“You’re living where you are because of Taylor and her father,” he corrects. “But you have something you’re passionate about, something you’re pursuing.” He waits a beat and says, “You serve aporpoise.”
Nicola guffaws. “Have you been waiting all summer to use that one?”
“Just since early July.”
He’s right. When she leaves this place, and leaves behind all these unstable, unhappy people, she does have something else to think about. She has work to do that she believes is important and necessary.
“Listen, David—” She wants to say something here about him and the cars, about that day at the state fair, about the fact that nobody’s dreams are worthless.
“Yeah?”
But she can’t really say any of that; it doesn’t feel like the right time to strike an emotional chord that deep. So she settles for this: “I’m no expert, believe me. But I bet your Porsche goes pretty fast, almost as fast as a race car.”
He’s quiet for a long time and she worries that she’s tried too hard to make light. But then he cracks a smile, a real one this time, not at all shaky, and he says, “It does. It goes pretty fast. It really does.” He points at a log just off the trail covered in leathery orange layers.
“What’s that, professor?”
She peers at the log. “Looks like a fungus.”
“Ew.”
She rolls her eyes. “Calm down. It’s part of the ecosystem. It has a job to do, like anything else.”
“Rub it in, why don’t you,” says David. “Even the fungus has a job.”
They walk on a bit longer. Nicola consults her map. “This is the Enchanted Forest,” she says.
David looks around. “This? Are you sure?”
“That’s what the map says. And also this.” She points at the sign ahead of them, wooden with white letters spelling outENCHANTED FOREST.
“Is that a trick? The fact that the arrows are pointing in both directions? Do you think the sign was put here by a hobbled old woman with crooked teeth and a basket of apples over her arm?”
“Kind of feels that way.” She suspects that in fact it was courtesy of the Block Island Nature Conservancy.
David seems disappointed. “I thought an enchanted forest would feel much more magical than this. I thought there would be more trees.”
Nicola pulls out her phone, checks for a signal, taps a query into google. “Here’s the explanation.” She reads from the website: “‘The Enchanted Forest was a grove of trees planted by the Nathan Mott Park Corporation in the 1940s. It was one of the only large stands of trees on the island and provided excellent habitat for nesting and roosting birds, particularly owls. In the early 2000s, the Enchanted Forest was cut down because the trees were causing a navigational hazard for planes landing at the nearby airport.’”
“That’sa downer,” says David.
“You can say that again.” It’s the oldest story in the modern world, though, isn’t it? The crossroads of nature and progress, the ebb versus the flow. They are always coming up against that crossroads in the marine world. Just ask any right whale scarred by a propeller blade, ask any dolphin with plastic trash caught around its beak.
They start on the steepest part of the hike, which is not very steep, but for a few minutes they do need to concentrate on their footing, making sure their feet don’t catch on the tree roots.
David breaks the silence first. “I remember when we were little and we used to think the grown-ups had it all figured out. Right? Don’t you remember that feeling?”
“Yeah.” Here comes a memory. There’s a float about one hundred meters out in the lake, and every summer morning, right after breakfast, the kids would swim out there, the group of them, a great posse. They were all strong swimmers, and nobody had ever had any trouble making it to the float.
But something happened to Nicola one day. Maybe she’d had too much breakfast—David’s mom had made her famous blueberrypancakes—and she couldn’t make it to the float. For years she’d been making this swim, and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, she began to struggle. Then a pair of strong arms lifted her up, then another pair, and another, until they were all at the float, and these sets of hands collectively got Nicola onto it. She lay there for a few minutes, heaving, spitting out water. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them she saw the eyes of her sisters and her cousins all looking at her with a concern that was almost panic.
Nicola’s mom came running out of the house. She had seen a commotion from the screened-in porch. She was wearing a bathrobe, not a bathing suit, and they were all out on the float, so she stood on the dock, waving her arms, calling out to see what had happened. Soon after came David’s mom, and David gave them a thumbs-up. Nicola remembers she turned her head and she saw the two of them at the shoreline and she thought, Oh, good. The adults are here. Everything is okay now.
But it hadn’t been the adults who saved her. She didn’t know then that the grown-ups were just guessing about everything, about the world, about how to live in it, same as Nicola and David are now.
“Yeah,” she says again. “I remember that feeling.”
“I think the dirty little secret of the world is that the adults never had it figured out.”
