smiling.
“Good,” said Hank.
After a lunch of cheese, sliced apples, and bread, they shopped in town and then sat on the beach. They told each other ribbons of stories: Nadine’s summer in South Africa, Hank’s mother in Florida, who was growing forgetful, the young girl he’d just diagnosed with diabetes. “That must have been tough,” said Nadine, when he described telling the girl’s parents.
“She’s fine,” said Hank. “Diabetes is a cakewalk compared with the worst things.” Nadine wanted to ask about the worst things, but stopped herself: she didn’t need nightmares about pediatric health disasters. Instead, she changed the subject.
“I had a boyfriend once with diabetes,” she said. “Cameron. He was from Vermont.”
“Cameron,” said Hank.
“Yeah,” said Nadine. “I loved his family. I loved his house. His parents built it themselves.” Nadine had met Cameron her freshman year at Harvard. He was tall, with brown hair and green eyes. He had to give himself an insulin shot before every meal, taking the bottle from a mini fridge in the corner of his dorm room. He taught Nadine how to give him the shot, and he taught her about writing music, his passion. They went to jazz shows in the city, Cameron’s fingers tapping the beat on Nadine’s knee.
He brought her to Vermont for Thanksgiving. Cameron’s house, filled with skis and musical instruments, was never quiet. He had five siblings, and none sat still. Something was always cooking—bread, apple pie, vegetarian lasagna—and someone was always telling a story or practicing an instrument. Nadine threw away a bread bag, and Cameron’s mother, who wore fleece tops and athletic pants, fished it out of the garbage. “We can use this again,” she said kindly, her hand warm on Nadine’s shoulder.
Cameron’s home could not have been more different from Nadine’s. Jim never saved a bread bag to refill with a homemade loaf, or cooked at all, for that matter. Nobody ever trailed through Nadine’s house wearing a wet suit and flipper fins, the way Cameron’s brother Horace did after swimming in the nearby pond. Even when the whole family was finally assembled at the table for to-furkey Thanksgiving dinner, Cameron’s house buzzed with noise: clattering plates, scraping chairs, booming classical music. Nadine held the butter dish, which Cameron’s mother had made and painted with butterflies. She soaked in the noise of a happy family, and thought, It is possible. I could have this.
“What was it like?” said Hank. “The house Cameron’s parents built?”
Even after Cameron dumped Nadine for a willowy oboe player, she thought of his family: a table of loud people who belonged together. She looked at Hank. “It was wonderful,” she said.
Nadine tried on clothes at the Lilly Pulitzer store, refusing to even exit the dressing room in the bright outfits. Finally, she found a store she liked, and charged jeans, slim black pants, leather boots, and two sweaters—more clothes than she’d bought in years.
Hank made elaborate dinners, which they ate in front of the fire: clams and linguine, lobster Diablo, steaks on the grill for Christmas. While he cooked, Nadine sat at the kitchen table and watched. “Where did you learn how to cook?” she asked.
“Maryjane could have been a chef,” said Hank. “When we broke up, I couldn’t peel a garlic clove. In fact, I had lost every skill she had—remembering people’s names, keeping up with Christmas cards, knowing where to hang
a picture. One day I was in the grocery store, throwing ginger ale in the cart, and I stopped and asked myself, Do I even like ginger ale? Learning how to cook was a way of making my own life. I took lessons, actually, at Cape Cod Community College.”
“Do you?” said Nadine.
“Do I what?”
“Like ginger ale?”
“You know,” said Hank, “I prefer Pepsi.”
That night, Nadine dreamed of dinner at her favorite restaurant in Mexico City. It was a small, neighborhood spot called Alejandro’s. Alejandro’s wife, a slight woman named Marguerite, made a chicken dish with a rich sauce from her native Oaxaca. The sauce was called mole, and Nadine loved it so much she decided to feature Marguerite in an article. She arrived at Alejandro’s with her notebook and convinced Marguerite to take her into the kitchen. The resulting story was a huge success, and Nadine committed the mole recipe to memory.
In the morning, Nadine decided to make mole for Hank. She presented him with a list of twenty-six ingredients and told him dinner would be late and fabulous, just the way it was at Alejandro’s. Hank stared at the list. “Chocolate?” he said. “I thought you were making chicken.”
“It’s a sauce with chocolate and chiles,” said Nadine. “You’re going to love it. Might as well get some sipping tequila, too.”
“Nadine,” said Hank, sinking into a kitchen chair, “You think the Nantucket Stop & Shop is going to have—” He paused, counting, and then continued. “—five kinds of chiles? I’ll be lucky if I can get tortillas.”
“Right,” said Nadine, sitting down next to him. “Well, do your best.”
Nadine cooked all day, and around nine PM they ate. “Spicy,” said Hank appreciatively.
“That would be the Ortega taco seasoning packet.”
“Hm,” said Hank. “And these—” He held up a forkful of something crunchy.
“Fritos,” said Nadine. She shook her head, imagining Alejandro’s horror at her creation. He’d like Hank, though, she decided, watching him pour another glass of tequila.
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