by Nancy Thayer
Emily nods rapidly. “I know! I feel that way, too. Sometimes I dream I’m adopted.”
“Me, too!” Maggie blinks with surprise at this coincidence. “In the car, when I’m riding, sometimes I think my real family will see me and rescue me.”
“I do that, too,” Emily tells her. “My parents are so …” Her voice trails off. She can’t think of the words. She may not know the words. “At least,” she continues thoughtfully, “you have a brother.”
“Yeah, he makes it all better,” Maggie says scornfully, kicking the dirt. “I don’t want a brother. I want a sister.”
“Me, too,” Emily agrees. “A sister would be fun. We could play together. Trade clothes.”
“Braid each other’s hair.”
The two girls look at each other. Maggie wears rubber flip-flops, blue shorts, and a yellow tee shirt. Emily wears red leather sandals, white shorts, and a striped red top. Except for their clothes, they look just alike, Maggie thinks. They’re both skinny and tanned, although Maggie’s hair is short this year while Emily’s is pulled back in a ponytail. Still, Emily is blond with blue eyes, Maggie has dark hair and blue eyes. So they make a complete set, like salt and pepper.
“We’re kind of like twins,” Emily decides.
Maggie’s so pleased she giggles. “Except, um, you’re blond and I’m dark.”
“Yeah, but …” Emily bites her lip. “It’s not just the way we look. It’s the way we think. It’s the way we are.”
“I know.” Maggie cocks her head, considering. “You’re the closest thing to a sister I’ll ever have.”
“Same here.”
“What if …” Maggie begins, then stops.
“What if what?” Emily prompts.
“I have an idea but I’m afraid you’ll make fun of me.”
“Which would be so wrong because sisters never make fun of each other,” Emily teases.
“Okay, then. Here.” Maggie lifts the lid of the small plastic box in the corner. “I’m making a yarn bracelet.” She holds it up, a few inches of blue, white, and yellow braided together.
“That’s really pretty,” Emily says, a yearning note in her voice. She has bracelets at home, lots of them, but this one calls to her.
“Do you like it?” Maggie holds it out to her. “You can have it. I mean, when I finish it.” Scooting around to face Emily, she directs, “Hold out your hand so I can measure your wrist. I’ll see how much more I need to do.”
An emotion swells inside Emily—a gratitude, a kind of love, and an astonishment that Maggie wants to give her this bracelet.
“And you make one for me!” Maggie tells her.
“I don’t know how.” Emily’s learning how to make knots for sailing, but she’s never learned how to make a bracelet.
“I’ll teach you. Right now. It’s easy.” Handing the box to Emily, she says, “Should I have the same colors or different?”
Emily’s glad to be able to make a choice since the box, the yarn, and the idea are Maggie’s. “The same colors, of course.”
“Okay.” Maggie digs around in the box and takes out three skeins of yarn. “You won’t believe how easy it is. You know how to braid, right?”
“Duh.”
The two girls sit together, hands busy with the yarn, concentrating hard as Maggie shows Emily how to be sure the yarn is taut.
“Like this?” Emily asks after a while.
Maggie grins her irresistibly contagious grin. “Right.”
They lean against walls on opposite sides of the little lair, braiding quietly in the quiet shade. It doesn’t take long. Their wrists are small.
“Now,” Maggie instructs, “I’ll tie yours on your wrist, and you tie mine.”
Emily obeys. “It’s like a rope bracelet, only prettier,” she says.
“Only more important,” Maggie reminds her.
Emily smiles. “Yes. It means we’re sisters.”
Maggie proudly specifies: “Nantucket sisters.”
CHAPTER TWO
The next morning, Emily’s mother drives Emily to the yacht club to sign her up for sailing lessons.
“You’re going to have such fun!”
Emily wants very much to please her mother. She senses that Cara is disappointed with her because Emily looks like her father, who is big, muscular, and freckled, instead of like Cara, who is petite and slim. Emily does have her mother’s blond hair and blue eyes, but they adorn a slightly long, horsey face, her father’s face. Emily has overheard her mother say, “Perhaps she’ll grow out of it.”
Emily prays every night that her face and body will change. She can only wait.
