Nantucket Blue (4 page)

“She was making these fish pictures. And she was barefoot, one pant leg was rolled up, and her hair was doing that thing where it kind of stands up on one side.” At least ten people laughed. Jules walked back to her seat. My mouth was dry, but I kept going. The story seemed to be telling itself. “And she had that look on her face. The one she got when she was really into something?” A horse-faced woman with a headband nodded. “That look that meant she was ready for anything, ready for action, ready for life.” That last word hung in the air. My breath caught. “And before I knew it, I had a cold fish in my hand and she was teaching me how to use a trout to make a print, which was actually fun—gross and messy and fun. I forgot all about my exam. We made five and left them drying in the basement.” I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. “I don’t remember what happened to the fish.”

“So
that’s
that smell,” Mr. Clayton called from the front row. This time almost everyone laughed. Except Jules. She was slouched, her hands in the lap of her black crepe dress, her face as still as a doll’s. I tried to make eye contact with her, but she was staring at the ground. Zack looked right at me, though. Something about the way he was smiling, crying with his eyes open, urged me to keep going.

“And that was the thing about Nina. She looked at a dead fish and saw an art project; she’d look inside a refrigerator and find nothing but hot dogs and mayonnaise, and she’d throw them together and make you feel like you’d had the best meal of your life.” I was gesturing wildly with my hands—they seemed to have a life of their own. “She looked at you,” I choked, “at me, and saw someone to love.” The man with the wire-rimmed glasses dabbed his eyes with a Kleenex. “She was the best, and I’m going to miss her so much,” I said. I walked quickly back to my pew and slid in next to my mother. I looked at Jules, but she didn’t turn around.

“You know, it’s not healthy to be handling raw fish like that,” Mom said, as she handed me a tissue. “You could’ve gotten sick.”

I looked at her in disbelief. How could she have chosen this moment to criticize Nina? How could she have missed the whole point of that story? If I hadn’t been crying, I would’ve screamed.

After, the church parlor was crowded. I knew a lot of the people—parents from school, people I’d seen around Providence. Practically our whole class was there, gathered in a corner, a cluster of navy and black dresses. Arti waved me over, but I didn’t want to join them. They hardly knew Nina, and they certainly didn’t love her. They wouldn’t know how I was feeling. I didn’t want to talk to anyone but the Claytons. While my mother talked to the woman with the yellow dogs from the yellow house on the corner, I studied a bulletin board of community announcements and ate a crustless egg salad sandwich and a handful of wet red grapes. I was hungrier than I’d been in days. In fact, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had an actual meal. I was reading a flyer advertising a playgroup for toddlers when someone tapped me on the shoulder.

“I know that you’re drawn to the neon-pink paper, but you can’t join that group,” Zack said. He’d dripped Coke or coffee on his tie.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Too old.” He shrugged. “And you have to be potty-trained, so there’s that.” His exhausted smile pained me.

“I’m working on it,” I said. “Every day.”

“Thanks for what you said about Mom,” he said.

“Really? I was a little worried that maybe I shouldn’t have,” I said.

“No, it was good,” he said. “It was funny. And sweet.”

“Thanks,” I said, taking in a sharp breath. “Where’s Jules?” I asked. The reception was so packed that I’d lost sight of her. I’d figured we talk, finally, when it had thinned out a little.

“She just left,” Zack said, and shrugged his shoulders. “She’s on her way home. You might be able to catch her.”

As soon as I stepped out of the church, I saw her down the street, three blocks away. I jogged in my flats, which were murdering my pinkie toes, and caught her as she was about to turn up her street.

“Hey,” I said.

She gasped. “You scared me.”

“Do you want to go and get some iced coffee or something?” I asked as I caught my breath. Little trickles of sweat ran down my back. “We could go to The Coffee Exchange.”

“Um, no. Not right now.”

“Later, maybe?” I licked my upper lip. Summer was here early.

“Sure,” she said. I walked with her up her street. “Only thing is, my cousins are here, so I don’t know what we’ll be up to. Hey, I saw that Jay called you.”

“Yes, but that’s not important right now. You are.” I put my hand on her shoulder, where it hung awkwardly as she walked fast and I tried to keep up. “Jules, are you okay?”

