in Boylston for most of the year, and Yarmouth for the summers. Denise loved gardening, the royals, and English chocolate, and apparently passed those loves on to Julia, who would help Denise in the garden, and beg her for stories of growing up in Rushden, England. I think of the Cadbury’s Dairy Milk bars in my suitcase—half for Julia and half for her to send to her friend Denise.
Julia struggles to support herself, he said, so he helps her. I went quiet when I read that. Not that there is anything in life I want that I don’t have, except perhaps a nicer car, and only because mine is always breaking down, but because she has someone to turn to. Of course, my mother would help me, financially or otherwise, if ever I asked her, but what would it have been like to have a father who took care of me?
I remember, when I was young, friends’ fathers saying they had to save up for their first car, and as soon as they had the money—scrimping it together from Saturday jobs and babysitting—the fathers would tell them that actually the car would be a gift, and they should keep their money for something else. My father never actually got that last bit. He told me I had to save, and I did, confident that once I actually had that fourteen hundred pounds together he would buy me the Triumph Spitfire that I was so desperate for, and let me use that money to help get me through university, just like everyone else’s dad did, but he didn’t. I called him up to announce that I had finally saved up enough for the car, and he said, good, I should go and buy it then.
I kept thinking he’d surprise me, but he didn’t. As if I should have expected anything else.
Julia freelances for whoever will take her work when she has a free moment, which is rare. She also writes his catalogs. I can’t be sure, but I think she’s his favorite. She’s the one who has inherited his creativity, he says. And me, I think. She’s also, he says, an incredibly talented artist. One of the things he’s encouraging her to do is write and illustrate children’s books. She is something of a lost soul, he says, and he wishes she would settle down. She lives on the island, although he worries it’s too small for her, that she needs to spread her wings, move farther afield to find where her happiness will lie. She has a knack of picking bad boyfriends, unfortunately.
“She will walk into a room filled with a hundred men, and the one she will end up with will be the addict or the alcoholic,” he wrote regretfully. “Not that it’s hard on the island. You’ll discover we islanders have a unique relationship with alcohol.”
She has a new boyfriend, a sous-chef up for the summer, about whom Brooks is cautiously optimistic.
Both girls look like me, especially Julia. He promises to send photographs.
And me? Knowing all this about a family I have never known? If I could have found a way to teleport myself there the minute I found out all of this, I would have done so. As I peer out the window of the plane, high above the clouds, I remember the things Brooks wrote about Nantucket, his description of the cobbled streets, the pretty architecture, the boats bobbing on the water.
I read about driving over to Sconset, for ice cream in the village, to get the papers on Main Street and walk down to the harbor, and everything about my life feels grey and dismal and dull, and the only place I want to be is Nantucket, where everything will be better, I absolutely know it will.
That feeling I have carried my entire life, not fitting in, standing on the outside, never quite belonging, whoever I’m with? Once I’m in Nantucket with my family, I know it will disappear. It already has.
* * *
Nantucket airport really is tiny, especially after the noise and bustle of JFK. As soon as we took off from New York, I realized I couldn’t quiet the nerves anymore, and even though the wine helped, now that we have landed, now that I am minutes away, I find my hands shaking.
This is it. I’m about to meet my father. As the full impact hits me, I want to throw up with anxiety. I twist in the seat, but there’s no aisle