Chapter Three Lily
Later, in the privacy of our car, I permit myself a single scream.
“Jeez, Lily!” says Mom, startled. “You’re going to scare the whole island!”
“The therapist you made me see in the city told me about a technique she calls ‘scheduling your grief.’ I’m just following orders.”
According to said therapist, you’re supposed to allow yourself to feel by setting aside specific times of day to cry. Rose is a clinician on the island and because of her, I’m perhaps the most therapized twenty-five-year-old in the state. Somehow, it hasn’t made me any less of a disaster.
“Isn’t that for crying, not screaming?” Rose points out.
“It’s all the same.”
I lean my head against the steering wheel, and the horn lets out a loud squawk.
A figure looks up from a shopping cart, alarmed.
It’s the same red-shawled woman who passed us in the ice cream aisle a few minutes earlier.
Her hair is such a brilliant shade of white it looks almost blue in the light of our high beams. It’s the detail, the vague resemblance to Aunt Lottie, that does me in.
It is a ridiculous idea to “schedule your grief,” I decide. A capitalistic scam, another inhumane effort to reach optimal productivity. Feelings are not supposed to follow a schedule. Some messes cannot be contained.
“Are you okay?” There’s real concern in Rose’s voice now. “I thought that went fine! All things considered.”
I look up from the steering wheel to raise my eyebrows. “All things considered?”
“Yeah! You were cordial, sweet… polite.”
“I fell off a shelf in the grocery store and was covered in bottles of detergent. Which hurt, by the way.” My body is tender, riddled with soon-to-be bruises.
Mom touches a welt on my forehead. I wince. “Well, that part could have gone better.”
I groan and hit my head against the wheel again. “I’m an idiot.”
“You’re not an idiot.”
“I gave him a handshake.” Once I had removed the detergent containers from my body, the two of them approached, and in a brilliant flash of idiocy, I reached out and shook both of their hands.
“Yes, well, I suppose that part could have gone better, too, but like I said, at least you were polite,” says Rose.
I can still feel my heart hammering in my chest and my stomach churning. Before today, the last time I saw Henry was at Lottie’s funeral last Memorial Day weekend. He looked as innocent and clean as summer rain in that pressed black suit.
Henry and I broke up a little over two years ago, right before the pandemic, but we never stopped speaking.
The world shut down; we left the city and returned to our respective families for quarantine.
Me, here. Him, home in Connecticut and then, later, Boston.
We would talk late into the night, text all day, send each other funny videos on social media to break up the fear and despair.
We said we would stop if one of us met someone, but neither of us did.
I was more preoccupied with the world potentially ending, and Lottie’s increasingly defeating treatments, to even think about romance.
I assumed he would eventually come back to New York and leave Boston.
I assumed that someday, maybe, we would give it a try again.
There was a part of me, however small or suppressed, that even dared to hope he would be here this summer—both of us single—and we would meet again, but this time, it would be right. It would stick.
Then, three months ago, he told me he met someone. He said they had been seeing each other for a while, all throughout the pandemic, but it recently became “serious.”
Now I realize that by “serious,” he meant he is engaged. Quite the understatement.
“How is this possible?” I say aloud, mostly to myself.
We dated for five years, have been in each other’s lives for seven. How long could he even have known this girl? Less than two years, max?
Mom reaches out and smooths my hair, tucks back the stupid bangs. “You must’ve known he was going to move on eventually?”
“Of course,” I say, but it’s not the truth.
Our breakup never felt solid. I never mourned; I didn’t even cry once. Not talking to him the last three months was a stark change, and sure, it was difficult to resist dialing his number. My fingers naturally gravitated to his name in my phone. Still, it didn’t feel over.
An engagement?
Rose must detect the truth in my face, because she sighs. “Oh, Lily-pad,” she says, her nickname for me.
I notice the clock on the dashboard. It’s almost eight p.m., time for Rose to meet up with her friend. I realize how selfish I’m being, keeping everyone waiting over my melodramatics.
“It’s okay,” I say. “Enough about me. Let’s get you downtown.”
I take a deep breath. I’m backing out of the parking spot when I hear a loud honk. There’s a red Land Rover pulling out at the same time. Our bumpers almost hit but don’t: a near miss.
My heart picks up speed. I’m driving Lottie’s old Jeep, and beyond being the only car we have, it holds extra sentimental value.
