Beth doesn’t like coming up here for fear of either forgetting about the low ceiling and impaling her head with a nail or accidentally stepping off the planks and falling through the fluffy fiberglass floor into the living room. Because of this, she normally visits the attic only twice a year—the day after Thanksgiving to take the Christmas decorations down and New Year’s Day to put the Christmas decorations back. Up and in, out and down, she’s never dallied in here.
Jimmy’s got a bunch of his stuff strewn all over the far end—fishing rods leaning against the angled ceiling, two of them fallen over, tangled nets, tackle boxes, one of them open, a collection of golf clubs crisscrossed and loose on the floor like a pile of pick-up sticks, the empty golf bag, a single golf shoe, a surfboard, a clamming rake and bucket.
“Jimmy.”
With her hands on her hips, she scolds him in her head and has to resist the urge to tidy it up. That’s not why she’s here.
Separate from his mess are three standing fans and two window-box air conditioners. Six plastic storage tubs, all labeled in her printing with a black Sharpie on masking tape, sit in a neat row, two each: CHRISTMAS, HALLOWEEN, WINTER.
The winter boxes are both empty. She and the girls have still been wearing their winter coats in the morning and at night, and they’ve also been getting good use out of their winter boots, the ground finally fully thawed, the height of mud season. Each year, about a week or two from now and under Beth’s directive, Jimmy carries all of the winter gear up to the attic and comes back down with the fans and air conditioners. She sighs, recognizing that this will be her job from now on.
One last tub, apart from the others, way at the back, is labeled BETH. The lid is coated with dust. She hasn’t opened this bin in at least a decade. Feeling both excited and scared of what she might discover inside, she sits cross-legged next to it and opens the lid.
First, she pulls out a red Frisbee signed by everyone on her ultimate Frisbee team, turning it over in her hands as she studies each note and signature. Johnny C! Her four-year, unrequited crush from Reed College. She hasn’t thought about him in years. He was such a sweet guy. He was premed. She wonders where he is now. He’s probably a successful doctor somewhere, not cheating on his wife.
She finds a stack of ticket stubs held together by an elastic band. Rolling Stones, Stomp, Rent, Cirque du Soleil, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, an airline ticket from Portland to New York, another to New Mexico, even movie stubs, each labeled with the names of the friends or boyfriend who went with her. She can’t remember the last concert she’s been to (it might’ve been the Stones), and her last plane trip was from New York to Nantucket, one way. She misses vacations to new places, Broadway shows, and museums (and the trips with each daughter’s third-grade class to the whaling museum don’t count).
She shuffles through her college ID cards, photos from parties and summer vacations. She laughs at her huge hair and aqua-blue eyeliner. The nineties!
Then she finds a stack of birthday cards, and she hesitates, gathering emotional courage. Eight birthday cards from her mother. She reads through them all, starting with sweet sixteen, treasuring each handwritten word, each Love you, Mom, wiping her eyes with her pajama sleeve every time the words get too blurry to read through her tears.
Her mother had a lumpectomy the summer before Beth moved to Nantucket. Her doctor said they got it all. She had radiation and chemotherapy after the surgery. Everything was standard procedure. Everything looked good.
Her hair was gone when Beth moved to New York in September. It was her first job out of college, an editorial assistant for Self magazine. Her mother insisted she go and start her life and assured her that she would be fine.
But she wasn’t fine. They didn’t get it all. In November, she went back into surgery, this time to remove the whole breast and some lymph tissue. Beth’s heart tightens. If only they’d done this in the first place. Again, the doctors said they got everything. She and Beth celebrated over Thanksgiving weekend, relieved and grateful.
But they shouldn’t have celebrated anything because some microscopic flecks of cancer had already broken free of her breast before the doctors removed it, and they floated off into her mother’s body, looking for a new residence. They found her liver first. And then her lungs. She died in January.
Beth holds the last birthday card, the last Love you, Mom. It was her twenty-third birthday, and she never imagined her mother wouldn’t be here to see her turn twenty-four, thirty, thirty-eight.
