We'll Always Have Nantucket

By Doreen Burliss

"We'll Always Have Nantucket" is a compelling novel that celebrates friendships, both new and everlasting, the abiding pull of family and traditions, and the enduring effort of reconciling the past and understanding that the future always contains the present.

Audacious, environmentalist, surfer-girl, Teddy, abandons her California university position in a fall from grace for a summer on Nantucket to reevaluate her dubious personal and professional choices. In this dual narrative Teddy's mom, Sadie, braids her island visit with her daughter's; their first return to the cherished summer vacation spot since the death of Teddy's father four years ago.

While Teddy rents a carriage-house with three strangers in their late twenties, each caught up in their own holding patterns, Sadie stays with friend, Val, who provides an abiding source of comedy, Tito's, and an unrelenting zeal for Sadie to make some new memories already.

Teddy takes a part-time catering job experiencing the charm and theatrics exclusive to the privileged and moneyed, while her free time brims with personal and environmental contemplation, sharing the surf with one kind of shark or another, and commiserating over a Goombay Smash or three with housemates over the myriad complexities of long-distance relationships, having Teddy question how you know when you've found the one.

Meanwhile, Sadie and Val fill their days with beach shenanigans doused in cocktails, debating the folly of bikinis at age fifty, considering the Nantucket triathlon, and enduring the often-Herculean task of parenting grown children. Intrigue surrounding a missing person and an uptick in shark activity often lands them all at Cisco Brewery, swaying to live reggae and wondering with Bob Marley, "Could you be loved"?

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9798986109510

Book preview

July

chapter 1

Teddy

It was the thick ocean of nightmares, tangy, gelatinous, and she couldn’t paddle her surfboard fast enough to catch the wave building to her left. It passed under her, or something did. A quick panic rose as she gathered strength to catch the next one. But it started to peel and she was staring at the giant curl, its frothed lip and sea-green belly, the barrel of the wave yawning massively as she whipped around to catch it. She couldn’t get there. She was yanked back with a sickening rupture, fear spreading like the puce trail of her blood tainting the sea. Terror energized her, but it wasn’t enough. She felt the tugging at her dead limb.

Her body jerked awake in her steamship seat portside as she watched her foot, heavy with pins and needles, kick at the dog biting her shoelaces. In the long minute it took for her leg and brain to wake up, the latest issue of Yesterday’s Island slid from her lap with the headlines staring up at her, Shark sightings off Nantucket shores. Her body thrummed with the vibration of the idling steamship while anticipation and anxiety argued in her stomach.

A relief to have caught the ferry and find an outside seat, it felt like she’d lived two days since yesterday. It was barely nine o’clock in the morning and she’d already endured a redeye from San Francisco and a two-hour bus ride from Boston to Cape Cod, but there she was. It was one week into July and the fast ferries to the island were sold out, but she didn’t mind the slow boat. It was the unhurried chug, that rite of passage she knew best, having taken this boat every summer of her childhood to Nantucket to their rented cottage for family vacations.

Closer to thirty years old than twenty, she wondered if she should have given more thought to her wardrobe. In frayed cutoffs, Black Keys t-shirt and Vans, she didn’t look much different than the last time she sat there as a college undergrad. But she felt different. She felt tired, alone, and with a little less hope for the world and her place in it.

Eyes closed against the soft morning sun and salty wind, she felt the Eagle pick up speed out of Hyannis Harbor. She needed to use this thirty-mile crossing to reconcile the last six months of her California life.

She should have her shit together by now. Single and unemployed was not where she thought she’d be at the age of twenty-seven, having foolishly squandered the opportunity for a Professorship with the UC Santa Cruz Coastal Science program. Her consummate fall from grace. She was too old for impetuous behavior and diving headlong into things, should have known herself better than to think she could work platonically with someone like Professor Griffin Carrigan. Brilliant, beautiful Griff. She should have been more mindful, then maybe she’d have noticed what was going on with their student, Luke, that he’d had inappropriate feelings for her and where that was going.

