Chapter Six

“She was so cool,” I babbled to Dad over dinner. We were at the Jetties Beach bar he’d mentioned yesterday, a seaside restaurant with loud music and lots of bright, frozen drinks. I’d grabbed a poke bowl and badgered my long-suffering father into a salad.

I couldn’t believe I had a job. A cool job. I felt like a little kid in my excitement about space. Memories of lying on the grass, the black night spread above, suffused me. I hadn’t known you could have a job in something you liked so much. It felt like cheating.

“I went to the library afterward—the Atheneum.” The exterior of the white-columned building made it look alarmingly grand, but inside it had been lined with books and blanketed by comfortable quiet like any other library. I’d gone there for the AC and the Wi-Fi, and because I’d wanted to google Dr. Cora Bradley extensively. I’d ended up googling another woman as well. “Did you know Maria Mitchell—the woman who the science center is named after—was the first American female astronomer? And the Atheneum’s first librarian?”

“I did.” Dad looked delighted. “I have a whole chapter on her.”

“You do?” Shouldn’t I know if he had a chapter on a badass lady astronomer? “But—she’s not a nautical dude.”

He smothered a smile. “No, her family was more academic. Her mother ran a library in ’Sconset, and her father was a teacher and amateur astronomer. He taught all his kids mathematics, Maria especially. By twelve, she was assisting him in calculating a solar eclipse.” Dad settled happily into storytelling mode. “At your age, seventeen, Maria opened her own school. She was progressive for the time—three of the first children who enrolled were Black, though local schools were still segregated. Then she became the Atheneum’s librarian, which was flexible enough she kept helping her father with astronomy. And then, of course, in 1847, she discovered her comet.”

“But I don’t see how any of this has anything to do with your book, and the sea,” I said. “It’s all the sky.”

Dad smiled and leaned forward. “Sometimes, they’re very close to the same. Remember Bache?”

How could I not? Only this time, I was more curious than usual. “Yeah, Ben Franklin’s great-grandson. Who ran the Coast Survey.”

Dad nodded. “Bache hired Maria and her dad. He wanted them to establish a cardinal point for latitude and longitude for the US, to help sailors navigate. Maria was the first woman the federal government ever hired in a professional capacity. And later, she worked for the Naval Observatory’s Nautical Almanac Office, calculating the orbit of Venus. We’ve always depended on the sky to navigate the sea. Since the very beginning.”

“Celestial navigation,” I recalled. Though stars stayed relative to each other, planets moved between them. If sailors knew where a planet would be at a certain time and place, they could tell their own location. When I was little, my father used to point at the sky and tell me if I could find the planets, I could find myself.

“Right. I’ve got a few chapters on astronomers in this one—Benjamin Banneker, the first Black American astronomer, whose 1790 almanacs charted the sun and moon and predicted weather, and whose tide tables were used by sailors. Tupaia, a Polynesian star navigator trained in immense amounts of knowledge on the cosmos and histories. He joined Captain Cook in the 1760s on the Endeavour.”

“Like the spaceship?”

Dad smiled. “Like the space shuttle, yes. The space shuttle was named after the ship.”

“Oh. Cool.” I scraped a bite of quinoa out from the remnants in my bowl. “How come I didn’t know you had a chapter on Maria Mitchell? Or any of these guys?”

Dad hesitated, then gave me a wry smile. “I guess we don’t talk about my work too much.”

Was that true? We talked about the day-to-day stuff—his agent and his editor and print runs and signing. But maybe we didn’t talk about the content. “Huh.”

He picked at his salad. “I never thought you were particularly interested.”

I felt taken aback. Why didn’t he think I was interested? Okay, maybe I didn’t ask him to recite his chapters verbatim, but I wanted to hear the stories. Was my resentment of the time he spent on Nantucket clearer than I’d thought? I was proud of the books, and proud of my dad for writing them—but maybe it didn’t come off that way. “I’m interested.”

Dad nodded slowly. “Good to know.”

Wow, I was a shitty daughter. What if, when Dad told me he didn’t need my help with his research, he hadn’t been pushing me away—what if he’d thought I wasn’t interested and my offer to help wasn’t genuine?

Dad cleared his throat. “On Friday, I thought we’d have dinner with the Barbanels.”

Oh no. Abort. “We could,” I said warily. “But, counterargument—we could also not.”

