Nantucket Red (Nantucket Blue) (11 page)

Twenty-seven

THE THREE OF US WALKED BACK
toward town on Cliff Road. It was empty and quiet. The houses were still with sleep, and the darkness was weightless and unthreatening. The cool air held the smells of the daytime: beach roses, sandy towels, and sun-warmed pavement. I couldn’t hear the ocean, but I could sense it, close by, lulling the island. It was the nighttime of dreaming children. The only sounds were our footsteps as we walked in the middle of the street. Jules and I drank from our thermoses. Zack took swigs from a bottle of vodka that Jules had brought as backup.

“I thought he was just ‘getting back out there,
’
” Zack said.

“Me, too,” Jules said.

“She’s too young,” Zack said.

“She’s too stupid,” Jules said.

“She has cats,” Zack said.

“She’s never been out of the country,” Jules said.

“She’s Republican,” Zack said.

“She’s not even funny,” Jules said.

“She doesn’t even like us,” Zack said.

“What will happen to Mom’s stuf
f
?” Jules asked.

“Will she want to have kids?” Zack asked.

“It hasn’t happened yet,” I said, stopping this runaway train of thought. “He might not do it. Your dad is a good man. A smart man. He married your mom.”

Over the next stretch of road, we walked again in silence. Jules walked ahead. She had gallantly offered to carry our wet towels and suits, and the damp canvas bag bumped against her hip. Zack hung back near me. A car sped by, and he changed places with me so that he was walking closer to the road. Our pinkie fingers brushed and my pulse jumped. Two steps later, our shoulders touched. My cheeks burned so that the air felt cold. His palm crossed mine, and the shock of it nearly transformed me into an electrical impulse, one that could travel on telephone wires. When Zack held my hand, I gasped with pleasure.

I brought the thermos to my mouth and drank until I was dizzy with Campari and confusion as Zack and I ran our thumbs over each other’s knuckles. We swayed as we walked. I knew I needed to let go of him, and that he couldn’t just show up and hold my hand after the distance he’d put between us, but instead I held his hand tighter. I told myself I would allow myself ten more seconds of touching him. I counted slowly, savoring each second.
One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand
….I was at seven when Jules called, “Do you guys smell that?” Zack and I dropped our hands.

The delicious smell was coming from Something Natural sandwich shop. The ghost of homemade bread hovered in the air and beckoned us into its driveway. My mouth was actually watering.

“Wait, they’re not open. What’re we doing?” I asked as we walked closer, realizing that my words weren’t coming out right. I couldn’t quite catch up to my thoughts. “Uh, I think I’m drunk.” I giggled, plucked a hydrangea blossom from a bush, and tucked it behind my ear.

“Yes,” Jules said, laughing as we locked arms and tripped closer to the building. “You are!”

“I need a picture of this,” Zack said, turning on his camera phone, but not before dropping it on the ground; he picked it up and fumbled with the buttons. He was even drunker than I was. “I need a video.”

“Why?” I asked, leaning toward him.

“So when we’re old we can remember we were kids once,” he said.

I tilted my head back and breathed in the night. “Look at the sky,” I said, arms extended, walking in an uneven circle. I just knew at that moment that Nina was with us. She was watching us and wanting us to be together. Jules and me as best friends. Zack and me as a couple. Together, our own kind of family.

“This is us,” Zack said, holding the camera away so that it was facing us, and we were in the frame together. He put an arm around me, and I tilted my head so that it was resting on his shoulder. He turned to face me. Our lips brushed in an almost-kiss. Then he tilted the camera to the sky. “And this is the middle of the night.” He turned the camera back on us. “This is us in the middle of the night.”

“Give me the camera,” Jules said. Zack handed it to her. “And put your arms around each other.” We did. “You guys look so happy it’s not even funny.” She handed the camera back to Zack. “And I’m so hungry! I’m so hungry I could faint!” She sat on the ground.

“Poor Jules,” I said to the camera. “She’s so hungry.”

“And drunk,” she said. “I’m very, very drunk.”

“Me, too!” I said. “I, Cricket Thompson, am so very drunk.”

“You know what I need?” Jules said.

“What do you need?” I answered. “I’ll get you anything you need!”

“I need a sandwich!” she said, rolling onto her stomach. “I need a sandwich like I’ve never needed anything before in my whole life. Turkey and avocado. Oh, and cheddar. On Portuguese bread.”

“Then a sandwich you shall have!” I said.

“But they’re not open,” Jules said, waving a finger. “I checked.”

