Summer Secrets (13 page)

It is ridiculous that he seems to think I am pulling a geographic. Shaking my head at him with what I hope is a derisive look, I get up to go to the bathroom and take a break.

And once outside, in the hallway, I realize I really don’t want to go back in. I don’t want to listen to those people anymore. I don’t want to hear their stories or stand around the room at the end holding hands and saying the Serenity Prayer.

What I really want, what I really,
really
want, is a drink.

No, Cat, I tell myself. I don’t. I don’t want to let Jason down. Don’t want to let myself down. But nor do I want to listen to any more of this crap, and it is all starting to sound like crap. I whisper to Jason that I’m not feeling well, slip out the door, and make my way home.

Eleven

I am beginning to realize, at the ripe old age of twenty-nine, that one of the problems I have in life is a tendency to completely romanticize how things will be in the future, which inevitably leads to disappointment because it’s pretty much never, never, what I expect.

Not that I dwell on the bad stuff particularly. If anything, I tend to move on pretty damn quickly, but sitting on the plane as I make my way over to meet my family on the island of Nantucket, I’m alternating between thinking about Jason and how disappointed I am that things haven’t worked out the way I was so certain they would, and imagining what it is going to be like having my dad pick me up at the airport, meeting my sisters, being embraced by this new family.

First, Jason. He came to see me before Mum picked me up to take me to the airport. In a very short space of time he has become someone I know I can absolutely rely on. He said he’d drive me last week, although there’s no way my mother would allow anyone else to take me when this trip is so momentous, and even though I know we’re just friends, I’m also pretty sure I’m not imagining the chemistry between us. And even though I know he will not do anything about it, at least not until I’m sober a year, my God, how am I supposed to wait a year? And more to the point, how is he? I know something’s going to happen soon, and something should happen soon, and once it does, there’ll be no turning back.

So in my fantasies, I had thought the great send-off might be the time something would happen. I could see him helping me out to my mum’s car with my suitcase, putting it down next to me and hugging me—which isn’t unusual, because we’re big huggers—and as we pull apart he stands, a little closer than usual, just gazing down at me. Then maybe he reaches up and tucks a strand of my hair behind my ear (I told you I had a tendency to romanticize), and there’s this jolt in my stomach as the smile leaves his face, and then he’ll shake his head with that twisty smile he does, and his face will move closer, and although he knows this is a bad idea he just won’t be able to help himself, and then we’ll be kissing, and he won’t want me to leave.

Of course, I will leave, and then he’ll miss me so desperately that by the time I get back from Nantucket he will realize he has fallen madly, but madly, in love with me, cannot live without me, and the rest of my life after that will be one great big fairy tale, lived together, in sobriety and love.

Then there’s the second part of my fantasy, which is landing in Nantucket to have my family all come to the airport to meet me, maybe with homemade welcome signs, which I would find completely mortifying but would secretly be thrilled about.

My dad’s going to take me in his arms and I’m going to feel safe, and exactly where I belong, and Ellie and Julia are going to be instant best friends, we’re going to sit in the car on the way to the house and none of us are going to be able to stop talking, unable to believe how alike we are, and the rest of my life will be … well. Yes. You probably already guessed, one great big fairy tale.

I have to say, the farewell with Jason didn’t quite go as planned. He’d been haranguing me slightly about making sure I find meetings on Nantucket, but honestly, there’d been so much to do I hadn’t actually got round to it. I did find a number for some AA service place in Massachusetts, and I had been meaning to call to find out more info, but life got in the way, and I had looked it up online, but I forgot to go back and revisit the site, and all in all it hadn’t been a priority. Even though he apologized this morning and said he wouldn’t ask anymore, that it was up to me and he couldn’t control what I did or didn’t do, I could tell he was pissed off.

All of which didn’t feel very good. I hate that feeling of knowing someone is unhappy, particularly the man you are pretending is your new best friend when actually you have a giant crush on him.

