Nantucket Nights (33 page)

You worry too much,
Arch said.

A rotund man wearing a Day-Glo vest, long pants, and a long-sleeved shirt in industrial blue, even on this sweltering day in June, motioned for Beth to drive off the ramp, following, though not too closely, the car m front of her. Seconds later Beth was not on the ferry anymore—not on the ferry, not on 1-95, not in a parking garage on East Eighty-second Street. She was on Nantucket Island. The rotund steamship man waved at her—(she could see
him mouthing, “Come on, lady, come on,” as if she were just another elegant housewife from Chappaqua,) but he didn’t know what had happened to her. He didn’t know that, along with the Pierre Deux bags and the expensive mountain bikes, they’d brought along the urn that held her husband’s ashes.

Beth’s forehead grew hot, her nose tingled. Here, again, were the tears. It was the new way she evaluated her day: On a good day she cried only twice, in the morning shower and before her Valium kicked in at night. On a bad day, a
stressful
day, it was like this—without warning, in front of the kids, while she was
driving,
in
traffic.
Tears assaulting her like a migraine.

“Mom,” Winnie said. She’d slept for most of the drive and the ferry ride, and now she gazed out the window as they cruised past the bike shops, the ice cream parlor, the Sunken Ship on the comer. The whaling museum. The Dreamland Theater. People were everywhere—on the sidewalks, in the stores, riding bikes, eating ice cream cones. As if nothing bad could happen. As if nothing could hurt them. Meanwhile, Beth negotiated the traffic surprisingly well at full sob.

“Mom,” Winnie said again, touching her mother’s leg. But what else could she say? Winnie pulled the neck of her sweatshirt up over her nose and inhaled. It was her father’s old, raggedy Princeton sweatshirt, which he’d worn often, sometimes to the gym in their building, and it smelled like him. Of all their father’s clothes, the sweatshirt had smelled the most like him and so that was what Winnie took. She’d worn it every day since he died, ninety-three days ago. Winnie tried to convince herself that it still smelled like him, but his smell was fading, much the way her father’s vivid, everyday presence in her mind was fading. She couldn’t remember the whole of
him, only bits and pieces: the way he loosened his tie when he walked into the apartment at the end of the day, the way he ate a piece of pizza folded in half, the way he’d fidgeted with a twig when he told her and Garrett the facts of life one warm and very embarrassing autumn afternoon in Strawberry Fields. (Why hadn’t her mother done “the talk”? Winnie had asked her mother that question a few weeks after the memorial service—now that Daddy was dead, certain topics could be broached—and Beth said simply, “Your father wanted to do it He considered it one of the joys of parenting.”) A whole life lived and all Winnie would be left with were snippets, a box of snapshots. She breathed in, listening to die atonality of her mother’s sobs as if it were bad music. The sweatshirt no longer smelled like her father. Now it smelled like Winnie.

The Rover bounced up Main Street, which was paved with cobblestones. Garrett shifted uneasily in his seat and checked for the hundredth time on the um, which was a solid, silent presence between him and Marcus. It was embarrassing to have
his mom losing it with a stranger in the car. Beth kept Garrett awake at night with her crying and he had a weird sense of role reversal, like she was the kid and he was the parent. The Man of the House, now. And Winnie—well, Winnie was even worse than his mother, wearing that sweatshirt every day since March sixteenth—every day: to school over her uniform, to sleep, even. And Winnie refused to eat. She looked like a Holocaust victim, a person with anorexia. And yet these two loonies were far preferable company to the individual sitting next to him. Garrett couldn’t believe their bad luck. The last thing Arch had done, practically, before his plane went down, was to invite Marcus Tyler to Nantucket— not for a week, not for a month—but for the entire summer. And since a dead man’s words were as good as law, they were stuck with Marcus.

Your father invited him to come along,
Beth said.
We can’t exactly back out.

Yeah,
Winnie said.
Daddy invited him.

Garrett tried to talk to his mother about it, using the most powerful words he had at his disposal, the words of their therapist, Dr. Schau, whom they all saw together and separately.

We need to heal this summer,
Garrett said.
As a family.

Your father invited him for a reason,
Beth said, though Garrett could tell even she wasn’t sure what the reason was, and Garrett called her on it.

