Nantucket Blue

Five





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.