She’s often wondered if she’d be married to Jimmy if her mother hadn’t died. She found getting out of bed and going to work nearly impossible after her mother’s funeral. She remembers feeling utterly unable to do her job, even though it only consisted of fairly mindless office duties such as answering the phones, checking faxes, and scheduling meetings. She remembers trying to hide a torrent of tears at so many unprofessional moments. She needed some time off. She clawed her way through each week until June, then she quit and left New York City. She quit and went to Nantucket.
She had inherited a little money from her mother, enough for her to rent a cottage with three friends for the summer and attend graduate school in the fall. She’d been accepted into Boston University’s MFA program in creative writing. Other than that, there was no plan. She didn’t plan on meeting Jimmy and falling in love with him. And she certainly didn’t plan on marrying him and starting a family instead of going back to school.
But this is exactly what she did. On Labor Day, when her friends got on a plane and flew back to the real world, Beth stayed. A year later, she and Jimmy got married, and a year after that, Sophie was born.
She’s often wondered what her mother would’ve thought of Jimmy. She probably wouldn’t have liked him. She certainly wouldn’t be a fan of his right now. Her mother never had a high opinion of men. She and her father divorced when Beth was three, and they never saw him again after Beth turned four. She doesn’t remember her mother ever dating. She was entirely devoted to making a living and raising her daughter, her only child.
Beth digs through the tub, now looking for a specific picture. She knows it’s in here. She finds it at the bottom of everything, the only picture she has of her father. He’s wearing a men’s white undershirt and black-rimmed glasses. His light brown hair is receding. He’s smiling. His arms look strong. He’s holding Beth in his lap. Her blond hair is in pigtails, and she’s wearing a pink party dress. It’s her second birthday. She’s also smiling. They look happy together. She has no memory of this man or of herself as this little girl, but she believes that it’s them. The writing on the back of the picture, her mother’s writing, reads Denny & Beth, 10–2–73. She breathes a dense sigh and discards the photograph back to the bottom of the bin.
She presses the stack of birthday cards from her mother against her chest. She misses her, especially now. She smiles and dabs her wet eyes with her sleeve, lost in a bittersweet thought about her own daughters. Her mother may not have cared for Jimmy, but she would’ve loved her grandchildren.
Beth returns the cards to the tub and pulls out a paperback book. Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg. The book that made her believe she could be a writer someday. Why is this book in here and not on her bookshelf in the living room or on her bedside table?
When she first moved here, she wrote event pieces for Yesterday’s Island, nothing earth-shattering, but she was writing and getting paid for it. After she had Jessica, she landed a better job as a staff writer for the Inquirer and Mirror, but after she had Gracie, she found working and raising three young girls too much to juggle, and she quit the paper. But still, for a while, she kept her pen active.
She finds her essays, poems, and short stories. She finds her notebooks—ordinary, spiral notebooks, floppy and worn, every inch jammed with blue ink—writing exercises, ideas for short stories, vignettes, her imagination, her thoughts and emotions, her tender, naked insides laid out on the eight-and-a-half-by-eleven, college-rule
d pages. She flips through them and becomes absorbed in reading one in particular, a short story about a peculiar boy who lives strictly within the confines of a bizarre yet beautiful imaginary world. She remembers when she wrote that story. It was about six or seven years ago after a morning on the beach with the girls, inspired by a little boy she saw there playing with rocks by the shore. She used to find inspiration in her everyday life here, and she used to write about it. When did she stop writing? When did her life become uninspiring?
One of the notebooks she finds is brand-new, untouched. She holds this notebook in her hands, makes a promise to herself, and sets it aside.
Next she comes to the clothes—the faux-leopard-print coat that was her mother’s; leather pants (rock-star black); her Goldie Hawn, pink-and-orange, geometric mod dress. She used to love that dress. She wore it everywhere—parties, dance clubs, weddings, first dates. Her first real date with Jimmy.