But now, with her mother watching, she trots along with the other kids in their yellow life jackets, out of the echoing clubhouse, past the patio where tables are being set up for lunch, over the emerald green lawn, and down the wooden docks to the rainbows bobbing in the dark blue water. Their instructors are good-looking, private-school, private-college kids in deck shoes, white shorts, navy blue polo shirts, all tanned and good-natured, hearty and welcoming. Emily’s glad they’re so nice.
Five other kids are in her group, among them Tiffany Howard. A wiry, energetic redhead, she’s obviously used to being on boats. Emily forces herself to pay attention to the instructors. She knows nothing about boats and is terrified of making a fool of herself. Her body feels stiff, made of sticks. She keeps bumping into things as the instructors point out the centerboard, rudder, tiller, hull, mast, bow, stern, boom. So much to learn. It’s scary.
Once they’re out on the water, actually sailing, Emily relaxes. The playful smack of the wind against the sail, the bob and glide of the boat, her hair blowing back from her neck, cooling her while the sun shines brightly down—all of it fills her with an unexpected, unaccountable happiness. Each student has a turn with the tiller and mainsheet, and when Emily feels the living tug of the wind and sea, her heart leaps in her chest. She can’t stop smiling. She wants to sail to India.
As they walk back toward the patio after their lesson, Tiffany says to Emily, “You’re a natural sailor.”
Emily blinks in surprise. “I am?”
“Yeah, can’t you tell? You should come out with us sometime on my parents’ boat. It’s an eighteen-foot Marshall cat.”
Emily doesn’t know what that means and it seems odd because she’s pretty sure cats don’t like water, but she quickly responds, “I’d love to!” She can’t wait. And it will make her mother happy.
After that day, the summer slides by like honey, full of lazy sunshine, blue water, good friends. Some days Emily sails and afterward cruises town with Tiffany. Sometimes, especially on rainy or windy days, Emily tours the whaling museum and the Maria Mitchell house. If she has time, late in the day, she runs over to the McIntyres’ to see Maggie, but Maggie is often babysitting.
In the middle of August, Tiffany’s family leaves the island and Emily goes to Maggie’s every day.
One morning, Cara comes into Emily’s bedroom, her long tanned legs flashing against her tennis skirt. Emily has dutifully made her bed and put away her nightgown. Now she’s sitting on the floor, buckling her sandals, in a hurry to run to Maggie’s.
Cara sinks down on the white chaise longue next to the window overlooking the ocean. Emily hardly ever sits there—it’s white! But now her mother pats the cushion next to her.
“Sweetie, come sit with me a moment,” Cara invites.
Pleased and wary, Emily sits. Her mother’s perfume, citrusy, intense, envelops Emily.
“What are you doing this morning?”
“I’m going to the beach with Maggie.”
“I thought so.” Cara takes Emily’s smaller hand in hers and runs her fingers up and down meditatively. “Darling, Daddy and I wish you wouldn’t become involved with the McIntyres.”
Emily stares at her mother, surprised. “Why not? Maggie’s fun.”
Her mother runs her soft hands down Emily’s shoulders. “Because, honey, I know you can’t und
erstand yet, but they’re just not our kind of people.”
Emily frowns. “Why not?”
Cara pulls Emily closer to her, keeping an arm around Emily’s shoulders. She always holds Emily when she tells her something important. “Baby, it’s hard to explain. But you see, Daddy didn’t buy a house on Nantucket and join the yacht club for you to play with poor people.” Her diamond rings flash as she continues to stroke Emily’s hand.
Emily considers this. She wants to please her mother. “I met Tiffany Howard,” she reminds Cara. “Her parents invited you for cocktails.”
“Yes, sweetie, and we’re so proud of you for that. We want to meet more people like Tiffany and her family, you see?”
Emily doesn’t understand but she nods as if she does. These few quiet moments within the aura of her mother’s glow are precious.
Maggie has always been aware that her friendship with Emily is lopsided. Emily always comes to Maggie’s house. She never invites Maggie to her enormous posh house on the ’Sconset bluff. Emily explained she can’t have friends over because her father works at home on his investments, but during the winter Maggie has walked around the outside of the house, peeking through the closed curtains over the windows, and she knows the house is so big and has so many rooms that Emily’s father couldn’t hear them if they played drums in Emily’s bedroom.
