Chapter 7
Back in her room in the family apartment at the White Oak Lodge, Aurora ignored a smattering of text messages from her father.
PAPá: Aurora, come to my suite immediately. We need to talk.
PAPá: Aurora, don’t make me come down there to find you.
PAPá: Aurora, you are coming back to Rome with us.
PAPá: Aurora, you will not get away with destroying your life. As your father, I can’t let you.
Instead of answering, Aurora opened a recent email from Oren, in which he’d attached the video footage of their interview with Marybelle, the woman whose father had drowned in the shipwreck.
Although the lighting in the room was imperfect and it was sometimes impossible to hear what Marybelle said, Aurora thought it was a decent interview and an exciting next step in Oren and Kenny’s journey to make a documentary. She wrote back right away.
This is so cool. We have to find more Nantucket stories. We have to branch out.
Oren sent back a cartoon heart, and her heart skipped.
She knew Oren liked her, that maybe he wouldn’t have allowed her to be involved in the documentary nor sent her the footage if he didn’t.
But she often caught herself daydreaming about Kenny’s fingers linked through hers under the turquoise waters.
She imagined what it would be like to kiss Kenny, alone on a beach somewhere, with Oren far, far away.
She heard someone calling her name. “Aurora!” It was coming from the family apartment's kitchen, and it was her father, searching for her.
Panicked, she shot up and hurried to the closet, slipping in behind bagged clothes and an old bookshelf.
She tucked herself into the corner, just as her father stormed into the room.
“Aurora, are you in here?” He sounded sweaty and panicked, just as he always did after long hours at the restaurant.
Sometimes it boggled her mind to imagine that he actually wanted her to take over the managerial responsibilities at the Sardinia restaurant.
Why would she willingly take on all that stress? It was going to kill him.
At this thought, her heart darkened. She certainly did not want her father to die because of his stupid restaurants. She didn’t want him to die because he was worried about her, either. But something kept her tucked away in the closet, waiting for her father to head out and search elsewhere.
Just before he left the room, he tore open the closet door and peered through the shadows. In Italian, he said, “Aurora, I swear, if you’re in here, say something. Tell me what’s going on.”
At this last bit of tenderness, Aurora nearly cried out, for it was true that she couldn’t tell her father what was going on, nor what she was running away from Rome for, not this time.
Three years ago, she’d gotten herself into a terrifying mess, from which her parents had saved her.
(Her parents wouldn’t let her forget about it, either.) And now that she was in yet another mess, she knew she couldn’t rely on her parents.
She had to rebuild her life herself. Otherwise, she felt they would never respect her.
Maybe she wouldn’t respect herself, either.
Finally, her father bucked out of the room, slamming the bedroom door behind him. Aurora finally allowed herself to breathe again. She took big gulps of air.
Just before she slipped out of the closet, her foot knocked against a stack of old books, toppling the first several to the ground so that they opened to reveal beautiful penmanship.
Aurora realized at once that they were journals.
Greedily, she carried as much of the stack as she could into the bedroom, where she spread them out on the floor to see them better.
Most of them were black and brown and dark green, but they were written by numerous Whitmores, many of whom Aurora had never heard of.
It boggled her mind to think about all these people from the White Oak Lodge’s past. How had the journals survived the fire in the first place?
She’d heard someone saying that most of the Lodge had actually been all right post-fire, that they’d managed to salvage a great deal of the space and the things in it before boarding it all up and letting nature take its toll.
But if that were the case, who had held on to these journals for all these years?
And why had they been hidden away in the closet of the room where she now slept?
Just then, Oren texted again, telling her that he and Kenny were going to get burgers later. You should come too, it read.
This triggered an idea. With a new sense of purpose, Aurora dug into the journals, searching for stories that might help invigorate Oren and Kenny’s documentary.
Not only did she want to help them but she also wanted some of the ideas to be her own.
That way, they would be required to bring her deeper into the project.
She wanted the safety of something to do.
She wanted to resurrect her artistic independence.
One of the journals she picked up belonged to Grandma Francesca, and it was written entirely in Italian, which had probably made it useless for any Americans who’d previously dug through these books.