We chatted, obviously, as I raced around my flat, making sure I had my passport, my money, but it felt perfunctory, and a little forced. When my mum phoned to say she was on her way, he apologized. He said he was just nervous for me, that going away on a big trip, particularly one with such an emotional component, was a much bigger deal than I seemed to realize, and he was worried I’d fall off the wagon and lose everything I’ve gained in the weeks we’d spent time together.

I reassured him I was going to be fine, and things were easier after that, but our hug good-bye did not involve any simmering, longing looks, or tucking hair behind an ear, or anything other than a completely platonic hug and kiss on the cheek.

Yes, I was disappointed.

So now I’m on the plane replaying all of that stuff, and when I’m bored of that, I’m projecting meeting my family, but I’m realizing I really have to stop, because there’s absolutely no point, and all that I’m doing is setting myself up for disappointment.

I pull out the book I bought at the airport and, with great effort, manage to stop the squirrels in my head for the next hour.

I love flying. I love airplane food, in compartmentalized trays. I even love puffy synthetic sponge cakes for dessert that taste of little other than chocolate that has been artificially manufactured in a factory somewhere. I love gloppy sauces on chicken breasts, and dull, overcooked green beans.

I love that you have absolutely nowhere else to be other than captive on a great big soothing plane. I love how friendly the stewards and stewardesses are. I love that sometimes they hand out ice cream. I love that you can step onto a plane not knowing anyone and emerge a few hours later with a new best friend.

And I love that they keep pouring wine. At least, I did, before I met Jason. I shake my head when the stewardess offers wine the first time around, as the people on either side of me have a glass of white.

Oh, for God’s sake. Why would I not have a glass of white wine on a plane? It’s tantamount to orange juice. I’m on holiday. Ridiculous that I wouldn’t celebrate a trip with one glass of white wine. It’s only one. Maybe two. Three at the most, but hardly three, in those little plastic cups. Three of those might equal one and a half glasses of wine. Hardly excessive.

“Excuse me?” I call down the aisle to the stewardess, who turns, bottle poised in hand.

“Actually, I will have a glass of white wine. Thank you.”

The guy sitting next to me smiles his approval and gives me a “cheers” when my glass is in my hand. I’m not becoming best friends with the guy next to me today, that’s for sure, but we raise our glasses before I let the cool wine slip down the back of my throat. It is more cloying than I would have chosen, but delicious nonetheless. It is the perfect addition to this flight; I have my book, my magazine, movies, and the task of stilling the fantasies in my head, which, I’m very clear, are to hide the fact that I’m actually nervous as hell. And I will take any distraction over my thoughts.

Because what if they don’t like me? What if we have nothing in common? What if they find my Englishness obnoxious? Or superior? Or alien? What if Brooks Mayhew turns out to be difficult? Or arrogant? Or drunk?

He doesn’t sound like he’s going to be any of those things, from our phone conversations. He doesn’t sound like he was ever any of those things, from what my mum has now told me about her summer with him, even though, as she kept pointing out, it was such a very long time ago.

I’m not going to think about it anymore. I’m just going to try to focus on the flight, the movie, the book, the food, the wine. I’m going to focus on getting to JFK and finding my connecting flight to the tiny airport on Nantucket. I’m going to try to focus on staying in the moment and not, absolutely not, allowing a single fear, or fantasy, to creep in.

Twelve

The flight is long, but feels short. Eventually I abandon all hope of distracting myself and give in to my thoughts. There is so much to think about, so much anticipation, it is all I can do not to get up every few minutes and tear up and down the aisle, just to get rid of some of the nervous energy.

I know a bit more about them all now, my father having written to me and told me about my long-lost family. I have learned that Ellie is twenty-seven, married to Robert, who is a banker. They live in New York, in a brownstone in Chelsea. They have two children, the light of his life—Trudy, a newborn, and Summer, who is four. Ellie is much more like her mother. She is frighteningly organized, heavily involved in the 92nd Street Y, where Summer goes to preschool. From Brooks’s description in his letters, she sounds, honestly, a little uptight, but obviously I’m not going to say that. They apparently hold lots of fund-raisers in their very lovely home, and she is an excellent mother. He says the place she really lets her hair down is Nantucket. Although plenty of her friends have summer homes on Nantucket, she chooses not to be part of the scene when there, leaving her New York airs and graces behind and reverting to the island girl she once was.

