The Summer We Started Over, page 3
Who was she? Barrett thought during those odd transitional years. She wasn’t a genius like her brother had been, and thank God for that. She wasn’t a scholar like her father. She didn’t run away from her problems like her mother. She didn’t want a glamorous life like Eddie.
Most people have parents or teachers to advise them. Barrett lived in her dreams. She wasn’t crazy. She did well in school and had fun with friends. She watched television with her father. She kept up on current events.
But at night, trying to sleep, she slipped into a dream world, a daydream world, an emotional sanctuary. It was as if she were inside an egg, a robin’s egg that was a beautiful blue inside as well as outside. The egg was as big as the universe, and over the years she imagined rooms that were like oceans she could float in. A room made of the sapphire of the island’s hydrangeas. A room as transparent as sea glass, and one as deep indigo as the ocean at night. The blue of flame, the blue of ice. The blue of the summer sky.
By the time she was twenty-three, she knew that she wanted to own a shop on Nantucket. It would be called Nantucket Blues. She was building her future on dreams, but she had saved most of her money while she worked on the island, and she had enough to rent a shop on Lower Main Street, in the small courtyard of shops like Aunt Leah’s Fudge.
It was a good location. People passed it on their way to and from the Hy-Line. It had a large display window and a small back room with a table for wrapping gifts and unwrapping deliveries. She’d rented a credit card machine and invested in a touch screen cash register. She wanted to make her dream come true at last. And she was prepared, and could handle both things—business and dreams.
She would open the door to Nantucket Blues on Memorial Day weekend.
Her front window was ready. On the right side was layered a pile of cashmere sweaters in dreamy spring and summer colors—aquamarine, turquoise, azure, and sapphire. In the center, a pair of expensive cobalt blue vases were surrounded by waves of blue and white silk, the background for earrings, necklaces, and bracelets fashioned into scallop shells, lightship baskets, starfish, mermaids, some inexpensive, some pricey. Picture frames adorned with tiny dried flowers, translucent jingle shells, dried blueberries, and ribbon faced the street along the left side. The frames held pictures of happy families on Nantucket beaches. The photos were spectacular, because her friend Cath was an island photographer, and this helped both Cath and Barrett. Notebooks with heavenly blue covers. Finally, a large white antique pitcher tempted the eyes with its bouquet of Nantucket’s showgirls, giant blue hydrangeas. Most of her items had been handmade by Nantucket crafters or judiciously bought at estate sales on the island.
Eddie had said, “Care Bear, Nantucket Blues is a great idea. But I worry that the shop won’t be successful and you’ll lose all the money you worked so hard to earn.”
“Eddie, stop. I’m making my dream come true. How many people can say that?” Eddie was older and wiser and more sophisticated, but this summer Barrett felt strong. She knew people came to the island for the sun and the beach, but they also came for the time to dream. “Can you?” she challenged.
Eddie had taken a moment to respond. “I suppose I sort of can. I’ve always wanted my life to be about books.”
“There are so many ways for a life to be about books,” Barrett reminded her sister.
Eddie, usually so sweet, snapped, “I’m fine, Barrett.” Regretting her cranky response, she added, “I just don’t have everything figured out. Dreams don’t just pop into your heart in complete detail.”
Mine did, Barrett wanted to say, but she diplomatically said, “I’m sure you’re right.”
* * *
—
Eddie could have flown into Nantucket. She absolutely could afford to. But she took the fast ferry for the crossing over Nantucket Sound to the island. The boat was packed with people headed to the island for Memorial Day, the start of summer. She stood at the railing with the wind in her hair as she left one world for another.
The boat docked with a sturdy bump against the wharf and soon, with much clanging and banging, the crew positioned the metal ramps so the passengers could single-file down to the brick sidewalk.
Eddie’s heart lifted as she set foot on the island. It was beautiful here. She’d forgotten how sweet the air was. She walked toward the crowded baggage claim area, glanced up, and tripped over her own feet.
Standing only a few yards away was Jeff. She hadn’t seen him for two years, but he still looked like everything she’d ever wanted.
Eddie was stunned. Instead of fighting through the crowd to the luggage carts, she froze, staring at Jeff as if he were a vision. She shouted—the crowd was noisy—“What are you doing here?”
“Hello, Eddie,” Jeff said, with his slow sweet smile. “I just put my grandmother on the boat. What are you doing here?”
Had he gotten taller in the two years she’d been away? Was that even possible? She didn’t think so, not when he was almost thirty. But his shoulders were wider, and his entire body was more…more there…than it had been before.
She wanted to kiss him.
She had never stopped wanting to kiss him.
She forced herself to be sane, or at least act that way. “I’m coming home for a few weeks, helping out while Barrett opens her shop. And to check on Dad. How are you?”
“I’m good. Hey, let me drive you home.”
“Oh.” Alone with him in his truck? She was so not ready for this. Eddie stumbled over her words. “Right, fine, yes, thanks.”
“Excuse me!” a woman said, as her corgi pulled on its leash. “We need to get by.”
Jeff asked Eddie, “Which bags are yours? I’ll get them.”
