Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
I t was that first night at the hostel in Boston that Sylvie let herself break down.
She’d gotten a bed in an eighteen-bunk dorm that housed other very broke women, many of them traveling through Boston with backpacks, paying just three dollars to stay the night.
After she put the sheets on her bed and pulled the pillowcase over her pillow, she sat at the edge and stared down at her feet.
She felt far younger than seventeen. She felt alone and stupid and maybe seven years old.
“You good?” An older woman in her forties was looking at her from across the aisle. Already, she was dressed in a pair of sweatpants and a big T-shirt, and her hair was wet and clean from a recent shower.
Sylvie wasn’t sure what to say. She wondered what had happened in this woman’s life to bring her here. Had she lost someone? Had she lost her job? Was she sick in some way? Sylvie had been so sheltered, and now, she was throwing herself into the wide world to see what happened next.
Maybe this woman was trying to rob her. But Sylvie had all the cash she owned in a bag tied around her waist and tucked under her shirt. I hope I can sleep at night, she thought.
“I’m good,” Sylvie lied.
“You far away from home?” the woman asked. It seemed she wouldn’t take Sylvie’s lie.
“Not too far,” Sylvie said.
The woman took a beat. “Does your mother know you’re here?”
Sylvie’s mouth went dry. It was true that no matter where you were, people assumed you had a mother somewhere out there who was worried about you. Sylvie didn’t want to get into the whole of “my mom’s dead” stuff, so she shrugged.
“I’m sure she’s worried about you,” the woman said.
“I’m eighteen,” Sylvie lied.
“And I’m the queen of England.”
Sylvie pulled herself up onto the bed so that her back was against the wall. Where was her book? She could bury herself in it, distract herself both from her hunger and from this woman’s prying eyes.
“Listen,” the woman said, digging through her bag, “I have a daughter, too. She’s maybe about your age.
Fifteen? Sixteen? I don’t know where she is, and she doesn’t know where I am, and it’s gotta be the worst thing that’s ever happened to a human heart.
” She touched her chest and then procured a bag of peanuts. “I want you to have these.”
Sylvie’s first thought was that the peanuts were in some way poisoned, that this woman was cruel and wanted to destroy Sylvie. But the look in the woman’s eyes spoke of true turmoil.
The woman threw the bag of peanuts onto Sylvie’s mattress and said, “I want you to promise me that you’ll take care of yourself.
I want you to promise me you’ll call your mother the first chance you get.
I don’t know why you had to leave home or why you’re in this godforsaken place by yourself.
But I want you to remember that people love you. ”
Sylvie turned onto her side, facing the wall, and cried as quietly as she could. The room smelled of soiled sheets and salt and sweat, and she ached for the familiar smells of lavender and salt and sand. She ached to hear Graham’s voice.
The following morning, Sylvie woke up to find that the woman across from her had packed up her things and moved on.
There was a hollow ache in her stomach. The hostel had a free breakfast of toast and coffee, and Sylvie ate until she was stuffed and went for a long walk through the city, wondering what she should do next.
Everywhere she looked, she saw people failing the world they’d been given.
She saw litter. She saw people throwing plastic in the garbage without bothering to recycle.
She saw big steamships and thought of oil spills.
She took many breaks on benches to cry and considered calling Graham.
But she knew what Graham would say. He’d tell her that she could move in with him and his family.
He’d tell her that they could escape James Bruckson’s wrath.
Sylvie knew this wasn’t true. She knew that the minute she returned to Nantucket, James would lock her away, swallow the key, and prepare her for the trip to boarding school.
There was something broken and sinister in her father, an evil energy that dripped out of him.
Sylvie had always been a smart girl, but she’d never been particularly keen on school. What did that mean for her future? She was supposed to have another year of high school left. She was supposed to apply for college soon. But what if she didn’t want any of that?
After a few days in Boston, she ran into the crew of environmental protesters that she and Graham knew, and they told her that Graham had been calling around, asking for her.
“You need to call him,” they said, their faces marred with worry.
“Did you graduate?” one of them asked.
“Do you need a place to live? I have a room going for two hundred a month,” another said.
But Sylvie didn’t know how she would make two hundred dollars a month, let alone enough to fully sustain herself.
Plus, Boston was beginning to feel too close to Nantucket.
Her father came here plenty on business.
And Graham knew these people. What if he came up and dragged her home? What if he alerted her father?
Sylvie felt out of her mind with worry and hunger. Her peanut bag ran out on day three, and she did her best to sustain herself on toast, coffee, and water. At night, she had dreams of her mother, strange rainbow visions that found her mother on a Nantucket beach, calling Sylvie’s name.
Sylvie had been seven when her mother died.
There had been an accident, she knew. But it occurred to her now, as she wandered the streets of sticky, humid Boston, that she wasn’t entirely sure what that accident was.
Clearly, her father hadn’t told her because he wanted to protect her.
But shouldn’t she have been informed by now? Wasn’t that pertinent information?
Wanting to get farther away, Sylvie took a five-dollar bus to Manhattan.
There was another eighteen-bunk hostel near Grand Central Station, and she booked herself a bed and headed out to an anonymous-looking pay phone many blocks away to make the call.
It was three in the afternoon, which meant her father was probably in the office of The House on Nantucket, doing paperwork or going over the numbers of the previous few weeks.
Had he already given up on her trying to call?
Had he sent the cops after her?
Had anyone seen her at the ferry, fleeing?
Sylvie dropped the quarter into the pay phone and listened as it rang and rang across the East Coast and into her father’s study. She could picture him hunkered over his desk. She could picture the little wrinkle between his furrowed caterpillar brows.
Mrs. Galloway answered. “Hello! This is The House on Nantucket. How may I assist you today?”