Emily also confessed that her mother’s a snob. “It’s all about who belongs to what club and who went where to school,” Emily said once when she was mad at her mother. “Honestly, she doesn’t even know what this island is like!”
Today the two girls biked to the moors to have lunch by a hidden pond they can reach only by squeezing through the bushes along a deer trail. Water lilies blossom across the surface of the pond. Egrets and herons daintily step among the grasses sprouting on the island in the middle of the pond.
“She’s such a phony,” Emily says. “She’s so pretentious.” She shoots a quick glance to be sure Maggie knows that word. They’ve made a pact to learn all the words they can, to use precise words, and when they read a book, they meet afterward to discuss the new words they’ve learned.
“She’s very beautiful,” Maggie reminds Emily. She’s only met Cara Porter a few times, when Emily’s mother picked Emily up to take her somewhere, and Mrs. Porter has always been cold and aloof, like Emily said, a snob. But she is beautiful, and her clothes are fancy, not homemade, like those of Maggie’s mom.
Maggie’s mom is such a disorganized mess, Maggie’s too embarrassed to even complain about her.
Maggie changes the subject. “See that boulder over there? Tyler calls it Neptune’s Nephew. It oversees all the fish and other creatures in this pond.”
“Oh, Ty-ler,” Emily whines, and kicks a pebble into the water.
“You’re jealous of Tyler,” Maggie singsongs, elbowing her friend gently. Maggie may not have money, but she does have this island they both love, and she does have a friend who thinks about the island the way Maggie does.
“Am not,” Emily snaps. “He’s funny looking.”
“He’s already read all of The Once and Future King.”
“Well.” Emily sags. There’s no topping that. T. H. White’s fantastical tale has proven too complicated for Emily, while parts of it—the swans—enchant her and Maggie both.
Maggie experiences a tingle of satisfaction as Emily pouts. When Maggie’s not babysitting or helping her mother with housework, and when Emily is at her yacht club, Maggie bikes to the moors. Tyler can often be found in his secret den near the hidden pond behind Altar Rock. Poor Tyler, who now has buck teeth! Part of every summer, he goes to visit his father, who lives in California. Tyler’s parents are divorced, and he lives with his mom, who makes peculiar jewelry out of paper clips and screws.
Tyler’s gotten kind of strange, in a cool way. He’s obsessed with the island’s Indians, the Wampanoag, who’ve all died off by now. He’s developed his own bizarre mythology, a kind of Native American meets the Brothers Grimm. Wildflowers are different families of elves; shrubs and bushes are spirits and sprites and gnomes; the ponds are cousins of the ocean; and the ocean’s Queen; the island, King. It’s a complicated scheme that grows more complex every time Maggie sees Tyler, but it’s clever and surprising and fun.
If she bikes to the moors and Tyler’s not there, she still calls out greetings as she pedals past. “Hail, Lord Boulder! Salutations, Princess Pond!”
In a weird way, having Tyler for a friend partly makes up for Maggie not having a father and for not having any money. Emily’s friends can sail and play tennis, but they don’t seem to have the spark of imagination that makes life much more vivid and colorful. Tyler’s wicked smart, too, much smarter than Maggie and Emily put together.
For just a moment, Maggie enjoys Emily’s jealousy. Then she nudges her with her shoulder. “Emily. You know you’re my best friend. You’re my Nantucket sister, you dope.”
Suddenly Emily’s face is sunshiny. “You’re mine, too.”
Maggie smiles back. “Did you bring your list of words? Let’s go over them.”
Emily digs in her backpack and pulls out her small pink notebook with the gold peacock on the cover. “Spell ‘delirium.’ ”
Maggie takes a breath and begins.
That night, a summer storm swats the McIntyres’ little home like a cat with a toy. The next day, a newly broken gutter hanging just above the front door pours water down their backs, sending Ben off with a face like thunder and Maggie back into the house, dancing with the shock of the cold. The next night, through each long hour, gusts of wind slam the gutter against the wall.