The younger daughter is Julia. At twenty-six she is, wrote Brooks, a free spirit. She wants to be a writer, but in the meantime is juggling a ton of jobs: a waitress at the Downyflake, cleaning houses, occasional bartending at the Anglers’ Club, and scalloping when she has a morning off.

For a few years she went over to Cape Cod for the summers. She grew very close to an English woman, Denise Holyoak, who lived in Boylston for most of the year, and Yarmouth for the summers. Denise loved gardening, the royals, and English chocolate, and apparently passed those loves on to Julia, who would help Denise in the garden, and beg her for stories of growing up in Rushden, England. I think of the Cadbury’s Dairy Milk bars in my suitcase—half for Julia and half for her to send to her friend Denise.

Julia struggles to support herself, he said, so he helps her. I went quiet when I read that. Not that there is anything in life I want that I don’t have, except perhaps a nicer car, and only because mine is always breaking down, but because she has someone to turn to. Of course, my mother would help me, financially or otherwise, if ever I asked her, but what would it have been like to have a father who took care of me?

I remember, when I was young, friends’ fathers saying they had to save up for their first car, and as soon as they had the money—scrimping it together from Saturday jobs and babysitting—the fathers would tell them that actually the car would be a gift, and they should keep their money for something else. My father never actually got that last bit. He told me I had to save, and I did, confident that once I actually had that fourteen hundred pounds together he would buy me the Triumph Spitfire that I was so desperate for, and let me use that money to help get me through university, just like everyone else’s dad did, but he didn’t. I called him up to announce that I had finally saved up enough for the car, and he said, good, I should go and buy it then.

I kept thinking he’d surprise me, but he didn’t. As if I should have expected anything else.

Julia freelances for whoever will take her work when she has a free moment, which is rare. She also writes his catalogs. I can’t be sure, but I think she’s his favorite. She’s the one who has inherited his creativity, he says. And me, I think. She’s also, he says, an incredibly talented artist. One of the things he’s encouraging her to do is write and illustrate children’s books. She is something of a lost soul, he says, and he wishes she would settle down. She lives on the island, although he worries it’s too small for her, that she needs to spread her wings, move farther afield to find where her happiness will lie. She has a knack of picking bad boyfriends, unfortunately.

“She will walk into a room filled with a hundred men, and the one she will end up with will be the addict or the alcoholic,” he wrote regretfully. “Not that it’s hard on the island. You’ll discover we islanders have a unique relationship with alcohol.”

She has a new boyfriend, a sous-chef up for the summer, about whom Brooks is cautiously optimistic.

Both girls look like me, especially Julia. He promises to send photographs.

And me? Knowing all this about a family I have never known? If I could have found a way to teleport myself there the minute I found out all of this, I would have done so. As I peer out the window of the plane, high above the clouds, I remember the things Brooks wrote about Nantucket, his description of the cobbled streets, the pretty architecture, the boats bobbing on the water.

I read about driving over to Sconset, for ice cream in the village, to get the papers on Main Street and walk down to the harbor, and everything about my life feels grey and dismal and dull, and the only place I want to be is Nantucket, where everything will be better, I absolutely know it will.

That feeling I have carried my entire life, not fitting in, standing on the outside, never quite belonging, whoever I’m with? Once I’m in Nantucket with my family, I know it will disappear. It already has.

*   *   *

Nantucket airport really is tiny, especially after the noise and bustle of JFK. As soon as we took off from New York, I realized I couldn’t quiet the nerves anymore, and even though the wine helped, now that we have landed, now that I am minutes away, I find my hands shaking.

This is it. I’m about to meet my father. As the full impact hits me, I want to throw up with anxiety. I twist in the seat, but there’s no aisle service on this tiny puddle jumper, no drinks available. I turn back and try to concentrate on deep breathing in the hope this will calm me down.