The shadow of the Cessna flitted over the white-capped waves of Nantucket Sound, swift and elusive as a gull’s wing. Nora could see the shape of the island long before it spread beneath them, dark green and brown in the surrounding blue. She was sitting near the front of the Cape Air plane, which was the size of a minivan. Its passengers were usually distributed among its nine seats by weight, but on this sunny May morning there were only three people flying to Nantucket. The pilot told them they could sit where they liked. Nora chose the starboard wing. She was hoping to glimpse the house’s gray-shingled eaves as they flew over the harbor.
There was the jetty, trailing out into the Sound like a pinball flipper. There, far below, was the car ferry from Hyannis steaming into its wharf. No sails braved the stiff wind that raked the sea today, and the moorings in the basin were deserted. Summer People and their yachts had yet to arrive. But the steeples of the old churches on Centre and Orange Streets still pierced the horizon in a way she remembered.
When she craned to study the roofs above Steps Beach, however, Nora was suddenly disoriented. There were so many houses, now, where once there had been only a few. Raw scars in the bluff and naked wood frames showed that more were rising. Huge houses with swimming pools—swimming pools, on Nantucket!—stretched out behind them. Compounds with guest cottages and caretaker quarters above expansive garages. What did people do with so much space? Although Step Above, the house where she’d spent each summer as a child, was hardly small . . .
The plane dipped and bucked as the pilot descended. The harbor fell away behind. Nora gripped the seat, her stomach lurching into her throat as the ground came up to meet them. No matter how many bush planes or choppers she caught, in hellholes or paradises around the world, this was what she remembered each time she landed: a runway bracketed by beach plum and sand.
“You in for the Wine Festival?” her taxi driver asked.
“The what?”
“Wine Festival. Whole world’s coming in this weekend. It’s the summer kickoff.”
“Not Memorial Day?”
“Too obvious.” His eyes met hers in the rearview mirror. An embroidered flourish on his polo shirt read Kevin. This was Kevin’s Island Taxi, so apparently she’d scored the owner himself. A tribute to Tuesday mornings, off-season.
“The Chamber of Commerce likes to make up reasons to celebrate,” he explained.
“Like Daffodil Weekend. Or Christmas Stroll,” Nora said.
“And the Book Festival, the Dance Festival, the Film Festival.” Kevin shrugged. “Now it’s wine. I’m waiting for them to organize Oktoberfest, myself, but knowing the Chamber it’ll probably be Craft Brews, and I can’t get behind that. Why pay six bucks a bottle when you like your beer on tap?”
The taxi bucketed over Main Street’s cobblestones. Nora glanced swiftly right and left, taking it all in. Scaffolding surrounded the aged brick of the Pacific Club at the foot of the street, and Ralph Lauren had taken over the space that used to belong to Nantucket Looms, but the compass rose painted on the side of the building still showed the nautical miles to Pitcairn Island—14,300. Crazy Quinn’s ice cream store was gone, she realized, as they lurched across the cobblestones to Water Street. How long had she been away?
“Lincoln Circle,” Kevin mused as he turned up Cobblestone Hill. “Spence Murphy lives around there. The foreign correspondent. Probably before your time, and he’s getting pretty old, now—but that guy will always be a personal hero to me. Staying behind after we pulled out of Laos. He blew the whole secret war wide open, you know? The FBI had a file on him, he was considered so dangerous.”
“They had files on a lot of people, back then,” Nora replied.
“What’s the address you’re looking for?”
“Thirty-two Lincoln. Place called Step Above.”
Kevin glanced at her again in the rearview mirror. “But that’s Murphy’s place, isn’t it? You know him?”
Nora felt her usual weariness. Here on Nantucket she shouldn’t have to explain. “He’s my dad, actually.”
“Your dad?” Kevin’s eyes widened. He was trying to make sense of it: her delicate frame, jet-black hair, her almond-shaped eyes. She had never looked like a Murphy and never would.
“I’m adopted.”
He almost missed the granite stone marker at the foot of the crushed quahog shell drive. She’d heard the house had been winterized when her parents moved permanently on-island, but the hedges hadn’t been trimmed in years. The sprawling old captain’s house needed re-shingling and the rosa rugosa had run amok next to the garage.
Some things, she thought with a rush of gratitude as she handed Kevin his fare and stepped out of the taxi, never changed at all. Some things you could count on. Some things were safe.
That was why, despite all the heartache and hatred, she had finally decided to come home.
Kevin waved and pulled out of the circular drive. Nora shouldered her backpack. It held all she owned in the world. She lifted her head and took the tricky first step toward the front door.