Nantucket Sisters (5 page)

Spooked by their own thoughts, they shriek and run down Front Street, past all the small rose-covered cottages and their hollyhock and seashell gardens. Breathless, they hide behind a fence covered with old lobster buoys, giggling.

“I left the bread on the bench!” Maggie exclaims.

“Let’s go back and get it.”

“All right. He should be gone now, anyway.”

They walk around the last cottage to Broadway, and amble down the narrow one-way street, back toward the Sconset Market.

The red pickup truck noses around the corner, roaring and coughing like a dragon.

“It’s him!” Emily screams.

Shrieking, the girls dash between two cottages, pressing themselves into someone’s outdoor shower. Bravely they make their way back to the market bit by bit, hiding behind hydrangea bushes, darting from house to house, covered with goose bumps and wild with an exultant fear.

The loaf of bread lies there, innocent and passive. Maggie picks it up and links her arm through Emily’s.

“Ready?” she whispers. “Let’s run.”

Before they take a step, Ben zooms up out of nowhere on his bicycle, slamming to a stop next to them. Both girls shriek.

Ben looks down his nose at them. “Freaks.”

“No, Ben,” Emily says, her voice low. “We’re being chased by some guy in a truck.”

Ben studies Emily. “I doubt that,” he scoffs, then, surprisingly, continues. “But just in case, I’ll walk home with you.” He climbs off his bike and begins to walk it.

“Oh, thanks, Ben,” Emily says.

“Oh, thanks, Ben,”
Maggie echoes snarkily, her eyes narrowed suspiciously as she looks at her best friend looking at her brother.

As they walk along the shady lanes, Emily confesses, “We’re probably being silly. We’ve been reading Edgar Allan Poe.”

“Have you read Sherlock Holmes yet?” Ben asks.

“Not yet—” Emily begins.

“But we’re going to!” Maggie interrupts bossily.

Emily glares at Maggie.
You talk about books with Tyler!
she wants to point out, miffed that Maggie butted in on her conversation with Ben. Before she can gather her wits to come up with something to say to him, Ben swings his leg over his bike and pedals away without another word.

At the end of the summer, only a few days before the Porters leave the island for New York, Maggie tells Emily her mom is going to marry Thaddeus Ramsdale.

“Do you like him?” Emily asks.

“I think so. Yeah, I do. He makes my mom happy. And his place is awesome, Emily, you’ve got to see it.”

With her mom’s permission, Maggie and Emily bike along the Polpis Road to Thaddeus’s farm. Dropping their bikes by the house, they run over the rolling moorland toward the harbor. Small stars of yellow, pink, white, and violet flowers glint along the narrow path winding through the sandy heath. When they reach the water’s edge, Maggie thumps down the length of the wooden dock, grins over her shoulder at Emily, and dives into the water with her clothes on. Laughing maniacally, Emily follows. The shock of cold water exhilarates them even more—they dive deeper and deeper, then explode to the surface, spewing water like whales.

Later, they lie flat on the dock, drying off beneath the steady lamp of the sun, almost dozing in the heat.

“I have an idea,” Maggie begins, “but I don’t know if it will work …”

Emily sits up. “What? Tell me!”

“Let me show you.”

She leads Emily over the grass to an old boathouse. Inside, the floor has been swept clean and Maggie has scavenged some of Frances’s sprigged blue cotton to tack up over the window. She’s dragged down an old wooden cable spool to use as a coffee table and some boxes to use as seats. On a hook that once held rope, Maggie’s hung a clouded mirror.

“How awesome is this.” Emily walks around the space with a big grin.

“I call it Shipwreck House,” Maggie confides shyly.

“Why?” Emily protests. “All the shipwrecks took place on the ocean side of the island, not here on the harbor side, plus there haven’t been any shipwrecks for about a hundred years.”

“I know that!” Maggie’s tone is sharper than she intends, but she’s on the defensive. “It’s just that when I’m here, I’m cut off from the rest of the world.”

“Okay?” Emily draws the word into a question.

Maggie lets it all go. “I’m writing a book.”

“Can I read it?”

Maggie hesitates. Seeing the light in Emily’s eyes, she rushes on: “I’ve only just started. I know it’s about a mermaid who can come out onto land but only at night, and a boy who becomes a sea horse, but only during the day.”