“Yeah,” she said. We stopped in front of her house. I wanted to ask her if she’d been about to laugh up there, if she’d been sleeping okay, if she wanted to collapse in my arms the way I had in my mother’s. I wanted to peel back the clear plastic curtain that seemed to be hanging between us so I could touch her. I wanted some proof that she was still herself. I wanted her to cry.

“Is it okay that I stood up there and said that stuff?” I asked.

“Yeah, it was great,” she said. “I was freaking out. I’m just tired.”

I sighed with relief. “Well, just so you know,” I said, feeling a little shaky, “this summer, I’m there for you no matter what. We don’t have to go to parties. We can stay in and watch ’80s movies. We can go for walks on the beach every day. I’ll do whatever. Just whatever makes you feel better. You’re my best friend and I’m here for you one hundred percent.” Anyone could come up with those words. Where were the right words?

“Thanks,” she said, and crossed her arms. “I’m going to change out of this dress. I feel like a freakin’ pilgrim.”

“Okay,” I said. She stood on the bottom step in front of the closed door. “I guess I’ll head back to the church and find my mom. Call me, okay?”

I was standing in front of the mirror, brushing my teeth, when Jules called the next morning. I spat and picked up. “Hey!”

“Hey,” she said, sounding like her old self again. “What’s up?”

“Uh, not much,” I answered. “How are you doing?”

“Oh my god, it’s so crazy in this house,” Jules said.

“I can’t imagine,” I said, and looked out the window. Frankie, the neighbors’ beagle, was curled under the one patch of shade in their backyard. It was going to be another hot one.

“My little cousin is sleeping in my room, and she wet the bed last night, all the way down to the mattress. It stinks so bad in here. And my grandmother ironed all my jeans stiff as a board. With pleats. I’m not kidding.”

“Well, that sucks,” I said, surprised at how normal she sounded. “I was thinking maybe we could ride our bikes out to Bristol?” Bristol is a little seaside town with coffee shops and a cool antique store. Jules and I liked to look at the stacks of old photographs in back of the store.

“Not today,” she said. “My whole family is here.”

“Oh, right. I just thought, you know, it would be peaceful out there. Anyway, that reminds me, should I bring my bike to Nantucket?”

“Actually, that’s what I was calling to tell you. You can’t come with us anymore.”

“Oh,” I said, as I watched my face pale in the mirror. “Okay.”

“It totally blows, but my dad said only family in the house this summer.”

“Of course. I understand. Of course.” I sat on the closed toilet seat and hung my head. How could I be thinking of myself? I burned with shame. “I totally get it.”

She sighed and added, “But you can get your babysitting job back with the Kings, right?”

THE FIRST TIME I THOUGHT
of going to Nantucket by myself, I was about to pick up the phone and call Deirdre King, mother of Andrew. I’d already typed in her number on my phone and was staring at it on the screen. My lip curled. Why, I wondered, was I doing it? I hated that job. Last summer, Andrew was obsessed with the word
boobies
. He’d say “boobies,” then punch me in the boob. It really sucked. Especially when Mrs. King found it funny, which maybe it was if it wasn’t
your
boob. I didn’t want to play the straight man for Andrew King’s comedy act again. I hung up the phone. I won’t do it, I thought, falling back on my bed.
I won’t.

I started to think of other babysitting jobs, ones that provided housing, ones that I heard paid twenty bucks an hour or more. Ones on Nantucket.

A little seed was planted.

The second time I thought of going to Nantucket by myself, I was sitting on the front porch, texting with Jay. It was supposed to have been my night at Dad’s, but Alexi wasn’t having a good night, so none of us was having a good night. Polly had adopted him from an orphanage in the Ukraine when he was three years old, and he’d had a pretty rough time there, which I guess is why he sometimes had these fits. Alexi loved the Beatles, and that night, after the fifth time of listening to “Yellow Submarine,” I was going a little insane, so I changed the song. I put on James Taylor, one of Dad’s favorites, but it set Alexi off. He started rocking on the floor, kicking his heels and wailing, even after I’d switched it back. Polly had to make him feel better, which meant that Dad had to make Polly feel better. I slipped out the back door without even touching my grilled steak. Dad was too swept up in the chaos to convince me to stay. He just waved good-bye and blew me a kiss.

At least it was peaceful at Mom’s, I thought as I read a text from Jay. He’d gotten a job as a lifeguard out there on Nantucket, at a beach called Surfside. I started thinking about my almost-kiss with him and the moment when he’d pulled me onto his lap. I was thinking about sitting in a lifeguard chair with him in my new plum-colored J. Crew bikini with a ruffle. I was thinking about kissing him in the sand.