Clouded by their misplaced blaze of infatuation, neither she nor Griff had paid enough attention to the students in the Natural Resource Economics class they taught. The farce was crystal now, all the office hours Luke spent wanting extra help with her when he had an A in the class. Blinded by lust one Thursday mid-semester, Teddy was caught by Luke, in flagrante on her desk, under Griffin — equally stripped of propriety.

She’d speared her dignity so exquisitely.

Capturing her attention once and for all, Luke filed a bogus sexual harassment charge with the Dean of Students. Blindsided by this student’s unrequited obsession and accusations, her meticulously planned career path dissolved like breath on a cold wind. Reaching for her phone she tortured herself anew with the University Board’s email:

Though the sexual harassment complaint against Theodora Wilson was determined to be without merit when presented before the Faculty Review Committee, Professor Carrigan’s and Teaching Assistant Wilson’s affair being conducted on school grounds and during office hours has been deemed discordant with university standards and professional code of ethics.

It cleaved her sense of self.

She couldn’t allow this to define her. Fuck that. She’d peer through the veil of embarrassment that clung as penance. And push forward, consider what she genuinely wanted from her education and experiences. Shouldn’t she have more answers by now than questions? She’d decimated her savings for this island-time in a leap of faith to reassess, away from academia and the competition it bred. She’d devote no more than ten minutes of the steamship journey to her pity party and bad luck.

Thank God Griffin’s tenure was still intact, if not their meteoric fling, and while no formal or public charges were filed against either of them, a requisite twelve-month sabbatical away from the university was part of the deal. And if she were being brutally honest, she’d admit to feeling already restless in academia.

As disgraced and chastened as she felt, she wasn’t about to slap a scarlet letter on her chest. A self-saboteur hat maybe. But the more she considered her life’s purpose, the clearer it became that she needed to be where the action was, where policies were made, playing an active role in the projects that would save the planet instead of teaching and preaching about them. She’d secured recommendations and had resumes out to a couple of the biggest sustainability and climate-change corporations in California and now all she could do was wait. And try to keep her anxiety from sinking her. Getting the hell out of dodge was in order and the Massachusetts summer surf had it all over California.

She cast regret into the wedge of the wind and thought, what better place to put the real world in the rearview than Nantucket? That ironically whale-shaped island thirty miles out to sea, home of her fondest memories. But would it feel the same as it did in childhood? Before she lost her dad? Would she be swept up in the moments that felt more like spun sugar than time? Or crippled by the nostalgia of her once-whole family.

Best and luckiest of all was that her mom’s island visit with her best friend would overlap. And even if all else was a fail, Mom and Valentina were a sure thing.

She retrieved her copy of Yesterday’s Island from the ship’s deck and opened it to Fin-sightings close south shore beaches to swimming. With equal parts excitement and trepidation she read about Madaket Beach lifeguards ordering everyone out of the water last Tuesday after a fin sighting was reported at around 2:40 p.m. Cisco lifeguards then followed suit after a second fin-sighting was reported there at 3:10 p.m. She read the rest of the article under her breath: The Madaket sighting has been confirmed as that of a shark, harbormaster Cheryl Long said. It was heading east from Madaket Beach toward Cisco Beach so both beaches remained closed to swimmers. Charter fisherman Bob Davies also reported via Facebook that The Cod Father Charters saw a shark take a seal pup near Great Point Monday.

Teddy had a thing for sharks. Her fascination and respect for them went as deep as they did. And as a surfer she felt tuned into them, heeding her sixth sense always. While the entertainment industry had long depicted sharks as blood-seeking villains, she knew they were far more intriguing and complex than that. But people craved drama. And fish stories and rumors, the bigger the better. She made a bargain with the universe that she’d volunteer with the marine mammal alliance on the island in order to stave off the closing of her cherished surf breaks. Surfing was the singular thing in this life that brought her peace and balance. As the Eagle plugged along through a fattening fog, she tried not to let anxiety seep as the unknowns pushed in.

