“Cancer is a journey,“ the narrator speaks in the beginning. Just is life. This is the trip that lasts a lifetime. It has its child-dug holes the size of graves lifted by dunes and maintained by the soft endless beach sand.
Elin Hilderbrand cleverly weaves the paths that Vicki, Josh, Melanie, and Brenda took to get to this summer throughout the novel. The moments they experienced separately all lead up the moments they share together. This summer is going to be different. This is the summer that will always be remembered and yearned.
This journey of three women at a beach house in Nantucket takes me back to the season we summered. The world around us was crazy and we put it on pause for a few months to walk along the shore.
Vicki has cancer. Newly diagnosed, she transcends her view of the world through the novel. At the beginning it is a poor-me attitude followed quickly by a why-should-anyone-be-any-different one, finally to an I’m-going-to-fight-this-and-live mantra. She found a new appreciation in life.
That season we did too. Surrounded by old and new friends, fresh perspectives, and the encouragement to try something new, we climbed the dunes and fell in the holes. Yet, we continued to walk along the water’s edge by day and by night.
Brenda is on a true vacation from life. She lost her promising career over a silly stipulation. She avoids the potentially haunting phone calls from her lawyer and attempts to bury herself in a screenplay. The beach becomes her muse. She closes her eyes, jumps, and flips her troubled times into something fresh and overdue.
The beach became our escape from reality. In the chairs, on the blankets, and beach-side bars we mused and wrote our own stories. We didn’t look back as we broke into the future. We turned a heat wave into a refreshing summer rainstorm.
Josh, a college student, discovers the lust of an older woman, a real woman he describes her. He knows it is just for the summer, or so he keeps telling himself. Yet, he finds himself wanting to listen and be with her more and more. But when she mentions contacting her husband, he is thrown back.
How easy it is to recognize real when you can compare two juxtaposed. Our season, as true as it felt, in retrospect we know it was just months in the twilight zone. We floated among the stars with no gravity to hold us down. The night sky was so dark we could only see the twinkling lights. We never saw the comets coming.
Melanie finds comfort and confidence in Josh. Her failed in-vitro attempts lead her to a failing marriage and this summer trip. The news of her pregnancy and the opportunity to get away lead her to Josh. She lets the salt air carry their hearts away.
When he meets her husband, he can literally feel his stomach jump to his throat. It is only quelled when the distraction of a past romance haunts him and she discovers their truth. They are not sure how it happened, it just did.
A summer romance turned into more. The white noise when we’d meet someone new. Someone we shouldn’t be meeting. Someone who should only exist in distant stories, like the fairy in Peter Pan. It made us question our views, realign our priorities, and learn what really counts.
His vision is blurry and narrow. He knows what he wants in the moment, but also realizes after the moments pass, things change. In hindsight, however, it is all so clear. Part of him wishes things ended differently, but it is probably better off that it didn’t. His heart needed to close.
In the end, Melanie, Vicki, Josh, and Brenda are transformed. Though they each made some questionable choices during their few months together, their decisions created a trail to self discovery and appreciation.
Fusion of the fairytale and real life make the trip and the summer worth every breaking wave on the shore. When the crest comes crashing down, they had the sand between their toes to ease the changing tides.
The revelation of the season wasn’t as eye-opening as a new day. Rather, it was more of just a passing cloud, the refreshing rainstorm at the end of a hot date. In the scheme of the summer events, it was just another wave in the ocean.
And, we still walk barefoot along the water’s edge.
