Chapter Eight Lily
Once again, Mom is gone before I wake. There’s a sticky note on the back of the door and a silk dress hanging from the frame.
It’s Memorial Day, but leave it to Rose to work on a bank holiday.
I walk to the full-length mirror on the back of the door and hold the dress against my body. The green fabric is near identical to the color of my eyes. So thoughtful, I think. Rose has always been the best at giving gifts. As a kid, I thought she could read my mind.
The dress is for the event on Friday, in four days. I assumed I would just pull something together from Rose’s closet, but knowing she thought of me ahead of time like this warms my heart.
Every summer since Rose first became involved in the island’s mental health community, we have volunteered at several charity events.
It’s the busiest time of the year for fundraising, and many of the local nonprofits rely on one summer party to sustain their programming for the entirety of the year.
This is the benefit of the summer people.
Usually, we will run the auctions or help set up decorations.
At the end of July, Rose is being honored at the Dragonfly fundraiser as the Clinician of the Year.
The event raises money for the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) and the local therapy office, Fairwinds.
Rose is expected to give a speech, which she has been working on for the last month.
I can hear her sometimes, practicing in the shower, but I can never quite distinguish the words.
I take a quick shower and get ready for the day, determined to make the most of it. If Rose is busy, I might as well make myself busy, too.
First up: flyers. I sit in Lottie’s nook and bring out my sketch pad from beneath a pile of books on the shelf. Through the wavy glass of the window, I can feel the morning sun. Outside is Lottie’s beloved garden, still in the process of blooming.
I start out small, sketching some of the flowers outside: the rosebuds crawling up the trellis, the daisies poking their heads out hesitantly.
The more I draw, the more I begin to lose myself in the process.
It’s like being submerged underwater. I lose track of time, watching as the sun progresses a shadow across the page.
Eventually, I bring out my watercolor kit and fill in the image.
I never have a plan before I sit down to paint.
It’s like the image tells me what needs to happen next, and all I can do is hurry my hand along before I miss the directions.
I’ve always loved the peace in the utter immersion of it.
The fury of invention and then the finished project—knowing I created something from nothing.
The first time I admitted I wanted to be an artist, I said it like it was a curse. Rose was driving me to a friend’s sixth-grade birthday party. I remember my heart was pounding against the seat belt. She pulled us into a parking spot and said, “Okay, honey. Have fun! I’ll be back in a few hours.”
But I didn’t leave. I just kept sitting there, my hands slick against the leather seat.
“Are you okay?” Mom asked.
“I have to tell you something,” I said in a grave voice.
I’m not sure why I chose that particular day, except that I couldn’t keep it in any longer. The car was where the majority of our revelations and deep conversations took place—the front seat was like a confessional booth for us, almost holy.
I must have alarmed her, but to her credit, she remained calm.
“What’s wrong, Lily-pad?”
I took a deep breath in. “I want to… I want to be an artist when I’m older. Like for real.”
Inexplicably, there were tears in my eyes.
I had loved drawing since I was a kid, and friends and teachers frequently told me I had talent, but this was my first time admitting out loud that I wanted to pursue it seriously.
Art was not some fun, absent-minded hobby for me.
It was not the activity of a girl trying to kill time.
I needed it. I needed to do it constantly. I wanted to be taken seriously.
“Well, that’s great!” Mom laughed, relieved. “Now, you better get inside before you’re late. I’ll see you later, honey. Have fun!”
That was the end of it, but it was like I had walked through a hailstorm and emerged miraculously untouched.
From that day on, Rose supported my dream, but I always felt some hesitancy from her.
I know she wants the best for me, but for her, that means stability.
It means a reliable income and health insurance.
Lottie was the one who truly saw my vision.
When I was seventeen and applying to colleges, thinking about majoring in something practical like marketing so I could at least fall back on a corporate job while still retaining some creativity, she said to me, “There is nothing more irresponsible than ignoring a dream. It will eat away at you if you don’t pursue it. And that is the real tragedy.”
It was Lottie who encouraged me to keep painting when I had self-doubts, Lottie who told me to take art classes in college, even if everyone else said it was a waste of tuition.
It was Lottie who told me I could be anything.
She was married to a good man, Charlie, my great-uncle.
But he passed when I was only eight. All I remember of him is his love of the constellations.
He would take me on the deck at night and point out the stars.
After he was gone, Lottie was heartbroken, but she remained resolute in her grief. She worked more on her craft, started writing the book she always wanted to write. She held up Rose and me, despite her own suffering. She was the strongest woman I ever met.
I notice a ladybug making steady progress on the windowsill, its tiny legs marching forward. I try to count the dots on its shell but can only see one side of its small body.
Good luck, I think with a smile. Lottie used to always say that ladybugs are good luck. I hope she was right about that one. I hope she was right to believe in me, too.
When I’m done with the drawing, I hold the paper against the sunlight.
To give myself credit, I think I did a decent job capturing the garden in its full splendor.
There are a few lines I’d like to clean up, but for the most part, it looks okay.
In the middle I write my advertisement: “Photography services available for weddings, family photo shoots, graduation photos, and more!”
Photography is the closest to my background in print media, but then I think about how nice it felt to be painting again. In a smaller line underneath, I add, “Also available for house portraits and custom oil paintings.”
I try to keep the desperation out of the copy but it’s hard because, well, I am in fact desperate.
Two hours later, I’m downtown, carrying a bunch of photocopied pages. I balance the stack in my left arm, pausing to staple a few to a job board by the library. I have already approached several businesses with my résumé, including Nantucket magazine and the local gazette, The Inquirer.
There’s a small art studio down by the library, and when I walk in and ask if they are hiring someone for the front desk, a snooty girl with acrylics and a bad attitude tells me to come back later.
