Nantucket Blue (6 page)

AS I WALKED TO THE HOUSE
, I imagined lifting the scallop-shell knocker—Jules’s eyes huge at the happy surprise—how she might do that little jump-flutter-kick thing, then link her arm in mine and pull me to the two-seater swing on the porch, another spot well documented in the Clayton family photos.

I got there in no time at all. The house was exactly as I’d imagined it. Rose-covered trellis, soft inviting lawn with a garden, bushes with big flowers lining the front of the house, a wraparound porch with beach towels hung over the railing to dry, two bicycles leaning against the garage, a wood-paneled Wagoneer parked in the driveway (the land yacht, Zack called it).

I knocked. Jules answered the door right away. Her hair was up and she had on makeup.

“Ta-da,” I said, and stretched out my arms.

“What?” She blinked. She wore new earrings. Dangly ones.

“It’s me, Cricket,” I said. I wondered if in her grief she’d forgotten who I was.

“I know,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m living here. I got a job and a place to stay and everything!” I said, holding my arms open like Jules might jump into them. But she just stood there in the doorway with a blank face. I put my hands in my pockets. “I’m a chambermaid.” God, it sounded so weird.

“Oh.” She stepped outside and shut the door behind her, switching on a light that hung above the door. “Where?”

“The Cranberry Inn?” Jules shook her head, didn’t know it. “It’s so close. It’s practically around the corner.”

“Wow.” She smiled, but it looked like it hurt.

“So this is the famous Nantucket house,” I said, taking a few steps backward. The damp grass brushed my ankles. The light bulb buzzed inside its glass walls. Dark moths fluttered around it. The sky above was filled with stars. I breathed in the night air. “It’s beautiful.”

She nodded and sat on one of the benches. I sat across from her, tucking my hands under my thighs. She was quiet, so I just started talking. I told her about the bus ride to Boston and the Lucas kid. I told her about Gavin in his hippie pants, and Liz’s accent. I told her about my room at the Cranberry Inn, the slanted ceiling, the tiny dresser and the little window, the front door that was never locked. I told her that it took me less than five minutes to get to her house from there. I talked so much my mouth was dry; she didn’t say anything back.

“I completely understand why you can’t have any houseguests this summer,” I said. “I mean, of course. But I figured this way I could be here for you. If you need me at any time, you just call out my name, that kind of thing.”

“Thanks,” she said, staring past me. She crossed her legs and pulled out a cigarette. I tried not to act surprised. We’d only smoked once before. It was in her basement. It felt terrible, like breathing exhaust from an old school bus, and it made me nauseous and lightheaded. Nina smelled the smoke from the garage, where she’d been doing one of her projects—something with a sawhorse. She ran into the basement saying
no
,
no
,
no
, and waving a broom in a way that was unintentionally hilarious.

Later, she’d sat us down for a serious chat, showing us pictures on the Internet of black, shriveled lungs and faces so wrinkled they looked like they were made of corduroy. I hadn’t had a cigarette since then, but Jules was smoking like she knew how, tapping her finger on the end so that ash fell like snow into a Coke can. The beach towels on the porch rail stirred in the breeze.

“Want one?” she asked. I shook my head.

“Where’s your dad?” I asked.

“At the Club Car.” I nodded as if I knew what this meant. I heard someone laughing inside the house—a girl.

“Who’s here?” I asked.

“Zack and this girl.”

“Who is it?” As far as I knew, Zack hadn’t ever really had a girlfriend. There was Valerie, a French girl he’d met on a ski trip to Vail, but after a few weeks of video chatting, she’d sent Zack a dramatic e-mail and moved on. He wouldn’t eat french fries for a month, and all French words were banned from the house, including
omelet
,
perfume
, and
champagne
.

“This girl out here,” Jules said. She dropped her cigarette into the Coke can. It hissed.

“Cool. Hey, have you seen Jay?” I asked. “He said he was a lifeguard at Surfer’s Beach.”

“Surfside,” Jules said. “And, yeah, I saw him last night.”

“How’d he look?”
Was he with anyone? Did he ask
about me?

“Hot,” she said with a quickness and certainty that made me want to remind her how much I liked him.

“I can’t believe how close we came to kissing at Nora’s. It was amazing.”

“Must be something about a whore’s house.”

“I can’t wait to see him. I don’t know if I should text him, or if it’s better for me to just run into him.”

“I’d wait to run into him,” she said.

“You think?”

She nodded. “Anyway, I’m really tired. I think I’m going to hit the sack.”

“Well, all right,” I said, standing up. I hadn’t had a puff of the cigarette, but I had that lightheadedness anyway. I turned to head down the path that led back out to the street. “So I guess I’ll see you tomorrow?”

“Sure,” Jules said. I opened the gate to leave.

