The Cottage on Nantucket

by Jessie Newton

  “I’ve seen that in her file,” Shane said. He’d been asking her about her sales, her contacts, and her goals for the future for half an hour. Janey’s stomach flipped again, something it had been doing for the entirety of the interview. “Here’s what I’m thinking.” He paused for a moment, and Janey wondered when he’d last made a cold call to a massive corporation and tried to sell them expensive software they didn’t want.

  Probably not for years, she thought.

  And if she got this Senior Sales Manager position, she wouldn’t have to do that anymore either. She’d over see a team of people. Yes, there would be more paperwork and the same odd hours as she spoke to people overseas in various time zones.

  She’d have an office with real walls, and she’d get to set her own schedule. She’d see an increase in pay by thirty percent, and she’d get to keep doing the things she liked most about her job—talking to her clients.

  “You’re clearly more qualified than the other candidate,” Shane said, lifting his eyebrows. On her screen, Sunny nodded, and gratitude and relief filled Janey.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “I think the position should be yours, and if you can get OceanAir to sign on the dotted line with all of their airlines for all three software pieces we sell, I’ll bonus you a year’s salary.”

  Janey’s eyes widened to the point of pain, and her heartbeat fought against itself it went so fast.

  “Shane,” Dalton said, and that was all.

  “We regularly bonus our people, Dalt,” Shane said. “Let’s make a note of this in Janey’s contract.”

  “What if I don’t do it?” she blurted. “Do I lose my job?”

  Shane smiled and chuckled. “Not at all. I just think sometimes it’s good to have a goal to work toward, with something attached to it.”

  Janey wasn’t sure she believed him, but she couldn’t find any malice in his face. “Thank you, sir.”

  “Sunny, get the paperwork done and pushed through. I want this tied up before the fiscal year ends.”

  “You got it, Shane,” Sunny said.

  Janey couldn’t stop smiling. Dalton and Shane dropped out of the call, and she squealed with Sunny. Waves of adrenaline shot through her, coursing through her veins over and over. “Wow,” she said. “That’s a huge bonus.”

  “It sure is,” Sunny said, still laughing at Janey’s shriek. “I’ll be sure to give you until the end of July to get OceanAir on-board,” she said. “And the fiscal year ends August thirty-first, Janey, so you’ll assume the new position on September first.”

  Janey drew in a breath, trying to quiet everything that had started rioting. “Okay, sure. Yes, September first.” Her mind flew through the bills that were due before then. The roof that needed fixing. The fact that she really wanted to sell her house and get into something cheaper and smaller.

  It’s six weeks, she told herself. She’d gone months with the pressure of her bills and financial obligations in the past. Heck, years.

  “Okay,” Sunny said. “Go enjoy that island and the beach. I wish I was there with you.” She waved, and her screen went dark in the next moment.

  Janey just stared at the remaining words—Sunny Jones has left—her thoughts zipping over each other before one had even finished. As the adrenaline wore off, Janey realized she wasn’t going to be lounging on the beach, chatting with her sister about her new promotion.

  Excitement danced through her, and she wanted to tell someone about this amazing call. In the past, that someone was Tessa.

  Now, she didn’t even know who Tessa was to her.

  “A half-sister,” she murmured, and somehow that seemed so much less than who Janey would rely on, spend time with, or share her most intimate thoughts and feelings with.

  Knowing she wasn’t Tessa’s full sister hadn’t answered any of the questions about why Mom had to leave the hotel and other assets in the will addendum just to Tessa. Janey was still her mother’s daughter, just as much as Tessa was.

  Dale Harton.

  The name entered her mind, and Janey strained against her memories to find some with him in it. He and his wife, Joan, had lived here on the Point for a couple of years. Or maybe they’d just had a beach house, the way Mom and Daddy did. Janey wasn’t sure, because she’d been a teenager at the time.

  The box with all the photographs sat on the corner of her desk, and she pulled it toward her. She’d looked through every one of these on Monday night when Tessa had returned from Long Island, not knowing what she’d find or what she was supposed to find.