“Oh, the navy blue suitcases in cart forty-seven. There. I put ribbons on the handles so I could spot them.”
Jeff shouldered his way to the carts and lifted off her two roller bags. “Follow me,” he told Eddie.
She nodded. She followed him.
He looked amazing from the back.
As he hefted her suitcases into his truck, he said, “You look good.”
Her heart pounded. “You, too.” Was he going to kiss her, right out on the parking lot of the steamship terminal, with all sorts of people coming and going?
Was she going to kiss him?
“Thanks.” Jeff opened the passenger door of his Dodge Ram pickup truck and held out his hand to help her up. Her skirt rose as she stepped up into the truck, and she hoped he noticed.
Jeff came around, got in, and started the truck. “Going home?”
“Yes, home. How are you?”
“I’m great. My guys and I are building houses as fast as we can hammer. Making big money and building big muscles.” With a grin, he flexed his arm.
“Impressive.”
They buckled into their seats. Jeff slowly wove his way into the traffic.
“So. You’re a city girl now.” He kept his eyes steadily on the road.
“I am. But I do miss Nantucket.” Eddie couldn’t think straight. The attraction between them was as intense as it had been two years ago. She was still crazily in love with Jeff.
“You haven’t come home very often.”
They were almost to her house. Trying to be flippant, she said, “You noticed.”
Jeff jerked the steering wheel to the right, pulled over to the curb, and put the truck in park.
Turning to face her, Jeff said, “Eddie, did you think I wouldn’t notice? I love you. I didn’t say that lightly. I meant what I said. I’m never going to stop loving you.”
She ducked her head, hiding the sudden tears in her eyes. “I love you, too, Jeff. Just as much. But I told you why I can’t marry you.”
“Maybe you need to see a counselor. A therapist.”
Eddie put her hands to her face. She took a deep breath. “Jeff. Right now I need to go home.”
“Got it.” Jeff put the truck back in gear and drove.
They didn’t talk for the rest of the ride. Jeff turned right and right again, and there they were, at the long, crushed-shell driveway to her family’s home.
The house was a traditional farmhouse, white clapboard, a front porch with two rocking chairs, four first-floor windows, four second-floor windows, one half-moon window on the top floor. A wooden fence began behind the house, starting at the barn and running off into the distance. Yellow daffodils and pink tulips filled the gardens next to the house, and fruit trees were flashing their flowers.
“Looks like a greeting card,” Jeff remarked.
Eddie nodded. “It really does.” Emotion surged over her, almost taking her breath away. How could she have left?
Their dog, Duke, raced up to the truck, barking, wagging his tail, jumping with joy.
Eddie stepped down from the truck. Jeff carried her suitcases to the porch, and she followed him.
“Thanks for the ride.” She paused. “Could we, I don’t know, get together for coffee sometime?”
“Sure. Sometime.”
Eddie thought he was going to kiss her, but he hurried down the steps, into his truck, and tore out of the driveway, leaving her standing there alone.
She took a moment to regroup. Her emotions were all over the place.
* * *
—
Three years ago, their father suddenly bought the small farm on Nantucket and moved them there. The clear, clean air of the small Berkshire Mountains town where they’d lived for years had seemed to Eddie to be clogged with the gray of ashes. When her father told her they were moving, she understood why.
Eddie knew that their father hoped this would be a way to distance them from the residence of a tragedy, to live where no one had known her brother, where they could start their lives anew.
Eddie had quit her city job to stay and do what she could to help. Barrett had been about to graduate from college. She needed support, stability. Eddie had gone through the packing of what they wanted and the trucking off to a charity shop of what they didn’t want. Eddie had been the strong one for the family, what was left of the family. She’d bought a used four-wheel drive Jeep. She put delicious food on the table for them at normal hours and did the laundry and threw out the flowers that had been sent and later wilted and died.
And this house, this farmhouse, such an odd place on a resort island, like a Laura Ingalls Wilder book set in Saint-Tropez, had been clean and bright and welcoming. The floors were wide-board pine, freshly stained to a butterscotch shine, and the windows were large, letting the sun brighten the air and everything in it. The rooms were spacious, some wallpapered in pleasant old-fashioned flower designs, all of them with freshly painted marshmallow white trim. The kitchen had a large porcelain sink and a Garland six-burner gas stove from the fifties. They put a large, oval-shaped rag rug in the middle of the room with a new oak kitchen table with six matching chairs.
The property had been excitingly strange, not at all like the stony Berkshire Mountains, and not like Nantucket’s golden beaches, but rich with thick grass laced with wildflowers, and next to it, at the end of the driveway, a small, handsome barn. It had a loft full of hay so sweet-smelling Eddie wanted to chew on it, and a floor of large unpainted wide boards that made a satisfying clopping sound when you walked over it.
She’d stayed for almost a year. She bought a used Jeep for herself and gave her newer Jeep to Barrett. She painted rooms, washed windows, bought groceries, and cooked dinner. She worked at the bookshop six days a week. Sometimes, she missed New York and her life there. Still, she went to the beach with Barrett, and to the movies, library lectures, concerts, any event where her sister might make friends. She tried her best to coax their father into joining them, but he remained in a kind of walking coma, dealing with the loss of his son and his wife by arranging books on the shelves in an order that only he comprehended. Eddie knew they had to give him time.