The seed burst from its husk and sprang green spindly roots.

The third time I thought about going to Nantucket alone, I was at the Brown University Bookstore. I was looking for my summer reading books when I saw a T-shirt just like Nina’s. My heart cramped. I held my breath. I couldn’t be away from Jules all summer. The Claytons might need alone time now, but in a week or so Jules would want me there, she’d need me. I wouldn’t be in their house, so I wouldn’t be a burden, and they’d still have their privacy. But I’d be close by. Ready to pitch in. Ready to load the dishwasher or run to the store for milk. I’d be ready to whip out a board game when that famous Nantucket fog rolled in. I’d make silver dollar pancakes for everyone. I’m good at that. I had an image of me setting the table.

But the vision was quickly replaced by one of Nina with the colorful place mats that she brought home from Mexico last spring. I could see her hands laying them on the table. I could see the wavy silver cuff bracelet around her wrist. I could see her eyes squinting in a laugh as Jules and I tied the matching napkins on our heads like bandannas. It made me miss her so much I felt like I’d been kicked. I held my breath until the sadness subsided.

I bought all my summer reading books except one (they didn’t have the collection of Emily Dickinson poems for Mrs. Hart’s class), and stopped to get a Del’s from the cart on the corner. I handed over the dollar bills, soft and crinkled from a whole day in my back pocket, and took the cold little waxy dish of frozen lemonade. One lick woke up my mouth, chilled my sinuses. It would be
fun
to go alone. I was going to be eighteen in eight weeks, an official adult with the right to vote and join the armed services. I’d have my own paycheck and spend my money as I chose. I’d go to that café I’d heard Jules talking about, the Even Keel. I’d develop a croissant and coffee habit. I’d go running on the beach every morning and cool off in the ocean afterward. Maybe, in the evening, I’d carry a sketch pad. My whereabouts would not be known at all times, and this idea filled me with space: a pleasant, light-filled space.

I’ll be like a college student, I thought as I stopped in front of a café popular with Brown students. The plastic bag of books strained and started to cut off the circulation in my hand. I switched my grip and peered in the window. A girl in a sundress with a purse slung over her chair was scribbling in an artist’s notebook. I should wear dresses more. I need a notebook like that, I thought, when a cute guy walked in, kissed her, and sat down with a couple of drinks. As he touched her knee under the table and they clinked glasses, the idea of going to Nantucket by myself bloomed like a tropical flower.

I had to go.

THE HORN SOUNDED
, the ferry launched, and my summer swung open like a saloon door. The engine hummed under my metal seat. I placed my duffel bag on the seat to save it—I had a good one, front row—and leaned on the cold, sticky railing. The breeze was soft, persistent, cool but not cold. I zipped up my hoodie and looked at the ocean. Farther out it was a deep blue, but right here, right under me, it was beer-bottle green and brown with flashes of gold. I lifted my face into the late afternoon sun and inhaled the salty Atlantic air.

The ferry was crowded with families. They seemed to own the place. Nearby, a little boy resisted the hugs of his mother, wrestling out of her arms to press his face against the grating. A girl in a hot-pink Lilly Pulitzer dress tried to climb up the viewfinder, begging her parents for a quarter. Kids in polo shirts darted around the seats, wanting to be chased. The parents were dressed in clothes as vivid as their children’s. Grown men wore kelly-green pants stitched with yellow whales. The women were in an unofficial uniform: white jeans, bright-colored tops, and Jack Rogers sandals—I recognized the brand instantly because Jules had a pair in blue and another in pink. Six young moms talked in a circle; they looked like a fistful of lollipops.

“Uh-oh, here come the Range Rovers,” said an old man with a weathered face and a light, sensible windbreaker, as a madras-clad couple walked past with monogrammed tote bags that looked freshly sprung from L.L. Bean. Their three blond kids wore T-shirts that said
Nantucket
.

“Why do they have to wear T-shirts that tell the world where they’re going?” the old man’s wife said, shaking her head. “I don’t wear a shirt that says
New Hampshire
when I go there.”

The old man saw me eavesdropping and leaned toward me. “To us, it’s home; to them, it’s
Nantucket
,” he said with a tight jaw and an over-the-top snob accent.

