With Tyler’s phone blasting “Sevivon,” we wove tinsel around banisters and tacked silver-sprayed leaves over paintings and mirrors. We filled vases with ornaments and sprigs of eucalyptus spray-painted white and placed dried bouquets of blue baby’s breath in slim glass containers. We sprinkled dreidels and gelt on the hallway tables.
Next up came the great room. I studied old photos of Grandma’s house. “Let’s move the stuff off the fireplace mantels— we can put them on the bookshelves—and then we can try to replicate this picture. See?”
He knelt down by the drink cart again. “More brandy first, though. For creativity.”
“For creativity, shouldn’t we be drinking absinthe?”
He grinned up at me, doling out two more fingers of amber liquid. “Do you have absinthe?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I just likeMoulin Rouge!” I poured myself more Godiva, feeling pleasantly buzzy. “Game on.”
We lined each mantel with a blue table runner, then placed the prettiest dreidels on top, along with candles and ornaments.We scattered more decorations around the room and strung up sparkling Stars of David along the French doors. Nothing looked as classy as Grandma managed, but it certainly looked festive.Hanukkah, oh Hanukkah, come light the menorah. Let’s have a party; we’ll all dance the hora...
With everything satisfactory, I verified the existence of frozen pizza and preheated the oven. Then I glanced at the menorah. Technically, I should have lit it at sundown, but better later than never. “Are you, um, cool, if I light the candles?”
“Course.” He watched as I slid two candles from the box and placed them in the menorah. “I thought it was the first night?” he said hesitantly. “Why two candles?”
I felt overly on display. “There’s one candle for each night, and this candle, the shammash”—I nodded at the slightly raised candleholder—“is used to light the rest.”
“How come?”
Oh no. Questions. I dredged my brain on the off chance answers had been caught in the nooks and crevices over the years. Surely I’d learned this in Hebrew school?Because you dodidn’t seem like a sufficient answer. “It’s like—the other candles are too important to touch a match to them. So you light one candle, the servant candle, and it lights everything else.”
“Does it matter what colors you use?” He nodded at the white shammash and blue candle.
“No, or only for fun.” Arranging the candles was a big deal inmy family. I was into patterns, Grandma liked alternating, and Noah was exacting, though one year he did all orange candles on the eighth night, and I still hadn’t forgiven him. But to be fair, we always had more orange candles left over than any other, and we had to get rid of them somehow.
Tonight, I’d picked white for the shammash and blue for the first night. Classic. “Okay, um. I’m going to... sing. You don’t have to pay attention or anything.”
He frowned at me. “Why wouldn’t I pay attention?”
Now I felt weirder and more flustered. “No reason. I don’t know.”
“Cool.” He hesitated, hands in his pockets. “Should I do anything?”
“Um. Nope.” I struck the match and fire bloomed out of nothing, accompanied by the faint scent of char. “Barukh ata Adonai,” I sang, intimately aware of my thin, reedy voice alone in the silence. Usually, my voice blended with the voices of two dozen family members, collectively sounding strong and true and right, instead of my singular weak and hesitant voice. Still, I carried on, warbling on some notes, breaking on others. “Eloheinu melekh ha’olam, asher kid’shanu b’mitzvotav v’tzivanu l’hadlik ner shel Hanukkah.”
I touched the match to the shammash, then the shammash to the first candle. My family always raced to light all the candles and replace the shammash before we finished the prayer. Bythe seventh and eighth nights, this meant stretching out the last words of the song like a college kid with quarters. But on the first night, the lighting could be leisurely, no rush, plenty of time.
With a practiced flick, I extinguished the match and set it on a small plate, breathing in the nostalgic scent and watching the lights flicker. In the Hanukkah story, the oil lasted for eight nights instead of only one. The Hanukkah miracle. The Festival of Lights.
A massivecrackboomed through the house, and everything went dark.
CHAPTER FIVE
With the great room plunged into darkness, the two candles flickered boldly. Now instead of seeing our faces reflected in the large French doors, we could see snow still falling, piling high in navy-blue drifts while the moon and stars shone bright.
“Man.” Tyler sounded slightly impressed, like he was pleased nature had pulled one over on us. “I bet a power line went down.”
“Do you think the heat’s still on?”
“Yeah, why wouldn’t it be?”
“I don’t know! Your heat wasn’t.” I padded over to the doors, mesmerized by the snow—and nervously aware of Tyler in a way I’d almost shaken off in the past few hours. What a difference darkness could make. “What if our families can’t get here tomorrow, either?”
“Then I guess we’ll have to forage in the pantries of the Nantucket elite for food. Speaking of.” He glanced at the oven, the planes of his face cast into stark contrast by the candlelight, as intense as a Caravaggio painting.
“Oh no.” The oven’s power had been cut; so much for pizza. “Let’s see what else we can eat.”
