Chapter 2
Chapter Two
Amos
June 2025
A mos stood in the living room of the little cabin on the outskirts of Siasconset with a frothy and frantic feeling in his stomach. There was an oil-slick skillet on the stovetop, a dirty plate in the sink, and wine in a glass. Suddenly, the bedroom door screamed open and out came a pretty black-haired woman with a lamp raised over her head, the cord swung comically over her shoulder. Her eyes were pointed with fear. It took Amos a second or two to realize the fear she had was for him. Amos put both hands up and took a dramatic step away from her, then tripped on a kitchen chair and fell backward. The cabin, which sat on stilts over the water, shook with his weight. The woman lowered the lamp.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
Amos remained on the floor with his legs spread out in front of him. He hadn’t asked for this. “I’m the caretaker. I’m here to look at the bathroom light?”
The woman clutched the lamp harder. Amos realized what he’d said was the kind of thing an intruder might say—an intruder with bad intentions. He groaned and pushed himself to explain more, “The owner is a woman named Nancy Mulligan. She owns several properties from Nantucket to Martha’s Vineyard and has me manage the utilities and checkups. She didn’t tell me someone had booked this place out. Or, if she did, I got my dates wrong.” He raised his shoulders and thought back to a few minutes ago on his walk over when he’d double-checked Nancy’s email about the bathroom light and made extra sure that nobody had booked the cabin out for the night.
The woman took a breath. “I booked it last minute.”
Amos sighed. “Nancy still should have told me.”
“Yeah. She should have.” The woman side-stepped along the edge of the kitchen to reach the bathroom, where she flipped the switch. Nothing happened. In her eyes, he recognized that she believed him, or almost did, which had to be good enough right now.
“To be fair,” Amos said, pulling himself up and righting the kitchen chair, “I told Nancy I was going to fix it this morning. But today got out of hand.”
The woman’s lips twitched as though she wanted to smile and wasn’t going to let herself. She really was beautiful, with pale, glowing skin and big, intelligent eyes. Without fully meaning to, he checked her left hand for a ring and saw it was bare. No husband. Here alone. No wonder she was frightened. But it wasn’t rare for single women to rent places in Nantucket by themselves. He’d met many who were writing books, working on their memoirs, or spending hours a day painting the ocean.
“I know those kinds of days,” the woman said.
Amos fixed his face into a half smile, one he hoped wouldn’t scare her even more.
“You didn’t see my car?” the woman asked.
Amos shook his head. “I walked down from my cabin. It’s about ten minutes thataway.” He pointed in the direction of the old White Oak Lodge. Halfway between here and there was the cabin he’d built himself ten years ago, tucked under a line of trees.
The woman put the lamp on the kitchen counter and crossed her arms. Amos wasn’t sure what to do. Should he go ahead and fix the bathroom light?
He decided to ask, and the woman nodded. “I guess I’ll need it.”
Amos took his tools into the bathroom, feeling the woman’s eyes upon him, watching his every move. When he removed a screwdriver, he felt her fear rise, and when he inserted it into the screw around the light fixture, he felt her fear dissipate again. He hated this about being a man of six-foot-three. To anyone else, there was no guarantee he was safe. At night, he’d seen women cross the road to get away from him. He’d wanted to call out to them and say, me? Not me! I’m here to protect you! But how could anyone know that for sure?
Plus, there was his past to consider. But you couldn’t see that just from looking at him, could you? You couldn’t judge a book by its cover. Could you?
His thoughts whirred.
“I’m Nina, by the way,” the woman said.
Amos had the old light bulb in his hand. He looked at her, surprised that she’d offered this piece of information, and said the first thing that came to his mind. “Great name.”
Nina laughed. “Is it? I think it’s pretty ordinary.”
“I’m Amos,” he said.
“Not ordinary at all,” Nina said.
Electricity shimmered between them. Or maybe that was just Amos’s imagination.
With the tips of her fingers, Nina touched her forehead and sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m being so strange. It’s been a weird day.”
“Some weird guy barreled into your cabin,” Amos reminded her. “That isn’t your fault.”
Nina smiled and watched as Amos fitted the new bulb and re-hung the fixture. He flicked the switch to turn the light on and off.
“Thanks a lot,” she said.
Amos laughed. “I feel a little silly doing it. I’m sure you know how to change a light bulb.”
“I do. But it’s nice to have someone else take over for a change,” Nina said.
Amos put his screwdriver back in his toolbox and slipped the old light bulb into his big pocket. It was time to go. He reached for his yellow wool hat and said, “You’ll let me know if you need anything?”
Nina eyed him nervously.
“Do you know anyone else on the island?” Amos asked.
“No,” Nina said. “Nobody.”
“Where are you in from?”
“Jersey,” she said.
“Ah. Never been,” Amos said. “How is it?”
Nina raised both of her shoulders and glanced at the bottle of wine. The clock on the oven said it was nine o’clock. He bit his tongue to keep from asking her more about herself. Leave this woman alone , he scolded himself.
But it was Nina who asked, “Do you want to have a glass of wine with me?”
