Nantucket Nights (28 page)

“Of course,” his mother said quickly, like she knew that would never happen.

When it was time to catch the ferry, Theo hugged his sisters and shook Luke’s hand. He was leaving a week earlier than
his mother, and so both of his parents stood with him in the parking lot of the Steamship Authority before he got on the boat. His mother was crying, of course. His father wore sunglasses,
his mouth a perfectly straight line. Even in the crowded parking lot filled mostly with tourists, Theo felt people staring at them. It was hot and
his shoulder grew sore with his heavy bag. He hadn’t let anyone else touch it. Theo kissed his parents good-bye and was the first person up the ramp of the boat, walking the bike alongside him. He didn’t wait to watch them wave.

Theo found a spot on the upper deck and lay down in the sun, resting his head on his duffel. He stayed awake until the boat passed Great Point, and then he fell asleep.

Theo’s grandmother, Sabrina, did things her own way. For most of Theo’s life she had lived on ten green acres in Concord, Massachusetts. The house was called Colonial Farm, although it wasn’t a farm at all—just a sprawling house and lots of grass and a small pond stocked with fish. It was the house where
his father had grown up. When Theo’s grandfather died, Sabrina sold the house and bought an apartment on Marlborough Street in Back Bay. Many of her friends were moving into retirement communities, but not Sabrina. She headed right for the big city, like a kid fresh out of college.

Theo insisted on finding the apartment himself. He took the T from South Station and wandered over to Marlborough, hauling
his heavy-ass bag, walking Antoinette’s bike. The city of Boston was as foreign as Kathmandu. The noise, the rows of brownstones, the throngs of people. The smell of urine in the T station. So different from Nantucket.
I could forget about her here,
Theo thought.
I could forget about everything.

He had to ring his grandmother before he could get into her building; he remembered that much from previous visits. A loud buzz sounded, and Theo pushed open the door. He locked
his bike to the banister for the time being and lugged his suitcase up to where his grandmother stood in the door of her apartment, smiling at him sadly. She wore dangly earrings that looked like very small wooden spoons, and a red-and-purple scarf over her silver hair.

“My poor, dear child,” she said. “Come to Sabrina.”

Theo put his bag down and hugged his grandmother. She was wiry and strong, and her embrace nearly strangled him. He wanted to thank her for letting
him stay, but he was afraid if he opened his mouth he would cry. He wondered how much she knew.

“My grandchild,” Sabrina said. “Son of my son. Or should I say sun of my son? Wait until people meet you. No one believes I’m old enough to have a grandchild, much less a grown man like you. Oh, Theo, come in. Come into my life. I’m glad you’re here. I can help you.”

“No one can help me, Sabrina.”

She ushered Theo in. Her apartment smelled like curry and apples. On the walls hung Indian tapestries and a Salvador Dali print. In the living room was a low, round table surrounded by big turquoise pillows. Theo remembered the table from her other house. It was the table where Sabrina performed séances. Sabrina had psychic powers; she knew how to talk to God.

“Do you still do séances?” Theo asked.

Sabrina smiled at him. She had the same golden brown eyes as
his father, only her eyes were surrounded by millions of tiny wrinkles. “But, of course,” she said. “In fact, just before you arrived, I asked the Madame what our time together was going to be like, and do you know what she said?”

The Madame—this was how Sabrina pictured God, as an old French peasant woman who collected eggs in a basket and baked her own baguettes. “What?” Theo asked.

“She said it would be transforming. Transforming!”

He had his own bedroom and his own bath. On his bed was a crocheted afghan knit by Sabrina herself, a twin to the one Theo’s family used to have, the one he had seen draped over Antoinette’s naked body when she came to baby-sit. Theo shoved the afghan into the bottom of
his closet. He unpacked his clothes and placed the cocktail napkin and the snapshot of Antoinette in the drawer with his boxer shorts. The whelk shell went on the back of the toilet.

I could forget about her here.
How wrong Theo was. In the city of Boston, Theo saw Antoinette everywhere—a long, lean woman with bronze skin wearing black, with dark hair caught carelessly in a bun. She rode the T with Theo on
his way to his new school, she lounged under the weeping willow in Boston Commons, she drank coffee at Rebecca’s Café near Government Center. When Theo spotted her, his heart banged in his chest until he realized that it wasn’t Antoinette at all, but someone else, many someone elses.