  Until she’d seen the title for the car currently parked in the garage, she hadn’t known Dale Harton meant anything. He’d been a friend of Daddy’s, a doctor just like him. They’d gone to school together, and they’d both landed jobs at Johns Hopkins.

  Daddy performed heart surgeries, and Dale had too. For a few years, at least.

  A memory tickled her, and she reached into the box, now knowing she wanted to see all the pictures with Dale and Joan in them. She wasn’t sure why, but she kept the pictures separated into their groups of twenty-four, taking out any with Dale or Joan and setting them on the desk in front of the packet.

  Over and over, she sorted through them, trying to find a pattern in when Dale and Joan came into their lives.

  They were there in the oldest of the pictures, when Janey and Tessa were tiny children, building sandcastles and wearing saggy swimming suits until they couldn’t keep their eyes open for another moment.

  Janey flipped through the dozen or so pictures with Dale in them. He had dark hair, like hers, with big, bushy eyebrows. She’d always plucked hers or gotten them waxed to keep them feminine and shapely.

  She pulled in a breath on one with Dale laughing. He tipped his head back in the picture, and the only other person in the photo was her. Dale and Janey as a child—maybe seven or eight years old—laughing about something.

  She didn’t remember what. She didn’t remember talking to him when this picture was taken. The next one in the group was of her and Tessa walking with Dale. The three of them approached the camera, and the trio all smiled.

  Janey was holding his hand; Tessa wasn’t.

  Tears gathered in her eyes, and she wasn’t sure why. She wasn’t happy to be learning these things. She wasn’t relieved her father might still be alive.

  She was angry. Oh, so angry.

  She didn’t want to know any of this.

  Shaking, she swiped her hand across the desk, scattering the pictures she’d so painstakingly sorted. As they flapped and fluttered to a stop, she stood in the room, her chest heaving.

  “I don’t want to know any of this,” she said out loud. “Do you hear me, Mom?” She looked up at the ceiling. “I just wanted to come here and get this cottage cleaned up so we could sell it. Why couldn’t it have just been that simple?”

  “Janey?” Tessa’s light knock on the door had Janey wiping at her eyes quickly.

  “Just a minute,” she said, looking at the photos. “I’m almost done with my call.”

  “Okay.” Tessa’s voice came through the closed door she hadn’t tried to open, but Janey didn’t hear her footsteps retreat.

  She bent to pick up one of the fallen pictures. It was her and Tessa and Dale again, this time nearly smothered in darkness. A red-orange glow across the top of the picture illuminated their faces as they lay on a blanket on the beach.

  “I remember this,” she whispered. The Fourth of July fireworks, which could be seen from anywhere on Nantucket. Mom always took blankets out to the beach, followed by at least three picnic baskets filled with sandwiches, licorice, potato salad, krab salad, and fruit.

  They ate as the sun went down, and Tessa and Janey drew stars and Liberty bells in the sand with sticks until it was too dark to see. The water lapped at the shore as it always did, and they tuned their FM radio to the feed coming out of downtown Nantucket.

  When Neil Diamond’s They’re Coming to America! started, a cheer rose over
the beach out here at the Point, where locals and tourists alike had gathered for the fireworks display. An assortment of patriotic music, as well as a spoken program, followed, with fireworks filling the sky with booms and pops and crackles—and light.

  Such glorious light. Janey had loved the Fourth of July holiday on Nantucket Point.

  In the photo, she lay against Dale’s side while Tessa sat cross-legged on his other side. Again, the familiarity of the two of them spoke of a father-daughter relationship, and Janey wondered why she’d never realized it.

  “The innocence of childhood,” she said aloud, supposing that to be true. She knew better now, and the worst part was, so did Mom.

  Mom had known who Janey’s father was. Instead of leading her all over two states and this island collecting pendants and envelopes and letters, she could’ve just put everything in her blasted will to begin with.

