Belonging (54 page)

Now Pat came to Joanna, arms outstretched.

“Let me take him for a while,” she said, reaching for the baby. “I used to see him every day and now I never get to. I don’t want him to forget me.”

“I think he needs changing, and he’s fussing for a bottle,” Joanna said, relinquishing her baby into Pat’s arms.

“I’ll take him below into the cabin. We’ll fix him all up, won’t we, snookums?” Pat’s voice slid into the sweet goo of baby talk as she nuzzled Christopher’s downy head.

“Can I help?” Norie appeared in front of them, looking hopeful.

“That would be great,” Pat replied easily. “Here, you play with him and I’ll find his bottle and a fresh diaper.” The two women disappeared into the cabin.

Free of the weight and care of her son, Joanna rose and found Madaket, who now was standing at the bow of the boat. Joanna had asked the captain to take them out into the Sound and east, around Great Point, then down along the eastern shore of the island, so that they could see Joanna’s land from the water. Joanna slipped her arm around Madaket’s shoulders, and Madaket slid her arm around Joanna’s waist, and in companionable silence they looked out at the coastline. A gentle breeze made the long blue ribbon on Madaket’s hat flutter and sent the hems of Madaket’s and Joanna’s light dresses dancing.

They passed around the tip of Great Point, and then as the boat motored steadily south, they saw the scrubby green of tenacious beach plants and the angular gray
geometrics of houses rise above the long stretch of gleaming sand.

It was difficult figuring out just what land belonged to Joanna and what to other people, for from this view there were few markers. She recognized the houses on either side of her property, but there were no fences, and the wild moorland spread in an unruly tangle of roses and brambles and low bushes. The beach shone golden as far as she could see.

“Look,” Madaket cried, “there’s my garden!”

Joanna squinted, peering against the brightness of the setting sun. Up past the shore and the steadfast luxuriance of seaside roses and ivies and heathers, past the large irregular patch of damaged and blackened ground being reclaimed by wild vines and tough grasses, near the winding white ribbon of the gravel drive: there it was, Joanna could see it, Madaket’s garden, small rows of tender greens cultivated and flourishing in the midst of the patient and resilient earth.

All around the boat the ocean flowed deep blue, and above them the sky shone in layers of pure blue light. The straight, sleek stream of a jet cut a line of white overhead.

“That plane’s way up there,” Madaket observed.

“Yes. On its way to England or Europe. Maybe you’ll go there someday with Gardner.”

“Maybe.” Madaket shrugged beneath Joanna’s hands. “Maybe not. I’m not wild to go anywhere at all, really. You can travel and send me postcards.” She grinned. “And bring me presents.”

Joanna smiled in reply. “All right. That sounds good to me.”

She would travel. She had come to understand that was one place where she belonged, where she felt at home: in a state of movement, from one location to another, in a train or a plane or a Jeep or a taxi or a ferry, or even physically in her study as her mind voyaged along electronic thoroughfares. And her home base would remain here, with Madaket and Nantucket and Angelica’s memory and grave, as well as in New York, with Jake and Christopher, and also at the network, where recently she had reclaimed her office space, dumping a briefcase full of notes and papers and computer disks onto the welcoming wide surface of her lovely desk.

“Goodness!” Her new secretary, Louise, had goggled at the abundance of paperwork cascading before her. Then, to Joanna’s immense relief and satisfaction, Louise had actually rubbed her hands together in greedy anticipation. “What a lot of work
to do! We’d better get busy.”

The phone had rung then, and Joanna had heard a shriek in the hallway. The makeup man, Dhon, raced into the room, waving his hands, babbling euphorically. Since she’d been gone, he’d added a ring to his nose and dyed his hair green.

“Can you have lunch with me today? I have gossip that will make your ears hot.”

“You bet,” Joanna had laughed, delighted; at lunch they’d gossiped and giggled like schoolkids.

