Mark Clayton was heading back to work with a sandwich when memory tugged him abruptly into the past. He had missed the five p.m. deadline to order dinner from the firm’s dining service, not through any misplaced optimism about his ability to get the work done and go home early—those days were long past—but simply because he’d lost track of time. It happened with surprising frequency, alarming, really, given that hours were what he was supposed to keep the closest eye on. If he had plenty of time, he’d go and get takeout from the Chinese place on Nineteenth Street; if he was in a frantic rush, he’d stop in the lobby. But the deli inside the building served a captive audience and knew it. They skimped on the chips and even essentials like mayo and hot peppers. So when he could, Mark walked half a block to a pizza place run by gruff Greek brothers, who also did the best cheesesteak he’d had since Philadelphia. Later at night, especially on weekends, it would be crowded with college students, but weekday evenings he could order what they unaccountably called a “steak and cheese with everything” and be in and out in under ten minutes.
He made his way back along the sidewalk, feeling heat rise through the tinfoil and the paper bag, inhaling the aroma of the crusty bread and the sharp, slightly sour odor of the hot peppers. As he neared the firm he let the bag fall to his side and another scent came to him, something sweet and floral drifting through the dusk. The bushes by the door, he assumed, gardenias or sweet olive or something like that. And he was seized by memory, thinking of other fragrances in another night.
Nantucket got very dark. That was perhaps the most surprising thing. You wouldn’t know it walking around, most of the time; the streetlights and the houses spread their glow over most of the places you were likely to go. But if you got off by yourself away from them, the night was around you like a cloak, a darkness you kept expecting would lift as your eyes adjusted. It didn’t; it remained inky and impenetrable, broken only by the occasional flash of a firefly or sweep of a lighthouse beam. There was none of the general ambient light of a city, the inescapable illumination of hundreds or thousands of close-packed buildings. Growing up in New Rochelle, Mark had seen the sky glow orange at night, the clouds absorbing and diffusing the light the city cast off. In Nantucket, if there were clouds, you couldn’t see anything. If there weren’t, you could see the stars, more and brighter than Mark had ever known, the Milky Way actually a visible smudge, the constellations clear and distinct, if you knew what they were, which of course he didn’t.
Mark had taken a year off between college and law school, though given his uncertainties about the future, it hadn’t seemed necessarily a year between. It might have been the beginning of something, but he’d worked mostly odd jobs with one eye on the LSAT. And then in February he’d started with Ambrose Marine, and in June, when he’d already been accepted at Penn, they sent him to Nantucket to fix the beach by digging holes for pipes and pumping stations.
The trouble with the beach was that it was moving, heading inland at a pace of five to ten feet a year. Sometimes more, so fast that it outran the sand and became a jagged margin of dirt bleeding mud and shrubs into the ocean. The beach moved, but the houses didn’t, or at least they weren’t supposed to. That was the real problem. Back on the mainland the project supervisor had showed them a Boston newscast taped in the fall of 1991, a cottage floating out and breaking up in the waves. That was the perfect storm, which took the Andrea Gail. On the island they didn’t need a video. There was a path along the bluff that had gone up to the lighthouse on the point and now stopped short, plunging into space. There was the lighthouse itself, separated from the advancing cliff by a few yards of grass and the trembling raised hand of a chain-link fence. Down in Codfish Park, by the public beach, there was a house on stilts, like an old woman who’d hiked up her skirts at the water’s approach, showing tubes and cables not meant to be seen.
Dewatering had been discovered by accident, in Denmark, they were told. The idea was that running perforated pipes underground and collecting water and pumping it back out to sea would stop the process of erosion, fix the beach in place, or even reverse its course, send it away from the houses. Eight thousand gallons a minute sounded like a lot of water. On the other hand, there was a lot of water in the ocean already. Mark didn’t care about the history, or even the theory. He liked walking the sleepy streets of Siasconset, looking at the houses with shingles faded gray by the salt air and names on small boards by the door. Willow Harp, Sans Souci, Fortune Cookie, Nepahwin. They meant something, presumably, to the owners, just like the license plates on the lines of Jeeps parked along the street out front, usually some variant on ACK, the airport code for Nantucket.
The Jeeps had oversand permits for driving on the beaches, fishing pole racks, and crusts of sand on their bumpers. The houses had weathered lobster claws and painted clamshells in the windows, Adirondack chairs on the lawn. Mark and the rest of the crew were staying in one of the larger houses. It was named Decked Out; it slept eight in comfort; and it would have rented for seven thousand dollars a week had the owner not offered it gratis. Much of the dewatering project was privately financed by those whose houses were threatened, and one of the things Mark had most eagerly anticipated when he’d learned of it was the prospect of meeting these people who hoped to hold back the sea.
He met a couple, though no one he hadn’t seen already in Boston. The construction workers kept mostly to themselves. They hung out with the housepainters, the Irish kids who’d come over for kitchen work, the caddies at the local golf club, who were younger but reliably hosted beach parties. When the weather was bad they went to bars in Nantucket Town, the Rose and Crown and the Atlantic Café. On the rare free afternoon they borrowed the house clubs and chipped golf balls inexpertly around the lawn, or went to the beach and displayed the T-shirt tan lines that distinguished them from the children of leisure. Occasionally, walking down to their beach, where the earthmoving equipment ferried expensively from Hyannis awaited, Mark passed by the tennis club. The courts were ringed by fences and thick privet hedges. Through the leaves Mark could see flashes of tanned arms and legs; he could hear the repetitive thwack of a ball against strings, men muttering curses or compliments, and female voices raised in cries of mock despair.
Once a fuzzy yellow sphere soared out into the street, trailing a highpitched lament: “Keep your eye on the ball!” Mark caught it on the fly, surprising himself, and tossed it back. The same girl’s voice called out thanks.
“Oh, now you’re in,” said Ty, the foreman. “She wants you. Gonna have dinner at the country club.” Mark peered through the hedge, catching a glimpse of dark hair in a long ponytail, then felt himself being pulled away. “Joking, buddy boy,” said Ty, who was fond of dispensing advice. “There’s a league. That they are in and you are not. The only way you’ll meet girls like that is if you’re working for their dads. Come on. Tide’s a-wasting.”
Not even, thought Mark. He was working for their fathers, indirectly at least, and still he never met them. He saw them sometimes, slim and bronzed and elegant. The regulars, the house owners, were called the summer people, and even the name had a flavor of the otherworldly, the untouchable. He saw them in the little market, on the beach or the narrow streets, and he exchanged waves or smiles but never spoke.
That night the construction workers went shopping at a seafood place near the airport. In the house they raced lobsters on the kitchen floor, through a track of quahogs and surf clams, an exercise that left Mark unable to participate in the cooking or eating. Instead he stepped outside and looked at the stars, the sweep of the beam from the lighthouse, the black ocean and the white foam of the waves. That was when he noticed the characteristic scent of the air, the slight salt tang of the sea and the sweetness of wild rose and honeysuckle on the breeze. Anything could be out there, behind the darkness, in the future; anything could happen.
Walking through the glass corridors of Logan on his way back, changing terminals from Cape Air to Continental for the flight to La Guardia, Mark felt the satisfaction of tangible deeds. The experience had been unreal in some ways, but he had done something, made a difference. It was that feeling, he thought, that made those weeks return so often to his mind. In law school, as he’d struggled with the vagaries of doctrine and rule, and even more since he’d joined Morgan Siler. If he’d told anyone, it would have sounded ridiculous, he knew, even pathetic. But he missed the sense of accomplishment he got from pumping water back into the sea. Compared to what he was doing now, it seemed the establishment of an empire.