Page 7 of Summer Light on Nantucket

Her children, together.

Another Nantucket summer.

Slowly, she drove away from the crowded ferry terminal. As she navigated through the maze of lanes, she took the time to notice the bursts of color from the flowers in the window boxes and yards of all the handsome historic houses. Kids zipped past on their electric scooters, a girl sturdily pedaled along on her bike, landscapers trimmed privet hedges, and suddenly, there was their three-story shingled house set back from the street, with a long porch and a glossy blue door with its shining brass door knocker shaped like a mermaid. The house didn’t have a view of the ocean, but it did have porches and decks and lots of bedrooms and bathrooms and a fireplace and a lawn in the backyard for badminton and croquet and railings for hanging beach towels to dry.

The children had gotten there first. Blythe remained in the car, watching them run into the house. They would scatter to their separate bedrooms, shouting with delight.

Blythe continued to wait, knowing that at any moment, Miranda would leave the house and run into town to meet her summer girlfriends and Teddy would run down to the yacht club to see if anyone was there to play tennis and Daphne would hurry over to the Maria Mitchell museum to see if they had any jobs for her. Holly would rush off to see her best island friend, Carolyn.

Or Holly might remain inside. Blythe worried about Holly, who would probably sit on her bed with her drawing pad and continue tocreate her graphic novels about sea gerbils, which lived in the shoals of Nantucket shores. Blythe loved to read. She’d taught her children to love to read. She told herself she shouldn’t fret so much about Holly wanting to write a book about sea gerbils, who weren’t even real. A graphic novel counted as a book, didn’t it?

And what else could Blythe do? She’d accepted the fact that she would worry about her children all the time, all her life. She knew she couldn’t protect them forever, but she would try her best to give her children happy, healthy lives.

She thought she’d done fairly well so far. This was her third summer coming to the island without Bob. It helped that her grandmother had left her the Nantucket house in her will. It was a bonus that Bob’s parents lived on Nantucket, and he and Teri could stay with them in the large, rambling house on Fair Street where he grew up.

In Boston, Bob had taken an apartment near his office in Back Bay where he worked as a lawyer. He liked the hustle and action and drinking in bars with his colleagues after work. Teri was a paralegal, and lovely, and soon after the final decree, Bob started dating her. Two years ago, Teri moved in with him, and Blythe was fine with that.

Blythe liked Teri well enough. The only problem was that Teri and Bob were the fun parents. They gave all the children the newest electronic screens and toys. They didn’t correct, scold, or chastise. Now, whenever Blythe disciplined her children, these children she’d patiently grown within her own body and impatiently and painfully given birth to from her own body, these children whom she’d lost sleep over and changed her entire life for, these children, when they were angry with Blythe, threatened to leave their mother and go live with their father and Teri.

Sometimes Blythe wanted to yell, “Fine! I’ll drive you over now!”

She hadn’t done that. Yet.

By now, her children seemed to be reconciled to the divorce, plus, they were growing older and becoming independent.

Now Blythe swung her legs out of the minivan, stepped out, andstretched. She walked up the slate walk, noticing that their caretaker, Emilio, had mowed the grass to a glossy velvet, trimmed the privet hedges, and filled the window boxes with bouquets of sweet-face violets. She went up the steps, seven exactly, and onto the porch with its pale blue ceiling, a darker blue wooden floor, and handsome, secure balusters to keep toddling children from nose-diving into the rosebushes.

She opened the front door.

And there, so soon, was the first thorn of summer.

The kids had stormed into the house because the door wasn’t locked because Bob’s sister, Kate, who lived year-round on the island, had a key and had come over earlier to open the windows and fill the refrigerator with milk and butter and set a vase of daisies on the dining room table.

Nice of her, absolutely, but also irritating because Blythe knew Kate snooped in every closet, drawer, and bathroom cabinet, and even rearranged their kitchen shelves. Kate was Bob’s bossy older sister. Kate believed that the Nantucket house and the lives of the Benedict children belonged to her. Blythe was grateful that Bob’s family never once ended their friendship and their love after the divorce and she also understood that it was necessary for someone on the island to have a key to the house in case of emergency. But still. It was an intrusion. Almost an invasion. Especially because Kate was Bob’s sister, and Blythe feared Kate was funneling Blythe’s secrets to her brother.

Not that Blythe had any interesting secrets.

Shaking off her thoughts, she entered the house and rested in the front hall, just breathing. After almost two hundred years of standing firm in gale force winds and thundering rain, after countless layers of paint and wallpaper and hooks for pictures, and walls wrenched apart so new plumbing could be installed, after all that patching-up and renovating, after all the noisy busy life lived in this house, it still smelled ever so slightly of some clean spice. Nutmeg, maybe. Or, simply, sunshine.

But many of the closets smelled of mildew. Theywereon an island surrounded by the sea, and in the summer, humidity curled around the town and houses like a damp ghost. Miranda said that mildew was such a constant pervasive perfume in the summer that they ought to bottle it and label itNantucket.It would sell like crazy.

Blythe glanced into the living room. The sofa pillows were all plumped (by Kate), and the newest copy of the local newspaper was on the coffee table. Blythe passed through the long front hall into the kitchen, then headed up the back stairs to the bedrooms. The children had dumped their backpacks and duffel bags and hurried off to their Nantucket lives.

Blythe entered her bedroom and dropped her suitcase on the wide queen-sized bed.

Once this had been her grandparents’ room when they came from Ohio to spend three months in the cool island air. Her parents had used the biggest guest room and Blythe had used the small room at the end of the hall. The other guest rooms had been saved for real guests, friends of her grandparents or her parents. It was a spacious, welcoming house.

Next to the door of the stairs to the attic, one small rectangular chamber had been made into a one-person guest room just large enough to hold a twin bed, a side table with a lamp, and an old-fashioned dresser with a mirror held by harp-shaped posts. Above the bed was a round window, like a portal in a ship, overlooking the town and the sky.

This had always been Blythe’s favorite room when she was young. It had seemed less like a bedroom than a secret hideaway. She’d kept her books stacked neatly beneath her bed and her sneakers, sandals, and Mary Janes placed at the foot of the bed where she couldn’t see them. Where they wouldn’t break the spell.

Light came through the window like a herald from another world. The sunlight woke her in the morning, falling on the antique etched glass lamp with prisms that caught the beam and scattered it intorainbows that shivered against the wall like butterflies. In the winter, when they came for Christmas, the moonlight looked icy, striping frosty silver beams across her bed. In the summer, the moonlight was clear and strong, a slope of light leading to another world, to Blythe’s dreams. When the mirror caught the light, the room glowed.

When she was a child, she knew that the house was alive, not like a zombie or a ghost, but like a wordless living creature, like trees or rabbits, capable of loving but not capable of speech. Each time she entered the room she knew she was welcomed, embraced by the light. Each summer, as a teenager, she turned the mirror to face the wall when she left, as if to keep the room dark until she returned.

Now she and each of her four children had his or her own bedroom. The hideout in the hall was empty and would be all summer. She knew that Miranda’s boyfriend, Brooks, could sleep there even though it was on the same floor as Miranda’s room. But Blythe couldn’t tolerate the thought of Brooks, handsome athlete that he was, sleeping there. It would be like putting a tiger into a birdcage. With one swoop of his arm, the antique prism lamp would be knocked to the floor and shattered. And where would he put his clothes? His size 11 shoes?

Blythe didn’t want to say all this to her daughter, so she used the excuse that she didn’t want Brooks sleeping on the same floor as Miranda, and that was also true.

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