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Stepping

Page 31

by Nancy Thayer


  The wine-colored Jeep came bouncing back to the farm just then. As I walked from the barnyard I saw the people get out; they were like bright-colored beads of life exploding from a box. Big Irish Brad, wriggling noisy Adam, large strong Charlie, and then Caroline, slim and blond, with Lucy in her arms. Lucy had fallen asleep and lay against Caroline, totally limp, lips open, sighing in her sleep.

  It was a strange sight to see the two of them: Charlie’s daughters, one twenty-three years old, the other only two, one asleep in the other’s arms. I wondered if it seemed to Charlie that Caroline looked like Lucy’s mother more than I. They had the same coloring, the same bone structure, the same features; both girls were long and slim, fair-haired, green-eyed, white-skinned. At Lucy’s birth I had been afraid that she was dead, because she was so pale, as white as a sheet of paper. But she had been perfectly healthy; she simply had managed to have Charlie’s coloring. I remembered the time in Michigan when I had held Alice’s little girl and longed for a little girl of my own, one who looked just like me. Now I had a little girl of my own, and she looked just like, exactly like, my stepdaughter. How strange life is.

  We all went into the house, and because it was growing cool Charlie made a fire in the kitchen fireplace. Brad went downstairs and found more champagne. “Champagne and pizza!” we all cried. “How weird!” But it was delicious.

  “Let me take Lucy up and put her in her crib,” I said to Caroline.

  “That’s okay,” Caroline said, settling into a kitchen chair. “I’ll hold her. She might wake up if you move her. She’s fine. I’ve got a free hand to eat with.”

  We sat about the round oak table, eating pizza, drinking champagne, watching the fire. Irish Brad entertained us with stories, but I didn’t listen carefully. I kept looking at Caroline, holding sleeping Lucy, eating her pizza carefully, so that she wouldn’t joggle Lucy too much and awaken her. I wondered if Caroline was perhaps sitting in the same chair she had been sitting in two years before, right after Lucy’s birth, when I had sat holding Lucy at my breast, and feeding Adam and myself with my one free hand, and hating Caroline and Cathy with all my heart.

  Oh, love. It is not a constant thing, though we would all prefer it to be so; it would certainly make for a calmer life. Love and time; love needs time; love must climb time as if time were a series of beautiful, twisted, convoluted stairs, with landings to rest at, and window seats looking out over the past, and railings to hold to against a fall into nothingness, and perhaps, one hopes, a room of wisdom and knowledge at the last step, at the top.

  Here in Helsinki, I am not anywhere near the wisdom of that last step, but I have come this far, I do see now that I love Charlie, and that I always will. He loves me. We have come this far, quite far, together. I realize now that it is okay, it is allowable, to love other things at the same time I love him; my love for him is not diminished. And he realizes now that I must do the things I want to do or become a stunted person. In our case the way of separation enriches our love; the way of togetherness would have destroyed it. He will travel and lecture, and I will teach and play with the children, and we will write letters to each other. In a few short months we will be together again. It will be nice, coming together again. Perhaps there will be more comings and goings in our lives now that we are mutual people, both of us standing on our own personal ground. I will love him better for being independent of him. He will love me better, I think, because I will become a better person to love. It seems exciting. After thirteen years of marriage it seems that we are starting all over again.

  And I love my children. I will love them enough to know, to accept the knowledge, that there will be times when I will hate them, when they will hate me, when we will make each other grieve and cry. But for the most part I will happily soak in the love, the beauty, the joy, of living with these young people.