She’d met Jeff.
And now, here she was, after two years away. She took a deep breath and walked toward the house.
three
Eddie tried the front doorknob, and of course, it turned and opened because no one ever locked it. She pulled her suitcases behind her and went into the front hall. The house was quiet. A new bookshelf had been added. It was filled with books, and it ran the length of the hall, and all the books, she could tell, were her father’s. Leaving her suitcases—she’d take them up to her bedroom later—she walked toward her father’s study. For a moment, she stood in the open door and took it all in.
The large room was filled with light from the two long windows in the back wall. Her father’s desk and his sagging old leather reading chair stood where they always had been, and an old table was next to them, piled with books. All the walls were stacked with books, so that the windows were framed by shelves and gave a sense of being recessed. In the past two years, her father had obviously acquired more books, and she could tell he’d arranged them in a sensible order—biographies here, literary criticism there, novels leaning dangerously in the corner.
Her father stood in the midst of it all, holding a book in one hand and muttering to himself. He wore baggy khakis, an old college sweatshirt, and sneakers. He hadn’t shaved for a few days and his blond-brown hair was still a shaggy, handsome mop.
“Hi, Dad,” Eddie said.
Her father pushed his reading glasses up to his forehead and smiled. “Darling, have you seen my biography of Charles Lamb?”
Alarm lanced Eddie’s heart. Was her father senile at fifty-five?
“Dad?”
“Oh, wait,” William said. “Eddie! That’s you! You’re home! I didn’t know you were coming home!” He set down his book, crossed the room, and hugged her. “Let’s go to the kitchen, have some tea, and catch up. Now where’s your sister? She’ll be thrilled to see you.”
Relief washed through her. Her father wasn’t senile. He seemed almost like his old self, kind, loving, enthusiastic about life. She followed him into the kitchen, where the counters, the stove, the round oak table were shining clean—Barrett’s work. In the middle of the table was the antique ironstone bowl, filled with bananas, apples, and pears. Barrett’s touch there, too. In the midst of a house full of books and confusion, the kitchen was serene and welcoming.
William filled the Keurig with water and popped a pod in. “These are recyclable,” he told Eddie quickly, before she could ask. “Ha!” he laughed. “Look out the window.”
Eddie leaned over the porcelain sink and saw the red barn and the long spill of land beside it, rolling slightly all the way to the woods that separated it from the winding road through the new housing development. The horse was trotting, shaking her mane, chasing after Duke.
Before Eddie could speak, William said, “It’s a game they play. Duke nips at the horse’s heels and runs while Duchess chases him. Don’t look so worried. They like each other. Think of it as occupational therapy.”
“That’s great,” Eddie said. “I’m glad the horse has finally made a friend.”
“You want a drop of milk in your coffee, right?” William opened the refrigerator door and took out a carton of milk.
“Yes, thanks.” Eddie sat at the table, pleased that her father remembered how she liked her coffee and wishing she could ask him to remove his reading glasses from his forehead. The lenses caught the light and reflected it haphazardly across the room. It was unsettling. But she didn’t want to say one negative thing during this precious time with her father.
William put her cup in front of her and sat at the table with his own cup in his hands.
“Now, tell me everything,” he said. “First of all, why are you here? Are you still working for that writer? What’s she like? Her books seem…lighter than what I would choose to read.”
“Dad, she’s wonderful and so are her books. I’m here because I haven’t had a vacation in two years.”
“But, Eddie, you’ve been to Paris!”
“True, Dad, but I went as Dinah’s employee. I wanted some time to myself.”
“And you came home.” William smiled. “You could have gone anywhere but you came home. I’m so glad.”
For a moment, Eddie was a little girl, safe in her father’s arms. “I want to see if I can help Barrett with her shop.”
The smile vanished from her father’s face. “I’m worried about Barrett. Well, not Barrett herself, but her shop. You know she saved money for years, working long hours when other young people were out at beach parties. I hope she can make a go of it.”
“I know.” Eddie sipped her coffee. Hot and rich. The brand they’d used forever. Dunkin’. “And what about you, Dad? What about your book?”
“It’s going very well, actually. Wilson put out a new biography of Charles Lamb this year and it’s a brilliant book, just brilliant. Your Dinah Lavender would love Charles Lamb! You know his sister killed their mother, right?”
And here we are, Eddie thought, wandering through her father’s thoughts about the lush and leafy maze of poetic history.
She tossed back the rest of her coffee. “I want to see Barrett and her shop. I’ll carry my bags up to my room, but I won’t take time to unpack. I plan to stay here for a month, more or less.”
She rinsed her cup, set it in the drainer, and left the room before her father could say more. Once he got started on his favorite subject, he could go on for hours.
As she lugged her suitcases up the stairs, she couldn’t help knocking into piles of books. This was nothing new, the books on the stairs, but when she entered her bedroom, she was shocked to see towers of books leaning against the walls, the end of her bed, the sides of her chest of drawers. A narrow path led through the books to her dresser. At least there were no books on her bed.