Amos was so shocked that he almost laughed. A beautiful woman in her late thirties or so asking him for a drink? But of course, she was lonely, and he’d given her a major fright. Wasn’t Amos himself lonely, too?
“I don’t want to intrude,” he said.
“I insist.”
Amos and Nina went out onto the porch overlooking the Nantucket Sound. The clouds parted to reveal a splendid pearl moon that cast a blurry reflection on the water, and the stilts creaked slightly, groaning but never giving way. Amos had checked on their strength not a month ago and informed Nancy that they were good for at least another ten years. Amos filled his mouth with wine and tried not to look at Nina’s profile for too long. His heart surged with questions. They sat on the two creaking wooden rocking chairs and clinked glasses.
Silence filled the space between them. Amos wondered what normal people talked about. But Nina got there first, asking him how long he’d worked for Nancy.
“A few years,” he said.
“Do you like it?”
Amos laughed. “I don’t mind it. I’ve encountered a few tourists who aren’t as kind as you, I guess. But I don’t mind them, either. Never see them again.”
“Remember, I almost attacked you with a lamp. How kind can I really be?”
“You’d be surprised how bad the others can get,” he said. “They’ll insult you to your face and laugh about it.”
Memories drifted through Amos’s psyche: that blond woman with the five-year-old son who’d called Amos his “slave” when he’d come to fix the drain; the blond woman had laughed and corrected him to say servant instead. Then there were the sailors who came from the city to wreak havoc on the boardwalk and get so drunk that they couldn’t stand. They insulted islanders, too, because they saw them as “simple” creatures who didn’t know how to live.
Nina didn’t look surprised about the tourists. “I was born in Nantucket. I remember what tourism could be like—how the people were eager to walk all over you because they were paying exorbitant prices day in and day out. But I guess it wasn’t as bad then as it is now.”
Amos took a breath and let what she’d said settle. “You’re an islander?”
“I left when I was eleven,” Nina said.
“Have you been back since then?”
Nina hesitated. “Once. It was thirteen years ago. I was twenty-five and different, I guess.”
“Weren’t we all different when we were twenty-five?”
“Goodness, I hope so,” she said.
“Your parents aren’t here anymore, then?”
Nina shook her head. Her eyes were like two drops of ink.
“Do they ever come back?”
“No.” Nina reached for the bottle of wine and refilled both of their glasses, although Amos’s wasn’t even half gone. She seemed jumpy.
Amos wanted to probe deeper to see if they knew any of the same people, but Nina didn’t seem like she wanted to talk about Nantucket or her past here.
“How long will you be here?” he asked.
“A few weeks, at least.”
“At least! No plan?”
“I’m not sure how long it’ll take me to do what I came to do,” Nina said.
“That sounds mysterious,” he said.
“I don’t mean to be obtuse. I’m just confused, I guess.”
“I’ve been there,” he offered.
They sipped their drinks in silence. Water lapped around the stilts that kept the cabin up.
“What do you do back in Jersey?” he asked.
“I work at the university,” she said.
“Oh.” Amos straightened his posture. He’d known she was smart, but he hadn’t expected this. “A professor?”
“Yeah.” She winced as though she was embarrassed. “Anthropology.”
Amos’s eyes widened. “I barely know what that is.”
Nina chuckled. “Don’t worry. Basically, it’s the study of what it means to be human. But I don’t know if anything we’ve ever learned has helped us along the way. Maybe learning about ourselves has made the human experience worse. Perhaps it’s similar to looking in the mirror a little too long and making ourselves crazy.”
“It seems to me that knowledge is never a bad thing,” Amos said.
Nina lowered her eyes. “You’d be surprised.”
Amos took a sip of wine and watched as moonlight fluttered through the waves. “There are a lot of universities up in Jersey. Which one is yours?”
Nina grimaced. “Princeton.”
Amos nearly dropped his glass of wine. “You’re kidding me.” It wasn’t that he’d ever been there or known anyone who’d been there. He hadn’t ever pulled for one of their sports teams or read about their assuredly important work in research. But he’d heard of Princeton. He knew of its prestige. Who hadn’t?
Nina waved her hand. “It looks good on paper, but trust me, it has the same problems as every other university. Maybe it has even more.”
“How did you end up there?”
Nina looked like she didn’t want to talk about this anymore, either. She stretched her legs out far in front of her and let her face melt into something languid and soft. Amos allowed himself—briefly—to pretend that he and Nina were a married couple, that they’d met in university at the age of nineteen, and that their children were sleeping in the next room. It was a life so many other people were allowed to enjoy. Why had it passed him by? But Nina was a stranger, a Nantucket-born Princeton University professor who was probably here to do something important and very beyond him. Amos’s heart slowed. He knew if he stayed there a moment longer, it’d break. So he finished off his glass of wine, stood, and said, “I better get out of your hair.”
Nina looked about to protest, about to tell him to sit down, that she had another bottle of wine chilling in the fridge. But instead, she nodded and got up to guide him to the front door. They laughed about how they’d met with the air of people who’d never see one another again. When Amos stepped out the door, he could feel Nina watching him as he cut into the dark down the road back to his cabin.