“Well.” Dad scratched his head, right at the spot his hair began to thin. “They’ve invited us for Shabbat.”

I stared. “Shabbat.”

He looked almost embarrassed. “Sometimes when I’m here, I drop by.”

Wow, wasn’t this a dinner full of whiplash. Dad did Shabbat without me? I couldn’t remember the last time Dad did Shabbat with me. This felt as bizarre and unlikely as him announcing he moonlighted as a unicycle juggler at a circus. “Shabbat,” I said again, carefully. “Hm.”

Dad tugged on his neckline, the way he did when flustered. “I thought you might enjoy it.”

I probably would enjoy it. I liked Shabbat; I liked feeling part of something bigger than myself. But Dad rarely suggested doing anything religious. We went to Aunt Lou’s for the holidays and to temple on the high holidays, but after Mom died, we’d fallen off the Shabbat bandwagon. Mom had been raised Conservative and Dad cultural; they’d landed on Reform Judaism for our family. But Dad—on his own—disliked organized religion, so now our observances were restricted to holidays.

Which was usually fine by me. Except—every so often I wished I’d had more exposure. At Aunt Lou’s, I hated how I was always a step behind everyone for each prayer and gesture. I was embarrassed how I needed to read the transliterated Hebrew, that I never knew what was kashrut or what the minor holidays were. I hated how I felt like I was bluffing my way through anything Jewish.

I’d never really talked to Dad about this because if I did, he’d feel guilty, and besides, what would be the point? We couldn’t change the past, and I was basically an adult now. If I wanted to be more involved with Judaism, I could be.

I’d never expected Dad to be the one to suggest it.

And the idea of Shabbat with the Barbanels made me nervous. They were proper Jews, who wouldn’t accidentally mix up the prayer for bread with the one for wine. I didn’t even know the handwashing one. God, I was getting sweaty just thinking about this. And Ethan Barbanel would see me being a disaster. Great.

“Cool,” I said, because what else could I say? I had no other plans all summer. “Why not.”

After Dad brought me back to Golden Doors, I borrowed a yoga mat from Ethan’s mom and took it to the widow’s walk. (“The roof walk,” she corrected me; maybe there were no widows on Nantucket? Maybe it was like Disney and no one could be declared dead on the property.) I spread the mat across the wooden boards, listening to the roar of the waves in the distance, taking in the glittering ocean under the darkening sky. This was the perfect place for yoga. I could watch the changing colors of the evening as I cycled through the poses, the buoyancy of the backlit clouds as they shifted from yellow to blue, the sky itself turning pink and yellow and orange.

Yoga reminded me to breathe and gave me something to think about—hips tucked, belly pulled toward the spine, head over heart. I liked poses so challenging they pushed every other thought out of my brain, so all I could think in revolved chair pose was This hurts so much and in crow, Hope I don’t fall. Sometimes I didn’t want to think. I wanted a blank brain and a body wrung out like a washcloth.

But tonight, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t completely clear my mind.

Maybe it was good Dad occasionally spent Shabbat with the Barbanels. Maybe it gave him a sense of community. It clearly meant he’d healed enough from losing Mom he could do things that reminded him of her.

I was only four when my mother died of complications from open-chest surgery. I’d been told she downplayed the surgery to her friends. One year, when I was eleven or twelve, my mom’s old friend Irene had come over to see my dad on the anniversary of Mom’s death. She’d started crying. “I didn’t know it was so serious,” she’d said, over and over. “I didn’t know it could be the end.”

Irene, like many of my mom’s friends, treated me like a delicate flower. Pain and longing filled their eyes when they stopped by. I hated it because it made me feel delicate, when I was in fact all steel and edges. Though that night, with Irene, I only felt fury. How dare she make my father comfort her, this night of all nights?

Mom’s death was one of the keystones of my existence, but to my secret humiliation, I barely remembered her. Mostly, I remembered the afterward. I remembered the black velvet dress I wore to sit shiva, still folded in a tiny square in a box in my closet at home. I remembered Dad, red-eyed. I remembered how I ate Cinnamon Toast Crunch for breakfast for months when I’d never been allowed sugary cereal before. I remembered the pity.

But we’d made a good life, Dad and I. I liked our life, and I felt happy and complete and whole. And I thought Dad did, too, for the most part. I thought he’d healed enough for another relationship—but he hadn’t had one. I worried he focused so much on me, he forgot to focus on himself. I worried he used me as an excuse to not try to form romantic relationships.