Why was she thinking of the network now? Joanna wondered as she stood in the fresh air on the deck of the cruise ship, with her arm around her daughter. The sun fell on their shoulders and into the sea so that the water seemed strewn with jewels. Beside her, Madaket’s face was lambent with light and emotion, and Joanna smiled to surmise Madaket’s thoughts: of Gardner, and their future, their wedding, their children, their home. I’m not like Madaket, Joanna realized. I don’t crave one single place on this earth to be mine. I don’t need one home—or rather, I need many. I need Christopher, and Jake, and Madaket, and the network and this island, and the vast, light-flung sky, and a vehicle to carry me through.

From the distance came the deep resonant rumble of the jet’s engines as it disappeared from their sight. In her euphoria, Joanna silently saluted the jet and thought that the very sound of movement was just one of the many things to which she belonged.

This book is dedicated to Jill Hunter Wickes with much love and gratitude for her literate, generous, reliable friendship.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank many people who helped with this book: Lisa Hale and Tony DiGioviny of the Massachusetts General Hospital Sumner Redstone Burn Center; Bruce Watts, chief of the superlative Nantucket Fire Department; Jane Bonvini of Nantucket Cottage Hospital; attorney Kevin Dale; Nantucket historian Nat Philbrick; Charlotte Maison and Janice O’Mara of the Nantucket Atheneum; Patrick and Riley Wynn, who reminded me how delicious babies and children are; the lights of my life, Josh Thayer and Sam Thayer; and Charley Walters, my husband, my home.

B
Y
N
ANCY
T
HAYER

Nantucket Sisters
A Nantucket Christmas
Island Girls
Summer Breeze
Heat Wave
Beachcombers
Summer House
Moon Shell Beach
The Hot Flash Club Chills Out
Hot Flash Holidays
The Hot Flash Club Strikes Again
The Hot Flash Club
Custody
Between Husbands and Friends
An Act of Love
Family Secrets
Everlasting
My Dearest Friend
Spirit Lost
Morning
Nell
Bodies and Souls
Three Women at the Water’s Edge
Stepping

Nancy Thayer is the
New York Times
bestselling author of
Island Girls, Summer Breeze, Heat Wave, Beachcombers, Summer House, Moon Shell Beach
, and
The Hot Flash Club
. She lives in Nantucket.

For updates, bonus content,
and sneak peeks at upcoming titles:
Visit the author’s website
nancythayer.com/
Find the author on Facebook
facebook.com/NancyThayerBooks

Read on for an excerpt from Nancy Thayer’s

Nantucket Sisters

Ballantine Books

It’s like a morning in Heaven. From a blue sky, the sun, fat and buttery as one a child would draw in school, shines down on a sapphire ocean. Eleven-year-old Emily Porter stands at the edge of a cliff high above the beach, her blond hair rippled by a light breeze.

The edge of the cliff is an abrupt, jagged border, into which a small landing is built, with railings you can lean against, looking out at the sea. Before her, weathered wooden steps cut back and forth down the steep bluff to the beach.

Behind her lies the grassy lawn and their large gray summer house, so different from their apartment on East 86th in New York City.

Last night, as the Porters flew away from Manhattan, Emily looked down on the familiar fantastic panorama of sparkling lights, urging the plane onward with her excitement, with her longing to see the darkness and then, in the distance, the flash and flare of the lighthouse beacons.

Nantucket begins today.

Today, while her father plays golf and her beautiful mother, Cara, organizes the house, Emily is free to do as she pleases. And what she’s waited for all winter is to run down the street into the small village of ’Sconset and along the narrow path to the cottages in Codfish Park, where she’ll knock on Maggie’s door.

First, she waves back at the ocean. Next, she turns and runs, half skipping, waving her arms, singing. She exults in the soft grass under her feet instead of hard sidewalk, salt air in her lungs instead of soot, the laughter of gulls instead of the blare of car horns, and the sweet perfume of new dawn roses.

