Natalie flared her nostrils. “Don’t you? I mean, I stayed because I love it here and can’t imagine going anywhere else. But you ran off to a fancy college somewhere.”
“I wanted to learn enough to save the place I love,” Graham said, his anxiety mounting. He didn’t want to let it show.
The handcuffs cut into the skin on his wrist. It had been a couple of years since he’d done this. He’d forgotten how uncomfortable it was and what it felt like to put his body on the line.
“That’s such bologna,” Natalie said.
“It isn’t,” Graham insisted.
“Then why didn’t you come back to Nantucket immediately after you graduated? Why is this the first time I’m arresting you for doing something like this? Why did you try to save Antarctica before saving Nantucket?”
Graham flared his nostrils and didn’t want to say that Natalie was making some pretty good points. “The world is big,” he said finally. “I want to save all of it.”
Natalie groaned. “You environmentalists are all the same. Too optimistic. Too in your head. You don’t see reality for what it is.”
“We might say the same about you,” Graham said.
Natalie turned around and left him standing in the sand and the mud with his chin raised to the horizon. The sun was hidden beneath swirling gray clouds. Another rainstorm was fast approaching. In his gut, he had the sensation that everything he was doing, everything he stood for, didn’t matter to anyone else. Maybe he was just doing it as a performance to himself, as proof that he was still alive.
It wasn’t for another four hours that Natalie was able to cut Graham off the bulldozer. By then, the late April sunlight had burned the clouds away. As she shoved Graham into the back of the cop car, he heard the roar of the great machines behind him and the construction boss calling out for his employees to join the ranks and start digging. They were behind schedule. Graham forced his eyes away as they drove, blinking rapidly to keep from crying. It was true that he hadn’t slept much last night, and he was exhausted. Natalie drove without speaking, which was a small mercy. When they got to the station, his photo was taken, and he made a statement before he was forced into a little room with no windows.
“Are you hungry?” Natalie called just before the door shut between them.
Graham was shivering and ravenous. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to admit such a weakness to Natalie—that snotty girl from history class. But he didn’t know how long all this would take, so what choice did he have?
“I could eat,” he said finally.
Ten minutes later, a little window within the door burst open, and a tray was shoved through. It was a ham and cheese sandwich with potato chips. Graham’s stomach churned. He’d been a vegetarian since high school when he’d read about the environmental impact of eating meat. He felt like the cops were rubbing his environmentalism into his face. He removed the slice of ham and put it on the plate, where it sat like a piece of gum flattened on the sidewalk. He ate the bread and cheese and potato chips and drank the juice they’d provided for him, waiting till they gave him a chance to call his lawyer.
That evening, Graham made bail and took a cab to the tow yard where they’d taken his car—an electric vehicle that most people called “impractical.” It was barely alive. After paying to take it off the lot, he drove it slowly, steadily, his hands squeezing the steering wheel hard until he reached the charging station. As it was charging, he went into the little shop to buy a package of peanuts, which he ate standing next to his car. He stewed with anger and hatred at himself. He’d failed today. The world was still burning. He was alone.
In the beginning, it hadn’t been like this. In the beginning, it had been him and his high school girlfriend staging high school protests, making posters, going vegetarian together, crying about the state of the world, and promising that they’d build a better one for the people who came after them. They’d been idealistic and so sure of themselves. When Graham met Hannah a few years later, he’d spoken of his high school girlfriend as the person who’d changed his life—far more than his parents, teachers, or anyone else.
Hannah had asked, “Why isn’t she in your life anymore?”
Graham had shrugged. “Just one of those things.”
Hannah hadn’t been jealous or possessive. She’d always said, “If you ever want to reach out to her again, you should. There’s no reason we can’t all be friends.”
But Graham had said, “That era of my life is over. I’m in Chicago with you. It’s the only place in the world I want to be.”
Graham drove the rest of the way from the EV charging station to the little house he’d bought with the money he’d gotten from Hannah’s life insurance policy. Graham lived his life alone. Inside, he sat on the sofa with the wind howling at the door and looked at his phone, waiting and watching for the article that called him the environmentalist who would save Nantucket’s microbiome, the one brave enough to stand up to the money-driven men destroying the island. But there were nosuch articles. Eventually, he turned on the television and fell asleep to an old movie, one that he and his high school girlfriend had loved—Adaptationwith Nicolas Cage. It was surreal in a way that made Graham’s dreams twisted and dark. When he woke up, he was alone in the living room and didn’t remember how old he was or what had happened to him.
Hannah,he thought, drawing himself up from the sofa for a glass of water.Hannah, why did you leave me all alone?
Chapter Three
Three days after the phone call from her father’s lawyer, three days after Mike’s admission, Sylvie was on the ferry back to Nantucket Island. It felt like a nightmare. Too exhausted to leave her vehicle, she remained inside it throughout the journey across the water, crying and sneezing into a tissue from a mix of seasonal allergies and desperation. She couldn’t be around people, least of all tourists, who’d come to take in the pretty spring weather on Nantucket Island. Tourists have so much to live for, with partners to sleep next to at night and children to play with. When the ferry pulled into the harbor and dropped its ramp, she started her engine and dutifully drove onto the island she’d promised never to return to. But this was the only place in the world where she was needed right now. Somehow, this gave her a gravity she no longer had in Manhattan.
Sylvie’s friends said she was ridiculous for thinking so. “You have a million friends, a huge social circle, and so many other writer-colleagues who love you,” another environmentalist writer named Steffi had told her. “You’re needed in Manhattan, whether you like it or not.”
But Sylvie felt like she was floating. A meeting with her father’s lawyer was a thing on the calendar, something she could fathom. Her Maps app led her directly to the parking lot on the far side of the Nantucket Historic District, where she parked and got out on shaking legs. It was maybe seventy-three degrees with a light breeze and, therefore, the perfect day. It drove her insane.
She entered Timothy Everett’s office, which was bright with monstera plants and hardwood floors. A receptionist in her late fifties greeted Sylvie warmly and prepared her a coffee with a side of soft cookies that Sylvie knew she wouldn’t be able to touch. Her appetite was nonexistent. She sipped the coffee and studied the law degree hanging on the opposite wall of the lobby, wondering how often her father had sat in this very room. Then again, Timothy said that he and her father were good friends. Maybe they’d done all that “will” stuff in the comfort of one of their homes, pouring shots of whiskey and talking about how disappointed James was in his daughter, Sylvie.
On the phone, Timothy had said, “He really did love you, Sylvie. He struggled to know how to say it. But that’s a problem a lot of us in this generation have.”
Yeah, right,Sylvie had thought. Their relationship wasn’t a matter of millennials versus boomers. It was far more complicated, far darker. But whatever. She didn’t know how her father had talked about it after she’d left, that he’d tried to make sense of it with a friend. But she couldn’t blame him for trying to rebrand, to tell the story in a way that made it easier to carry.