We need to help those less fortunate,
his mother responded lamely.
Why is Marcus less fortunate?
Garrett said.
He

has a father.

You know why,
his mother said.

Because Marcus was the son of a murderer. Even as the Range Rover jostled up Main Street, Marcus’s mother, Constance Bennett Tyler, was locked up in Bedford Hills Correctional Facility because she had killed two people. Arch had been Constance’s defense attorney, and he’d gotten to know Marcus and like him. That was why Garrett shared the backseat with this huge black kid, this refugee from one of the most talked-about court cases in New York City in years. And because Marcus was the same age as Winnie and Garrett they had to be friends. Because of the tragedies in life that had converged on the four people sitting in this car, they had to join together. Empathize. It was the most twisted, unfair situation Garrett could imagine, and yet it was happening to him this summer.

Garrett glanced sideways at Marcus. Marcus was wearing an expensive-looking white dress shirt with
his initials—“MGT”—embroidered on the pocket. It was the kind of shirt one wore to brunch or a college interview, though it was inappropriate for seven hours of car travel. Marcus had been sweating the whole ride and now the shirt looked like it’d been plucked from the bottom of a laundry hamper. Marcus had shown up at their apartment that morning wearing a squeaky new pair of dock shoes, which looked so unlikely on Marcus’s feet that Garrett wondered if he’d worn the shoes to mock them somehow, to mock this trip to Nantucket. He’d taken the shoes off before they even
hit Connecticut and his enormous bare feet gave off an odor that nearly caused Garrett to gag. Before Garrett could dwell on the other aspects of Marcus’s appearance that bothered
him—his closely-shaved head, his heavy-lidded eyes that made it seem like he was always half asleep—Garrett realized that Marcus had his elbow on the um. He was using the um as an
armrest.
Garrett held no fantasies about the contents of the um—it was only ashes, another form of matter. There had been a few weak attempts at levity since the um arrived from the crematorium—one night, Garrett set the um at their father’s place at the dining room table—but Garrett didn’t believe the um in any way contained
his father. Only the remains of the body that once belonged to his father. Still, using the um as an armrest was
not
okay. Garrett glared at Marcus, but refrained from saying anything. They’d made it all the way from New York City without incident and Garrett didn’t want to start trouble now, when they were almost at the house. An instant later, as if reading Garrett’s mind, Marcus lifted
his oxford-clad elbow and Garrett moved the um into his lap, where it would be safe from further indignities.

Marcus was the only one who thought to offer Beth a tissue. She seemed genuinely grateful, turning her head so that he could see her try to smile. “Thanks, Marcus,” she said. She stopped crying long enough to blot her eyes and wipe the runny stuff from her nose. “Here it is your first time on Nantucket and I’m blubbering so hard I can’t point things out. I’m sorry.”

“S’okay,” he said. He’d gotten the gist of the place already: the gray shingled houses, the cobblestone streets, the shops with expensive clothes and brass lanterns and antique rocking horses in the windows. White people everywhere all excited about summer.

Beth stopped crying and put on her sunglasses. Marcus wasn’t sure what to make of the woman. He couldn’t tell if she was being nice to him because she wanted to, or because she felt she had to—if pressed, he would lean toward the latter. She spoke to
him like he was in nursery school. (At McDonald’s that morning for breakfast, with a pinched smile, “And, Marcus, what would
you
like? How about some pancakes?” As if he was too simple to navigate
his way around the menu.)

Marcus had met the twins twice before. The first time was when Arch brought them along to visit Marcus and
his. family in Queens. The twins had stood in the apartment looking around like they were on a field trip about poverty; he could almost hear them thinking, “So this is where it happened.” The second time Marcus met them was at Trinity Episcopal Church on East Eighty-eighth Street, at the memorial service for Arch. The twins’ father, Arch Newton, had been the gold standard of human beings (Marcus intended to use this phase in the book he was writing), the only white person in all of America who was willing to help save
his mother’s life. And for free—an expensive Manhattan lawyer who offered to defend Constance Bennett Tyler against the death penalty, even though everyone knew she was guilty as sin.

I’m going to help your mom,
Arch told Marcus.
I’m going to see that she gets the best possible defense.