  I love my stepdaughters. Yes, I’ve climbed this far; I can say with honesty that I love them. It will be an interesting experience living with Caroline. Will she expect me to be her mother and keeper and cook and maid, or will she want to live as if we are friends? What will Adam think of having her in the house with us? He is almost five now, beginning to ask questions, sense relationships, put things together. He has never asked Charlie or me why Caroline calls Charlie “Dad” or why Caroline’s last name is the same as ours, but I know the time will come when he will. What will I, or Charlie—it’s his problem after all—say to Adam, innocent Adam, about Caroline and Cathy, these first children of his? What will we say to Adam about marriage and divorce and children then? Will Adam be afraid then that Charlie will leave him? Well, if so, he’ll just have to be afraid; there is always that possibility. This is the twentieth century, and even though we live on a farm now, we are caught up in the values of our time. All in all, I think Caroline and I will have a good time together this semester. I am looking forward to talking and laughing and sharing life with her. It’s obvious that I care for her—love her—more than I do Cathy. It always has been that way. But I feel no grudge against Cathy, and I think she carries no grudge against me. Out there in California with her guitar-playing boyfriend, she probably doesn’t think of me at all. She’s never needed me, leaned on me at all; it’s always been men she’s preferred, right from the start. Well, Adam is turning out to be a handsome and charming boy; perhaps when Cathy comes back this way she will enjoy his company. Perhaps someday Cathy will take Adam and Caroline will take Lucy to a movie, and they’ll sit and eat popcorn and laugh together, and perhaps, since they can never live as brother and sisters, perhaps they’ll live as friends. Perhaps they will somehow enrich each other’s lives. That is the most I could hope for. That would be a very fine thing.

  But this much I know: it does not end here. We will not ever be at peace. Nothing will be definite. Our relationship will not now or ever become constant, settled, fulfilled. It will always change. I will have to remember that, and not hold grudges. It is just as possible that my stepdaughters and I will die hating each other as it is that we will die loving each other. In this relationship nothing is assured. I can only enjoy the good times and let the other times go by.

  Charlie has never seemed to worry about the relationship between his two sets of children. Perhaps that is because he is a historian, and a realist. He seems to know that children will get sick, and then get well, and that people will learn to love each other, or not, no matter how much we fret and yearn. It would not bother him if Caroline and Cathy did not love or care for Adam and Lucy; I wonder why it would bother me. I think it is more than merely that I have been a housekeeper for so long and want things tidy. No, it is that these are four people that I care for and enjoy, and I would like them to care for and enjoy each other. But I will let the matter rest, go free, I will not try anymore to work things out myself. Lucy fell asleep in Caroline’s arms when I was not around.

  Now, on this cold January morning, I pick up the twisted piece of lead, my Finnish fortune, and put it in my pocket. There’s no place else to put it; all the bags are packed and locked. I could throw it away, the small unnecessary piece of metal; it is certainly worthless to everyone but me. But I want to take it back with me, as a memento, a souvenir, a talisman. I want to remember all that went on here, all I thought about and learned, all the steps I climbed, physically and in my mind. I want to keep it near me, up high somewhere on a desk or fireplace mantel, some everyday place where my eye will fall on it occasionally. I want it to help me remember how far I’ve come.

  And I want it, in its severe and shining way, to continually bless and protect me. With love I am climbing the steps of time; I have so far to go.

  For stepmothers and mothers everywhere

  BY NANCY THAYER

  A Nantucket Christmas

  Island Girls

  Summer Breeze

  Heat Wave

  Beachcombers

  Summer House

  Moon Shell Beach

  The Hot Flash Club Chills Out

  Hot Flas
h Holidays

  The Hot Flash Club Strikes Again

  The Hot Flash Club

  An Act of Love

  Belonging

  Between Husbands and Friends

  Bodies and Souls

  Custody

  Everlasting

  Family Secrets

  My Dearest Friend

  Nell

  Spirit Lost

  Stepping

  Three Women at the Water’s Edge

  Morning

  Nancy Thayer is the New York Times bestselling author of Island Girls, Summer Breeze, Heat Wave, Beachcombers, Summer House, Moon Shell Beach, and The Hot Flash Club. She lives in Nantucket.

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  Nantucket Sisters

  Ballantine Books

  It’s like a morning in Heaven. From a blue sky, the sun, fat and buttery as one a child would draw in school, shines down on a sapphire ocean. Eleven-year-old Emily Porter stands at the edge of a cliff high above the beach, her blond hair rippled by a light breeze.

  The edge of the cliff is an abrupt, jagged border, into which a small landing is built, with railings you can lean against, looking out at the sea. Before her, weathered wooden steps cut back and forth down the steep bluff to the beach.

  Behind her lies the grassy lawn and their large gray summer house, so different from their apartment on East 86th in New York City.