She flies along past the old town water pump, past the Sconset Market, past the post office, past Claudette’s Box Lunches. Down the steep cobblestoned hill to Codfish Park. Here, the houses used to be shacks where fishermen spread their nets to dry, so the roofs are low and the walls are ramshackle. Maggie’s house is a crooked, funny little place, but roses curl over the roof, morning glories climb up a trellis, and pansy faces smile from window boxes.

Before she can knock, the door flies open.

“Emily!” Maggie’s hair’s been cut into an elf’s cap and she’s taller than Emily now, and she has more freckles over her nose and cheeks.

Behind Maggie stands Maggie’s mother, Frances, wearing a red sundress with an apron over it. Emily’s never seen anyone but caterers and cooks wear an apron. It has lots
of pockets. It makes Maggie’s mother look like someone from a book.

“You’re here!” Maggie squeals.

“Welcome back, Emily.” Frances smiles. “Come in. I’ve made gingerbread.”

The fragrant scent of ginger and sugar wafts out enticingly from the house, which is, Emily admits privately to her own secret self, the strangest place Emily’s ever seen. The living room’s in the kitchen; the sofa, armchairs, television set, and coffee table, all covered with books and games, are just on the other side of the round table from the sink and appliances. In the dining room, a sewing machine stands on a long table, and piles of fabric bloom from every surface in a crazy hodgepodge. Frances is divorced and makes her living as a seamstress, which is why Emily’s parents aren’t crazy about her friendship with Maggie, who is only a poor island girl.

But Maggie and Emily have been best friends since they met on the beach when they were five years old. With Maggie, Emily is her true self. Maggie understands Emily in a way her parents never could. Now that the girls are growing up, Emily senses change in the air—but not yet. Not yet. There is still this summer ahead.

And summer lasts forever.

“I’d love some gingerbread, thank you, Mrs. McIntyre,” Emily says politely.

“Oh, holy moly, call her Frances.” Maggie tugs on Emily’s hand and pulls her into the house.

Maggie acts blasé and bossy around Emily, but the truth is, she’s always kind of astounded at the friendship she and Emily have created. Emily Porter is rich, the big fat New York/Nantucket rich.

In comparison, Maggie’s family is just plain poor. The McIntyres live on Nantucket year-round but are considered off-islanders, “wash-ashores,” because they weren’t born on the island. They came from Boston, where Frances grew up, met and married Billy McIntyre, and had two children with him. Soon after, they divorced, and he disappeared from their lives. When Maggie was a year old, Frances moved them all to the island, because she’d heard the island needed a good seamstress. She’s made a decent living for them—some women call Frances “a treasure.”

Still, it’s hard. It isn’t that kids made fun of Maggie at school. Lots of kids don’t
have fathers, or have fathers who live in different houses or states. It’s a personal thing. The sight of a television show, even a television ad, with a little girl running to greet her father when he returns from work at the end of the day, or a bride in her white wedding gown being twirled on the dance floor by her beaming, loving father, can make a sadness stab through her all the way down into her stomach.

Plus, her life is so cramped by their lack of money.

When a friend asks her to go to a movie in the summer at the Dreamland Theater, Maggie always says no, thanks. She can’t ask her mom for the money. In the winter, when friends take a plane off island to Hyannis where they stay in a motel and swim in the heated pools and see movies on huge screens and shop at the mall, they ask Maggie along, but she never can go. She
hates
the things her mom makes for her out of leftover material saved from dresses she’s sewn for grown women. Frances always tries to make the clothes look like those bought in stores, but they aren’t bought in stores, and Maggie, and everyone else, knows it.

Frances
never
makes her brother Ben wear homemade stuff. Ben always gets store-bought clothes—and nice ones, ones that all the other guys wear. Their mom knows Ben would walk stark naked into the school before he’d wear a single shirt stitched up by his mother. Ben’s two years older than Maggie, and bright, perhaps brilliant—that’s what his teachers say. Everything about him’s excessive, his tangle of curly black hair, the thick dark lashes, his deep blue eyes, his energy, his temperament.