“Are you hacking butts again, Jules?” I turned around. Zack was leaning out a first-floor window. He squinted in my direction. “Hey, who’s that?”

“It’s Cricket,” I said, and waved. Seconds later, the screen door was snapping shut behind him. He was barefoot and his hair was sticking up, like he hadn’t taken a shower since he’d come home from the beach. Jules stepped out of the way as he walked toward me in a half jog. Had he grown an inch in the last week?

“What are you doing here?” He gave me a quick, hard hug. He smelled like sunscreen and salt water. “I thought you weren’t coming. I thought you had a babysitting job in Providence. When did you get here? Are you staying with us?”

“No, remember what Dad said?” Jules said, standing several feet behind us. Zack looked confused.

“I got here tonight. I got a job at the Cranberry Inn, and I’m staying there.”

“Oh, I’ve seen that place. Don’t they have famous muffins?”

“I don’t know,” I said, smiling at the thought of Zack keeping up with the Nantucket muffin gossip.

“What?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“Are you coming to the party in ’Sconset tomorrow?”

“What party?”

“It’s not a party,” Jules said. She was now silhouetted in the doorway, and I could see Nina in her shape so well that I felt a light pressure on my chest. “Just a few kids who come every summer, getting together.” I wondered if this meant that Jay would be there. I had a feeling it did.

“Fine. We’ll call it a mixer,” Zack said to Jules. “I didn’t know you had such a penchant for precision.”

“Don’t be a dick,” she said.

“Penchant?” I asked with raised eyebrows.

“I’m a Word Warrior,” he said. That was the SAT vocabulary-building program everyone had. Zack took a pen from his pocket. Then he took my hand, uncurled it, smoothed it, and wrote on my palm:
15 Sand Dollar Lane.

“I don’t know where that is,” I said.

“Just take Milestone Road.”

“Can I walk?”

“No. I’m getting a ride from work. But text Jules. She’ll take you.” We turned to her, but she was gone.

“EVERYONE EATS BREAKFAST
in the garden, except when it rains,” Liz said as she expertly pulled silverware from the dishwasher and wiped it with a checkered dishrag. “Then we put them in the dining room.”

“Got it,” I said, and sipped my coffee, the first cup from the percolator I’d just been shown how to set up and get started (fill with water, twenty scoops in the filter, plug it in, flip the switch). I sipped some more, hoping I’d start to feel more alert soon. Liz pulled a stack of little bowls from the dishwasher and handed them to me. “There’s some jam in the fridge. Put it in these ramekins.”

“Okay, no problem,” I said, noting the new word
ramekins
, which sounded like a species of rambunctious munchkins, and took another gulp of coffee.

Gavin took a fresh batch of blueberry corn muffins out of the oven, and their scent made my cheeks pucker with desire and my stomach growl so loud that he and Liz laughed. Gavin gingerly plied a muffin from the tin, placed it on a saucer, and slid it down the counter with just enough force that it landed right in front of me. “You might want to let it cool,” he said. But I couldn’t wait. I tore off the crusty top, smeared it with butter, and stuffed it in my mouth. I hadn’t finished the last bite before I took another.

“Come on, piglet,” Liz said, “we have to wipe down the chairs in the garden.”

I ate another bite, grabbed a clean rag from the stack under the sink, and followed Liz outside. Eight wrought-iron tables with matching chairs sat nestled in dewy green grass, awaiting sweethearts. They were surrounded by hedges, roses, and bushes that looked like they had blue pom-poms on them. A gray rabbit hopped across the lawn and into a bush with pink berries, right next to the window I’d propped open with the Emily Dickinson book.

“You didn’t have any visitors last night, did you?” Liz asked as she wiped off the tables.

“No,” I said. Gavin emerged with some clippers from the back door and was headed down the brick path, past the gurgling fountain, to the rosebushes, no doubt to make an arrangement for the buffet table. “What do you mean?”

“Don’t scare her,” Gavin said as he passed, smelling faintly of patchouli oil.

“It’s only fair that I warn her about Mr. Whiskers,” she said.

“Do you have a cat here?” I asked.

“Better. A ghost,” Liz said. “An old sea captain with a great, bushy beard.” She stuck out her chin and gestured as to the bigness of the beard.

“I’ve worked here eight years and I’ve never seen him,” Gavin said as he inspected a rose for clipping.
Huh. I thought
Gavin owned this place.

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” I said. I never have. It always seemed like there was too much in real life I was supposed to be afraid of: drunk drivers, rapists, unwanted pregnancy, HPV, undercooked chicken, toxic shock syndrome, and a bad reputation. I just couldn’t add the unseen and paranormal to my list. Besides, there was always someone with one eye open sliding the thing across the Ouija board, someone’s brother outside the tent making the footsteps or wagging the flashlight under his pimply chin.

