They stood in the crowded airport terminal. Everyone was leaving-heading back to Manhattan or Washington, D.C., or Los Angeles, heading back to work or school, sweaters and real shoes, football games and Broadway openings. Summer was over. It happened every year, but this year it was hitting Agnes the hardest because the one thing about a Nantucket summer was that no one ever wanted it to end.
She was afraid she might cry.
“You saved my summer,” Agnes said. “Thank you for being my friend. Thank you for helping me find Clen. Thank you for loving my mother. Thank you for…being you.”
“Hey,” Riley said. He grabbed Agnes’s chin and she felt her heart spin in its socket. “You’re welcome.” He bent over and kissed her. They kissed and they kissed and they kissed-it felt like an entire summer’s worth of kissing-until his flight was called and he had to leave Agnes to board his plane, with Sadie barking in protest.
Clendenin
As soon as the night air got a chill, she started to careen away from him.
Careen away from him. The phrase came unbidden, borrowed from their ancient history together, one of their first dates-sledding, during an unexpected snowstorm in December 1980.
Clen and Dabney hadn’t so much as held hands in December 1980, but this was not to say that they didn’t have a relationship. Dabney had pursued Clen with an enthusiasm that he suspected was based in pity. He was the new kid, too much smarter than anyone else to have made any friends. Dabney approached him one day after English class and asked him if he’d ever read Cheever.
Was she teasing him?
Of course, he’d said. He had gobbled the red volume of stories the year before, on recommendation from the young, vivacious librarian, Eleanor, back in Attleboro. He now knew all about commuter trains, gin and tonics, and adultery.
Dabney had taken to engaging him in conversations about books-she liked Jane Austen, he preferred Chekhov and Kafka-and from there she probed a bit into his personal history. What was his affinity with the depressing Russians? Had he moved to Nantucket from a gulag? Clen was hesitant to talk about himself, but he let certain details escape: He lived with his mother, he said. He was an only child. His mother waited tables at the Lobster Trap. They lived in a cottage out behind the restaurant.
That must be fun! Dabney said. Do you ever get to eat free lobster?
Clen nodded. His mother brought home lobster for dinner every night, along with dried-out crab cakes and small potatoes coated with congealed butter that looked like beeswax. He was sick of lobster, although he did not say this.
Dabney took to sitting next to him in the cafeteria, and at study hall, where she doodled in the margins of his loose-leaf paper. The doodles became notes. The notes said things like, I am an only child, too. And, I have no mother.
He raised his eyebrows at that one. Wrote below, Is she dead?
I don’t know, Dabney wrote back. Probably not.
Clen wrote, My father died drinking.
To which she drew a face frowning, with two fat tears.
Clen had wanted her to know that he didn’t cry over his father’s death. He hadn’t felt sad, only relieved, because his father had been a very large man with an even larger drinking problem, and…well. Clen had been surprised when his mother cried, but not surprised when she said they were moving.
We need the ocean, she’d said.
Clen had wanted the city, Boston; he’d wanted a shot at going to Boston Latin or Buckingham Browne & Nichols, where he could really get an education, but his vote didn’t matter. Nantucket it was.
Do you hate it here? Dabney wrote.
He looked at her. On that particular afternoon, they were swaddled in the hush of the high school library and Dabney was wearing her headband, and a strand of pearls that he assumed were fake-or maybe not, because something about Dabney announced money, even though he knew her father was a policeman. She had a freckled nose and those big brown eyes, which seemed to shine a warm light on him.
No, he wrote back.
When the surprise early snow came, they were not boyfriend and girlfriend, but they were not nothing. The snow piled up outside and Dabney wrote in the margin of his paper, Dead Horse Valley, 4pm. Dress warmly. I’ll bring my toboggan.
Clen had done his fair share of sledding and other winter sports in Attleboro, but he hadn’t enjoyed them. He was big and heavy, clumsy on skates and skis. If it was snowing, he preferred to stay inside and read.
Okay, he said.
The after-school scene at Dead Horse Valley during the first snowfall of the year was frenetic, but most of the kids were younger. The other high school kids, Clen surmised, were probably hunkered down in someone’s den, drinking beer and smoking pot. Dabney was waiting right on the road, wearing navy snow pants and a bright pink parka and a pink hat with a white pom-pom on top. She held up the most beautiful toboggan Clen had ever seen. It was made of polished walnut and had a graceful bullnose at the front; secured to the base was a green quilted pad.
“It looks too nice to ride,” he said.
“My father and I have been using this toboggan since I was little,” she said. “We take good care of it.”
Clen nodded, and again thought, Money. There wasn’t a single piece of furniture in his rental cottage as nice as that toboggan.
Dabney manned the front and held the reins. “This is great,” she said. “You can push. We are going to fly!”
Clen wasn’t afraid of the speed, although the hill looked steep and bumpy and he wondered how the hell there could be a hill this steep on an island where the highest elevation was 108 feet. The other kids-the ten-year-olds and twelve-year-olds-were shooting down with high-pitched screams, some of them spilling halfway, some of them catching air off a bump and landing with a thud, then picking up even more speed. What frightened Clen was the athletic feat that was expected of him-to push the toboggan while running behind it and then to launch himself neatly onto the toboggan, tucking his legs on either side of Dabney. He didn’t think he could do it.
But for her, he would try.
He bent over and placed his gloved hands flat on the toboggan, and with his head down, he started running, pushing with all his might. Dabney whooped. Clen felt the momentum of the hill pulling him down. Inertia was real. He could not stop his legs from running. He would never be able to fling his legs up and get on behind her. Never.
No wonder the horse was dead, he thought.
He sent the toboggan down the hill while he stumbled behind it for a few steps before doing a spectacular face-plant into the snow. He raised his head to see Dabney flying indeed; the fancy toboggan might have been a magic carpet. She careened down the hill away from him, getting smaller and farther away, until she disappeared behind a stand of fir trees. He had lost her.
He had thought, When she gets back up to the top of this hill, I am going to kiss her. I am going to make her mine.
Thirty-some-odd years had passed, but there was an eerie similarity in Dabney’s tobogganing down the hill at Dead Horse Valley and the slide for the worse in her health, which had started in late September. Clen felt as helpless and inept and incapable as he had then. She was going. He could not go with her.