Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Present Day
The day after the reading at the bookstore, Nora woke up to a disastrous house.
The kitchen walls were bare and patchy with leftover pieces of wallpaper, and the bathroom walls were still orange.
There were still boxes all over the living room, piled on the kitchen counters and tables, and filling the corners of her bedroom and the Pepto-Bismol pink one beside hers.
Heavy with a sudden onslaught of depression, Nora crept through her house, made herself a batch of coffee, and considered moving back to the city.
Maybe she could call the real estate agent and say that she’d made a mistake and wanted her old life.
Paul would probably return to New York City after he figured things out, and she wanted to be there.
But just as Nora prepared herself for a full day of anxiety and shame and guilt, the doorbell rang.
Nora considered not answering it. She guessed who it was.
And when she peered through the window, she realized she was right.
But the doorbell rang again, bringing with it a hollered, “We know you’re in there! We have donuts!”
Nora couldn’t resist that. She was starving, having eaten only half a bag of popcorn the night before. Laughing at herself and how weak she was, she opened the door to find a grinning Hilary and Stella with a big pink box of donuts in their arms.
“I just made coffee,” Nora said, surprised at how joyful she felt not to be alone. “Come in.”
But as she said it, Nora forgot the state her house was in.
Leading Stella and Hilary into the kitchen meant showing them the chaos she was living with.
It was a chaos that seemed to come from within her heart and extend to every inch of that bungalow.
As Nora poured their mugs of coffee, they tried and failed to avoid each other's gazes. She knew they were concerned about her, that they’d come over here because they were worried, and now they were even more anxious. What a mess she was.
“Nora,” Hilary said gently, “I want to say this very, very gently.”
Nora still couldn’t look up at her. She imagined Hilary would say, “You need help,” or “You’re depressed,” or “Get a therapist.”
“You need a redecorator,” Hilary said instead, laughing. “And Stella and I love redecorating.”
Nora laughed with surprise and raised her chin to look at her new friends. “I don’t know what I’m doing,” she said. “I thought I bought paint, but I saw this morning that it’s still in my online shopping cart. I can’t keep track of anything!”
“Moving is traumatic,” Stella said. “Especially when you’re doing it by yourself.”
“How can you possibly remember everything?” Hilary agreed.
“But first, donuts,” Stella ordered.
Nora smiled and grabbed a maple-filled donut, guiding Hilary and Stella out to the porch, where she was embarrassed to see she’d left half a bottle of wine from last night. “Ugh,” she said, reaching for it. “I had a weird evening to myself last night. I’m sorry.”
“You don’t need to apologize!” Hilary said. “Weird evenings are our forte.”
Stella nodded. “I used to sit and drink wine and look at the ocean for hours and hours. It was like I thought the ocean could tell me what to do?”
“I was hoping for something like that,” Nora said. “It seems full of secrets. Maybe one of them will help me?” She took a bite of a donut and immediately felt rejuvenated, pulsating with sugar.
Hilary and Stella were quiet for a moment, eating their donuts.
And then Hilary said, “We’re really sorry about last night.”
“Your relationship with Max is none of our concern,” Stella agreed hurriedly. “Honestly, I don’t know what got into me. It was obvious you didn’t want to talk about it.”
Nora set down her donut. Shame spun in her chest. “I’m embarrassed.”
“Don’t be!” Hilary and Stella cried in unison.
“Honestly, it’s not the biggest thing on my mind right now,” Nora said.
“Max Spader was a huge surprise, yeah. But seeing him sent me spiraling into memories and… Yeah. My son. He lost his wife last year. It was a tragedy, an awful tragedy. And he asked for space from my husband and me after it happened. Honestly, I can hardly admit this to myself. It’s a nightmare I can’t wake up from.
And seeing Max Spader like that? A famous writer, living out his dream, while I’m brokenhearted on an island I left forty years ago? It ripped me in two.”
“Oh, Nora.” Stella touched her shoulder. “I’m so sorry about your son.”
Tears filled Nora’s eyes. She wanted to say it was okay, but it wasn’t, and maybe it never would be. Hilary and Stella sat with her in silence, knowing that no words of encouragement would help. They knew devastation. They knew sometimes, all you needed was someone else there to carry the load.
But eventually, maybe because it was the only thing she could think to say, Nora said, “No, but, weirdly, I saw Max Spader last night. It’s weirder than weird.”
Hilary and Stella brightened.
“We don’t know how weird it is!” Stella said excitedly. “Because you won’t tell us!”
“And we don’t need you to tell us,” Hilary reminded her.
But there was a bubbling in Nora’s chest. She found herself falling into those bubbles, into the joyous energy of new stories. “Okay. I obviously had a fling with him. But we were teenagers. I was sixteen years old! He was seventeen!”
“That makes it so much crazier,” Stella said. “It’s been so long!”
“I mean, I know I’m older than you,” Nora said, laughing and rolling her eyes. It was impossible to say why being sixteen didn’t seem that long ago. Time was a funny thing.
“You know, he never got married,” Hilary said. “I read an interview with him. He said that he was always afraid to get married because he saw how dishonest it could be.”
“Interesting,” Stella said.
