Nell

by Nancy Thayer

  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 hates 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.

  Sometimes Maggie thinks that books are her best friend, her truest, most reliable, friend. The fathomless, most treasured part of her own private self is her connection with books. She’s happy when she’s reading, and library books don’t cost Frances a thing.

  Maybe that’s why she and Emily are so close. Emily reads as much as Maggie does. Like Maggie, Emily talks about the characters as if they were real people, and she can enter a pretend world like a fish slipping into water. When Maggie met Emily, it was as if a gate opened in Maggie’s life. Like a path curved into the future. Maggie began to believe having an imagination was a good thing, that somehow, even if she couldn’t see it now, she could believe she had someplace to go and feel a wonderful sense of relief that she would have companions along the way.

  Emily is the person who seems most like Maggie, who gets Maggie. Maggie’s not an idiot. She knows Emily is rich while she is poor. Maggie knows rich and poor don’t mix.

  On the other hand, her favorite stories tell her they can.

  * * *

  They sit at the kitchen table, breaking off bits of gingerbread and munching it, washing it down with cold milk. Even now, in the middle of June, the heat and humidity are oppressive.

  “Did you read The Secret Garden?” Maggie asks.

  “I did. I loved it.”

  “Oh, good! Because I have a surprise—”

  The front door flies open and slams shut. A thirteen-year-old boy stomps inside, completely ignoring the girls as he rummages in a kitchen cupboard. He’s got shiny black hair like a crow.

  “Want some gingerbread?” Maggie asks.

  Ben grab
s a jar of peanut butter and a spoon. Tossing himself into a chair, he digs a spoon into the peanut butter and licks it off.

  “Ben,” Frances says quietly.

  “The jar’s almost empty,” Ben tells his mother. “I’m going to eat it all. No one else will get my cooties.” He’s always got an answer for everything.

  Ben wears nothing but swim trunks, and Emily thinks she sees some hair in his armpit. He’s a teenager, she reminds herself, and the thought makes her stomach do flip-flops. She wonders when she’ll grow armpit and pubic hair. She wonders if Ben has pubic hair. Emily and her city friends have all made bets on who will start menstruating first.

  “Hey, Neanderthal,” Maggie says, “could you say hello to Emily? She just got here for the summer.”

  Ben jabs the spoon into the peanut butter again, then takes a bite and grins hideously at Emily, peanut butter hanging in disgusting clumps from his teeth. “Hello, Emily.”

  “Gross.” Maggie stands up. “Come on, Emily, let’s go outside.”

  Emily follows obediently but reluctantly. She’s never told Maggie, or anyone, but Ben, even with peanut butter teeth, is so gorgeous he gives her shivers. Maggie’s just as good looking; both have wavy glossy black hair and deep blue eyes accentuated with thick black eyelashes. Beside them Emily, with her blond hair and freckled skin, feels colorless.

  “I don’t play with dolls anymore,” Maggie announces as they walk around the side of the house. “You know how we made those Laura Ingalls Wilder dolls? Well, this year, I don’t want to make dolls, I want to be Mary Lennox. Mom let me plant my own garden in the back yard, near the Rosa rugosa and honeysuckle. I actually made a wall around the garden out of boards I found at the dump.”

  “Wow.” Emily stops to stare, her heart filled with admiration and envy. It never occurred to her to build her own secret garden. Not that she could in her New York apartment, but she could have planned to build one in the back yard of their Nantucket house. Sometimes she thinks, compared to Maggie, she’s boring.

  “You have to crawl through here,” Maggie tells her, demonstrating. The doorway is made of bits of old trellis over which morning glory vines have grown. Inside, the floor is grass, the ceiling, sky. The air smells like flowers. Maggie has made a miniature dollhouse in one corner with pebbles and shells. In another corner is a plastic box holding a bracelet she’s braiding out of yarn.

  For a while they simply sit cross-legged in the shade, finishing their gingerbread, looking around.

  “I like your secret garden,” Emily says. “Except the grass itches my bum.”

  They both giggle because she said bum.

  “Yeah, but you don’t have chairs in a garden,” Maggie reminds her.

  “Yes, you do,” Emily argues. Emily thinks of her Nantucket back yard. The caretaker has put out the glass-topped table and wrought iron chairs and several cushioned lounge chairs. Emily’s not supposed to get them dirty; they’re for the adults. If Emily tried to build something like this, a wall around a secret garden from boards from the dump, her parents would kill her.

  Maggie looks around. “This place is too small for chairs.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  Above them a bee buzzes and lands on a pink rose of Sharon flower. It’s quiet, private.

  “You know what?” Maggie whispers. “Sometimes I hate my family.”

  This happens all the time between Emily and Maggie. They think the same thought at the exact same moment. “Sometimes I hate my family, too,” Emily confesses.

  “You do?” Maggie’s eyes are wide.

  An unfamiliar excitement fills Emily, a kind of sharp danger and guilt. “Sometimes my mother drinks too much. She bumps into things. She talks like this: ’Em errr, whersh my purshe?”

  Maggie giggles. “I’ve heard Mother do it with a man.”

  All Emily’s New York friends talk about sex, but no one’s ever heard their parents do it. “What does it sound like?”

  “Oh, oh, oh, oh,” Maggie pants.

  Emily face grows hot. “Who was it?”

  “I don’t know, I didn’t see him, I only heard him. It was disgusting. I’m never going to have sex.”

  “Me neither,” Emily announces loyally.

  “Swear?”

  “Swear.”

  “Sometimes I think—” Maggie pauses, as a strange new sensation of guilt shoots through her like a quickly branching vine—“that I don’t belong in this family.”

  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 voice 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 T-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 pony tail. 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 out 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 opposite sides of the walls 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.”