“Ravenna,” Emily whispers.

“What?”

“The mermaid’s name should be Ravenna.”

Maggie starts to object, then pauses. She repeats the name, tasting it, judging. “Cool. So I think the story is during the day they swim together, swirling and flipping and arching up from the water,
laughing and having fun, and at night, when they’re both human, they talk and talk, walking the beach or sitting together, hidden away from the rest of the world in Shipwreck House. But they don’t know how to find a way to be together
always
.”

Emily asks, “Can they talk to the fish?”

“I don’t know. I hadn’t gotten that far.” Maggie flaps her hands like her mother does when she’s talking. “I’ve got more babysitting to do, and school starts in a week, and I don’t know when I’ll have time to write. But this place is so …” She can’t find the right word.

“Atmospheric!” Emily offers.

“Right.” Maggie puts her hands on her hips, assessing the space. “I’ve got plans to fix this place up. Just wait till you see it next summer!”

“Maybe I can help write it,” Emily suggests cautiously.

Maggie twists her mouth, surprised at the offer. “Maybe you can.”

In the fall, Frances McIntyre marries Thaddeus Ramsdale. Thaddeus isn’t much of a churchgoing man, so he asks the minister of the local Unitarian church to perform the ceremony on the boat dock at the back of his land.

Thaddeus wears a good gray suit and a starched white shirt, and has been to the barber to have his beard and hair trimmed. He looks very nearly civilized.

Frances wears a romantic dress of pale cream and a ring of fresh violets and lilies of the valley in her upswept hair. She buys Maggie a new blue dress for the occasion, and matching sandals; the morning of the wedding, Frances twines pale pink baby roses through Maggie’s dark mane. Ben grumbles and groans like he’s being tortured, but agrees to wear a new blue button-down shirt and khakis, although he refuses to have his hair cut.

It’s a small wedding party. Thaddeus’s mother, Clarice, is there,
her pale face shielded from the sun by a straw hat banded with ribbons and flowers. Maggie’s intimidated by Clarice, who appears strict and distant with her ramrod-straight posture and a talent for silence that rivals her son’s.

Frances’s two best friends, Sylvia and Bette, attend with their husbands, and Maggie’s friend Delphine comes, because Maggie felt it would just not be right to ask Tyler, who probably doesn’t have any decent clothes for a wedding anyway. Frances told her children they were allowed to invite one friend each, but Ben didn’t invite anyone.

After the ceremony, everyone gathers at the house. Frances and Maggie have cleaned it until it’s mirror-bright, each crystal glass catching and reflecting the light of this bright autumn day. Clarice, who loves to cook, has made a six-tiered cake and brought champagne, and on this occasion, Ben and even Maggie and Delphine are allowed a glass.

After they move into Thaddeus’s house, Frances has no time to sew for her customers. She’s too busy whipping the place into shape. She pays Ben and Maggie a dollar an hour to carry Thaddeus’s accumulated junk out of the house. He won’t allow it to go to the dump, but he does agree to let them store it in one of the barns.

Starting with the kitchen, Frances clears the rooms, scrubs the windows and wooden floors, paints the woodwork, buys new furniture or makes slipcovers for the furniture that remains, runs up curtains and drapes, and turns the place into a home.

At last Maggie has a bedroom she’s proud of, decorated exactly to her specifications, with yellow walls and glossy white trim, a daisy bedspread and curtains, and two entire walls of shelves that Thaddeus built to contain all her books.

Ben wants nothing done to his room at the end of the hall, even though the wallpaper is faded sprigged flowers. “And don’t come in my room when I’m not here,” Ben growls at his mom, who retorts,
“Fine, I’ll just throw your clean laundry on the floor outside your cave.”

Maggie discovers she likes having lots of space between herself and her increasingly grisly brother. She even explores the scary attic, crouching under the eaves when the wind howls, making the old boards creak as if they’re alive.

At dinner one night, Thaddeus remarks in his gruff, gravelly voice, “So you’ve been exploring the attic, Maggie.”

She freezes, her fork halfway to her mouth. Is she in trouble?

“See anything you like up there?” he asks.

Still wary, she nods.