The next morning, Maggie finds her mom already on the phone at breakfast, begging a friend for a recommendation for someone, anyone, to fix the gutter. Frances is in one of her mad moods, black hair snarled, pajamas buttoned crooked, eyes red. Emily’s mother would never look this way. Of course, Emily’s mother’s house would never have a broken gutter.
“I didn’t sleep one second all night!” Frances wails to her friend Bette. “I’m going to lose my mind!”
“I’ll fix the gutter,” Ben offers when she has hung up the phone.
“Don’t even think about it!” Frances snaps. “All I need is for you to slice your arm open with a piece of metal gutter pipe and fall off the ladder and break your leg!”
Ben’s face darkens, and Maggie understands—when will their mother stop treating him like a child?
All that afternoon, Maggie dreads going home after babysitting. It’s raining again, and the wind tosses and howls. She can curl up with a book, but what can Ben do? It would be misery to bike on the moors in this weather. She understands why Frances is so cranky, but if she doesn’t get off Ben’s back, he’s going to blow worse than a nor’easter.
She pedals down the lane to her house and drops her bike inside the fence. To her surprise, the gutter’s fixed. Racing into the cottage, she’s brought to a standstill by a heavenly aroma—Frances made Toll House cookies! When Ben skulks in at dinnertime, his mom calls, “Help yourselves to the casserole. I’ve got to keep working on this slipcover.” So Ben and Maggie watch television while they eat, and Frances doesn’t even yell at them about that. It sounds like she’s humming as she sews.
Very strange.
The following day, Maggie and Ben come home to hear clanking noises in the bathroom. They peer in: the toilet’s completely dismantled and a man who looks like a Viking warlord has his hairy red arms twisting down inside the tank.
He is Thaddeus Ramsdale. A large, beefy man with a face nearly as red as his beard and eyebrows and wiry hair, he wears dirty, indestructible canvas work pants, dusty work boots, and faded flannel shirts.
When he says he’ll have to come back the next day, Frances twinkles at him.
He likes their mom.
Their mom likes him.
Maggie thinks: Ick.
The Ramsdales are native islanders. Frances jokes that they arrived in the New World before the Mayflowe
r, having dismantled their British houses to build their own private ship, and blowing the sails westward across the Atlantic with their very own breath.
Frances also says Thaddeus Ramsdale’s land-poor. He lives by himself in a dilapidated old house on his farm on the Polpis Road. He works as a handyman, whenever he’s in the mood to work. If he wakes up one morning wanting to scallop or fish or hunt or fiddle around in his barn, that’s what he does. Thaddeus’s mother, Clarice, widowed and haughty, lives on the island, in a once-majestic old house on Orange Street.
Thaddeus comes to dinner once, twice, and then several times a week.
He doesn’t talk much, but he’s there, a big burly man smelling of sawdust and machine oil, who eats even more lasagna than Ben does, and whose brief, simple words invariably bring a smile and a brightness to Maggie’s mom’s face. His presence alters the delicate chemistry of their little triangular family life.
Maggie and Ben don’t talk about him, because they don’t talk to each other much these days, but they suspect things are getting serious when Thaddeus begins to bring them presents.
They’re wonderful presents. He gives Ben a Swiss Army knife, and shows him how to use it. He gives Ben a catcher’s mitt, a snorkel mask, and flippers.
Thaddeus brings Maggie books. Some are picture books, and he always takes care to tell her he knows she’s too old for them, but these are special. And they are. Time of Wonder, about an island in Maine, and The Little Island, and Treasure Island, and The Swiss Family Robinson. Thaddeus didn’t attend college and he’s not impressed by anyone who has, but Maggie soon realizes this doesn’t mean he’s not smart. In his own way, he’s brilliant. He knows everything about plants and animals, the land and the sea, and he reads, too, almost as much as Maggie.
Maggie approves.
CHAPTER THREE
“Listen to me, Emily,” her father says one morning as she eats breakfast with her parents on the patio. The green lawn lies like a quilt to the edge of the cliff and the blue ocean sparkles beyond. “This is very important, please pay attention.”