Three months ago, we’d been at my aunt’s for dinner, and most everyone had been in the dining room eating dessert. I’d popped into the kitchen to refill my water and had come across Dad and Aunt Lou. Dad gazed out the window while Aunt Lou put away a few dishes. They hadn’t seen me—the kitchen was funny shaped.

Also, I’d frozen and backed up when I heard my name.

“—anything to upset Jordan,” Dad had said.

“She’s seventeen,” Aunt Lou had replied. “I don’t think she’d be upset.”

“It’s been the two of us for so long. I don’t want to introduce any complications…”

“Tony. I’m not suggesting you spring a mail-order bride on her. Just sign up for an app.”

“I don’t even know what apps to use.”

I could practically hear Aunt Lou rolling her eyes. “It’s not that hard. You want a romantic relationship, right? You’ve said so before. It’s not going to drop into your lap. You have to be active about it.”

Dad’s voice had quieted. “Jordan needs me. I get nervous about her…”

So that had been horrifyingly alarming to hear, and it made me realize I had to get my act together, stat. No more unstable hookups, no more crying jags after bad breakups. Just nice, happy Jordan. Stable, mature Jordan. No messiness.

So I wouldn’t be messy about Shabbat, either. It would be another point in favor of me being normal and healthy.

How hard could it be?

I’d almost finished my yoga video when I heard the door open. I was folded in gomukhasana, cow face pose. Knees wrapped and stacked on top of each other, torso bent. I turned my head slightly to see the intruder. Ethan.

He looked taken aback. “Hey. Sorry, didn’t mean to interrupt.”

In tune with the gentle, soothing voice of the YouTube instructor, I unraveled my legs and took a cat-cow. “Come to check out my moves?”

He smiled briefly. “I was sent to let you know there’s an ice cream bar being set up.”

An ice cream bar. Was this family for real? But also, sweet. Literally. “I’m almost done.” I stretched my legs out to either side and bent forward, resting my forearms and head on the ground.

I heard Ethan sit beside me. He stayed there, silent, and when I came back to a seated position I saw him with his back to the wall, staring up at the cobalt sky, the piercing stars and waxing moon. He turned. “Your dad told me you got a job about astronomy.”

A small knot released inside my chest. Dad must have thought the internship was impressive if he’d bothered to tell Ethan about it. “Yeah.”

Ethan gave a chin nod toward the heavens. “So what’ve you got?”

“What, like do I have stars in my pocket to show off?”

He laughed, then pointed to the sky. “I’ve got the Big Dipper. Sometimes I say I can see the Little Dipper, too, but mostly because people are super insistent I see it and I want them to move on.”

“Ah.” I smiled, reluctantly endeared to him. “You see the two stars forming the edge of the rectangle of the Big Dipper furthest from the tail?”

“Man, you want me to see it, too.” He peered skyward. “Yeah.”

“Those are the pointer stars. Dubhe and Merak. If you follow them in a line, they lead to Polaris, which begins the handle of the Little Dipper.”

“Sure,” he said dubiously. “Polaris is the North Star, right?”

“Right. Can you see it?”

“Maaaybe. Oh! Yeah!” He swiveled to look at me, grinning. “Nice.”

“Wanna know a trick? At twilight, when you can see both the North Star and the horizon, you can figure out your latitude.” I held out a hand, made a fist, and then stacked my other fist atop it. Then I moved my first fist to the top, and my other hand on top of that, so I’d measured four fists between the horizon and the star. “Each fist is ten degrees.”

He did the same thing as I had. “So we’re at forty degrees latitude?”

“Exactly. I mean, not exactly, roughly, but yeah. It’s part of celestial navigation. The fist method.”

He grinned at me. “Sounds dirty.”

“Ethan.”

“It’s not my fault, it’s how I’ve been socialized.”

I shook my head, a small smile escaping. “You said you’re writing about Gibson’s comet for my dad.” I lifted my gaze back to the sky, as though expecting to see a ball of icy rock burning across the heavens. “You must know a little about astronomy, too, then.”

“I’m actually not writing anything comet-related. I’m writing about Gibson before he discovered the comet, in the early nineteen hundreds. Your dad has a whole chapter on one of his colleagues, and since Gibson’s got a Nantucket angle, we’re including him. I’m writing a sidebar.”

