“What are you doing?” he asks, suddenly sitting up straighter when I make the mistake of resting my hand on the shelf’s edge,not even near anything. “Okay, here is the first rule: Only I touch the old books, and only if necessary.” He stares at the other shelves, the ones full of boxes and crates. “Actually, maybe just check with me before you touch anything you’re not sure about. Which should be everything.”
I nod very seriously. “So then I probably shouldn’t have opened that glass display case in the back and scribbled my name on the parchment inside with crayons?”
He gives me a patronizing smile.
“Oh, and what if I need to sneeze but can’t find a tissue? It’s okay to keep blowing my nose on that ship log from thePerseverance’s Cry, isn’t it?”
Wren shifts his back to me and continues turning pages, but I swear he uses more force each time.
I want to ask how it’s going a few minutes later, but he seems grumpy enough for the both of us right now. And the more time I spend back here, the more I think I understand why. Glancing back at the Shelves, I think I’d be less than cheerful too if I had to stare at all this history, day in and day out, and yet know I’ll never get the chance to display any of it. Until I figured out what I was going to do about it. Wren, on the other hand, seems to have just accepted his fate without a fight.
I’ll never understand that.
I turn back to the pile of books I started. I’d thought I was bringing quite a bit to the table when it came to this place and its past. But being back here has shown me just how much I still need to learn.
I know my Nantucket history. I’d clean up if it were aJeopardy!category. But we’re just working on a theory about Kezia Gardnerat this point, and a vague one at that. I don’t have any proof that she wasn’t a smuggler.
And unfortunately, I’m not the only one.
For years, I thought my dad was the foremost expert when it came to Melville’s “elbow of sand.” He could recall obscure facts and quotes in an instant, spinning stories so vivid and persuasive that no one ever questioned him. Least of all me. But since finding his notebook I’ve realized his research practices left a lot to be desired.
The pages are a mess—snippets of quotes with no sources, shorthand that might as well be a secret code, and exclamation points scrawled in the margins like Dad was mid-conversation with himself. He also drew maps covered in rough sketches of coastlines that are unlabeled and so vague they might as well be doodles, and lots of ropes tied with sailor knots that I can’t make any sense of.
I’m not even going to think about how bad his handwriting is on top of all that.
I know he’d never justgiveme the answers. He’d expect me to work for them. But I thought he’d at least have left me more of a head start than this. I’ve been reading it for two weeks and it still feels like trying to decipher the thoughts of someone who never expected—or wanted—anyone else to follow them.
I glance at Wren, hunched over the notebook at the far end of the table. If anyone could help make sense of my dad’s notes, I thought it might be him. But the frown carved into his face tells me otherwise.
Finally, Wren snaps the notebook shut with enough force to make me jump.
“Well?” I ask, already bracing for the answer.
He exhales sharply, pulling his glasses off and dragging a hand through his hair before fixing me with a look that’s equal parts frustration and disbelief. “This isn’t research,” he says flatly. “This is... rambling. It’s like he had ideas faster than he could write them down and didn’t bother organizing anything.”
I stiffen, feeling defensive even though he’s not wrong. “There’s got to be something helpful in there. Somewhere.”
“Unless you’ve got some kind of secret decoder ring, this”—he holds up my dad’s notebook—“is practically useless.”
It’s crushing to hear my own thoughts echoed back at me. Wren is supposed to understand all this far better than I do, but he’s already calling it a lost cause after a few hours. “You’re telling me you can’t make sense of anything?”
“He keeps referencing the same number.” He squints, trying to read my dad’s awful handwriting. “Forty-three, over and over again. What does it mean?” He adds with dripping sarcasm, “You don’t know because, you guessed it, he never cites any of his sources.”
“We don’t know what it isyet.”
He spreads his arms wide as if inviting me to enlighten him.
I spread my arms too. “Well, I didn’t want to work with you for your sparkling personality.”
“Working out for you, is it?”
Yeah, great.Can’t wait for the part where I end up chasing another boat. “Look, if it were easy rewriting history, everyone would be doing it.”
“Or...” he prompts in an overexaggerated voice.
I swallow down a note of frustration. “There is information out there about Kezia, pieces of her story that nobody’s heard yet. Mydad knew it and I know it too.” I grab my dad’s notebook and flip to the end, where I tucked one of the last postcards he sent me next to my favorite photo of the two of us.
It’s all right here in this Faraway Land, the truth that no one else is compelled to search for. But we are, aren’t we, Lili?
