Nantucket Sisters (3 page)

Emily considers this. She wants to please her mother. “I met Tiffany
Howard,” she reminds Cara. “Her parents invited you for cocktails.”

“Yes, sweetie, and we’re so proud of you for that. We want to meet more people like Tiffany and her family, you see?”

Emily doesn’t understand but she nods as if she does. These few quiet moments within the aura of her mother’s glow are precious.

Maggie has always been aware that her friendship with Emily is lopsided. Emily always comes to Maggie’s house. She never invites Maggie to her enormous posh house on the ’Sconset bluff. Emily explained she can’t have friends over because her father works at home on his investments, but during the winter Maggie has walked around the outside of the house, peeking through the closed curtains over the windows, and she knows the house is so big and has so many rooms that Emily’s father couldn’t hear them if they played drums in Emily’s bedroom.

Emily also confessed that her mother’s a snob. “It’s all about who belongs to what club and who went where to school,” Emily said once when she was mad at her mother. “Honestly, she doesn’t even know what this island is
like
!”

Today the two girls biked to the moors to have lunch by a hidden pond they can reach only by squeezing through the bushes along a deer trail. Water lilies blossom across the surface of the pond. Egrets and herons daintily step among the grasses sprouting on the island in the middle of the pond.

“She’s such a phony,” Emily says. “She’s so pretentious.” She shoots a quick glance to be sure Maggie knows that word. They’ve made a pact to learn all the words they can, to use
precise
words, and when they read a book, they meet afterward to discuss the new words they’ve learned.

“She’s very beautiful,” Maggie reminds Emily. She’s only met
Cara Porter a few times, when Emily’s mother picked Emily up to take her somewhere, and Mrs. Porter has always been cold and aloof, like Emily said, a snob. But she
is
beautiful, and her clothes are fancy, not homemade, like those of Maggie’s mom.

Maggie’s mom is such a disorganized mess, Maggie’s too embarrassed to even complain about her.

Maggie changes the subject. “See that boulder over there? Tyler calls it Neptune’s Nephew. It oversees all the fish and other creatures in this pond.”

“Oh,
Ty-ler
,” Emily whines, and kicks a pebble into the water.

“You’re jealous of Tyler,” Maggie singsongs, elbowing her friend gently. Maggie may not have money, but she does have this island they both love, and she does have a friend who thinks about the island the way Maggie does.

“Am not,” Emily snaps. “He’s funny looking.”

“He’s already read all of
The Once and Future King
.”

“Well.” Emily sags. There’s no topping that. T. H. White’s fantastical tale has proven too complicated for Emily, while parts of it—the swans—enchant her and Maggie both.

Maggie experiences a tingle of satisfaction as Emily pouts. When Maggie’s not babysitting or helping her mother with housework, and when Emily is at her yacht club, Maggie bikes to the moors. Tyler can often be found in his secret den near the hidden pond behind Altar Rock. Poor Tyler, who now has buck teeth! Part of every summer, he goes to visit his father, who lives in California. Tyler’s parents are divorced, and he lives with his mom, who makes peculiar jewelry out of paper clips and screws.

Tyler’s gotten kind of strange, in a cool way. He’s obsessed with the island’s Indians, the Wampanoag, who’ve all died off by now. He’s developed his own bizarre mythology, a kind of Native American meets the Brothers Grimm. Wildflowers are different families of elves; shrubs and bushes are spirits and sprites and gnomes; the
ponds are cousins of the ocean; and the ocean’s Queen; the island, King. It’s a complicated scheme that grows more complex every time Maggie sees Tyler, but it’s clever and surprising and fun.

If she bikes to the moors and Tyler’s not there, she still calls out greetings as she pedals past. “Hail, Lord Boulder! Salutations, Princess Pond!”

In a weird way, having Tyler for a friend partly makes up for Maggie not having a father and for not having any money. Emily’s friends can sail and play tennis, but they don’t seem to have the spark of imagination that makes life much more vivid and colorful. Tyler’s wicked smart, too, much smarter than Maggie and Emily put together.

For just a moment, Maggie enjoys Emily’s jealousy. Then she nudges her with her shoulder. “Emily. You know you’re my best friend. You’re my Nantucket sister, you dope.”

