Page 8 of Summer Light on Nantucket

She left her little magic room and walked to the master bedroom at the end of the hall.

This was where Miranda was created eighteen years ago. They never told Miranda that, even though Blythe thought Miranda would like the idea of being a true Nantucket native, but Miranda had a friend named London who was horrified and grossed out when her parents told her they had named her London because that was where she was conceived. She now went by her middle name, Louise.

Back in her own spacious bedroom with the luxurious queen-sized bed, Blythe unpacked her suitcase, humming. It was summer now,really summer. She didn’t have to make any significant decisions, at least not for two weeks, which was when she told Krebs she’d call him back about the seventh-grade teaching job. She changed into a light sleeveless dress and put her hair up in a sloppy bun.

Blythe and the kids were having dinner with their grandmother, Bob’s mother, Celeste, tonight. It was a tradition and the beginning of their island vacation. It had begun when she and Bob were married, but the divorce had not altered the love the two women had for each other. Having a house, a history on Nantucket, and an endless love for four children had become a silken bond.

bob

Blythe and Bob had met when they were twenty-two years old and fresh out of college. They had thought they were so old, and they’d been so young.

Blythe had grown up in Arlington, Massachusetts, the only child of a physician and a high school teacher. Her parents were older than most parents, and she had no siblings or cousins. She did have books and an imagination and mornings at preschool, which she enjoyed so much that at home she practiced teaching, putting all her dolls and stuffed animals in a row and standing in front of them, lecturing them about everything she knew and much she invented. Her parents told her that was when they knew she’d grow up to be a teacher.

She was happiest when they visited her Nantucket grandparents, who let her sleep in her magic room and allowed her free range in an attic packed with trunks of old clothes. If it rained, Blythe would lie on the chintz sofa in the living room, and when she came upon athought she wanted to consider, she’d gaze at one of the gold-framed paintings of fruit in a bowl or a ship in a stormy sea, or two little girls in white dresses and pink sashes. She knew this was an old-fashioned house in which she was living old-fashioned summers, and she cherished them for the respite they gave her, the peace of being only herself.

As a teenager, she became more social. She made friends, played tennis, learned to sail, attended movies, especially frightening ones where she screamed as loudly as the other girls in the row of seats. During her last two years of high school, she learned to sneak down the back stairs to the kitchen door where she could leave and enter without her grandparents’ knowledge. When she was a junior and senior in high school, her world revolved around Aaden. When would she see him next? How could she abide living on an island so far away from him? Light was no longer magic. Only Aaden was magic.

When Aaden left for Ireland for good, everything changed.

Blythe was so heartbroken, sodestroyed,she couldn’t leave her room. She wanted to lie face down in her bed and die.

Her parents, impatient with her depression, sent her to Nantucket for the summer. She took a job working for a children’s summer camp, and slowly, the campers’ joy in each day woke the joy she’d thought she’d lost forever. The children swam, built sandcastles, climbed monkey bars, and went screaming down slides. They fingerpainted terrible pictures of dogs and cats and thought they’d produced masterpieces. They fought one another and made up, snubbed one another and became best friends, built entire villages out of sand and jumped up and down, destroying the villages, laughing maniacally. They thought Blythe was the most beautiful creature who had ever lived. They wanted to sit on her lap, squeeze next to her when she read a story, ask her to braid their hair. Carla, the other counselor, said, “You really have a special knack with kids.”

Blythe thought about this a moment, then said, “Yes. Yes, I do.”

She’d always remember Carla and how one kind word from anacquaintance had shone light on the path she hadn’t even known was there, a path she wanted to follow all her life.

When she left the island to start her freshman year at college, she knew she was stronger than she’d ever been. She’d learned that love wasn’t only something between two people, but like wind, invisible, uncontrollable, everywhere, and full of surprises.

She attended UMass Amherst and made good, if not spectacular grades, majoring in secondary education. She dated and flirted but didn’t get involved seriously with anyone. As the months passed, she became more and more interested in the skills and arts of teaching. Her grandparents had left the Nantucket house to her, and Blythe knew that was love, too. The year she graduated from college, her parents told her they were planning to eventually move to Arizona for her mother’s arthritis. Arizona was beautiful, they told her. She should come visit, and maybe she’d want to live there for a while. Blythe had told them maybe. Someday.

In late May, Blythe went to a fabulous, celebratory graduation party at the home of a classmate whose uncle had been governor of Massachusetts. The house was a massive brick mansion with an enormous backyard surrounded by tall, velvety spruce trees, making it its own little world. The tables held glittering bottles of gin, vodka, and champagne and platters of finger food. It was spring, and the night was starry. In the library, a three-piece band played dance music.

Blythe attended the party with several of her friends, all of them wearing their sexiest clothes and layers of makeup. They’d drunk champagne as they were getting ready and had taken a cab to the party because they knew they would be too tipsy from alcohol and freedom to drive home.

Blythe roamed through the enormous, sparkling house, chatting with strangers, munching caviar, and sipping champagne. The rooms were filled with laughing, hugging, yelling, kissing young people, with unruly thatches of thick hair and bright eyes and strong bodies, all emanating a luxuriant glow of health and hope. This was her tribe,she thought, and graduates in parties like this all over the country belonged to this tribe, and they were brave and good and eager. They were going to rule the world.

The world on this side of the Atlantic.

She’d heard from Aaden many times during her first year, always by email. He was studying business management at Trinity in Dublin. He spent holidays with his family at their grandparents’ home in Kerry. He sent photos of waves crashing against cliffs and castles on high hills. For the first few months, Blythe didn’t answer. It hurt too much to think of him, but she still sat in front of her computer, studying his pictures, missing him, loving him, hating him. By their sophomore year, his emails were less frequent, and by their junior year of college, Aaden stopped sending pictures or emails.

What a bullshit artist,Blythe decided. One night, weeping, she deleted every mention of Aaden from her files. She couldn’t imagine ever finding love again.

Her thoughts had pierced the happiness she felt that night at the dazzling party.

“Stop this now!” she told herself.

A couple involved in a serious conversation turned their backs on her.

“Sorry,” she told them.

She forced herself through the crowds and out onto the back patio, where she collapsed in a lawn chair with deeply soft cushions. Laying her head back, she gazed at the billions of stars and wondered where Aaden was at this very moment.

“May I join you?”

She focused her eyes and saw a handsome stranger in a tux smiling at her.

“Of course.” She waved her hand carelessly at the nearest chair.

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