Chapter 10 #3
“You have no idea. She put me in parochial school from the time I was six. Nuns teaching us Latin. Old-school football coach who kicked the crap out of us. I ended up with a couple scholarship offers from some big football schools, but Mom—like, as soon as that Dartmouth coach called? That was it for her. I had to go, even though they don’t do athletic scholarships in the Ivies.
And it turned out they paid my way anyway, because—you know, guaranteed financial aid and everything. ”
“In your mom’s defense, you can go anywhere with a Dartmouth degree.”
“Ironically,” he said, “anywhere except the NFL.”
“Dartmouth has players in the NFL. Don’t they?”
“I don’t know, maybe one. It’s uphill.”
“Well, you seem pretty good at uphill.”
Ben shot me some side-eye. “Just because it looks easy doesn’t mean it is.”
“Then why do you do it?”
“Because it’s hard. Because I want to play pro football.”
“Sedge said you like to hit people.”
“That asshole,” he said. “Here’s what I like about football, Lucy. You can do things that in any other context would get you arrested. Channel all that anger and shit into something people cheer you for.”
“Like hurt people?”
“Not people. It’s not personal. You want to compete. Test yourself. You want to fight. Hard, physical.” He made a couple of jabs in the air. “You want to win.”
“So what makes you angry? Your dad?”
“My dad, yeah. And, I guess, when I was a kid, just wanting to protect my mom. I wanted to protect her and I couldn’t, you know? All that stuff you can’t control.”
Already we had reached the path that led down to Poseidon Beach. “This is my stop,” I said. “I left my towel and flip-flops down there.”
“No, you wait here. I’ll get ’em.”
He handed me the bicycle and jogged down the beaten dirt track. I stood there listening to the hum of insects. The chirrup of early birds. A bee hovered at my arm and swayed away. The air smelled of flowers, of warm green leaves.
He came back a moment later, dangling towel and flip-flops from his hand. “That was lucky,” he said. “Tide almost got ’em.”
I put on the flip-flops and draped the towel over my shoulders. Now I could walk on the pavement without shredding my feet, but Ben stayed on my left, the traffic side. Not that there was any traffic to speak of at six in the morning on Winthrop Island.
“When you said I was part of the crowd,” I said, “what did you mean?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Just shooting my mouth off, as usual.”
“No, you pretty much say what you mean,” I told him.
The bike came from the vintage Peabody collection and there was a bell on the handlebars.
He brushed it with his thumb—brrring, brrring.
An innocent noise, a childhood noise. “My first winter in New Hampshire,” he said, “I’m looking around, everyone’s wearing the exact same fucking thousand-dollar puffer coat, that Canada Goose thing.
At first I thought it was a literal uniform, like for the ski team or something.
But I kept seeing that same coat everywhere I went.
And I’m thinking, how did everyone know but me?
” He shook his head. “I don’t know. My mom got me this coat from Lands’ End, on sale for a hundred bucks.
Big purchase for her. Keeps me warm just fine. ”
The corner of Plum Lane came into view. Another fifty yards up the road lay Serenity Lane, where Ben would turn to reach the Peabodys down at the end.
I fingered the edge of my towel. “My mom used to say—you know, when people were like, Wow, small world? She’d say, Honey, it’s not the world that’s small, it’s your world that’s small. ”
“That’s it,” said Ben. “The world is actually pretty big, when you break out of your bubble.”
“In fact,” I said, “I think that’s the real reason she left my dad. It wasn’t so much because he was broke. It was because of why he was broke. That his bubble meant so much to him. Couldn’t break out even to support his family. Couldn’t be somebody he wasn’t, basically.”
Ben stopped again and turned to me.
“Sorry. Wait a second. You said your dad’s broke? Doesn’t he own the big house next door to the Peabodys?”
“Big house, no money. Long story. My great-grandparents made a fortune and my dad’s been living on what was left of it. Eventually my mom gave up and divorced him and took me with her to France. I just visit here for a few weeks in summer. So I guess you could say it’s not my crowd either.”
We started forward again. Flip-flops crunching the broken asphalt at the edge of the road. I stopped at Plum Lane. The old gravel was pitted with potholes.
“This is me. Just—like I said?”
“Not a word,” Ben said. “Not even to Sedgie-boy.”
“What does that mean?”
He closed one eye and squinted at the sky. “Nothing.”
“Whatever.” I stuck out my hand. “Thanks for saving my life and everything. I guess I’ll see you around?”
—
When I walked into the kitchen, Dad looked up from the coffee machine. “There you are.”