I laughed and nodded as if I were a native, too. Then I made a mental note not to buy a T-shirt with
Nantucket
written on it. I didn’t want to piss off the locals.

“Avery, come back here!” Here was the mother of the Lilly Pulitzer girl—in a skirt that matched her daughter’s dress.

“No!” Avery stuck her tongue out at her.

“Avery, if you don’t get back here right away,” she stammered, “Theresa will get very mad at you.” Disgust flashed across the face of a short, round Hispanic woman before she remembered herself and leaped to coax the girl off the viewfinder.

“Why would you want to be a servant?” Mom had asked when I’d accepted the live-in babysitting position it had taken me less than twenty-four hours to be offered.

All it took was a morning on the Web site for the local Nantucket newspaper,
The Inquirer and Mirror
, and a few e-mails before a woman named Mary Ellen called my cell asking if I’d be available to start on Monday. She was the house manager—basically a butler—to a wealthy family in Boston who was already on Nantucket. She’d heard of Rosewood. She actually knew Miss Kang from college. If I could hop on a bus and meet her that afternoon in Boston, and if my references checked out, I’d be on a ferry Sunday. I met her in a crowded Starbucks on Newbury Street.

“Oh, you’re perfect,” she said when we spotted each other. “Caroline is going to flip over you. And you can swim?”

I nodded.
Obviously.

“And please tell me you drive. Do you drive?” I nodded.
What seventeen-year-old doesn’t drive?

She told me that it paid eight hundred dollars a week for eight weeks. Eight times eight was sixty-four! For a half a second I thought I was going to be making sixty thousand dollars (math is my worst subject), but when I got to six thousand four hundred dollars it was still an awesome amount of money.

“It’s not easy, though. You’re on from the minute the kids get up until they’re dead asleep. If they wake up in the night, it’s your problem.”

I nodded, grinning. Eight hundred
a week
! It turned out the father was the famous national news anchor for CNN, Bradley Lucas. He seemed a little old to have kids who needed a nanny, but he was famous. Mom would definitely let me go now. There were three girls, and three nannies rotating shifts around the clock. She told me that one nanny, a local Nantucket girl, hadn’t worked out and they were “in a pickle.” Then she bought me an iced tea, took a map of Nantucket out of her purse, and drew a path in blue pen from where the ferry would drop me to the house on 25 Cliff Road. At the bottom she wrote her phone number.

“Should I have the Lucases’ number as well?” I asked.

“No,” she said, chuckling to herself. “You need anything, call me. My cell is on all the time.” She gave me money for the ferry ticket and an extra fifty for “my time,” and told me that she’d be out there in a week.

I was thrilled when I told my mom. But she wasn’t.

“Babysitting again?” Mom asked as she ate the last bite of moo shu pork from the carton. “I thought you hated babysitting.”

“I don’t hate it,” I said. “I just don’t
love
it.” Mom leveled me with a look as she sipped her wine. “I want to go to Nantucket, and there’s no other way. Besides, I’d be a servant here, to Andrew King.”

“That’s different,” she said. “You wouldn’t live with the Kings. You don’t want to live in anyone’s home. It’s beneath you. They’ll think they own you.” She finished her glass of white wine and poured herself another. “And what if that news anchor is creepy? He’s too smooth, and he has that hairpiece.”

“If he tries anything, I’ll call the Law Offices of Snell and Garabedian,” I said, using the name of a criminal law firm whose ad, which featured two meaty guys holding up a golden set of scales in front of a wall of law books, was on every bus stop bench. Mom laughed. I could count the number of times she’d laughed this year on one hand. “Besides, Mom, you did it.”

My mom had spent one summer on Nantucket when she was my age. She’d worked at a hotel on the beach. I found a picture of her on a little sailboat in a blue bikini, grinning, a pointed foot dangling over the edge. The wind is sweeping her blond hair across her freckled cheek, and she’s laughing at whoever took the picture.

It’s pretty crazy how alike we look. For a minute I’d thought it was me. How could I have forgotten that day? It looked like the best day of my life. It only took a second to register that the picture was small and square with a matte finish; it was taken a long time ago. On the back it said
Nantucket, 1984
.

“I wasn’t by myself. I was staying with family, with my aunt Betty,” my mother said. “It can be really snotty out there, honey.”