What about her new housemates, would the four of them be friends? Finding a house through a Facebook group had seemed like a good enough idea, but she’d done that roommate dance before and it was a spin of the roulette wheel. Claire definitely had her act together at twenty-seven as a traveling nurse from North Carolina. Then there was Maverick, twenty-eight, from DC, and an architect working the summer at his uncle’s firm. And Camden, Claire’s second cousin, honorably discharged from the Army after two tours, married, but with his military wife overseas.

She hustled to the starboard deck once the steamship finally passed the jetties to catch the rounding of Brant Point. Her heart took up all the space in her body watching that squat lighthouse rise into view on its own curve of sand — the moment her dad would always say, aah, back to ACK. (How many times had she explained to people over the years that ACK was the airport code for Nantucket?) She could picture her dad now, hustling everyone down below to the truck, and could see in mind’s eye her brothers clearing the booth of their stuff: headphones, books, cards, cups, and Mom wrangling one or three animals to the stairwell.

Ga-jung, the steamship connected with the dock. It knocked her from her reverie, the loud horn blaring their arrival along with the clanging and off-loading of a flood of people and vehicles. It was enormously lonely having no one to share in the fullness of the moment, but a familiar excitement peeled in. She wanted to wrap her arms around it: the salt air, the toy-like boats bobbing on their moorings, the rose-covered cottages, and the memory of her little Hello Kitty-clad self. And she wanted to walk up and down every cobblestoned lane, around every corner to see what was new, what was still perfectly old. But she had all this baggage.

She was glad to be carrying the bulk of it on her back in the Osprey pack she’d used on the PCT. The Pacific Crest Trail was some of the most grueling hiking she’d ever done. Maybe next year she’d get another section of it under her belt, a lot hinged on this summer. What did Nantucket have in store for her? In which direction would it be shipping her off to at August’s end?

Her old wheelie suitcase bumped along the cobblestones behind her until the welcome break of Orange Street and its brick sidewalk. Adjusting the surfboard under her arm she checked her phone’s GPS, half a mile left to number Seven-A Captain’s Walk. It was an old carriage-house built in the 1800s and as she huffed up Orange she wondered if the internet photos did it justice. The press of her luggage was the perfect excuse to stop and admire the grand homes. She knew that once upon a time this little island was the whaling capital of the world, and that these magnificent homes had once belonged to esteemed whaling captains. That had always carried an air of enchantment for her, even grinding her way through Moby Dick in high school, though she knew historically that the life of whaling was a gritty and treacherous one.

The widow’s walks on the rooftops had captured her imagination for as long as she could remember. Her brothers and she would picture ladies pacing up there, solemnly searching, in plain dresses and plain shoes, with loose strands of pinned-back hair whipping in the wind, staring out to sea begging the horizon for any hint of the ships carrying their husbands and sons. Whaling voyages in the early nineteenth century could last years and boys on those ships were as young as thirteen. She couldn’t imagine such a life for her brothers, or the harpooning and slaughter of those extraordinary animals.

Her brothers were the best people she knew; what were they up to this summer? They had to come, for a weekend at least. For forever time on Nantucket was gold to them. They’d start counting down the days they’d be back the minute they were on the steamship home. These days though it seemed impossible to align their vortex of schedules. Adulting wasn’t always what she thought it would be.

Sebastian was the oldest and everyone called him Bash. Just over six feet tall with hair the darkest brown before being black and eyes the color of root beer, he was always focused on the next big thing. She couldn’t accurately describe what Bash did for a living other than to say he worked in finance and that he was very good at it. He made a lot of money and had a lot of fun spending it. Dude was hardcore. If he wasn’t heli-skiing some sick back-country terrain in Tahoe he was surfing in Nicaragua or planning his next Himalayan ascent. His wife, Kai, was immeasurably cool; keeping up with her brother she had to be. They met surfing in the Maldives where, depending on whose story you believed, Kai saved Bash’s life.

Henry, the middle child, was soft-spoken, independent, gracious, and as serene as Bash was not. He was a teaching fellow at Cornell University in the Wildlife Biology department. Animals and people alike were drawn to Henry, gentle and unassuming with his flow of tawny waves, matching scruff, and eyes more gold than hazel. He taught her how to play the guitar, fly-fish from a kayak, and how to sing with her mouth closed. He was the best of both their parents.