“Went for a swim. Jet lag.”
He frowned. “You shouldn’t swim out there all by yourself. Don’t forget that tidal current.”
I flung my towel over the back of a chair and my flip-flops on the seat. “Can I have some of that coffee?”
“Since when did you start drinking coffee?”
“For about five years now. You know, they have nice machines now. You don’t have to put up with this filter crap.”
He set the cup in front of me. “I like this filter crap. What can I make you for breakfast?”
“I’ll eat after I shower off all this salt and sand. What’s this?”
Dad sat down on the chair opposite. Before him lay a bunch of old papers in stacks of a few pages each. I reached for one. He batted my hand away.
“Careful! Those are about three hundred years old.”
“What? What are they?”
He set down his coffee cup. “Hephzibah Winthrop’s journal.”
“I’m sorry, who?”
“Heph-zi-bah. Winthrop. One of the early settlers. She lived right about where the Summerly house stands now. Kept a journal during the winter of 1717. It’s the island’s only primary account of the Great Snow. It’s priceless. Irreplaceable. It’s—”
He went to lift his coffee cup, but his fingers fumbled the handle. The cup tipped. An arc of hot black liquid soared across the table.
My teenage reflexes swung into action. Before the image from my eyes even reached my conscious mind, I had snatched a napkin to dam up the flood, just short of the papers.
“Shit! Fuck!” my father yelled, grabbing more napkins.
I shored up the sides. The napkins grew into soggy brown piles. “Wash your mouth, Dad. Jeez.”
“Damn it,” he said, dabbing at the edge of one of the papers.
I added more napkins and wiped away the stray drops. “Eh, no one will know. It’s already old.”
“You don’t understand. This is the only—Christ.”
“If it’s so precious,” I said, “so precious you would say actual curse words for the first time ever—”
“I’ve sworn before,” he said, offended.
“Not that I can remember. Anyway. My point. What is it doing here? On our kitchen table?”
“Old Mrs. Peabody told me about the journal. She used to work at the historical society when she was young.”
“The historical society?”
“It’s part of the library. Mrs. P remembered digging it up from the archives some time ago. Some fellow who was researching the Great Snow of 1717.”
“And it was still there? And they let you just. Walk out with it?”
A smile might have twitched one corner of Dad’s mouth. “I have an understanding with Sally.”
“Sally?”
“The head librarian.”
I threw away the napkins in the burgeoning trash and sat back down. “Dad, you can’t just keep these papers here. They’ll disintegrate.”
“I think I know something more about archival papers than you do, sweetheart.”
“Dad. You literally just spilled coffee on them.”
“I was distracted. I’ll be more careful in the future. Obviously.”
“In the future? Dad, you need to return this to the library. In fact, the library should probably consign it to a special facility. It’s irreplaceable. Like you said. You need to preserve it for future generations.”
“What do you think I’m doing?” He squared the edges with careful fingertips. “It’s safer here with me than at that library, where anyone could get their hands on it.”
“Anyone wearing acid-free white gloves, for example?”
“I’m so close, sweetheart. This journal—Hephzibah Winthrop—”
Here we go, I thought.
You need to understand that breakthroughs were not a new thing for Dad.
On a regular basis, he would poke his head into my room or burst into the kitchen or sit down to dinner and announce, in this hushed voice—as in, I’m playing it cool for effect, but this is huge, sweetie pie, this is the turning point, our worries are all behind us—something about, for example, discovering a reference to some pieces of eight dug up on a farm on Cape Cod that bore the same marks as a haul of silver supposedly captured by the Dread Ned.
So I recognized that whisper. That mad-scientist flame in his eyes.
“I finally got that laptop, like you told me,” Dad said, like a conspirator. “Did you know the Brits have digitized their national archives? Including all the naval records.”
“Welcome to the internet, Dad.”
“Ships’ logs, personnel records. Going back all the way to the early eighteenth century, the golden age of pirates.
Remember what I told you? The War of Spanish Succession?
The Crown handed out all these letters of marque—you know, the privateering license, which allowed private men of war to attack enemy shipping—”
“Dad, this might be the fifty-seventh time you’ve given me this history lesson. And when the war ended, the privateers turned pirate and started attacking everyone—”
“Yes,” he said, “interfering with legitimate trade, disrupting diplomatic relations. So the Royal Navy went after them hard. And it’s all there! On the internet.”
I laid my hand over his curled fist and smiled. “So did you find your pirate guy? Ned whats-his-name?”