Suddenly Emily’s face is sunshiny. “You’re mine, too.”

Maggie smiles back. “Did you bring your list of words? Let’s go over them.”

Emily digs in her backpack and pulls out her small pink notebook with the gold peacock on the cover. “Spell ‘delirium.’ ”

Maggie takes a breath and begins.

That night, a summer storm swats the McIntyres’ little home like a cat with a toy. The next day, a newly broken gutter hanging just above the front door pours water down their backs, sending Ben off with a face like thunder and Maggie back into the house, dancing with the shock of the cold. The next night, through each long hour, gusts of wind slam the gutter against the wall.

The next morning, Maggie finds her mom already on the phone at breakfast, begging a friend for a recommendation for someone, anyone, to fix the gutter. Frances is in one of her mad moods, black
hair snarled, pajamas buttoned crooked, eyes red. Emily’s mother would never look this way. Of course, Emily’s mother’s house would never have a broken gutter.

“I didn’t sleep one second all night!” Frances wails to her friend Bette. “I’m going to lose my mind!”

“I’ll fix the gutter,” Ben offers when she has hung up the phone.

“Don’t even think about it!” Frances snaps. “All I need is for you to slice your arm open with a piece of metal gutter pipe and fall off the ladder and break your leg!”

Ben’s face darkens, and Maggie understands—when will their mother stop treating him like a child?

All that afternoon, Maggie dreads going home after babysitting. It’s raining again, and the wind tosses and howls.
She
can curl up with a book, but what can Ben do? It would be misery to bike on the moors in this weather. She understands why Frances is so cranky, but if she doesn’t get off Ben’s back, he’s going to blow worse than a nor’easter.

She pedals down the lane to her house and drops her bike inside the fence. To her surprise, the gutter’s fixed. Racing into the cottage, she’s brought to a standstill by a heavenly aroma—Frances made Toll House cookies! When Ben skulks in at dinnertime, his mom calls, “Help yourselves to the casserole. I’ve got to keep working on this slipcover.” So Ben and Maggie watch television while they eat, and Frances doesn’t even yell at them about that. It sounds like she’s humming as she sews.

Very strange.

The following day, Maggie and Ben come home to hear clanking noises in the bathroom. They peer in: the toilet’s completely dismantled
and a man who looks like a Viking warlord has his hairy red arms twisting down inside the tank.

He is Thaddeus Ramsdale. A large, beefy man with a face nearly as red as his beard and eyebrows and wiry hair, he wears dirty, indestructible canvas work pants, dusty work boots, and faded flannel shirts.

When he says he’ll have to come back the next day, Frances
twinkles
at him.

He likes their mom.

Their mom likes him.

Maggie thinks:
Ick
.

The Ramsdales are native islanders. Frances jokes that they arrived in the New World before the
Mayflower
, having dismantled their British houses to build their own private ship, and blowing the sails westward across the Atlantic with their very own breath.

Frances also says Thaddeus Ramsdale’s land-poor. He lives by himself in a dilapidated old house on his farm on the Polpis Road. He works as a handyman, whenever he’s in the mood to work. If he wakes up one morning wanting to scallop or fish or hunt or fiddle around in his barn, that’s what he does. Thaddeus’s mother, Clarice, widowed and haughty, lives on the island, in a once-majestic old house on Orange Street.

Thaddeus comes to dinner once, twice, and then several times a week.

He doesn’t talk much, but he’s
there
, a big burly man smelling of sawdust and machine oil, who eats even more lasagna than Ben
does, and whose brief, simple words invariably bring a smile and a brightness to Maggie’s mom’s face. His presence alters the delicate chemistry of their little triangular family life.

Maggie and Ben don’t talk about him, because they don’t talk to each other much these days, but they suspect things are getting serious when Thaddeus begins to bring them presents.

They’re wonderful presents. He gives Ben a Swiss Army knife, and shows him how to use it. He gives Ben a catcher’s mitt, a snorkel mask, and flippers.

Thaddeus brings Maggie books. Some are picture books, and he always takes care to tell her he knows she’s too old for them, but these are special. And they are.
Time of Wonder
, about an island in Maine, and
The Little Island
, and
Treasure Island
, and
The Swiss Family Robinson
. Thaddeus didn’t attend college and he’s not impressed by anyone who has, but Maggie soon realizes this doesn’t mean he’s not smart. In his own way, he’s brilliant. He knows everything about plants and animals, the land and the sea, and he reads, too, almost as much as Maggie.

