Chapter 2
Chapter Two
I t wasn’t the first time Graham Ellis had handcuffed himself to a construction site.
Because he’d previously protested everywhere, from the Arctic Circle to Antarctica to Nigeria, it wasn’t even the worst weather he’d experienced while performing such a feat.
But late April on Nantucket could see anything from rain to sleet and sun to violent winds, and the morning he locked himself to the bulldozer had a little bit of everything.
At seven, buttercream sunlight crept across the Nantucket Sound, but by seven thirty, when the first of the construction crew came to work to find him there, clouds boiled on the horizon. Rain spat in his face.
“What’s gotten into your head?” one of the guys in a yellow hard hat asked him.
Graham set his jaw. “The construction of this resort will ultimately destroy thousands of Nantucket organisms and alter the microbiome of the Nantucket Sound forever.”
The guy in a hard hat tilted his head so far that his hat nearly fell off. “Is that so?”
Graham knew better than to argue with one of the lower-rung guys hired to rip up the earth.
They were working for a paycheck to buy food for their families.
They had rent to pay and health insurance to take care of.
They either didn’t know or didn’t care that such anti-environmental and pro-capitalistic efforts would have a lasting effect on their island home.
They didn’t know that the Nantucket they’d grown up with, the Nantucket that supported their livelihoods, would one day be gone if they didn’t take care of it.
“You should really unlock that,” the guy said, eyeing the handcuffs.
“I already threw the key in the sound,” Graham said.
The guy tossed up his hands. “You’re making my job a whole lot harder, you know?”
“Ben, you gotta call the cops,” another said.
“Threw the key in the ocean?” the guy called Ben muttered. “You must be the biggest idiot on the planet.”
“I’m standing up for Nantucket Island,” Graham told him. “I’m standing up for my island home.”
After that, the clouds opened up and dunked them with more springtime rain than even Graham had expected.
It was cold, and his drenched clothes chilled him to the bone.
The construction workers took refuge in their trucks, eating sandwiches they’d probably meant to save for lunchtime and looking at their phones.
Graham tried his best to look formidable and strong, chin raised, seeming not to be bothered by the rain at all.
It was important; he’d told his wife of his pro-environmental antics, his protests, and his strenuous efforts to save the world. If I didn’t do it, who would?
He hadn’t meant to think of his wife already this morning.
He hadn’t meant to make himself so sad so early on in his protest. Now, her image floated in his mind’s eye: wide green eyes, a mischievous smile, long fingers, and messy curls.
Hannah hadn’t always been able to travel with him to various pro-environmentalist protests or global discussions about how to better the world’s climate footprint, but she’d supported him from their home in Chicago, sharing social media posts, promoting his messages, and calling him when she could.
Because he wanted to talk the talk and walk the walk, he never flew, which often made for incredibly long travels—boats across the Atlantic and bus and train journeys that meant hours and hours of thinking.
Should he have been at home in Chicago with Hannah instead?
Had he wasted his time? Nobody else cared about the environment, anyway.
No! Graham snapped at himself. It wasn’t healthy to drop into the menacing cycle of depression, of thinking nothing he’d done was worthwhile.
The rain stopped a few minutes later, but the winds came and whipped around him, snapping at his coat and his dark hair.
Three police cars arrived, which seemed like overkill but also proof of the dramatic amount of funds backing the current luxury hotel construction project.
Graham kept a neutral expression on his face and watched as four cops stepped through the mud and sand to get to him.
He knew two of them from his high school days in Nantucket. The other two were strangers.
“Is that Graham Ellis?” The red-headed female police officer smiled with surprise.
“Hi, Natalie,” he said, remembering her as the stuck-up seventeen-year-old in his history class.
“The famous Graham Ellis?” A cop he didn’t recognize feigned disbelief.
Natalie’s eyes glinted as though she’d caught a dangerous animal in a trap. “I read about you,” she said to Graham. “I read you did this kind of stuff. But I never imagined you’d do it here.”
“Here is where I should have been doing it the entire time,” Graham offered. “Nantucket is my home, and over-construction and tourism are ruining its delicate microbiome.”
“What’s a microbiome, exactly?” one of the cops asked. “You always hear this word tossed around, but it doesn’t feel like it means anything.”
Graham wasn’t sure if the cop was messing with him or not, so he answered honestly, “A microbiome is a…”
“I know what it is,” the cop spat, although Graham was genuinely sure he did not know.
“All right.” Graham offered his kindest smile, remembering what Hannah had always said: be considerate, don’t insult them, and remind them that you’re there because you love the same things they love—their world, their natural environment, the sky and the sea and the soil.
“We’re going to have to cut you off and arrest you,” Natalie said. “But you know that, I guess.”
“Not my first rodeo.” Graham shrugged.
“We don’t have the right equipment yet,” Natalie explained, her hands on her hips as she scanned the faces of the construction workers. “It’ll be an hour or two. Maybe three. Nobody wants to work anymore.”
“I have all day. I have more than that,” Graham said.
“In fact, I’d like to stay out here till the press takes notice, writes think pieces about it, and gets the islanders angry.
I want someone, anyone, to care at least half as much as I do.