She carefully strips out of her nubby pajamas and slides the dress on over her head without hitting the ceiling. Miraculously, it fits! She doesn’t need the mirror in her bedroom to see if it looks cute. She knows.
She finds piles of cheap jewelry—huge silver-hoop earrings, chunky and colorful plastic bangle bracelets, lots of rhinestones, a bunch of tangled necklaces, all very Madonna circa Desperately Seeking Susan. She slides a moonstone ring onto the middle finger of her right hand and admires it, wondering why she ever packed it away.
She wonders why she packed any of this away. Some of it has to do with moving from New York to Nantucket and wanting to fit in here. Year-rounders on Nantucket wear oversized L.L.Bean fleece jackets and hip waders, not Goldie Hawn dresses and mood rings. And some of it has to do with the swelling and weight gain that comes with being pregnant three times. Those skintight, leather rock-star pants haven’t been humanly possible in years. But leather pants aside, these things, the notebooks and clothes and photos and cards, are pieces of herself, her history, her sense of adventure and style, her dreams for her future.
This is me, she thinks, staring into the bin.
She and Jimmy used to throw impromptu parties with nothing in the house but a bag of potato chips, a six-pack of beer, and a cheap bottle of wine. Everyone would bring something, and they always had plenty. They always had fun. She and Jimmy haven’t thrown a party in a long time. The parties somehow changed, no longer arising spontaneously from the quick and playful thought, Hey, why don’t we invite some friends over tonight? Instead they required planning and cooking and cleaning the house. Everything had to be just so. They became work, and she doesn’t remember the fun, only the fights between Jimmy and her ignited over some stressful aspect of getting ready, her anger and resentment sticking to her ribs long after the last guest went home.
She used to wear blues and greens and orange. She used to have moxie. She used to skinny-dip at Fat Ladies Beach and dance to the music she liked. Now she always wears a loose and large cover-up over her bathing suit at the beach, and she only listens to whatever the girls want to hear, usually Britney Spears or some Bambi-eyed teenage girl from the Disney Channel.
She used to write.
She can’t believe she stuffed so much of herself into a box, banished to the attic for so many years. At least she didn’t donate herself to Goodwill or, worse, throw herself out. She continues to dig through the box, skipping down memory lane with each item until she picks up the locket, the first gift Jimmy ever gave to her. She opens the smooth, tarnished silver heart and holds it in the palm of her hand. She and Jimmy kissing. She and Jimmy in love. She studies this picture of herself and Jimmy, and it’s as if she were seeing two other people, as if they were old friends she was so fond of once, friends she’s long lost touch with and who have moved far away. Her heart sinks. She wore that locket every day for years and loved it. Then, at some point, she doesn’t remember exactly when, the silver heart began to tarnish, and what once looked new and romantic and sophisticated to her suddenly felt old and boring and childish. She grew tired of wearing it and packed it away.
Careful not to stand up straight or step too far to the side, Beth drags her bin to the top of the stairs, then carries it down and into her bedroom. Balancing the bin on her hip, she slides the closet door open and plops the bin on the floor of Jimmy’s side. She gathers Writing Down the Bones, her old notebooks, including the one that’s blank, and sets them on her night table. She nods. Then she clasps the locket around her neck, rubs the silver heart between her fingers, and turns to check herself out in the mirror on the door.
There I am.
Ready for Salt.
CHAPTER 8
It’s the hour before sunset on Fat Ladies Beach, and Olivia is walking with her camera in hand. She’s been walking this beach every evening and has come to appreciate why photographers call this time of day the magic hour. Lighting this patch of earth for the last minutes of the day from across the horizon rather than from directly overhead, the sun coats everything in a soft, diffuse glow. Colors look more saturated, golden, romantic. Magical.
Olivia had been walking without her camera, uninspired, all spring. Everything everywhere was gray. But then the pervasive gray seemed to lift and vanish for good this weekend, as if it finally became warm enough for Nantucket to unzip and peel off its gray winter coat, revealing the remarkable beauty of this place, especially at this hour. The astonishing blues of the sky melting into the ocean, the crisp, apple-green blades of beach grass, the glittering sand, and soon the showstopping sunset, an intensifying blood-orange sun sinking out of view, trading places with a sky increasingly drenched in hot pink and lavender, unbelievably more magnificent than it was just seconds before. It all begs to be photographed.
