We'll Always Have Nantucket (eBook)

Doreen Burliss (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2022 | 1. Auflage
298 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-9861095-1-0 (ISBN)

Infos

'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.

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"e;We'll Always Have Nantucket"e; 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, "e;Could you be loved"e;?

Textauszug

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...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 31.5.2022
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• ISBN-13: 979-8-9861095-1-0 / 9798986109510