“But there’s an open window,” I said. “If I stand on your back, I bet I could climb inside.”

“Look what happens to the angel with some Campari in her,” Zack said, staggering behind me with the camera.

“I’ve got the devil in me, too,” I said.

“Oh, yeah, Miss Brown Lacrosse Player?” Zack asked.

“Don’t remind me about lacrosse. I haven’t practiced lacrosse in, like, weeks,” I said. “Now, do you want a sandwich, too? Give me your order. I’m an expert!”

“Roast bee
f
!” Zack proclaimed. “With mustard and lettuce and tomato.”

“That sounds good. We want roast-beef sandwiches,” Jules said, stumbling to a standing position and then squatting by the open window. “Climb aboard, birthday girl.”

“Sandwich party!” I said.

“Don’t forget the Portuguese bread!”

Was I really going to do this? To climb on Jules’s back, through an open window, and make sandwiches? Yes, I was. I’d missed out on my senior-year fun. This was one of the best things about Nantucket. It can make you feel so separate, so out to sea. Untouchable. For the first time ever, I felt like one of the people who belonged here. That was how the Claytons had made me feel before Nina died, that I had a place in the world. It was right next to them.

We were all laughing as I hoisted my body through the window. “I’m in!” I called as I landed on a countertop. I lowered myself into the kitchen sink. I tried to orient myself as my feet found the floor. I knocked into a dishwasher and felt around until I located a light switch and turned it on. Digging out my tip money from my pocket, I pulled two twenty-dollar bills and put them on the counter. That would more than cover the cost of three sandwiches. I smiled, imagining the staff wondering about where that money had come from. Then I took a few extra bucks and stuck them in the tip jar, because we food-service workers needed to help each other out. There was a knock on the door, and I made my way out of the back room and into the front, expecting to see Zack and Jules waiting for me.

“Coming!” I called. I saw an apron hanging up with the Something Natural insignia on it and thought it would be a nice touch to answer the door with it on. Then I saw a box of latex gloves and giggled to myself, thinking how this would really complete the outfit. But when I opened the door, it wasn’t Jules and Zack standing on the other side. It was the cops.

Twenty-eight

“OH,” I SAID TO THE TWO YOUNG
, good-looking officers. “I was just going to make a sandwich.” They looked like people I’d grown up with, just a little older, like someone’s big brother and maybe a cousin from New Hampshire. So in the first few seconds after I opened the door, I wasn’t that nervous, just surprised. They knew I was a good person, the kind of person who obeyed the rules 99.9 percent of the time, right? Everyone knew that.

I mean, I knew I wasn’t
supposed
to be inside of Something
Natural, but it didn’t feel like I was doing something wrong, either. I had left forty dollars on the counter and a tip in the jar, even though I was my own server. In fact, there was something that felt right about being in Something Natural in the middle of the night. I loved this place. I knew my way around a kitchen. I was planning on cleaning up afterward.

And all that Campari didn’t feel like a bad thing, either. It had given me energy and off-kilter bravery. It had pushed glitter through my bloodstream, and, like a liquid magnet, it had brought Jules and Zack and me together again. For the past few hours, the world was a party to which I’d finally been invited.

But the stern eyes and straight mouths of the officers clarified the situation. I took in their heavy shoes and their big, bright flashlights and my good feeling went away. So I tried to explain again, but my tongue felt slow and sticky. I couldn’t get my words to come out right no matter how hard I concentrated.

When the blond officer asked me to step outside and began to read me my rights, while the other went into Something Natural to “check for damages,” I was so surprised, so scared, so turned upside down that I vomited right into one of the hydrangea bushes from which just a half hour earlier I had plucked a blossom.

Jules and I were arrested and taken to the police station, where we were fingerprinted and had our pictures taken. We were both charged with underage drinking, but I was also charged with the more serious offense of breaking and entering. It was a misdemeanor, the officer said.
A misdemeanor
. I didn’t know what the word meant, but it scared me past the point of crying. I was going to throw up again.

The officer must’ve seen my color change, because he asked if I needed the bathroom. I nodded, clamping my hands over my mouth, certain now I was going to vomit. He let Jules accompany me while I ran down the hallway, barged into a stall, and hung my head over the toilet as the Campari rose again in a burning, acidic wave. Afterward, I sat on the closed toilet seat, shaking. Jules dampened a paper towel and held it to my head.

“It’s going to be okay,” she said.

“What happened to Zack?” I asked, wiping away a tear.