Nora raised her eyebrows, remembering her aunt and uncle. Max had certainly not had a good opinion of their marriage, nor anybody else’s in their orbit. It was funny that he’d carried that opinion deeper into life, into fame, into his writing career.
“You’re thinking about something,” Stella said to Nora. “You’re remembering something he said! I can see it in your eyes.”
Nora laughed. “No. I mean, he never liked marriage. Not even when I knew him.”
“But no seventeen-year-olds think they’re going to get married,” Hilary said.
“They think they’re going to live forever,” Stella said. “And have one amazing story after another.”
Hilary pulled her phone out of her back pocket and showed Max Spader’s social media profile, wherein he’d recently posted a selfie of himself near the Nantucket Harbor.
Nora’s heart felt light enough to float out of her mouth.
But it was almost painful to look at him, if only because she wasn’t sure she’d ever see him again.
His caption says, ‘taking a break from my book tour to spend a bit more time at home in Nantucket. See you when I see you.’” Hilary’s eyes widened. “Nora, do you think he cut the tour because he saw you?”
“No! No way,” Nora said, laughing.
“I don’t know,” Stella said, taking Hilary’s phone to reread the caption for herself. “Something fishy is going on.”
Nora pulled up Max’s profile on her own phone and scanned through the photographs: back to images of Max everywhere from Rome to Paris to Bangkok to Tokyo. He was a well-traveled, handsome, and successful man. There was no way he’d stop his beautiful life for her. She wouldn’t have wanted him to.
“Let’s stop all this Max talk and get to work,” Hilary said, her tone suddenly serious. “We’re going to clean up this place. Nora? You ready?”
No matter how many times Nora told Stella and Hilary that she didn’t need their help, that she could unpack and redecorate herself, they refused to listen.
Hilary made to-do lists. She made calls to delivery services.
She called her interior designer friend, who affirmed that the plan Nora, Hilary, and Stella had come up with was sound.
By late afternoon, they had a strategy in place to have the house fully ready by late summer.
“All good things take a bit of time,” Hilary said. “But this won’t take hardly any time at all.”
Before dinner, Hilary and Stella headed home to eat with their husbands, leaving Nora alone in a cleaner, tidier, and more nourishing space.
But maybe because of all the conversation about Max and what he’d been up to, she felt jumpy and eager to leave the house.
She put on a navy sundress and a pair of sandals, shook out her curls, and drove to the Nantucket Harbor, where Max had taken his selfie last night.
Maybe because she was foolish or perhaps because she was just as hopeful as the sixteen-year-old she’d once been, she parked the car and walked over to the spot where Max had taken his selfie. She wanted to see what he’d seen. She wanted to feel the sun and the air in that spot.
Leaning over the railing, she gazed out across the boats, trying to picture her Uncle Everett’s sailboat among them.
The people who boarded these yachts and boats were dressed just as Uncle Everett had dressed all those years ago in shorts, polos, and hats.
They looked moneyed and tanned and like they were chasing something.
Nora was glad that she hadn’t fully joined their world.
Although it was true that, having lived on the Upper East Side for years, she’d been on the outskirts of it.
She’d known people who’d run in circles with her aunt and uncle, but she’d kept her connection to Aunt Cynthia and Uncle Everett to herself.
But it was then, as she scanned the boats before her, that she saw a familiar figure.
A man in his late fifties was untying his sailboat and tugging at his sails, filling them with salty air.
It was Max, Max dressed in black jeans and a black T-shirt, looking entirely different from the wealthy sailors around him.
The boat he sailed had a sign on it that read SOLD, as though he’d just purchased it and had decided to use it as his getaway vehicle. Nora couldn’t believe it.
Was this the moment that Max was leaving the island for good? Even though he’d said he wanted to rest? Was he escaping his life of fame and fortune for one on the open seas?
Oh, goodness. Nora squeezed the boardwalk railing and tried to tell herself what to do.
There were two options. She could either watch Max sail his way out of the harbor and out of her life again.
Or she could use that darn phone number he’d given her, the same one she’d already put in her phone, and call him before he left forever.
Why did it have to be on her shoulders? Why did she have to choose?
“Fine!” she cried, hauling her phone out of her purse. She took a breath, searching for his name. When she dialed, she could still see him, sailing his way away from her. And then, she watched as he flailed around the sailboat, searching for his ringing phone.
At first, she wasn’t sure he was going to find it.
The phone rang and rang and rang. But finally, just in the nick of time, Max pulled his phone out of a random set of jeans that he seemed to have thrown off to the side.
He answered it, his chest heaving. He couldn’t have been more than a football field away.
“Hello?” Max said.
Nora didn’t know what to say, not at first.
“Hello?” Max tried again. He was frustrated. He needed to focus on the sails to continue his trek.
“Max,” Nora said finally. “Max, it’s Nora.”
Max’s voice brightened immediately. “Nora! Nora, I want to chat, but can I call you back? I’m in the middle of something.”
“Can you turn around, Max?” Nora asked. “I see you. Look. I’m the one on the boardwalk. I’m the one waving at you.”
Max yanked around on the sailboat so violently that he nearly fell. Slowly, he raised his hand to wave back at her. They gazed at one another across the harbor, across time.
“Don’t you dare go anywhere. I’m headed back.”
“I won’t,” Nora told him.