“But he marriedyou,” I said. “He wouldn’t have if he didn’t love you.”
She smiled gently. “You’re right, I’m sure.”
I was silent a long moment. “I don’t care about you giving your brothers your shares because of what it means for the company or whatever,” I said. “But—I get scared about what it means if youwantto give them your shares.”
“What do you mean, dear?” she said, gaze piercing.
I swallowed. “It would mean you and Grandpa aren’t okay. And if you’re not okay—that would mean you were unhappy.Areyou unhappy?” I asked, a little desperately.
She opened her arms, my not-very-physically-affectionate grandmother, and I moved to the couch and curled up next to her. “Oh, my dear. It’s not always easy to be happy.”
“I want you to be.”
She stroked my hair. “Sometimes I’m happy. It comes andgoes. It’s not something you lock in once, forever.”
“That sucks.”
“Yes.” She laughed, then sighed. “Inside, we’re all sixteen-year-old fools about love. We want it to be eternal. Unbending.”
“Maybe it is.”
“Maybe.” She looked out the window. “For the people who fell in love in the first place.”
I left, worried. If Grandma thought Grandpa had been in love with another woman but married Grandma anyway, she’d think her whole life was a lie, any happiness she had felt founded on falsehoods. But how could Grandpa have not loved her? The other woman had been a dream, part of his youth, not part of his life.
I retreated to my room to read the book on the Fersztenfeld family instead of ruminating on my own. Could it have been Sarah Barbanel—Sarah Fersztenfeld—who loved a sailor once? A woman who, like Grandma, hadn’t been born a Barbanel but had married into the family. A woman who might have been happier as someone else.
I’d been so focused on the lovers being young. I’d wanted it to be Josephine or Louisa—and I’d even rather it had been Shoshana setting aside a lover to marry someone new. Not another story of a full lifetime confused and unhappy. I wanted to know that the woman who’d lost a lover had found happiness at the end.
I skimmed the intro pages, the tiny font set closely together. The Fersztenfelds had moved from Germany to New York at the turn of the nineteenth century. They set up a clothing shop and had five children, the first of whom was Sarah. She was described as the wittiest and most headstrong of the daughters. At seventeen, she was sent to finishing school in Boston. No more mention was made of her until she resurfaced as the bride of Marcus Barbanel of Nantucket.
Headstrong. Like her second daughter, Josephine.
I unearthed the scrap of napkin I’d scribbled notes on.
1819: ships make it to Hawaii (seashells)
1850s/60s: photography shows up (no need for painting!)
1813–1845: Rosemary whaling
1845: Rosemary sinks
In 1845, Sarah would have been forty-one. She’d arrived on Nantucket at age twenty-two, in 1826. The dates worked.
Had Sarah known her sailor before she arrived on Nantucket and married Marcus, or had she met him after? She could have been a new, scared bride. Or a young mother, or a harried woman with three children pulling at her skirt. Did she maintain the affair for twenty years, until the ship sank? Did it last only a season, or half a decade?Not for a very long time, she’d said aboutknowing anyone on theRosemary, but by then she’d already been married for two decades.
It was so much easier for me to think the girl who had hidden away the chockpin and the shells and the painting had been a girl my age, still trying to figure her life out, still unsure what made her happy. It hurt more to think it might have been Sarah Barbanel, an adult, a wife, and a mother. I wanted to think by the time you grew up, you knew what made you happy. But maybe no one did.
Had Sarah resented her marriage to Marcus? Had she wanted to escape it, had she seen Golden Doors as a prison? Why had she married Marcus in the first place? Had resentment grown or dissipated?
Did Grandma resent her marriage? Did Grandpa?
God, I wanted to talk to Tyler. I wanted to tell him about Sarah and Marcus and the sailor. I wanted to talk to him about Grandma and Grandpa. I wanted... him.
But it was easier to think about other people’s wants and desires than my own, so I called a convocation of older cousins, summoning them to my room for privacy’s sake. Noah and Abby, Ethan and David and Oliver, and Miriam.
“I think Grandpa needs to do something,” I said. “To fix things.”
