Page 7 of The White Oak Lodge

Nina pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead and looked down at her fish curry, glistening in sauce. For the first time since she’d met Daniel, she wanted to tell him to keep his mouth shut. His beautiful mouth. She tried to take a bite of food, but she was so distracted that it tasted of nothing.

A realization struck her like a lightning bolt. This was no ordinary honeymoon. Daniel brought her here to study the Whitmore family. But why would he do that without asking? Suddenly, she was on her feet, and the chair she’d been sitting in was sideways on the floor. A few people in the restaurant were looking at her. Daniel was asking her if she needed a glass of water, but she was already on her way to the bathroom, where she threw up most of her dinner. Her legs shook violently. When she came out of the stall, Daniel was standing there, his eyes filled with worry. He held her and told her the bill was already paid, so they could go.

That night, Nina slept for ten hours and woke up to a buttercream morning. Daniel apologized profusely. He said he understood that this was incredibly emotional for her. “I don’t think I really got it before,” he said with a soft sigh, “but I do now, and I’m sorry. You say the word, and we can go.”

But Nina had lost the harsh stab of fear from the night before. She’d started to see his point, sort of. Why was it that she knew so little of what had happened to her family? Why had she accepted what Great-Aunt Genevieve had told her—that her mother was too grief-stricken to care for her, that her siblings were adults who needed to step away from Nantucket, and that it wasn’t strange that there hadn’t been a funeral for her father and brother? She’d been eleven and terrified. She’d been thrust into the Midwest with a suitcase and a backpack and a violent fear in her heart. Great-Aunt Genevieve had hardly left her sofa—had hardly done anything but eat TV dinners, watch reality television, and talk badly about Nina’s mother. Very suddenly, Great-Aunt Genevieve was the only person in the world who said she loved Nina. Very suddenly, Great-Aunt Genevieve was the only person in the world who demanded that Nina say she loved her back.

It was no small miracle that Nina had managed to go to undergrad and graduate school. It was no small miracle that she’d been “normal” enough to fall in love and get married. Not that anyone would ever call Nina “normal.”

Nina’s lips quivered. Up at Daniel, she blinked and said, “You know, maybe we should go to the Nantucket Historical Society. Just to look around and see what they have. Maybe something will turn up?”

Chapter Four

Nina

July 2012

Nina and Daniel walked from their B&B to the Nantucket Historical Society. In a light yellow button-down dress and a pair of sandals, Nina knew she looked far more like a young wife on her honeymoon than a downtrodden quasi-orphan with a dramatic Nantucket history. Beside her, Daniel looked self-serious and eager to learn. In his backpack, he carried notebooks and a laptop, where he hoped to record the dramatic findings of their Whitmore research. A part of Nina hoped they would find nothing. A part of her hoped they’d find a big newspaper article titled something like “Firework Accident Claims White Oak Lodge,” and that would be that.

A part of her hoped they’d undercover a tremendous drama that would lend meaning to the great loneliness of her life—but she knew that would bring more pain than she could bear.

The guy who worked in the archives of the Nantucket Historical Society was named Jeremy. Nina half rememberedhim as the high school football quarterback who’d been set for a Notre Dame football scholarship before a car accident landed him in the hospital and ripped him of a sublime future. Nina remembered her mother crying about it, saying in a lilting Italian accent, “That kid was going places. It’s a shame.”

It was bizarre to see Jeremy again like this—a little bit older than her, a little bit sadder, caught up in the dramas of Nantucket society, never having left. It was clear from the first handshake that he had no idea who she was, and Nina wanted to keep it that way. Not that he’d remember the youngest Whitmore. The baby of the family.

In the aisles of the archives, Daniel explained that he and Nina were anthropologists and journalists trying to learn more about the Whitmores and the White Oak Lodge. Jeremy’s eyes brightened.

“I haven’t heard that name in a while,” he said, whipping them over to the opposite side of the archives, where he pulled open a drawer filled with files on the Whitmore family. “One of the oldest families on the island, going back generations. The lodge itself was built back in 1862, if you can believe it.”

At the mention of that year, Nina’s ears rang. The year 1862 had been drilled into her from a young age. It couldn’t have been any other year.