“Make a list for me,” Thaddeus tells her. “I know you’re fixing up the old boathouse as your own place, and it seems to me a lot of those castoffs in the attic might be useful to you.”

Maggie’s eyes widen. “Really?” From the corner of her eyes, she spots her mom smiling. “That would be awesome! I’ve found an old gateleg table and a couple of chairs I’d love to have.”

“They’re yours,” Thaddeus tells her. He chews awhile, thinking. “I believe an old sofa’s up there, too. Stained and clawed up from the animals …”

Maggie’s almost in tears of joy. “I’d love to have that old sofa. But it’s too heavy to carry to the boathouse.”

Thaddeus chuckles, sounding like a boat engine rumbling. “Don’t you worry about that. Your brother and I can carry stuff down to the yard, load up the truck, and drive it there for you. Carry it in, too.”

Her throat has clumped with excitement. “Oh, thank you, Thaddeus.” Turning to her brother, she adds, “Thanks, Ben.”

Ben rolls his eyes.

“Ben,” Frances admonishes calmly, “be nice. You’ve already fixed up your lair in the old barn.”

Ben flinches, alarmed.

“Now, now,” Thaddeus says, “don’t look so anxious, son. Your
mom and I haven’t been up to the loft and we have no intention of doing so. I know every kid needs a private hideaway. Lord knows I did. We won’t violate your privacy. Or yours, Maggie.”

“Thank you,” Maggie whispers. She’d like to throw her arms around Thaddeus in a grateful hug, but she’s still a little intimidated by him.

“You’re most welcome,” Thaddeus tells her, and his smile is as warm as a hug.

Some winter nights the power goes out all over the island for hours at a time. Then Thaddeus builds a roaring fire in the living room, and Frances lights lots of candles, and they shut the door to the cooling air in the hall and settle on the floor around a board game. Ben loves Scrabble. Maggie prefers Clue.

While the dog snores on the sofa and the cat drowses in the wing chairs, Thaddeus teaches them to play poker. Maggie finds it very satisfactory, somehow, the people on the floor, the animals on the furniture. She becomes even more fond of Thaddeus because of this, and because of the way he makes her mom smile.

Thaddeus is changing Ben, too. He picks Ben up after school and takes him along on jobs, and when he’s not working somewhere else, he’s got Ben out at one of the barns with him, pounding nails or sawing wood.

By summer, Ben doesn’t look like a boy anymore. He’s shot up tall, and so gawky and lean that his leather work belt, crammed with hammers and pliers and screwdrivers, is always sliding down his hips. His black hair is pulled back into a short ponytail, his zits have disappeared, and his jaw is peppered with bristles. Beneath his black velvet eyelashes, his eyes are a dark flashing blue, a blue jay’s wing.

And he’s nicer. He smiles at Maggie. He thanks his mom when she hands him a basket of freshly laundered clothes and praises her cooking. His grades and teachers’ comments couldn’t be better.

Maggie’s glad, of course, and yet she feels oddly abandoned. Ben is suddenly so much older. His voice is deep, his muscles hard, his eyes inscrutable.

Maggie’s changing, too. She’s twelve, only months away from being a teenager. She’s eager for that, but also frightened.

Part Two

Nantucket Glossy

CHAPTER FIVE

Six Years Later

By the time Maggie turns eighteen, Thaddeus’s farm is her home and the sanctuary of her dreams. She dutifully does her household chores, keeps up with her homework, and babysits at every opportunity, even though the islanders never tip like the summer people. Otherwise, every free moment, she’s outside, irresistibly drawn to explore the twenty-five acres stretching from the Polpis Road to the harbor.

When it’s breezy, Maggie pulls on a fleece cap and an ancient sagging cardigan she wouldn’t be caught dead in anywhere else, and sets out, striding briskly over the Ramsdale land, stuffing her pockets with pebbles and arrowheads, each incline and hillock mapping itself into her memory through foot, leg, heart, brain. The sandy soil’s freckled with heather and bayberry, with bearberry and blueberry, with blue-eyed grass, thistles, daisies, and vetch. Small groves of
tupelo, oak, wild cherry, and pine grow hemmed around with brambles. She returns to the house after the sun sets, navigating her way through the dark as if she has eyes in her feet, each rock and tuft a star for her internal compass.