Arch was there through the worst of it: the hot hours in the courtroom, the cold visits to Rikers, the reporters, the TV cameras, the disturbing photographs in the
New York Times,
especially the one of Candy’s body being carried from the building, all of her covered by a sheet except for her patent leather shoes, the shoes that, ironically, Constance had bought for her. They reprinted this photo a lot; it became the icon for the case. Every time Arch saw the photo, he tore it in half.
They love it because it screams, “Baby killer!”
he said. If it weren’t for Arch’s powerful, steadying presence—his defense less a legal term and more like a physical shield that he held over Marcus and his family—Marcus never would have made it. But then, on the evening of  March fifteenth, flying back from Albany, where Arch had traveled to meet with an attorney he knew who was close to the governor and might be able to speak out on Constance’s behalf, Arch’s plane crashed into Long Island Sound. Ice on the wings. It was a week before the trial was to start, and bizarrely, Arch’s death added an element of humanity that had been missing from the defense’s case; the media softened, hailing Arch as a hero for the common man, specifically, for a woman facing death row with no resources to fight it. Another attorney from Arch’s firm took the case to trial, which lasted only three days. The jury convicted Constance of one count of first-degree murder, and one count of second degree murder, but the judge spared her the death penalty, and nobody protested. It was as if Arch had taken the punishment for her.

Offering Beth a tissue was the least Marcus could do. Because what all four people in the car knew but nobody acknowledged out loud was that if Arch hadn’t been defending Constance, he wouldn’t have died. And so, Marcus
would
be a slave to these people if that was what they wanted. He’d haul out the garbage cans, he’d sweep sand off the porch, he’d rub oil onto their backs so they didn’t bum in the sun. Yes, he would. Before Marcus left New York, Ms father, Bo, said,
These people didn’t have to invite you, son. So be a big help, and make me proud.

As they drove out of town, the houses grew farther apart. Then Beth signaled left and they turned onto a dirt road. Bumpy. Dirt and sand filled the air, gravel crunched under the tires.

Marcus would offer to wash the car.

He saw the ocean—it was in front of them suddenly, glinting in the sun like a big silver platter. Beth shut off the air-conditioning and put down all four windows.

“We’re here,” she said. She pulled into a white shell driveway that led to a house—a big, old, gray-shingled house—which sat on a ledge overlooking the water.

“Whoa,” Marcus said.

Beth shut off the engine and climbed out of the car, raising her hands to the sky. “It takes my breath away every time. I feel better. Kids, I feel better already.”

Marcus stuffed his feet into his very uncomfortable white-person shoes, wondering if he should help unload the car, but before he could make a move, Winnie took his hand and pulled him to the edge of the bluff. “Look, Marcus. What do you think?”

Marcus thought he might be experiencing some kind of reverse claustrophobia. Because he felt queasy, unsettled, unable to place himself. He was used to the Elmhurst section of Queens, and Main Street, Flushing. He was used to dirty streets and bodegas that smelled like too many cats and the long line outside the yellow brick public health building on Junction Boulevard. He was used to She a Stadium and LaGuardia Airport—obnoxious Mets fans in their blue-and-orange hats crowding the subway cars, jumbo jets overhead at any given moment. He was used to sitting in the back row of the classrooms at Benjamin N. Cardozo High School so nobody could stare him down. He was used to a dark, low-ceilinged apartment that he shared with his father,
his sister LaTisha, and the belongings of his mother—her head scarves, her record albums, her knock-off Prada bag—things that now simply took up space because she would never be back to reclaim them. He was
not
used to this—a Range Rover with leather seats, a white shell driveway, a golden beach, the Atlantic fucking Ocean, not to mention people who were civil to him even though they knew
his mother was a murderer.

“It’s cool,” he said.

Winnie steered him toward the front door. “Come inside,” she said.

Beth pulled the key out from under the welcome mat.

“Has that been there all winter?” Marcus asked.

“It has,” she said. “And this is the last time we’ll use the key until we leave in September.”

“You’re kidding,” Marcus said. “What if somebody steals your stuff?”

Beth laughed. “That’s the beauty of this place. Nobody’s going to steal our stuff.”