“When later?” I ask.
“I don’t know…” the girl says, flipping through a copy of a magazine without looking up. It’s the brand I used to work at. We designed everything months in advance, and I recognize my handiwork on the cover. “Just not now.”
As I walk through the wide, airy space and stare at the paintings, I feel this tingling sensation in the crook of my elbow, my telltale sign that something is registering with me.
Many of the pieces are what you might expect from a beach town: impressionist paintings of sunsets reflecting off the sloping backs of beach dunes, sailboats in the harbor, a rainy rendering of the street right outside the window—all the lights aglow with warmth, and yellow shadows on the brick sidewalks.
There are photos of lightning striking water, black-and-white images of women wearing vintage bikinis, a beach van in retro colors, a close-up shot of a wave about to fold—the ocean churning angry froth like the open mouth of a beast.
Others are more of a surprise. Outside the gallery is a large bronze sculpture of a man and a boy. A hippo in a tutu balancing on one foot. Sculpting is the one medium I could never comprehend in school. Perhaps I admire it all the more because of this.
I keep being met with the same noncommittal answers whenever I drop my résumé off at one of the galleries, but at least posting flyers is a start. It feels good to be doing something ostensibly productive, even if it proves to be a dead end.
“Lily!” a voice calls out as I’m pinning a flyer on the bulletin outside of the coffee shop, the Hub. I recognize it immediately.
There, walking across the brick sidewalk, is Becca Stone. I met her the same night I met Henry. She was the coworker who invited me to the party. For the last several summers, we have reconnected like old camp friends, picking back up where we left off despite the winters of not speaking.
I have a somewhat naive theory that almost everyone in the world would get along if only they were locked in a closet together for enough time.
Being in Nantucket that first summer was kind of like being locked in one glorious, small closet; Henry and Becca and I banded together and bonded over house parties and bonfires and tanning on the beach and ducking into bars on the wharf through the open windows when no one was looking.
Drunk middle-aged men would buy Becca and me drinks, and we would pass them back to Henry, fishing paper wristbands out of trash cans, taping them back together, and sneaking into Cisco Brewers during the day—persuading one of the young oyster shuckers to give us free snacks from the raw bar.
Back then, everything was easier because anything was possible.
“It’s so good to see you!” I say when she approaches. “How have you been?”
“I’m good! I’m just here for the week, back and forth between the island and Boston for the summer.”
“What’re you doing downtown now?” I say quickly, before Becca can get a chance to ask me any questions.
“Oh…” Becca looks down at her white sandals. They have handwoven flowers on them. “I’m actually meeting Henry for lunch, and his…” She adjusts the glasses up the ridge of her nose before continuing. “His, uh, fiancée.”
“Cool.” I smile breezily while my heart splits open. I know Becca and Henry have remained friends. She refused to take sides in the breakup, which I respect. “That’s great. I ran into them at the grocery store the other day. She seems nice.”
“She is, yeah!” Becca grins, clearly relieved. “I kind of can’t believe they’re getting married already, I feel like we just graduated college yesterday, but I’m happy for them. Real excited for the wedding in August, too. It’s going to be at the yacht club.”
Miraculously, I keep the smile fixed on my face as shock hammers through my body, landing somewhere in my gut. I know I need to respond, but I can’t locate the appropriate words—or, really, any words.
So soon. “Oh, that’s lovely,” is all I manage.
My voice sounds false, even to me. I adjust the flyers to my other arm. The edge of one of the pages slices across the soft skin of my forefinger, leaving a paper cut. My legs feel strangely weightless, like they might buckle.
“Well, I should be going, but it was good to see you,” I add. “Tell Henry I say hi.”
Before Becca can respond, I am already walking away, down the brick sidewalk, past the wharf, onto the farthest edge of the dock, where the boats are floating, oblivious.
Five seagulls fight over an abandoned turkey sandwich, ripping the bread to pieces.
Their squawking drowns out the sound of the ocean, my thoughts, everything.
The salt air must be thinner around here, because I can’t seem to find the oxygen to take a full breath.
I stand like that until I can no longer feel my fingertips vibrate, watching the ferries come in and out of the port.
It was on one of these ferries that I saw Henry on the last day of our first summer. We were on the way back home, off to college shortly after, and I spotted his curved back on the top deck of the boat.
We had been on dates on and off all summer, but neither of us wanted to start college with a long-distance romance, so we never pushed it past casual. We didn’t ask how each other felt or question when we would see each other next. So much was unsaid back then.
The night before the ferry departed, I considered calling him. I even walked by his family’s house on Baxter Road and stared at the big white porch, the swing chair that looked over the steep drop of the cliff. I thought about knocking but didn’t. I just kept on walking, regretting my cowardice.
Seeing him on the ferry that last day felt like fate, a chance to finally say how we felt before it was too late.
We smiled at each other hesitantly over the tops of seats until I approached, navigating my carry-on bag through the aisle. The waves made everything unsteady as the boat reversed into the harbor, propelling us forward.
There’s an island tradition that throwing a penny in the water when you pass the Brant Point lighthouse on the ferry will make your wish come true.
We went outside to watch the white lighthouse shrink smaller and smaller and threw pennies in the water, standing back-to-back.
My wish came true, and then it didn’t. I didn’t ask what he wished for, but I used to like to think it was the same.
Imagine us standing there, hair whipping into my eyes, stinging my cheeks, both of us asking the universe for each other. How could it resist? Even the universe can be persuaded.
Henry had the penny framed for our third-year anniversary. As it turns out, he had never thrown it at all.
Maybe that’s where everything went wrong.
August. They are getting married in August.