Page 4 of Lost Dreams

Now, three days before she was supposed to arrive yet nearly a week after she’d actually shown up to the White Oak Lodge unannounced, her parents, Lorelei and Roberto, were here too. From the looks of things, her father was just as frantic and sweaty and unhealthy as he’d been back in Rome. Lorelei looked nervous and antsy, always glancing at Roberto as though she wanted to gauge his moods. Aurora knew her parents’ marriage hadn’t always been like this, with her mother walking on eggshells and her father dominating everything. But it had certainly been like that for the better part of a year.

No wonder Lorelei had wanted to stay in the United States all year, helping Grandma through chemotherapy. No wonder she’d wanted distance from Roberto.

Now, after a rocky opening with her parents, Aurora was with her cousins Xander, Gwen, and Conor, the children of her Uncle Alexander. They were out on the beach, feeling the Nantucket winds whip around them. They’d made a bonfire that threatened to go out in the chilly winds. Behind them, far behind, was the veranda upon which Lorelei and Francesca sat drinking wine. Aurora had half a mind to join them. But just before she started back, she spotted a figure in the shadows behind the barn door.

Something told her to investigate.

When Aurora reached the barn door, she peered inside to find two men in their mid-twenties, sweeping the ground and filling the horses’ feed troughs. Aurora had spotted them before: a blond guy with broad shoulders and a light beard, and a guy with curly dark hair and a mysterious look in his eyes that made Aurora think of black holes and tidal waves, endlessly dangerous parts of nature. She hadn’t met all the newly hired staff at the White Oak Lodge, but she knew these were two of the stable boys. Stable men, rather. She couldn’t remember their names.

She decided to go full Italian on them to see what happened.

“Ciao,” she sang, entering the stables, moving her hips so that she had to grab her crop top before it dropped too far down. (She’d bought the crop top in downtown Nantucket, shopping with her Grandma Francesca the other day. Francesca had said, “You look like an American movie star!” Already, Aurora knew that her parents hated the choice in clothing.)

The two men stopped working abruptly and straightened up to look at her. It occurred to her, now, that they’d been talking about something, or someone. She put the pieces together and realized that they’d been talking about her great-grandfather, Francesca’s father. He was a world-famous film director, someone Aurora respected above all other artists she knew.

“Are you talking about my great-grandfather?” Aurora asked, smiling shyly, although she didn’t feel shy.

The blond man broke the silence. “Ah, of course. You’re Francesca’s granddaughter.” He extended his hand and turned to look at the dark-haired man, telling him with his eyes, Hey, we have to be nice to her. She’s the granddaughter of our bosses.

“Aurora,” she said, shaking his hand. Shaking hands felt endlessly American and funny to her. Nobody kissed anyone on the cheek here, save for her grandmother, who clung to Italian niceties.

“I’m Oren,” the blond-haired guy said. “And that’s Kenny.”

“Nice to meet you, Kenny and Oren,” Aurora said. “What were you saying about my great-grandfather?”

Oren and Kenny exchanged another glance.

“We, um. We think he’s brilliant, is all,” Oren said. He seemed to be the spokesperson of the two.

“Isn’t he?” Aurora arched one of her eyebrows.

“I mean, he’s only one of the most boundary-breaking auteurs of the twentieth century,” Oren said, laughing.

A beat of silence passed. Aurora quite liked the idea that they didn’t know what to make of her and felt they needed to be on their best behavior. They weren’t much older than she was, and she could feel that they found her attractive—even as they knew that they could not pursue that attraction, given who she was and what she could maybe do to their careers here in the stables.

It wasn’t that Aurora really had power here at the White Oak Lodge, of course. But it was nice to pretend—especially given how powerless she’d been over the previous few months, back in Rome. Especially given all that had happened to her.

But it was better not to think about that now.

In the silence, Aurora walked over to the nearest horse, a black beauty with a star on his forehead. His nose was soft against the palm of her hand.

“So beautiful,” she breathed. And then she asked the boys, “Have you both worked in stables all your life?”

Kenny looked annoyed and turned his back slightly to her, while Oren kept up that superb smile and said, “We grew up around horses back in Kansas, actually.”

“Kansas. Wow.” Aurora wasn’t entirely sure where Kansas was, as her American geography wasn’t so stellar, but she knew it was far away from Nantucket and maybe quite flat and away from water. “Quite different from around here.”

“Worlds away,” Oren agreed. “But we went to film school in New York.”

“Ah. New York is a place I know about,” Aurora said, laughing. It now made sense to her why they’d been talking about her great-grandfather. They’d maybe learned about him at film school. Perhaps they’d been passionate about his films before studying film in the first place.

“Is that why you’re working at the Lodge, then?” she asked. “Because of my great-grandfather?”

Oren laughed. “We couldn’t get jobs in film, not in the city. It’s too competitive,” he said. “We thought a summer on Nantucket Island would clean out the cobwebs and help us figure out what to make next. We were thinking about documentary work.”

Kenny remained quiet. Aurora suddenly found it difficult to look at him, as though his intensity would suck her in.

“My Aunt Charlotte makes documentaries,” she remembered.