  Last night, as the Porters flew away from Manhattan, Emily looked down on the familiar fantastic panorama of sparkling lights, urging the plane onward with her excitement, with her longing to see the darkness and then, in the distance, the flash and flare of the lighthouse beacons.

  Nantucket begins today.

  Today, while her father plays golf and her beautiful mother, Cara, organizes the house, Emily is free to do as she pleases. And what she’s waited for all winter is to run down the street into the small village of ’Sconset and along the narrow path to the cottages in Codfish Park, where she’ll knock on Maggie’s door.

  First, she waves back at the ocean. Next, she turns and runs, half skipping, waving her arms, singing. She exults in the soft grass under her feet instead of hard sidewalk, salt air in her lungs instead of soot, the laughter of gulls instead of the blare of car horns, and the sweet perfume of new dawn roses.

  She flies along past the old town water pump, past the ’Sconset Market, past the post office, past Claudette’s Box Lunches. Down the steep cobblestoned hill to Codfish Park. Here, the houses used to be shacks where fishermen spread their nets to dry, so the roofs are low and the walls are ramshackle. Maggie’s house is a crooked, funny little place, but roses curl over the roof, morning glories climb up a trellis, and pansy faces smile from window boxes.

  Before she can knock, the door flies open.

  “Emily!” Maggie’s hair’s been cut into an elf’s cap and she’s taller than Emily now, and she has more freckles over her nose and cheeks.

  Behind Maggie stands Maggie’s mother, Frances, wearing a red sundress with an apron over it. Emily’s never seen anyone but caterers and cooks wear an apron. It has lots of pockets. It makes Maggie’s mother look like someone from a book.

  “You’re here!” Maggie squeals.

  “Welcome back, Emily.” Frances smiles. “Come in. I’ve made gingerbread.”

  The fragrant scent of ginger and sugar wafts out enticingly from the house, which is, Emily admits privately to her own secret self, the strangest place Emily’s ever seen. The living room’s in the kitchen; the sofa, armchairs, television set, and coffee table, all covered with books and games, are just on the other side of the round table from the sink and appliances. In the dining room, a sewing machine stands on a long table, and piles of fabric bloom from every surface in a crazy hodgepodge. Frances is divorced and makes her living as a seamstress, which is why Emily’s parents aren’t crazy about her friendship with Maggie, who is only a poor island girl.

  But Maggie and Emily have been best friends since they met on the beach when they were five years old. With Maggie, Emily is her true self. Maggie understands Emily in a way her parents never could. Now that the girls are growing up, Emily senses change in the air—but not yet. Not yet. There is still this summer ahead.

  And summer lasts forever.

  “I’d love some gingerbread, thank you, Mrs. McIntyre,” Emily says politely.

  “Oh, holy moly, call her Frances.” Maggie tugs on Emily’s hand and pulls her into the house.

  * * *

  Maggie acts blasé and bossy around Emily, but the truth is, she’s always kind of astounded at the friendship she and Emily have created. Emily Porter is rich, the big fat New York/Nantucket rich.

  In comparison, Maggie’s family is just plain poor. The McIntyres live on Nantucket year-round but are considered off-islanders, “wash-ashores,” because they weren’t born on the island. They came from Boston, where Frances grew up, met and married Billy McIntyre, and had two children with him. Soon after, they divorced, and he disappeared from their lives. When Maggie was a year old, Frances moved them all to the island, because she’d heard the island needed a good seamstress. She’s made a decent living for them—some women call Frances “a treasure.”

  Still, it’s hard. It isn’t that kids made fun of Maggie at school. Lots of kids don’t have fathers, or have fathers who live in different houses or states. It’s a personal thing. The sight of a television show, even a television ad, with a little girl running to greet her father when he returns from work at the end of the day, or a bride in her white wedding gown being twirled on the dance floor by her beaming, loving father, can make a sadness stab through her all the way down into her stomach.

  Plus, her life is so cramped by their lack of money.