One passage read: Sometimes I remember what my mother told me about marriage, how lonely it can be if the other person withdraws from you.
I don’t think I ever would have thought Benjamin Whitmore would withdraw from me.
It goes to show that marriage offers a constant state of surprises.
Perhaps women who date around all their lives are never really surprised, because knowing someone on a surface level never gets to the root of knowing them at all.
Aurora raised her eyebrows with surprise. She wondered if her grandmother remembered having those thoughts about her husband, a husband who would soon become a stranger in her life. “I’ll come back to that later,” she murmured, setting her grandmother’s diary to the side.
She continued to read, opening and closing old journals, until she discovered a worn little book dated 1943. The name on the inner page read: Charles Whitmore. And beneath it were the words: Somewhere in France, another War.
Aurora was on her feet, her heart nearly bursting. World War II. She did a quick calculation and decided that Charles Whitmore was probably her grandfather Benjamin’s father. But she’d never known that he’d been a soldier in the war.
Being European meant constantly facing the events of World War II.
In school, Aurora had learned about Italy’s fascist past, about how Italy had paired up with Germany and fought against the Allied troops.
These facts were never comfortable, especially when they were paired with discussions of concentration camps and the heinous things people had done in the name of money and hatred.
But Aurora had never known that one of her family members had fought in the American Army.
She opened the journal and read in her great-grandfather’s handwriting:
July 11, 1943
I’ve received news from the White Oak Lodge today.
Mother and Father tell me that the Lodge is full with revelers, that it’s almost hard to remember a war is going on, given how celebratory everyone acts.
It is far from me to say how people should act in times of war.
While we starve here in the trenches, waiting for something to happen and praying it won’t, I try to remember what the Nantucket sunshine on my face feels like.
I try to remember what it’s like to hold Elaine’s hand as we walk along the sands.
Unfortunately, Father explains that it is likely Edmund will also have to go to war.
It isn’t clear where he will be stationed, although I pray it will be somewhere far from the battlefield.
I find this absolutely heinous. I volunteered to come so that Edmund could stay behind and help at the White Oak Lodge.
I do not believe a family should have to send both of its sons off to war, certainly not its twin sons.
But there you have it. They want all of us over here.
They want to put all of our lives at stake.
Aurora closed the book slowly, her mouth dry.
Charles and Edmund Whitmore. They were names that seemed so familiar, although she’d never heard them before.
She had the sense that there was a great deal of heartbreak in this journal, that Charles had probably starved and watched his friends die in battle.
She wondered if Edmund had actually been sent away.
It was funny to imagine her Great-Grandfather Charles having a twin brother.
Having a twin felt like something you were allowed to do as a child.
But she supposed many twins grew up. Many twins were allowed to watch one another age, watching the various ways their lifestyles played out differently on their genetically similar faces.
Aurora texted Oren and Kenny in their group chat, explaining that she might have found something interesting for their documentary.
AURORA: We can talk about it over burgers later.
Oren wrote back right away.
OREN: Is it more Whitmore buried treasure? We could use some of that to fund our documentary, haha.
Aurora rolled her eyes and smiled. She set her grandmother's and great-grandfather’s journals on the bedside table, then stacked the rest and prepared to return them to their hiding place in the closet.
But right before she did, she noticed one that had a handwritten name on the spine.
Lorelei Whitmore. Aurora slipped that one off the stack and added it to the mini-stack on the bedside table.
She’d never imagined that her mother kept a diary.
She’d never known anything about her mother’s inner life, especially not before she’d come to Rome and met her father.
Right before Aurora left for the night to meet the guys for burgers, she hid the three journals under the bed, frightened that her father would storm in again and get his hands on them.
She then stepped into the hallway and hurried toward the kitchen, eager to jump into Oren’s truck and get out of there.
But lo and behold, her father hadn’t really left the apartment after all.
There he sat at the kitchen table, his shoulders hunched, his eyebrows low.
Aurora panicked and nearly swallowed her tongue.
“Papa,” she said, stalling.
Her father spread his hands across the kitchen table. “Aurora,” he growled. “Don’t you think we need to talk?”