She set her suitcase upright in the middle of the sidewalk; this was really happening. What if it didn’t work out at all? She’d turned down Val’s offer to stay at her brand-new house on the south shore of the island — what had she been thinking? The south shore was home to her earliest surf memories: getting up on a board for the first time at age six, dawn patrol surf sessions as a teenager with the local boys, then her first surf competition at Cisco Beach.

But at twenty-seven she knew she needed to stand on her own two feet, find a place on her own. That although catching a ride on the coattails of someone who’d already done the work and made it would ever be a temptation, it held no allure for her. August was going to be a scene, a dream-summer. She hoped to have her life moving unwaveringly forward by then, her ducks lined up and in hot pursuit.

She stopped at the foot of the crushed-shell driveway to wipe the sweat from her face on the shoulder of her t-shirt and took a deep breath. Fat blue hydrangeas poked through the white fence in front of the house and bobbed in the breeze. She’d stepped into a watercolor postcard. Her shoulders settled and apprehension fell away. The heady blend of sunbaked cedar shingles, salt air, and rosa rugosa buckled her knees with nostalgia. Its lushness a refreshing diversion from the parched California landscape she called home. She stood and savored the mood it wrapped her in. She didn’t notice the guy coming out of the outside shower with only a towel wrapped around his waist until the door sprang shut. He had some kind of cast wrapped in a black trash bag on his left foot and a tattoo on his right arm.

Hey there, you looking for someone? he said, tightening the towel. Wait, are you Theodora?

She tried not to stare and wasn’t sure where to look, the very cool tribal armband tattoo wrapping around his muscled forearm or his blue eyes made glacial by the high sun. His hair was very short and very blond but tipped with a copper sheen in the light of mid-day.

Call me Teddy. Camden, right?

At your service!

Nice to have a face with the name.

And so much more! Sorry, I promise the next time you see me I’ll have clothes on. Here let me help you with your stuff.

Wait, no, I’ll get it, your leg — what happened anyway?

Oh, no worries, boot comes off in a week. Beach volleyball — came down hard on a rolled ankle back in June out at Nobadeer. What a pain in the ass.

Ouch, been there. Sucks, she said leaning her surfboard against the side of the house, shoulders aching with the load on her back.

Cam reached for her suitcase before she could protest and led the way, hopping as he went up the weathered front porch steps. Before following him inside she stood on the porch and smiled over at the white wicker chairs with fat green-striped cushions, an acoustic guitar against a driftwood table covered with scallop shells, guitar picks, and one huge clam shell full of bottle caps. What luck! She’d left her guitar back in Santa Cruz.

You play? she asked Cam.

I can press PLAY…

Ha! So, it’s not yours? The guitar?

Nope, that’s Mav’s. He’s around here somewhere. Come in, I think Claire’s home at least.

Taking in the weathered gray shingles and fresh white trim of the house she thought how lucky to have found this place on such short notice. The quarterboard above the door was a fading forest green carved with gold letters that spelled Wait and Sea. Perfect. Then she remembered that both the carriage-house and the main house were being put on the market at the end of the summer. She felt a tug of wistfulness for its loss already.

The sweet musty air inside transported her as soon as she walked in. As kids upon arrival to the cottage they’d rented, she and her brothers would hurry from room to room touching things, reclaiming ownership, and hoping with a child’s fervor that nothing had changed. They’d reacquaint themselves with the canvas couches, the vintage kitchen, and the views from the windows. They’d finger the spines of familiar books, peek behind pictures where they’d hidden time-capsule notes, and breathe in the breath of the place that took up so much space in their child-hearts.

She was glad to see a plain old kitchen instead of custom cherry with sleek black granite. She appreciated the uneven pine cabinet doors thick with layers of colonial blue paint and mismatched knobs. Stained white Formica counters flecked with gold and cluttered with life resonated more with her than if she’d walked into a glossy page of Town & Country or Elle Décor.

Hi I’m Claire, come in! That pack looks like it weighs a ton, let me get you some water. Or a beer maybe?

