One
Lili
The briny air takes on a suddenly sweet note as I step off the ferry. Not that my stomach pays any attention, choosing instead to clench as that final swell of sea lurches the gangway beneath my feet. Sweat slicks down my neck as I battle with what’s left of my breakfast, urging it to stay put. It’s touch and go as descending tourists jostle my shoulders on the left and right. I push my damp, blonde curtain bangs to the sides, and lift my face to a sun so bright it looks white against the watercolor-blue sky. I don’t care if it costs me a few extra freckles, I just need to see anything that is not the Atlantic Ocean.
I don’t get seasick in a cute, movie-montage way. There’s no dramatic moment of leaning over the railing, wind in my hair, staring mournfully at the horizon. The past two hours have been a nauseous, sweaty, miserable ordeal, punctuated with more than one bout of public vomiting.
Throwing up in public: 0/10, do not recommend.
I clutch at the railing as we disembark,webeing me, the vomit queen—an actual name given to me by an evil little boy with curlybrown hair on the ferry with us—along with my ten-year-old sister, Goldie, who chased said evil little boy off by threatening to have me aim at him the next time I threw up, and our mom, whose olive complexion hadn’t been as green tinged as mine, but who felt seasick enough that all she’d said in response was “Lili, don’t get sick on any kids, okay?”
I think she was kidding. I’d been too nauseated to really tell.
More people pour past me, so many, and even more crowd around the pier. I forgot what it’s like on Nantucket during this time of year.
Off-season the island has a population of around twelve thousand people, but that number swells to over fifty thousand during the summer. For an island only fourteen miles long and less than a third of that wide, it’s a lot of people.
And after seven years away, I get to be one of them again.
That thought is a sliver of sunshine piercing through my cloud of nausea.
Seagulls cry overhead and a wooden dock far older than my seventeen years creaks underfoot. In the distance, the familiar clang of the harbor bell sounds, and my fingers stretch automatically, searching for the hand that used to hold mine all those years ago.
A hand does find mine, not the one my memory longed for, but a familiar, comforting one all the same. Mom gives it a squeeze and me a knowing glance before letting go.
“Feels the same, doesn’t it?”
It really does, and though we both sigh, we couldn’t sound more different. Despite the unpleasant journey here, when I inhale, a mix of sweet honeysuckle, fresh bread, and salty kiss of ocean in the air makes me smile. Mom’s expression turns resigned as shefocuses on the burnt French fry scent of diesel coming from the ferry and the fishy seaweed wrapping around the wooden pilings of the dock.
I reach forherhand now and squeeze. “It’s just us this time. And whatever we want this summer to be.”
She gives me a resolute nod, patting our joined hands with her free one before striding forward to catch up with Goldie.
That nagging sense of guilt pricks at me before I can shove it away. I had promised Mom over and over again that we would make brand-new memories here to chase away the old ones that clung to her. So as much as I’d like to linger by the harbor, hopping along the cobblestones with my sister and doing more than window-shop in all the picture book–esque stores with names like Faraway Chocolate, the Petticoat Café, and the Sunken Ship, I become the one marching Goldie straight past the wooden placards hanging above colorful awnings as we walk the couple blocks to our car rental.
“Later.” I gently steer her by the shoulders. “Don’t you want to see the house?”
Mom brightens at this. “Oh, I hope it has roses climbing all over it.”
The picture we’d seen had indeed shown beautiful pink and white roses all but swallowing the tiny gray shingled house, but I bite my lip, remembering the words of caution from the property manager that the house had been somewhat neglected since that rather idyllic photo was taken.
“We can plant more if it doesn’t. It’s ours now so we can do whatever we want.”
Mom usually renovates and stages houses to appeal to currentmarket trends rather than any personal preferences we might have, but unlike the houses she flips, we won’t be selling this one. It’s ours, or at least Goldie’s and mine, and I don’t ever intend to let it go.
My still-hesitant stomach is thankful for the smooth drive outside Nantucket Town to the house, no starts and stops since there aren’t any traffic lights on the island. I find myself gripping the seatbelt as the tires crunch over the pea-graveled driveway, curving around huge silver maple trees that nearly block out the sky in places, until the branches thin and the sunlight pours down over a single house up ahead.
When Mom puts the car in park, we all stare at the house that I’d begged, pleaded, and implored them both to spend our summer at.
No one gets out of the car.
Goldie scrunches her nose. “All in favor of going back to Arizona right now, raise your hand.”
She’s being dramatic; the house is just old. There are about eight hundred pre–Civil War homes on the island, and while this one isn’t reaching the level of the 1687 Jethro Coffin House in terms of hauntability, it’s going to need more than a few new rose bushes to make it look inviting to the living.
“Is this why Dad died? He found out he was gonna have to live here?”
I suck in a breath at my sister’s careless words. She’d been only four when Mom and Dad divorced and he moved back permanently to his childhood home of Nantucket. He never did get the hang of consistent calls or visits, so while I pored over the postcards he sent, being so young, Goldie always cared more about thepictures on the front than the words on the back. She never went through the kind of grief that I did when he died six months ago.