The good luck charm Lottie placed underneath the rearview mirror—a gold evil eye pendant hanging from a string of colorful beads—still dangles exactly as it did the day she left.
Evidence of my great-aunt’s life is everywhere: the worn leather seats, the sand in the plastic mats, the “lucky pennies” she kept in the center console.
The interior even smells like her, if that’s possible.
Or maybe Lottie just smelled like the island, sweet honeysuckle and salt air and warm sand and freshly mowed grass.
If I had totaled the car—one of the last places we can still feel Lottie’s presence—I’d never forgive myself.
“Lily,” says Mom in a serious voice. “Are you sure you’re okay to drive? I can drive. Or, I can skip tonight altogether. We can go home and watch a movie instead.”
“No, I don’t want to ruin your night. It’s okay. I can do this. I’m an adult.”
If Mom disagrees, she doesn’t argue. We’re quiet as I drive the familiar route to town, passing the long line for the Chicken Box.
I wonder if the girls from the store have made their way in by now or if they were rejected by the bouncer.
I wonder if their lives are going to fundamentally alter tonight like mine did the night I met Henry seven years ago.
“Remember how scrawny Henry was when we first met?” I say.
Rose shifts in her seat. “He was a sweet kid.”
We were eighteen, about to head off to college.
It was Memorial Day weekend, just like it is right now, and I started working at a sweatshirt shop downtown.
The job was boring and repetitive, folding T-shirts and various other Nantucket merchandise for hours on end.
I’m wearing one of their products: a souvenir from the summer that changed everything.
One of the other employees invited me to a house party on Cliff Road after work, and it was there that I met Henry.
I remember spotting him by the pool. It was still cold out, and none of us wanted to jump in, but he was trying to start a movement.
He dared me to go first, and I did, because why not?
He followed shortly after. We spent the rest of the night huddled in pool towels, shivering in our wet clothes, talking in the corner.
Later, one of his friends drove a bunch of us home in the back of his pickup truck.
We sat side by side, towels flapping in the wind, watching the clapboard houses in town grow smaller.
The truck bumped over the cobblestones, Henry wrapped an arm around me for stability, and it felt like the beginning of something—like my life was finally starting.
The cold air dried our towels, and when it was my stop, he asked me out before I could hop out of the truck: my very first date.
Everything was simpler back then.
“Remember our first date to the movies?” I say to Rose. “Remember how nervous he was?”
“Is this reminiscing really helpful?”
We were shier than when we first met, because we no longer had the fever of the party and the beer to encourage us.
When he approached, he left at least three feet between us and said, “Hi,” with an awkward wave, and I said, “Hi,” back and forced my body into motion to give him a side hug that was all arms and elbows.
I remember how he said, “Shall we?” formally, and I giggled and said, “We shall.” He opened the door for me and I imitated a curtsy, and he asked, “Did you really just curtsy?” And I admitted, “I think I did.”
I had only ever been on “group hangs” in middle school and high school, where the large numbers provided a sort of protective buoyancy. When we took our seats, my palms were clammy, and I kept them stiffly at my sides, which Henry misinterpreted as a signal that I didn’t want to hold hands.
The air smelled like Sour Patch gummies and buttered popcorn.
Afterward, he suggested we go for a walk on the docks.
I had dressed up for the occasion: a nice dress and wedges that were far too fancy for a movie date.
As we walked, I remember thinking it was the first time in my life conversation flowed effortlessly with someone who wasn’t Rose or Lottie.
Talking to him felt like one of the satisfying tennis rallies Lottie was always watching on television.
Every ground stroke I hit, he returned with equal force.
It was beautiful, almost holy. The conversation was so mesmerizing I didn’t even notice that the straps of my shoes had begun to dig into my ankles, making my skin slick with blood.
The blisters turned into scars: thin, raised white lines like the rings of a tree. I showed them to Henry weeks later.
He said, “I guess you’ll never forget me then.”
I said, “I guess not,” and the idea wasn’t sad yet.
“He can’t be engaged,” I say now. The idea makes me sick, physically nauseated. I think about the scars on my ankles—the ones I still have to this day.
“I know,” Rose sighs. “It’s hard to believe, but he is. And you have to move on, honey. I know it’s hard, but it’s the only way.”