Claire looked exactly like her Facebook profile photo, strawberry-blonde hair in corkscrew curls to her shoulders, pale green eyes and fair skin. A living doll. Teddy couldn’t help but smile in her presence. All five feet of her.

A beer would actually be awesome. I can barely remember what day it is never mind what time zone, so yes, definitely a beer. Good to finally meet you guys. Excitement she’d guarded rose up in her like a soap bubble.

Oh Lord, Claire said, spinning half-around before opening the fridge door, "you probably want to dump your things in your room first, follow me. I hope you don’t mind the crazy winding staircase and watch your head here, yikes, you’re pretty tall, sorry! It’s this first door here."

Exhaustion hit her like a rogue wave and her big pack almost took her down the nautilus shell stairs. Whew, I’m beat and it is really warm up here — I do not remember Nantucket feeling this hot.

Oh, that’s right, you took the redeye! And it is hotter than usual this summer, some weird weather pattern, hot everywhere. Wait, there’s a fan around here somewhere, maybe the closet? Let’s look — Jen left here in a mad hurry — lucky for you though, right? Oh, here’s the fan!

Claire had some serious energy. Teddy felt like she was standing still while Claire spun around her like a cotton-candy cone putting her suitcase near the bureau and setting the fan up by the window. She shrugged off the pack and let herself fall back onto the double bed, her eyes closed before Claire turned back around.

Awe, Claire whispered and tiptoed back out of the room pulling the crooked door closed behind her.

T

A deep male laugh pulled her from some deep dream space as she swam to the surface. When she opened her eyes she was only momentarily disoriented wondering where she was. Then as her fingers absently worked the silky white tufts of the worn chenille bedspread under her she took in the details of her room. The walls were beadboard and painted a soft robin’s egg blue. Her body rose at such a simple pleasure. To her right was an antique, white, four-drawer bureau with a yellowing doily on top. The clear glass-cut knobs were her favorite part and the oval mirror above it reflected daylight from the little window by the bed.

The light was different, how long had she slept? Late afternoon sun leaned in from the window in long squares across the pine floor. There was no clock on the spindle-leg night table but she guessed it was at least four o’clock in the afternoon. God she needed to pee.

There was that big laugh again.

As she opened her bedroom door she caught sight of a descending head going down the winding staircase. Good hair. What was the rest of him like? Bathroom first. The door didn’t close tight without force but that was the charm of an old house, swollen shifting woodwork, creaky with age and life out in the middle of the sea.

Downstairs she picked out the laugh and the great hair right away, Maverick.

Well, here she is, Sleeping Beauty has risen! This is Mav, Cam said, his arm around Maverick’s shoulders.

Teddy noticed the strong handshake, not dialed back for a woman, and smiled. Releasing his hand and looking around the kitchen at her new people she could feel the protective coating she’d let grow start to thin. Claire handed out cold beers raised in a toast.

Welcome to Nantucket, she said, here’s to an amazing summer!

Cam, Mav, Claire, and Teddy clinked their bottles of Cisco Whale’s Tale Pale Ale. A rusty but familiar sense of excitement snuck up on her as she looked from one pair of eyes to the next wondering what the summer had in store for this cobbled together crew.

chapter 2

Sadie

How would she possibly have her act together by the twentieth of July? Sadie Wilson had no idea, but Nantucket was happening. She could hardly believe her good fortune at getting to spend four whole weeks there at Val’s new house, and with her own daughter on-island for the rest of the summer. She felt unendingly lucky.

Was it possible she was even more excited to get there than when Teddy and her brothers were little? Ugh, not a fair metric. That was another lifetime, when her family had been whole, before her husband had died so unexpectedly.

Graham had been gone four years now, impossible still to recalibrate life without him. Especially with the kids all grown and flown from their big old house, empty now but crowded with memories and his silent antiques. Sometimes grief still got her behind the legs. She needed to sit in the shade of her bluestone patio with a glass of Rombauer Chardonnay. Oh, that first taste — vanilla, toasted oak, with a silky pear finish — she did not get the chardonnay haters. She waited for that feeling, that cushion for her thoughts, the uncoiling of tension that