Maggie approves.

CHAPTER THREE

“Listen to me, Emily,” her father says one morning as she eats breakfast with her parents on the patio. The green lawn lies like a quilt to the edge of the cliff and the blue ocean sparkles beyond. “This is very important, please pay attention.”

It’s so rare for him to talk with her, she sits up straight and looks as intelligent as she can.

“The neighbors tell us there are vandals in the neighborhood.”

“Vandals?” She tastes the word; it has an appealing kind of Robin Hood ring.

Cara hurries to reassure her. “They’re not hurting people, don’t be afraid of that. But people’s possessions are being destroyed. The tires on Roger Johansen’s Mercedes were slashed. Someone put dog feces in Tigger Marlow’s mailbox—this is not funny! It’s disgusting, it’s a cowardly form of violence, Emily, as you’ll understand if it ever happens to you.”

“They come at night,” Emily’s father says. “You’ll be safely asleep
by the time the little bastards get up to their tricks, but if you see anything …”

“Or,” Cara continues, making her voice sweet, “if the little McIntyre girl happens to mention anything, perhaps some of their friends expressing ill will for the summer people—we expect you to tell us.”

Emily stares at her mother, confused. Is she being asked to spy on her friends?

“You understand?” Cara raises her voice.

“Yes, Mother,” Emily replies, although she’s not sure she does.

The Porters are invited to a fund-raiser for Sandy Willard’s political campaign. The Willards are holding a lobster bake on the beachfront of their Dionis house. This is a
very important
event, Cara tells Emily at least a trillion times. This man might someday be the president of the United States.

So Emily allows Cara to tie her hair with a red, white, and blue ribbon, and she wears the white sundress and matching sandals Cara bought for the party. With her long blond hair, she looks pretty, really, not beautiful like her mother, but pretty. It’s not that often she’s invited to her parents’ gatherings, and secretly, she’s looking forward to it. Her life has become a walk on a tightrope between childhood and maturity. Maybe here she’ll find something that will make her want to cross over into adulthood. After all, she is eleven.

But the party turns out to be, for Emily, what Cara would call “the most dreadful bore.” The lawn is crowded with men in navy blazers and patchwork trousers, while thin women with face-lifts and false smiles and flamboyant Lilly Pulitzer dresses prattle and coo like a crazy jungle where the birds have gone bonkers.

After Emily meets her hosts and politely expresses her gratitude
for the invitation, she’s set free to wander around looking for anyone her age. Near the house, a group of nannies herd a bunch of toddlers. Stepping inside, she finds all the other kids gathered in the family room—four boys younger than Emily and three girls older. They glance at Emily dismissively before letting their bored gaze trail back to the television screen.

Emily collapses on one end of the sofa and stares at the television, too, until two hours have passed and she can’t stand it anymore.

By then her parents and the other adults are well oiled and relaxed by liquor into peals and guffaws of laughter at just about anything anyone says. Her father’s face is crimson, and her mother’s weaving as she stands, a fresh glass in her hand.

Emily asks if she might go home—it’s almost eleven o’clock. Sure, they say, call a cab, they’ll see her in the morning.

Yawning in the taxi in spite of the heavy metal music blasting from the radio at volcanic volume, Emily rides through the night to her home. She tosses the driver a bill and steps out onto her driveway.

The cab roars off, leaving Emily alone in a sudden expanse of stillness. She can hear the slight sigh of the waves, but no birds sing, they’re all tucked away for the night. The yards on the cliff are large, the houses on either side dark. Hydrangea bushes loom like people crouching.

Her parents won’t be home for hours. Too bad Maggie’s in bed. It would be fun to prowl the streets with her. They could pretend they were Nancy Drew and Bess, peeking in windows.

Suddenly, three people bolt from the privet hedge three houses down. Footsteps and muffled laughter race toward her. It’s three teenage boys—it must be the vandals! Seized with a terrified delight, Emily stands paralyzed as they draw near. She doesn’t stop to think that these guys could hurt her.

She doesn’t hesitate when she recognizes one of them.