“But he’s heard the ghost,” Liz said. “Heard the door latch opening and closing.”

“Could’ve been the wind,” Gavin said, moving on to the pom-pom flowers.

Liz looked up from the chair she was drying. “Opening a latch?”

“Liz, if you scare away Cricket like you did Rebecca, I won’t hire anyone else. You’ll be stuck doing this alone.”

“Twice the tips for me, then,” she muttered.

“Have you actually seen this ghost?” I asked Liz.

“No, but one of the guests saw him. Standing by the stairs in an old-fashioned mac, he was.”

“That’s a raincoat to you and me,” Gavin said.

“He looked in her direction,” Liz continued, “but it was more like he was looking
through
her, and then he turned around very slowly, and as he walked up the stairs she saw he was floating, for”—she slowed down her speech—“he had no feet.”

“Ew,” I said, a little creeped out. “But wait, was she high?”

“Good question,” Gavin said. “Yes, probably. Also, Liz didn’t hear this story directly. It was told to us by the woman’s friend, who was stoned out of her gourd at breakfast.”

Liz waved him away. “Anyway, I was in a gallery on Main Street, and they were doing a portrait show about old Nantucket.”

“Don’t tell me,” I said, wiping the heart-shaped chair backs. “There was a picture of a bushy-bearded captain.”

“Don’t worry about the backs,” Liz said. “You just need to do the seats. Anyway, yes. And under it was a grim account of how he’d fallen overboard, his legs tangled in ropes. He thought he’d seen a mermaid and was calling out to her. I’ll spare you the details, but I will tell you this.” She folded her arms, pausing for dramatic effect. “Lost his feet at sea.”

I laughed aloud.

“Fine, don’t believe me,” she said, and inhaled sharply, her nose in the air. “But don’t come crying to me when you bump into a gimpy, transparent sea captain on your way to the loo.”

Gavin turned to Liz, a bouquet in his hand. “It’s almost seven, we have two couples trying to make the seven-thirty boat, and you still need to set up the creamers and the napkins. Could you
try
to focus?”

Liz plucked a rose from the bouquet and stuck it behind her ear, turned on her heel, and sashayed inside.

“Don’t listen to her,” Gavin said. “Nantucket is full of people who know someone who’s seen a ghost, but I have yet to meet anyone who actually has.”

“I’m not worried,” I said, checking to make sure the address Zack had written was still on my hand after handling the damp rag, and thought, At least not about ghosts.

BY THREE O’CLOCK
, I was ready to throw in the cleaning rag. Vacuuming was no big deal—kind of satisfying to push the heavy thing (it was mustard yellow and dated back to the 1900s) across the floor and leave those stripes on the carpets. And dusting was a piece of cake. Changing the beds wasn’t so bad, either; people had been sleeping in them for two days at the most. But I hated cleaning the bathrooms. There were certain smells, certain unmistakable dribbles and marks that inevitably evoked mental pictures of what had left them. The more I tried to block the pictures, the faster and stronger they came on. A few times, I thought I was actually going to barf.

And on the seats, in the bathtub, on the floor, and in the sink was hair. Hair, hair, hair! It was everywhere, and nine times out of ten, it was not the kind that grows on the head. I couldn’t help but wonder what people did to shed so much in this region. Were they combing it daily, letting the hair just fall where it may? Did everyone do this but me?

The best part was checking the little tip envelopes on the dressers. Liz had drawn cartoon pictures of whales on them, with smiles and water spouting out their blowholes. Usually there were just a few dollars inside, but sometimes there was a five or a ten. We’d made nineteen bucks apiece in tips, and on top of my twelve dollars an hour, I’d made almost a hundred bucks in one day. It was no eight hundred a week, but it wasn’t so bad, either. Liz warned me that the tips today were especially good; we’d had a lot of turnovers.

“Don’t get too used to it,” she said. “Usually we’re lucky to get ten apiece.”

We locked the last door at three o’clock, and flipped a nickel we’d found in the hallway for the first shower. Liz snatched the nickel in midair and slapped it against the back of her hand. “Heads, I win,” she said. After her shower she was going to see her boyfriend, Shane, who worked at a bar on Jetties Beach. “He’s twenty-three. An older man,” she said as I followed her down the back steps to where our rooms were. “A tall, dashing Irishman who gives me free whiskey sours, calls me ‘sexy delicious,’ and reads Yeats in his free time.”

Liz had a definite swagger. She was not a skinny girl; her boobs were big and unwieldy, and she had mom thighs with cellulite. She was wearing short shorts and a baby T anyway. She sauntered down the steps like a perfect hottie even though her pudge was poking out the top and bottom of her shorts. I felt a little rush of admiration for her confidence. I hated to admit it, but I couldn’t imagine not caring what people thought about how I looked. It almost scared me to contemplate it.