Theo’s new school was expensive. It sat on a campus of three square blocks of grass and trees across the Charles River, in Cambridge. Boston Hill—there was no dress code, but the senior boys wore soft chino pants or gray flannels, and pressed oxford shirts. They were quiet in the hallways; they were studious. The girls ate hummus for lunch. Everyone listened to National Public Radio. There was no baseball team, only fencing and archery. Theo told the few people who approached him that he came from Nantucket, but no one was impressed. Much of the student body was foreign—they summered in places like Provence and Tuscany. Theo made no friends, but at Boston Hill solitude was popular. There wasn’t a lunchroom—students ate alone under one of the trees, reading Rick Moody or Anne Lamott. Theo’s English teacher, a man named Geoffrey, assigned a year-long journal project.
“Record your thoughts,”
he said.
“Explore your soul. And read these ten books and compose a reaction to them.”
Theo picked up seven of the ten books and a journal at Water stone’s on Newbury Street. One of the books,
A Passage to India,
he’d seen on Antoinette’s shelves.

Theo took classical music and art history. He sat in acoustically designed rooms listening to Mozart’s eleventh piano sonata spiral through the air. He sat in other dark rooms and stared at slides of important paintings like Seurat’s
Invitation to the Sideshow.
Theo thought of Antoinette at the age of twenty-three meandering through the Met in New York, studying the original painting. This made him feel less lost, that they might have gazed upon the same painting or listened to the same Mozart sonata.

In the afternoons before he headed to the T station, Theo watched ballet class. It was held in the school’s dance studio, where they had a grand piano played by a white-haired gentleman whose hands trembled when they weren’t moving over the keys. Theo watched the dancers go through their stretches at the barre, their plies, their positions. He appreciated the lines of their bodies as they twirled. Some of the girls noticed him staring, and they scowled, or they smiled. They thought that he lusted after them with normal teenage-boy hormones. They had no idea that when Theo watched them dance he was drinking of the one time he’d seen Antoinette dance, her arms flowing, her back bending. He was drinking of how
his mother described Antoinette in the last moment she saw her, up at Great Point. She danced into the water,
his mother said.

After ballet class, Theo bought a PayDay bar from the subway kiosk and sat on a bench on the grimy platform of the Harvard T station watching people. Sometimes ten trains would screech into the station and pull out again before Theo finally boarded one. He got lost in
his thoughts; occasionally he swam around in his old life, afternoons at the Islander liquor store, a hundred years ago, a million miles away.

Am I transforming?
he wondered.

Pregnant women were everywhere in Boston, and Theo saw Antoinette in each one. Antoinette growing soft and round with
his baby.

Theo spoke very little to his grandmother and that seemed to be okay. She had plenty of other people to talk to. She’d created a life for herself that seemed to revolve primarily around shopping for dinner. It was very European, she claimed, to make numerous stops, and with each stop, enjoy a conversation. Sabrina chattered away with Joe the butcher, Helen at the bakery, Dominic at the fish store, Nathan with Down’s syndrome who bagged at the regular grocery, and a young man named Gianlorenzo who worked in the shop in the North End where Sabrina went to buy cannoli, fresh marinara, and ricotta pies. Sabrina was a great cook and an extravagant wine drinker—she adored the reds of France, which, she told him, were more expensive than
his tuition at Boston Hill.
But worth it!
Sabrina poured Theo a glass with every meal—her paella, her osso buco, her Peking duck. Theo started to gain weight.
Am I transforming?
he wondered.

Weekends were the most painful days because he was removed from
his school routine. On Saturdays, he slept as late as he could, hoping that when he rolled over, the blue numbers of
his digital clock would say eleven or twelve so that at least the morning would be over with. Sabrina made
him breakfast—granola, yogurt, strawberries—and always invited him on an excursion—strolling along the Charles, studying the gravestones at Old North Church, visiting die MFA. Theo always said no.

“I don’t blame you,” Sabrina said. “I’m an old woman. Not much fun.”

“You’re fun,” Theo said. “It’s me who’s no fun.” On Saturdays at home,
his mother made him do chores in the morning and then he went to the Whalers games with
his friends. Here, in Boston, he had no friends. On Saturday afternoons he rode Antoinette’s bike down to the FAO Schwarz on Newbury Street where he waited to see pregnant women, even though the pregnant women Theo found never failed to disappoint him—Diet Coke in one hand, bag of M&M’s in the other, puffy-faced, swaybacked and miserable looking.