  When a friend asks her to go to a movie in the summer at the Dreamland Theater, Maggie always says no, thanks. She can’t ask her mom for the money. In the winter, when friends take a plane off island to Hyannis where they stay in a motel and swim in the heated pools and see movies on huge screens and shop at the mall, they ask Maggie along, but she never can go. She hates the things her mom makes for her out of leftover material saved from dresses she’s sewn for grown women. Frances always tries to make the clothes look like those bought in stores, but they aren’t bought in stores, and Maggie, and everyone else, knows it.

  Frances never makes her brother Ben wear homemade stuff. Ben always gets store-bought clothes—and nice ones, ones that all the other guys wear. Their mom knows Ben would walk stark naked into the school before he’d wear a single shirt stitched up by his mother. Ben’s two years older than Maggie, and bright, perhaps brilliant—that’s what his teachers say. Everything about him’s excessive, his tangle of curly black hair, the thick dark lashes, his deep blue eyes, his energy, his temperament.

  During good weather, he’s outside, his legs furiously pumping the pedals of his bike as he tears through the streets of ’Sconset, or scaling a tree like a monkey, hiding in the highest branches, tossing bits of bark on the heads of puzzled pedestrians. He’s a genius at sports and never notices when he skids the skin of both knees and elbows into tatters, as long as he makes first base or tackles his opponent.

  During bad weather, Ben becomes the torment of Maggie’s life. When the wind howls against the windows, she’ll be curled up with a book, assuming he is, too, for he does like to read—then she’ll discover that while he was so quiet, he’d been removing her dolls’ eyeballs in an unsuccessful attempt to give all the dolls one blue eye and one brown. One rainy summer day, he scraped the flakes of his sunburned skin into her hairbrush. Another time he put glue between the pages of her treasured books.

  From day to day and often minute to minute, Maggie never knows whether she loves or h
ates Ben more.

  Emily says she’d give anything for a brother or sister. Maggie tells her she can have Ben any time.

  Emily is only on the island for three months in the summer, so Maggie doesn’t understand why, during the school year, she misses Emily so much. It’s not like she doesn’t have friends. She has lots of friends.

  Alisha is fun, but she’s pure jock. Alisha’s perfect day is going to the beach, running into the water, shrieking and jumping until a wave knocks her down. She comes up laughing, knees scratched from the sand, and runs back into the waves, over and over again. If Maggie suggests a game of make believe, Alisha looks at her like bugs are coming out her ears.

  Delphine loves horses. Her parents have a farm. They sell veggies and plants in the summer and Christmas trees in the winter. When Maggie goes to Delphine’s house, she spends all day on horseback, or helps Delphine curry the horses or muck out the stalls. Delphine doesn’t like to come to Maggie’s house—no horses there.

  Kerrie reads and sometimes plays pretend, but Kerrie has an entrepreneurial mind. She started a summer newspaper for children that she writes, illustrates, and sells from a little newsstand she built out of crates and set up on the corner of Orange and Main. When she isn’t selling her newspaper, she’s selling lemonade and cookies she bakes herself.

  Then there’s Tyler Madison. He would be Maggie’s best friend except he’s a boy. Tyler will play pretend with her if no one else is around. He loves the island as much as Maggie does, perhaps even more, and she can often find him on the moors painstakingly drawing in his own guide to landmarks, like the unusual boulders the glaciers left thousands of years ago. Using an ordinary scrapbook, Tyler is creating a fantastical volume of detailed maps, showing the names and locations of each salient feature. The cover is carefully pasted with calligraphed words: Official Register of Secrets. Inside, the first page is the Table of Contents. Next, Tyler has entered page after page of carefully sketched or photographed, imagined, and described boulders and their locations: Ocean Goddess. Island God. Pond Princesses. Lord and Lady Boulders. Twenty-seven different elf communities. Twelve separate Fellowships of Bushes and the Maraud Squad of poison ivy, scrub oak, bayberry. It’s so thoroughly detailed it seems as real as a chart of the stars. Maggie thinks the map is awesome and she adores Tyler, but Ben calls Tyler geekasaurus and four-eyes. It’s too bad, but understandable. Pale, underweight, uncoordinated, too clumsy to play sports, Tyler’s ostracized by most kids. Maggie suspects she’s Tyler’s best friend. Maybe she’s his only friend.

 

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