“It was built by these folks,” Jeremy said, tugging a photograph from the back of the file that featured an unsmiling married couple standing on the dunes where they’d built the lodge. “Samuel and Daisy Whitmore. Look at them!” The photo had been colorized badly, making them look overwhelmingly pastel and red-cheeked and friendly in ways Nina guessed they were not. She struggled to count back the generations and decided they were her great-great-great-grandparents, a fact she didn’t share with neither Daniel nor Jeremy. “Originally, the lodge was a sort of wilderness lodge, a space for fishermen andother outdoorsmen to shack up and grab a hot meal, but it soon transformed into something far more luxurious and exquisite,” Jeremy said. “By the end of the 1800s, it was the place to be for wealthy city slickers.”

Daniel put his hands on his lips and smiled proudly. “And the Whitmore families took over where their parents left off?”

“Yes,” Jeremy said, tugging the next photograph from the file—one of Richard and Rose Whitmore, Nina’s great-great-grandparents. It was a photograph that had once hung in the stairwell of the family apartment located in the northeast corner of the White Oak Lodge, an apartment with external access that didn’t force you to walk through the rest of the hotel in order to go home, but one where Nina remembered, you could still hear some of the goings-on of the tourists staying the week or month with them. Nina liked to eavesdrop, especially on warring married couples, whose insults boggled her mind. Was it possible to hate someone you supposedly loved so much? Now, she couldn’t imagine ever feeling that way about Daniel. It wasn’t possible.

For a little more than a half hour, Nina and Daniel looked through photographs of her great-grandparents, her grandparents, and the White Oak Lodge through eras of reconstruction, hurricanes, refurbishments, and grand parties. It wasn’t till then that they found the first photograph of Nina’s father, taken in 1960 when he was ten years old. In it, her father, Benjamin Whitmore, wore a mischievous smile and a swimsuit and held up a fish he’d just caught. Nina’s stomach heaved. Again, she thought she would throw up, made an excuse to Daniel, and hurried upstairs and into the sunlight.

Benjamin Whitmore: the father she’d loved so much, the father who’d once taught her to fish, and the father who’d jumped through waves with her and held her when she cried. In the photograph, he’d been one year younger than Nina had beenwhen he’d died. So young! So naive! So immune to the world’s evils! So open to its charms!

Why had Daniel brought her back here? She felt like a boat out at sea, pummeled by stormy waves, lightning striking the night sky.

A split second later, Daniel came out and wrapped his arms around her. Disappointment lingered in his eyes as though she hadn’t performed as well as he’d hoped, but his words told her, “It’s okay, honey. It’s all right. Let’s get you away from here.”

Nina wanted to go back in and thank Jeremy, but Daniel assured her that he’d already passed their thanks along and that it was better not to go back into the basement. Nina shook in his arms and said, “It was the first time I’d seen my father in years.” This was true. No photographs had survived the fire, none that she knew of, and Great-Aunt Genevieve hadn’t moved anything with her to Michigan when she’d married her husband. Nina had never asked Genevieve why, sensing that the question and the answer were uncomfortable. Now, Great-Aunt Genevieve was dead, and all those secrets were buried in her grave.

They returned to the hotel to change into swimsuits and restructure their day. Nina wanted desperately to rebound, to make the following three days on the island as bright and sparkling as their wedding day. But under everything they said, there seemed to be a shadow.He brought me to Nantucket against my will, she thought at odd times, then tried to strike it from her memory. She tried to remember he loved her and would do anything for her.

Again, they swam in the Nantucket Sound, floated on their backs, and kissed in the sunshine. Tourists swarmed most beaches, but Nina remembered the ones frequented by mostly locals, and she directed Daniel out to them, flicking through the radio stations until they found songs they wanted to sing. Only once that afternoon did Daniel bring up the White Oak Lodge,and it was to say, “It looks like such a grand place. I can’t believe it was lost.”

Nina coughed into her hand and kept her eyes on the turquoise horizon. She knew he wanted to go out to the old, burned-out structure. She also knew that she wouldn’t be caught dead out there. There were too many ghosts.

Maybe to distract Nina from her obvious troubles, Daniel made another dinner reservation that evening. Before they left the hotel, he surprised her with a bottle of champagne, pouring two flutes with bubbles and toasting “his wonderful wife.”

“It’s no wonder you’re from here,” he said. “It’s gorgeous and mysterious, like you.”

“I’m not mysterious,” Nina countered. But in his eyes, she saw something she’d never caught before: curiosity and jealousy.

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