“That’s really cool, you writing your own thing.”

“You think so?”

“Yeah.” Ethan Barbanel’s existence might annoy me, but my dad’s nerdiness had rubbed off: good research and hard work seemed cool.

“Thanks.” He cleared his throat, and I wondered if it was a nervous habit he’d picked up from my father. “He’s spent a lot of time teaching me. It’s really meant a lot.”

My stomach twisted, a hard, vicious yank tightening up my insides. The goodwill and friendliness I’d begun extending toward Ethan vanished.

It would have meant a lot to me, too, if Dad had bothered spending time with me. But why would he, with Ethan around? Ethan was friendly and easygoing and interested in the same things as Dad. Why wouldn’t Dad pick him?

I swallowed the threatening tears and looked at the stars, fixing on the Arbor constellation. “You know what, I’m not in the mood for ice cream. But you should go back down.”

In my peripheral vision, I could see confusion on Ethan’s face. God, did Ethan Barbanel ever not broadcast exactly what he was feeling? How nice, to go through life in a world where you could be open about everything.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Did I say something?”

“No.”

“You’re upset.”

“I’m fine.”

“No, you were laughing a minute ago—”

“Can you just go?” I bit out.

He drew back, startled. “Why are you so prickly all the time?”

“Why do you think?” I raked my hair out of my face, fingers digging into my scalp as though they could alleviate the pressure inside my head. “You have two parents. Why do you get mine as well?”

It almost hurt, the way his face softened. “I’m not trying to steal your dad.”

“Well, you did, okay? You did, and now you have him, and I don’t.” Completely without my permission, tears slipped out. I closed my eyes, humiliated, keeping my face tipped to the stars as though that would keep the tears inside. It didn’t.

I might have sat there crying silently forever if Ethan hadn’t shifted next to me and wrapped his arm around my shoulder, pulling me into his side. Part of me thought I should shove him away, but a stronger part craved the contact, and I melted into him as he ran his hand in comforting strokes up and down my arm. He produced a crumpled Dunkin’ napkin from his pocket. “Here.”

“Thanks.” I wiped my eyes and blew my nose with a long, honking noise I would’ve been embarrassed of at any other time. Then I leaned my head against his shoulder, drained. “I’m sorry. I’m a mess.”

“It’s okay.” His hand continued to stroke my skin. “I didn’t realize there was so much…emotion involved. I thought you were in a mood because you weren’t back home with your friends. I didn’t realize it was because…of me. And your dad.”

I tried for a huff of laughter. “Usually I keep it tamped down better.”

“You shouldn’t need to.”

“Really?” I lifted my head and gave him a wry look. “You think it’s okay for me to yell at someone because I’m jealous he has my dad’s attention?”

“More like, tell your dad how you feel.”

Tell him…what? Tell Dad I felt awful because he spent more time with Ethan than me? Then I’d probably cry, and Dad would feel horrible and think he was a bad parent, which I never wanted him to think. I was the bad one, not him. “One hundred percent definitely not. Please. We don’t talk about feelings.”

“My mistake.”

I leaned back and stared at the sky, at the diamond-bright stars, at the nothingness. “Usually I find better ways to cope when I’m, I don’t know, feeling chaotic.”

“Like what?”

I shrugged wryly. “Like hooking up with strangers to make me feel better.”

His eyes snapped to mine.

And I remembered how it had felt. How his lips had sealed so perfectly against mine, how he’d tugged me close and his warmth had spread into mine. I could tell, too, how easy it would be to kiss him right now. I wanted to, more than I’d wanted anything in a long time.

But I had some pride left, and you don’t throw yourself at someone right after you’ve been sobbing on their shoulder. “Maybe we should make some ice cream sundaes.”

He nodded and stood. “Will you do me a favor?”

“Depends on the favor.”

“I’m not trying to take care of you or anything, I swear. But if you go on any more morning swims, will you knock on my door and invite me along?”

I almost snapped at him, told him he was trying to look out for me and I didn’t need it—but actually, his offer was kind of nice. I didn’t feel like being prickly all the time. And I didn’t want to die in a riptide. And I kind of liked spending time with Ethan Barbanel.

“Okay, I suppose.” When he smiled at me and offered his hand, I took it and let him draw me to my feet. Together we went back into the warm glow of Golden Doors, and downstairs to eat ice cream sundaes.