  Or better yet, had the guts to tell Janey while she’d been alive.

  She dropped the photo and watched it fall to the ground. She didn’t want to ruin these photos, but she didn’t want to look at them right now.

  She didn’t want to break down. Not again.

  She couldn’t face Tessa. Not right now.

  Janey quickly stuffed her feet into a pair of sandals, grabbed her phone, and turned toward the window.

  She’d snuck out of this very bedroom while Tessa had slept in a nearby bed, and just because three decades had passed didn’t mean she’d forgotten how. The frame lifted noiselessly, and Janey popped the screen out in seconds flat.

  Twenty seconds later, she landed on the newly-mowed grass outside the cottage, and she strode away from it without looking back.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Janey hadn’t taken the keys to the car, so she set off down the street on foot. She had her credit card stored in her phone, and she could use that to pay for whatever she needed.

  She wasn’t sure what she needed.

  Her footsteps slowed as she approached the cottage behind Mom’s. Bobbie and Riggs lived here permanently, and they took great care of their house. It had been pink for a while, and then yellow, and now it stood two stories tall and bright white.

  Clean, and classic, and someone had put plenty of charm into the bright green shutters. Flowers hung from the eaves, and stepping stones and statues of frogs filled the garden surrounding the front steps.

  Janey found herself moving down the sidewalk and standing in front of the stepping stones. They had baby handprints and footprints pressed into the stones, with names of grandchildren etched in as well.

  Colored gems and rocks decorated the terra cotta, and Janey smiled. What a great gift from a child to a parent. She looked up to the house, which she stood very close to now. Panic seized in her chest, and she stumbled backward.

  She didn’t want to be here. She didn’t want to talk to Bobbie or Riggs. She could tolerate them, because they’d been such good friends with Mom. But Bobbie liked to give advice Janey didn’t want or need, and Riggs…there was something off about Riggs.

  She pictured the older gentleman as she knew him in real life, and then from the picture Esme had sent from Long Island. Why in the world had he gone there?

  Safely back on the road, she kept going away from the beach. Usually she ran toward the sand and surf. She loved the sound they made together when they met, as it had always soothed her.

  She remembered walking the sand with her mother one afternoon. Just her and Mom. She couldn’t remember where Tessa or Daddy had been, but Janey remembered her small hand inside of her mother’s. They’d stopped near the lighthouse on the Point, and Mom had looked out into the vastness of sky and ocean.

  “We’re but small players on a large stage,” she’d said. Janey didn’t know what it had meant. She still didn’t.

  The words looped through her mind, and she searched the memories for any sign of sadness from her mother that day. She’d sighed, lifted her arms up high, and stretched them toward the water as she bent over.

  “Stretch with me, little one,” she’d said, her smile returning to her face. Janey had, and she remembered her purple-painted toenails. Mom had done them the night before while they sat on the porch and listened to Daddy tell stories about his patients in the hospital.

  It had been years before Janey realized he cut into real hearts and not paper ones. She’d been very young in this memory, and she wondered if it was one of the first times they’d come to Nantucket Point as a family. Daddy had worked so much in Janey’s childhood.

  She wrapped her arms around herself as she let the memory go. The wind picked up as she turned the corner, and she headed down another finger-like lane that led to the beach. Out here on the Point, one could drive into a neighborhood and find a cul-de-sac of sorts, with streets leading off the circular center island, all of them lined with cottages, sturdy trees that could withstand the ocean breezes, and sand.

  They dead-ended into the beach, and Janey did step onto the sand a few minutes later. It slid into her sandals and across her skin, bringing comfort in the oddest way. She didn’t want the cottage here, but she did love the beach. The two thoughts warred with one another, and she didn’t know how to make them line up.

  She didn’t deviate right or left but went straight out to the water. The sun had risen and already started to warm the sand while she’d been in her interview, but the water held a chill as she let it kiss her feet.