Sylvie’s voice was so thin that she hardly recognized herself. “Hi, Mrs. Galloway. It’s Sylvie.”
Mrs. Galloway sounded stricken. “Darling! Where have you been?”
Sylvie was momentarily relieved to realize that she hadn’t been completely forgotten. She’d only been gone eight days, but it felt like a lifetime.
“Can I talk to my dad, please?” Sylvie asked.
Mrs. Galloway took a deep breath. “You need to come home, Sylvie. Please. We’re worried sick about you.”
Sylvie bit her tongue to keep from sobbing. “Please, Mrs. Galloway. I need to speak with him.”
Sylvie listened as Mrs. Galloway took the phone from the front desk to the back office.
As she stood on the side of a Manhattan street, planted between two massive buildings, sirens screamed behind her, and people dressed in suits darted from one place to another.
Everyone had somewhere to go. Everyone except for her.
Finally, her father’s gruff voice came on the line. “Sylvie.”
Sylvie couldn’t believe how much her father’s voice affected her.
It felt like a knife in the heart. Immediately, she began to wonder if he’d really been that bad all that time.
Immediately, she missed him so desperately.
She wanted to be a little girl again, to throw her arms around him, to sit by him on the sofa and listen to his big, deep voice as it vibrated through his body.
“Sylvie, what have you done?” her father said.
Sylvie’s thoughts stalled. She swallowed. She remembered.
“Sylvie, you’re a selfish child,” her father continued, his words coming faster. “You’re a selfish monster of a child, and we never should have had you. We should have listened to the doctor when he said we couldn’t have a child.”
Sylvie nearly threw the phone. She hadn’t known this part of her origin. She hadn’t known that she shouldn’t have even been born.
Was this something she’d felt beneath the surface her entire life?
Sylvie gritted her teeth. Don’t hang up. You’ve made it this far. Ask him the question you called with. Force him to tell you.
“You never told me,” she began, her voice wavering. “You never told me how my mother died.”
There was silence on the other end. Another siren screamed past.
“Where in God’s name are you?” he demanded.
Sylvie gritted her teeth. “Tell me. How did she die?”
“I won’t tell you unless you tell me where you are,” he shot.
Sylvie realized she could lie. She could say whatever she wanted.
“I’m in Providence,” she said.
“That’s a lie,” he said. “You were never an honest child. You were just like your mother.”
Sylvie’s eyes widened. All her life, she’d longed to be compared to her mother.
But not like this.
Tears were streaming from her eyes, hot and salty.
“Please,” she whispered. “I’ll never ask you for anything else.”
Her father scoffed. “Good. I hope you don’t.”
He hung up the phone.
It took Sylvie six months to get her journalism career started and another year before she could afford a room of her own.
The room was in Chinatown, of all places, directly above a place that sold the very best dumplings she’d ever had.
On the day she moved her single backpack and few belongings into the room, she bought as many dumplings as she could for ten dollars and sat on the floor to eat them, marveling at how far she’d come.
By then, she’d had eight articles published in small revolutionary presses, and people were paying attention to what she had to say.
She was only eighteen, but she was telling everyone she was twenty-one, and they believed her for now.
She’d never graduated from high school. She wondered if she could get away with this.
By then, Sylvie had developed rather keen research skills, which were required for her journalistic career. She knew what she needed to research next. But she wasn’t sure if she had the will.
It was the end of summer 2003 when she braved the call to the Nantucket Historical Society to ask about her mother’s death.
She was seated at the desk in her bedroom, watching the rain with the phone pressed against her cheek.
She’d opted for a separate landline in her bedroom so that her roommates weren’t bothered by her numerous daily phone calls, and she wasn’t bothered by the fact that they sometimes needed to use the phone to call boyfriends or girlfriends in faraway towns.
Come on, Sylvie, I need to call her now!
In talking to the Nantucket Historical Society, Sylvie used a fake name. The man on the line sounded bored and eager to pore through old death documents and newspaper articles to find the incident of her mother’s death. Sylvie had been seven; it had been eleven years ago. October.
“Here it is,” the man said of the obituary. He read it aloud. “Sarah Bruckson passed away on October 7th, 1991. She was the longtime owner of The House on Nantucket and a beloved member of the Nantucket community. She is survived by her husband, James, and her daughter, Sylvie.”
Sylvie waited for the man to go on. The silence was ponderous.
“That’s it?” she asked.
“That’s it.”
Sylvie was floored. Sarah Bruckson had lived and worked and gotten married and raised a daughter.
She’d had thousands of thoughts a day and been a very real, three-dimensional, complex person.
And someone, probably James Bruckson, had whittled down the events of her life to a few sentences. Sylvie was irate.
“What about the death certificate?” Sylvie asked.
The man at the Nantucket Historical Society took a breath. “It’s strange.”
“What’s strange?” Sylvie demanded.
“I can’t remember seeing anything like this before. But it doesn’t say how she died.”
Sylvie’s breathing was all over the place. She found herself on her feet.
She asked him if there was some mistake. But there was no mistake.
Sarah Bruckson had died on October 7th, 1991. But according to public records, nobody knew why.
But James Bruckson knew, Sylvie thought.
He’d decided to keep the facts of his wife’s death till he went to his own grave.
It was enough to make Sylvie sick to her stomach.
But she thanked the researcher, then lay back on her brand-new secondhand mattress, her hands in fists, feeling the world spin around her.
She felt her father had wronged not only her but also her mother.
And she felt that—in life—it was up to Sylvie to honor her mother’s memory, to fight the good fight for the earth and all the people in it, if only to prove to her mother that bringing Sylvie into this world had been worth it.