And then we can have a conversation about it. We can build from there.”
Natalie’s cheek twitched. The other three cops went back to their vehicles to make calls to the office and eat things they’d packed away in brown paper bags. They didn’t care about Graham anymore.
“You know islanders won’t get angry about it,” she said. “More tourism means more money for them. We live and die by the cash brought in during the summer. Another luxury hotel means a better life for our children, our elderly parents, our…”
“Don’t you remember what it was like to grow up here?” Graham asked gently.
Natalie flared her nostrils. “Don’t you? I mean, I stayed because I love it here and can’t imagine going anywhere else. But you ran off to a fancy college somewhere.”
“I wanted to learn enough to save the place I love,” Graham said, his anxiety mounting. He didn’t want to let it show.
The handcuffs cut into the skin on his wrist. It had been a couple of years since he’d done this. He’d forgotten how uncomfortable it was and what it felt like to put his body on the line.
“That’s such bologna,” Natalie said.
“It isn’t,” Graham insisted.
“Then why didn’t you come back to Nantucket immediately after you graduated? Why is this the first time I’m arresting you for doing something like this? Why did you try to save Antarctica before saving Nantucket?”
Graham flared his nostrils and didn’t want to say that Natalie was making some pretty good points. “The world is big,” he said finally. “I want to save all of it.”
Natalie groaned. “You environmentalists are all the same. Too optimistic. Too in your head. You don’t see reality for what it is.”
“We might say the same about you,” Graham said.
Natalie turned around and left him standing in the sand and the mud with his chin raised to the horizon.
The sun was hidden beneath swirling gray clouds.
Another rainstorm was fast approaching. In his gut, he had the sensation that everything he was doing, everything he stood for, didn’t matter to anyone else.
Maybe he was just doing it as a performance to himself, as proof that he was still alive.
It wasn’t for another four hours that Natalie was able to cut Graham off the bulldozer.
By then, the late April sunlight had burned the clouds away.
As she shoved Graham into the back of the cop car, he heard the roar of the great machines behind him and the construction boss calling out for his employees to join the ranks and start digging.
They were behind schedule. Graham forced his eyes away as they drove, blinking rapidly to keep from crying.
It was true that he hadn’t slept much last night, and he was exhausted.
Natalie drove without speaking, which was a small mercy.
When they got to the station, his photo was taken, and he made a statement before he was forced into a little room with no windows.
“Are you hungry?” Natalie called just before the door shut between them.
Graham was shivering and ravenous. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to admit such a weakness to Natalie—that snotty girl from history class. But he didn’t know how long all this would take, so what choice did he have?
“I could eat,” he said finally.
Ten minutes later, a little window within the door burst open, and a tray was shoved through.
It was a ham and cheese sandwich with potato chips.
Graham’s stomach churned. He’d been a vegetarian since high school when he’d read about the environmental impact of eating meat.
He felt like the cops were rubbing his environmentalism into his face.
He removed the slice of ham and put it on the plate, where it sat like a piece of gum flattened on the sidewalk.
He ate the bread and cheese and potato chips and drank the juice they’d provided for him, waiting till they gave him a chance to call his lawyer.
That evening, Graham made bail and took a cab to the tow yard where they’d taken his car—an electric vehicle that most people called “impractical.” It was barely alive.
After paying to take it off the lot, he drove it slowly, steadily, his hands squeezing the steering wheel hard until he reached the charging station.
As it was charging, he went into the little shop to buy a package of peanuts, which he ate standing next to his car.
He stewed with anger and hatred at himself.
He’d failed today. The world was still burning. He was alone.
In the beginning, it hadn’t been like this.
In the beginning, it had been him and his high school girlfriend staging high school protests, making posters, going vegetarian together, crying about the state of the world, and promising that they’d build a better one for the people who came after them.
They’d been idealistic and so sure of themselves.
When Graham met Hannah a few years later, he’d spoken of his high school girlfriend as the person who’d changed his life—far more than his parents, teachers, or anyone else.
Hannah had asked, “Why isn’t she in your life anymore?”
Graham had shrugged. “Just one of those things.”
Hannah hadn’t been jealous or possessive. She’d always said, “If you ever want to reach out to her again, you should. There’s no reason we can’t all be friends.”
But Graham had said, “That era of my life is over. I’m in Chicago with you. It’s the only place in the world I want to be.”
Graham drove the rest of the way from the EV charging station to the little house he’d bought with the money he’d gotten from Hannah’s life insurance policy.
Graham lived his life alone. Inside, he sat on the sofa with the wind howling at the door and looked at his phone, waiting and watching for the article that called him the environmentalist who would save Nantucket’s microbiome, the one brave enough to stand up to the money-driven men destroying the island.
But there were no such articles. Eventually, he turned on the television and fell asleep to an old movie, one that he and his high school girlfriend had loved— Adaptation with Nicolas Cage.
It was surreal in a way that made Graham’s dreams twisted and dark.
When he woke up, he was alone in the living room and didn’t remember how old he was or what had happened to him.
Hannah, he thought, drawing himself up from the sofa for a glass of water. Hannah, why did you leave me all alone?