He allowed himself one fantasy per day: autumn on Nantucket with Antoinette. Theo sitting with her on the back deck, Theo peeling her an apple, slicing a piece of cheese. Listening to the Canada geese pass overhead, Antoinette wrapped in a nubby wool sweater, Theo placing
his hand on her stomach and feeling his baby kick.

He masturbated exactly once a week—Saturday night—in the shower. It made him incredibly sad.

One night, when Theo had been living with Sabrina for just over a month, she made an old-fashioned meatloaf slathered with ketchup. It seemed uncharacteristically staid—a dowdy old meatloaf made by a woman wearing a fuchsia pantsuit with a matching head scarf. Sabrina’s long, manicured nails clicked against the plates as she set them down.

“This was your father’s favorite food growing up,” she said.

Theo picked up his fork. “Really?” Sabrina had said surprisingly little about
his father since he’d arrived. She hadn’t mentioned his mother or his siblings at all. Theo sometimes caught Sabrina staring at
him in a way that let him know she was trying to read his mind. He stared back, sending her the message,
Please don’t ask, Sabrina. I’m not ready.
But now as Theo ate the delicious, oniony meatloaf, he felt ready. “Has Dad called?”

“Twice,” Sabrina said. “While you were at school. Should I have told you?”

Theo shrugged. He was so busy longing for Antoinette that he didn’t have the energy to miss the rest of his family, not as he should. “What did he say?”

“He asked how you were doing.”

“What did you tell him?”

I said you were quiet, but that you were doing as well as could be expected under the circumstances.”

“Do you know the circumstances?”

“I know that you’ve learned a difficult lesson,” Sabrina said. She put her fork down and moved her hand across the table toward him. “I know that you’ve lost someone you loved.”

“Yes,” he said. Tears rose at his grandmother’s words. Finally, an acknowledgment of what was really wrong. He’d lost someone he loved—not one person but two—because Theo loved the baby Antoinette was carrying. Loved it with a fierceness that surpassed anything he’d ever felt. “They’re lost. Lost. Antoinette and… my baby. Antoinette was pregnant.”

“Yes,” Sabrina said. Her eyes shone with tears. “I know.”

“She wanted to have an abortion, and I was trying to stop her. I didn’t want her to kill our baby.”

“That’s understandable, Theo.”

“She disappeared to get away from me,” Theo said. “I think. But lately I’ve been having doubts. I’ve been wondering, you know, what if it
was
an accident? What if she
is
dead? Because what I picture is her living in Hawaii or something, you know, hiding from me.”

“They haven’t found her body,” Sabrina said. “Your father told me that much.”

“So she’s still alive, maybe,” Theo said.

He and his grandmother ate in silence as it grew dark. Then Sabrina cleared their plates and lit some candles.

“You’re going to think I’m nutty,” she said. “And you’ll be right, of course. But would you like me to ask the Madame?”

Theo squeezed his eyes shut.

“Never mind,” she said. “I just thought I’d offer. In case you were a believer.”

He
was
a believer of sorts. He had no choice but to believe. “Okay,” Theo said. “Ask Her if Antoinette is alive.”

Sabrina lit more candles. The apartment glowed with soft light. Outside on the street, Theo heard car horns. On
his way home from school that afternoon, he’d smelled autumn for the first time, the smokiness of falling leaves.

“I never make promises,” Sabrina said. “The Madame doesn’t always feel like communicating. She’s an old, old woman.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “I don’t expect much.”

Sabrina sat down on one of the turquoise pillows and waved
him over. “Come,” she said. She readjusted her head scarf. “Come and relax.”

Theo plopped onto a pillow next to her while she rubbed her small, manicured hands together. “Okay, now close your eyes and take my hands. What I need you to do is drink about Antoinette. Really think about her. Picture her in your mind’s eye and hold her there. Hold her steady.”

Theo framed Antoinette with her arms crossed over her chest, leaning against
his Jeep as she waited for him to emerge from the boys’ locker room after
his baseball game. This was a good picture, a “before” picture: before the sex, before the baby, before Theo fell in love. A moment in time with Antoinette when Theo was still safe. He was just a kid giving his mother’s friend a ride home.