Jules whispered that she’d given Zack the thermoses and the bottle of vodka and told him to run. She didn’t want to get charged with possession of alcohol or open-container violations. He was drunker than both of us combined. “There was no need for the three of us to go down. He’s either at home or passed out in the bushes somewhere.” She pressed the paper towel to my clammy forehead.

When we returned from the bathroom, the bail commissioner was there, and because I had my tips in my pocket, I was able to pay our bail amounts, which were forty dollars each. He told us that we needed to appear in court a week later and we signed forms promising that we would.

“If I were you,” the bail commissioner said, a meaty finger pointed right at my heart, “I’d get a lawyer.”

“Why didn’t you run away when Zack did?” I asked later that night in Jules’s bedroom. It was my first time in her Nantucket bedroom, which was a lot smaller than her Providence one, with one single bed, a small desk, and one window. There was evidence of Nina in the rug, the mosaic of family Polaroids arranged like a quilt, and the high-quality sheets. Neither Jules nor I wanted to sleep alone, so she lent me a T-shirt and pajama bottoms and we arranged ourselves head to toe in her single, iron-framed bed. We still didn’t know where Zack was, but at least he hadn’t been arrested.

“I couldn’t leave you alone,” she said as she handed me one of the pillows from behind her head. “I got you drunk.”

“You didn’t exactly force it down my throat. You didn’t make me drink.” I thought of the heat and excitement of Zack’s hand passing over mine, how it had almost been too much happiness, how I’d swallowed the Campari in gulps.

“This is going to sound kind of crazy,” Jules said, lying back and staring at the ceiling. Her feet, in socks with little Santa Clauses on them, were next to my face.

“What?”

“I could feel Mom there.” She was whispering, even though we were the only two people in the house. “It was like I just knew she wanted me to…”

“What?” I felt her breathing next to me.

“Stay with you.” She exhaled. Silence enclosed us like a canopy of trees. We stepped into its cool, leafy darkness.

After a few minutes I said, “You know that picture you gave me? Of your mom when she graduated from Brown?”

“Yeah?”

“On the back it has a list, a life list, of things she wanted to do.”

“It does?”

“I think she must’ve written it right after she graduated. She lists five things. And one of them is about drinking Campari with Alison in Italy.”

“So that’s why you brought Campari,” Jules said, lifting herself onto her elbows.

“Yes.”

“What else is on this list?” Jules asked, sitting up and drawing her knees into her chest. She looked like she was about seven years old as she tilted her head and bit her lower lip. I knew it had been wrong to keep the list from her.

“Let’s see,” I said, sitting up. “Well, the first one is
Visit the Rodin Museum in Paris.
”

“She definitely did that, like, ten times. What else?”

“The second one is
Learn to drive and then drive Route 1 to Big Sur.
”

“She did that when she was pregnant with me.”

“And then there’s
Drink Campari on the Amalfi Coast with Alison.
”

“What else?” Jules asked.

“She wanted to be in a Woody Allen movie,” I said.

“I wonder if she ever was.”

“It’s checked off,” I said and shrugged. “So she must’ve been.”

“Wait a second.” Jules drummed on the coverlet. “She told me about this. I’d forgotten. She was cast as an extra, but she wasn’t in the movie.”

“Which movie was it?”

Jules covered her mouth with both hands. “Oh, Cricket, you don’t want to know.”

“I do.” I kicked her under the covers. “I really, really do.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t tell you. Not right now.” She was trying not to laugh.

“Jules, what was it?” I asked, grabbing her feet, holding her toes hostage.

“It was—” Jules began, but she couldn’t finish, because she was laughing too hard, snorting and crying, the works.

“What?” I asked, as serious as she was ridiculous.

“It was…
Crimes and Misdemeanors
.”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “This can’t be what she meant.”

“Cricket!” Jules was laughing so hard she was wheezing. “We got arrested.”

“They put us in the patrol car and we got fingerprinted,” I said, and I started laughing, too.

“We had mug shots taken,” she said. “We’re outlaws.”

“We’ve committed crimes and misdemeanors,” I said. We were crying and laughing and laughing and crying.

“I’m crimes and you’re misdemeanors,” Jules said as we clutched our stomachs. We fell off the bed we were laughing so hard. We rolled around on the rug, tears streaming down our faces. We crawled to the bathroom so we wouldn’t wet our pants. We were releasing the tension of the day, of the night, of the whole year. We laughed until we were so exhausted that we were communicating exclusively in grunts and giggles and sighs, until we finally fell asleep, her Santa Claus feet in my face. I never did get to tell her about the last thing on Nina’s list.