“Can I stay with Aunt Betty?” I cracked open my fortune cookie:
Surprise doubles happiness.

“She died in 1993.” Mom sat up a little and tucked her hair behind her ear. “And she also read my diary, which infuriated me. But you’ll be all alone. I don’t want you to go. You’re only seventeen. What if something happened to you?”

“I’ll be eighteen in August. And what could be safer than Nantucket?” I asked. “It’s not exactly the Gaza Strip. And I won’t be alone. I’ll have the Claytons and the other nannies.”

“The Claytons,” Mom said. “What is so fascinating to you about those people? From the way you follow them around you’d think they were the Kennedys.” She took another sip from her glass. “Some people thought Nina was a little weird, you know. Last month I saw her in a turban on Thayer Street. I was like, really? A turban?”

“Mom!” I said, feeling my face get hot. “How can you say that right now?”

“You’re right,” she said. “Sorry.” She didn’t sound sorry, and she was speaking in a near whisper, a trick she used with her students when they got rowdy. When she lowered her voice, they lowered theirs. But it only made me louder.

“She was a bohemian,” I said, my hands curled into tight fists. “That turban was for yoga.”

“People don’t wear turbans to yoga, Cricket,” she said. I could tell that the second glass of wine had worked its way through her system.

“Yes, they do,” I said, my voice shaking. “For a special kind of yoga in New York. And Nina wasn’t weird, she was just…herself.” I choked on the last word. Tears filled my eyes.

“Okay, okay.” Mom looked me in the eye and took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said it.” She meant it this time.

“And I don’t follow them around,” I said quietly. “They’re like family.”

“I’m going to go take a shower,” she said, then sighed and headed up the back stairs.

“Wait, so can I go to Nantucket?” I shut my eyes and crossed my fingers as I awaited her reply.

She paused on the creaky stairs. “I’ll think about it.”

While she was taking one of her half-hour showers, I packed my bag. I was going to get her to say yes if it killed me. As I put the summer reading books in my suitcase, I decided to check the bookcase in the hallway, where Mom kept her old school books. I was looking for the Emily Dickinson collection. She had had Mrs. Hart, too. Sure enough, there it was. Had the summer reading really not changed in all these years? I plucked it by its spine. It was a little dusty, and the font on the cover was different, but it was the right book.

A little later, when I thought we’d both cooled off, I went into her room. Mom was lying in bed reading her mystery novel.

“Well?”

“I’m still thinking,” she said, and turned the page.

I took the novel from her hands, marked her page, and placed it carefully on the nightstand. I sat on the edge of her bed and looked in her eyes.

“Mom, it’s very lonely for me here,” I said.

“Oh, but we have each other,” she said, and took my face in her soft, light hands. She turned out her lower lip.

“I want more than that,” I said, pulling back sharply. Anger crept up my throat like a poisonous spider.

“Cricket,” Mom said quietly, and shrank back into her pillow. “I love you too, you know. I love you more than the Claytons do.”

“I know, Mom. And I love you. I love you so much.” Her eyes brightened. “It’s just that—”
It’s just that you shouldn’t
take me down with you. It’s just that I want a life, even if you
don’t. It’s just that you’re like a ghost, a strong ghost, barely here
but holding on to me too tightly.
I drew a deep, calming breath. “All of my friends are away for the summer on an adventure, and I want an adventure, too. It’s been a hard year for me, Mom, with Dad and Polly getting married.” Mom leaned closer. I was talking about it. I was
going there
. “I need to get away from it, so that I can move on from this—”
Say it
, her eyes begged. “Divorce.” There. “I need to move on. We both need to. I don’t know if I can do that in Providence. And I don’t know if you can, either.”

She took a long breath, relaxing a little more deeply into her pillow. She folded her hands in front of her and looked out the window. “Okay,” she said.

“Really?”

“You can go.”

“Thank you,” I said, and hugged her. “Thank you.”

Nantucket emerged between the sea and the lavender sky like a make-believe village. White church spires peeked above lush treetops. Sailboats dotted the harbor. On a sandy point, a lighthouse flashed green. When the boat docked, people on land waved to friends and family on the ferry. I didn’t mind that no one was waiting for me. I had it all planned out. I hadn’t told Jules. I was going to surprise her.
Surprise doubles happiness.
As I stepped onto the busy dock, the lowering sun left a path on the water. It had followed me here like a spotlight.