  She drew in a deep breath, taking in the power of the ocean as she did, held it, and then exhaled it all back out. Mom had taught her this too, telling her to imagine how powerful all that water was, how it could tumble ships as if they were toothpicks, and how it could form massive landmarks like the Grand Canyon.

  Take that power, Janey, and use it. Breathe it in, make it yours.

  Janey had believed her mother when she was ten years old, and she’d breathed in all the power and held it.

  You’re stronger than you know.

  The line from Mom’s letter to her popped into her head. Maybe she was, and maybe she wasn’t. “What do I do?” she asked. “How do I find the answers I need?”

  She had one more question she didn’t give voice to but which circled through her mind. Why do I feel like I need to do this myself?

  She’d always felt like that, actually. She wanted to do everything herself, from learning to bake a birthday cake to changing her own oil. She’d learned over the years that she had strengths and weaknesses, and she now paid for the things she simply couldn’t—or didn’t want to—do herself.

  She breathed in again, counting all the way to ten as her eyes drifted and then pressed closed. When she released her breath, she knew what to do.

  “Mm hm,” she said, her feet squishing in the wet sand. “That’s fine, ma’am. I can do that.”

  “And don’t be bringing any of that fake crab,” the old woman said. “And don’t ring my doorbell. I’m deaf anyway and I won’t hear it.”

  Janey smiled into the sky, but it faded quickly. “Yes, ma’am,” she said, wondering how she’d taken a call if she couldn’t hear. “Tomorrow at noon.”

  “Don’t be late,” she barked, and the call ended.

  Janey tucked her phone under her bra strap and against her shoulder bone and turned away from the water. She’d wanted to visit Viola Martin today, but the woman said her house wasn’t fit for visitors. She’d also been very keen to know how Janey had gotten her number.

  It was amazing what a professional voice and a quick call to the Nantucket Historical Society could yield her.

  The Lighthouse Inn stood proudly to her right, and Janey gazed up at it. Built up on a cement platform, the lighthouse seemed to right straight up out of the ocean. The beach sloped around the sides of it, but the front definitely had a rock wall fifteen or twenty feet up before the ground leveled.

  She’d never stayed in the inn, but she’d toured the place lots of times. She couldn’t believe they’d closed, and she hoped the Historical Society would be
able to find new caretakers and get the four-room inn reopened.

  She even had the wild thought that she could do it.

  That idea got dismissed quickly as she approached the dock attached to the inn. Whoever ran the inn had to have nautical knowledge, and Phil Michaels had been a sailor in the Coast Guard before coming to the inn with his wife, Margo.

  She’d often played in the foamy water under the dock here, though Mom didn’t like it. She said sharp shells got deposited here, and Tessa had cut her foot on one once, long ago.

  Today, a few fishing lines lay lazily in the water from the poles up on the dock. Janey heard people talking in voices muted by the water rushing ashore beneath the dock, where she walked, and she let her mind ebb in and out like the water.

  She watched her footsteps appear in the wet sand, and then blur and disappear, especially when a wave came ashore.

  Someone coughed, and this person wasn’t up above her. Janey looked up sharply and froze at the sight of Riggs several paces away from her, standing next to a pillar holding up the dock, water up around his ankles.

  His fishing pole had not been threaded with a line and hook. In fact, it stood against the pillar without even a reel of line in it. Janey couldn’t see a tackle box at all, and she wondered if he hid it in the grass somewhere between here and his house.

  Just the fact that she thought such things increased her heart rate, and she felt sure Riggs would hear the booming pulses as they moved through her ears.

  He muttered something to the water and walked away from her, around the pillar. She wasn’t sure what to do. She didn’t really want to talk to him, but walking in the water would create some noise, which could attract his attention.

  Her phone rang, and Janey’s panic reared again. He’d hear that, and she struggled to get it out from beneath her bra strap. He rounded the pillar as she did, and she turned away from him quickly as if she hadn’t seen him there at all.

  “Hey, Tess,” Janey said breathlessly, straining to hear Riggs’s footsteps behind her.