“Shane sounds rad,” I said, using a classic Jules word. We passed through the hallway where the supposed ghost liked to hang out, pausing in front of our bedroom doors.

“He’s an absolute dream,” Liz said, and went into her room.

I wondered what Jay read in his free time. I didn’t know much about Yeats, but I knew it was impressive that Shane read him. If Shane called Liz sexy delicious, I bet they were having sex. It was too ridiculous a thing to say to someone if you weren’t. I wondered if Jay and I would be having lots of sex by the end of the summer. I wondered what he’d call me. Was I sexy delicious? I worried I wasn’t. Partially it was the word
sexy
, which just seemed funny, not real, not connected to an actual way of feeling.

“You want to meet me at the beach later tonight?” Liz asked, poking her head into my room without knocking. “It’s really fun.”

“Thanks,” I said. “But I’m going to a party.”

“Suit yourself,” she said. “But Shane has friends.” I doubted I’d be interested in anyone over eighteen.

When Liz was done, I took a long shower, using so much soap that it was a mere sliver at the end of twenty minutes. Then I took a two-hour nap.

I texted Jules twice and she didn’t respond. She’s busy, I thought for the first hour, wondering if she’d gotten her job back at Needle and Thread, one of the high-end boutiques on Main Street. She’s definitely mad at me, I thought around seven o’clock, when she didn’t respond to my second text. I walked to the pizza place near the ferry because I wasn’t sure what else to do for dinner. After I finished my pizza, I called her. I felt desperate, a feeling I hated. Jules didn’t pick up. “Can I get a ride to the party with you?” I said to the dead air of her voicemail.

It was almost nine by the time she texted me back.

There’s no room in the Jeep
.

I felt a flash of anger, could almost hear it, like a sizzling pat of butter on a skillet. What the hell, I thought. She’s blowing me off so hard that I’m getting windburn. There was another text:

Sorry
.

I gave the phone the finger, then took a deep breath. You’re thinking like a desperate person, I said to myself. You’re thinking like a Nora. Maybe there really is no room in the Jeep.

Besides, I didn’t do anything wrong, I told myself as I clasped a necklace around my neck and squeezed into my nice jeans. I unpacked a green tank top that had once made a random guy stop me on the street to tell me my eyes looked like emeralds. I pinched my ears with delicate gold hoops. I blew out my hair and swiped on shimmery lip gloss. I dusted my cheeks with some blush.

No room in the Jeep, no problem. Gavin had said it would be fine for me to borrow one of the inn’s bikes as long as a guest wasn’t using it, and ’Sconset was only six miles away by Milestone Road. It would probably only take me a half hour at the most. I chose a blue bike with a big basket. It looked kind of old, but it was the only one with a low-enough seat. As I rode the bike out of the garden, Gavin waved to me from the kitchen window, where he was cooking ratatouille for his chiropractor girlfriend, Melissa, a glass of red wine in his hand.

The moon was so bright, I had a shadow. There was something freeing about the whole thing, about getting myself there without waiting for someone to take me, about the air, which felt soft and smelled like hay, and listening to the invisible insects. Jeeps and mopeds sped past me, some of them blasting music, but there were long stretches of road that were quiet, just me, my breath, my shadow, and the sound of the wheels whirring on the pavement. The best part was that I wasn’t afraid of being alone at night. This is why people come to Nantucket, I thought. So they don’t have to be afraid at night.

I coasted around a rotary; ’Sconset was its own little town with a coffee shop, market, and the smallest post office I’d ever seen. I was in front of some kind of country club, the flags out front snapping in the wind. I remembered that I needed to bear right to get to Sand Dollar Lane. It wasn’t long before I found it. It was pretty obvious where the party was, from the sounds of kids talking. The conversations were clear even a few houses away.

I hopped off of my bike and walked it down a driveway. My legs were wobbly and I was thirsty. My heart was beating fast, snapping like that country club flag, and my pretty green tank top was sticking to my back. I wished I’d brought a sweater. I wanted to cover up. As I was looking for a good place to put the bike (against the house? Inside the half-open garage?) I stumbled, my ankles suddenly soft as custard, and dropped the bike. It bounced off of a rock. Shit. I picked it up and placed it gingerly against the house. Pull it together, I thought, and applied more lip gloss. You’re fine.

I heard Jules’s laugh, her unmistakable “ha,” and a chill went through me. I should’ve gotten back on the bike and turned around, because I actually did know then, the way you just know sometimes, what was about to happen. You didn’t need a worry doctor to know that’s what jelly legs are all about. But for some reason, even though it was blasting as loudly as a mattress commercial, I just couldn’t hear the truth. So I straightened up and walked right into that party, practically begging for it.