Olivia loves the feel of her Nikon in her hands. She admits that the teeny, deck-of-cards-size pocket cameras would be more convenient to carry, and technically they can do most of what she wants from a camera, but they feel like cheap toys. She prefers her bulky Nikon, the responsive click of the button beneath her index finger, the dialing action of the manual focus, its overall heft.
It reminds her of how she used to love the feel of one of her new books hot off the press, the culmination of years of writing by the author and months of editing by her, its smooth and shiny new cover, maybe with embossed lettering, and the satisfying weight of it in her hands. She still loves the feel of a new book. While she appreciates the convenience of those thin, slick e-readers, they don’t give her the three-dimensional sensory experience that comes with a real book.
She walks along the water’s edge, stopping now and then to snap a wide shot of the horizon, a macro of a seashell, a sandpiper, the silhouette of a woman walking her dog in the distance. Unlike the previous months when she could walk here for as long as she wanted in complete and almost guaranteed solitude, other people are always on the beach now. The island is coming to life, and as Olivia walks, she realizes how out of step she is with the world around her. The pervasive gray surrounding her hasn’t lifted; it’s still winter in her heart. She feels that she’s witnessing her life more than she’s actually living it, this woman who lives on Nantucket, drinks coffee, reads her journals, goes for walks, and takes pictures, as if she were watching a movie, a boring movie about a boring woman where nothing much happens, a movie she’d like to shut off or change to a different channel, but for some reason, she’s glued to the screen. If she keeps watching, something will happen.
In one respect, something does have to happen soon. She needs to find a job here. Even with her meager existence, there are the expenses of daily living. David agreed to pay for her first six months, which means she only has a little longer left on his dole. Either she’ll need to make a living here, or she’ll have to sell the house and move, probably back to Georgia to be near her mother and sister, Maria, and her family. Or maybe she’ll sell the house and run away to somewhere even more remote, some island in the South Pacific where she can disappear.
She’s thought about it, about really disappearing
. Several suicides on Nantucket have been reported in the paper since she moved here. Counselors and psychologists weighed in as to why suicides are more common on Nantucket than elsewhere, pointing fingers at depression and seasonal affective disorder layered onto the extreme abyss of winter on this isolated speck of land. She’s imagined her own name in print, the star subject of a similar newspaper article. She gets it. An almost unbearable emptiness unfolds before her every morning. And then come the questions.
Why?
Why was Anthony here?
What was the purpose of his short life?
No answer.
Why am I here?
Why?
No answer. There are never any answers, not in her prayers or dreams, not so far in her journals or in the faith she used to have in God and the church, not in the magic of a sunset on Fat Ladies Beach. A part of her has accepted that these questions will never find their answers, that there is no point to this life, but another part of her continues the search, asking these questions over and over, with the deepest sincerity, repeating this inquisitive loop many times a day, perseverating.
Like someone with autism.
The silence that follows the last Why? of the day always hangs in the air, echoing for a long moment before floating off into infinite nothingness, leaving her so utterly and painfully alone that she often wishes she could dissolve right there and disappear with her question into that nothingness. But something deep inside her insists on holding on, enduring. Witnessing and waiting. And soon, finding a job. But a job doing what? What can she do here?
Why am I here?
Why?
She squats down low, looks through her viewfinder, adjusts her focus, and clicks a photo of the shore, the white foam, the wet, metallic sand, the layers of liquid blue. She looks up and sees the slick, black head of a seal in the surf. She zooms in and clicks. Still zoomed in, she can clearly see the seal’s round, black eyes, and it appears to be looking directly at her. She lowers her camera, and they hold each other’s gaze for a long moment before the seal dips below the water’s surface, disappearing, leaving her alone.