Girls of Summer(45)

Beth said, “You know, different groups are already doing research here, on the loss of eelgrass, on water quality.”

“Good,” Ryder said absentmindedly, glancing at his watch. He lifted his hand from Beth’s arm, and straightened in his seat. “I’ve got a meeting. Keep working on this. This seal did us a great favor. Email me.”

“Sure,” Beth said, smiling, and stepped down from the SUV.

Back in the office, Beth was energized. She sat down in her comfortable executive chair, pulled up a pad of lined yellow paper, and started a list. She studied her video of the men with the seal and decided it was really pretty awesome. For an hour she worked in a kind of cool-minded, emotion-hot intensity, until she paused, emotionally punched by the realization that her home, her island, was a kind of canary in the mine for the future of the coasts. Suddenly, this was very personal.

   It was odd, difficult, to read the daily weather reports and mix that news with her memories of growing up on the island. She’d been so very happy, and sometimes she felt guilty about that happiness, because she had lost her mother, so shouldn’t she always be sad? But the loss had happened when she was so young, she hadn’t known what was normal, she didn’t comprehend what she had lost. Her father had been her world, and she was his.

Her father loved the island. On weekends Mack took her hiking around the wild, lonely barrier beach called Coskata-Coatue that protected the Nantucket Harbor from the more savage waters of Nantucket Sound. He woke her early Sunday mornings to go to uninhabited island preserves to join the group of bird-watchers; he drove through a snowstorm to Coskata so she could see the snowy owl perched majestically on an evergreen. He taught her how to handle a Boston Whaler, how to fish, how to gut and dress the fish. He explained how the Wampanoag tribes had hunted whales from a canoe and gathered wild blueberries and beach plums from the moors to keep them healthy through the winters. He’d taken her with friends to spend the night on the nearby lonely island, Tuckernuck, and he’d shown her all the exquisite Main Street homes once built by the whaling captains. He’d impressed on her that this environment was fragile, the history of the island was unique, the beauty of the island unsurpassed.

Beth grew up knowing, deep in her heart where words could not go, that she was part of the island. She belonged to it.

And now, with the arrival of Ocean Matters and Ryder Hastings, she glimpsed an opportunity to help it. She had not been able to help her mother, and although Beth took as many chemistry and science courses as she could tolerate, she knew that she would never be the person to cure cancer, not the kind of cancer that had taken her mother. She’d never obsessed about that, she couldn’t control the past. But when Atticus died, Beth had carried a kind of guilt with her that weighed heavily on her heart. She had not loved him enough to make him love his life. No one blamed Beth for this, and she never spoke with anyone about it, because she knew with the rational part of her mind that she couldn’t have saved Atticus, even if she’d stayed by his side every moment of every day. But she was determined to do something life-affirming, something that helped, that mattered.

   And working for Ocean Matters made her believe she could do that. Would do that.

I am doing that, she thought as she looked at the work she’d done, as she saw more and more comments about the seal landing on the Facebook page. She was getting the word out. In her own small way, she was part of something larger, this island and the waters around it.

But what she’d done was only the beginning. She’d created a Facebook page and an Instagram page, but she needed help in order to build a website. She’d gone as far as she could go without technical help. Leaning back in her chair, she wondered what her next step should be.





fifteen


Juliet woke early, her mental alarm clock set to work time. For a while she allowed herself to look around her room, her childhood room. She’d been away for so long, first college, then her job with Kazaam. When she’d returned home for Christmas, for a week in the summer, she hadn’t paid attention to her bedroom, but now she was almost twenty-eight, which in her mind meant she was almost thirty, and here she was, in bed alone, gazing at a poster of Ashton Kutcher on the wall.

Well, he was nice to look at.

Ryder Hastings was nice to look at, too.

She reached for her phone on the bedside table. Yesterday he had answered her text canceling dinner with a brief: Maybe sometime next week?

She had texted: I’ll probably be on Nantucket.

So will I, he replied.

   Since then, nothing new from him, and why should there be, she hadn’t contacted him. Would she? Closing her eyes, she remembered how he had kissed her in his Tesla. What she’d felt for Ryder Hastings as they kissed, and what had lingered during the drive to Boston, was deeper than what she’d ever felt before. More dimensional.

Ha, Juliet said to herself, throwing back the covers and sitting up in bed. More delusional would be the correct word. She’d always known she didn’t want to follow the traditional path, love, marriage, children. She’d always wanted to make a difference in the world, and while Kazaam hadn’t actually brought world peace, she knew from comments on the website that her posts of dogs who had been mistreated and rescued and given a good home had brought a moment of joy and belief in the goodness of people. Maybe that was an event of little significance, but still, it counted.