By the time Dad woke up, John and I were both in fresh swim trunks and polo shirts, and he, even groggy, even befuddled by whatever Mom claimed was fucking with his brain, recognized that something fun was happening, and he agreed readily to take a walk.
We sat at the pier, and the earlier part of the day seemed very far away. Boats came and went along the harbor; parents wrestled squealing kids on the sand. Gaggles of bikers rang their bells in code, seagulls squawked, swings squeaked on the nearby playground, dogs barked for a Frisbee on the grass near the bandstand. If you listened carefully, you might even hear the lapping of ice cream cones, the slurping of iced coffees. Some afternoons, it seemed all of Nantucket passed by here on the way to town or the yacht club or the bike shop. Maybe the hubbub was a good thing. Maybe when you reached a certain age, a big swath of open beach sparked too much contemplation. It’s possible stretches of sand made you worried that’s what heaven was like, calm but empty. Who wants that?
Whatever the reasons, whatever the difference, the coconut aroma of sunscreen, the half-mossy, half-salty tang of the dock—it all seemed to soothe him. This was the thing we sometimes forgot—that most of the time, Dad was perfectly fine.
Then we walked home, and I saw it first, saw it as we approached our front lawn, the strange indentation, near the hedge, like crop circles. Dark and light. Light and dark.
I lifted my sunglasses onto my head, as if their tint was obscuring my vision. I stopped, and my dad ran into my shoulder blade, a pileup of sorts.
“Jesus Christ,” I said. “Is that what I think it is?”
The Barrett’s tour bus rumbled slowly down Hulbert Avenue, the guide talking loudly enough that we could hear her through the windows. “Hulbert Avenue is home to some of Nantucket’s oldest summer homes. Designed with no winterized features, they—”
One by one, the cameras appeared, along with the gasps.
A swastika, mowed into our lawn.
“Move it!” I cried out. “Move the goddamn bus!”
I banged my fist above the taillight, over and over, till I thought I could dent it, punch through the metal.
I looked over my shoulder for John and my dad. They were together, thank God. John’s arm on my father’s. I saw them in a kind of slow motion, or maybe I just remembered it that way, had to slow it down to take it in. My brother-in-law reaching up to pull my father’s right arm down, tucking Dad’s limbs tight to his ribs to keep him safe, or maybe, just maybe, to keep him from saluting, from turning this horrible mistake into something awful and true.