“They never did. I feel tricked.”
“Totally,” he says. “I want my money back.”
They bear right to get to the very top of the trail. The view is pretty spectacular: to the north they can see all the way to Clayhead, with the water beyond it, then town to the east. Nicola wonders if this all feels the same as it had in Lucretia Mott’s day. She wonders what Lucretia would think of Snapchat and Instagram, of Bumble and Tinder and swiping right. She wonders what she would think of Taylor and David and Juliana and LookBook. She’s pretty sure she knows what she would think of the houses the Buchanans are building. Nicola closes her eyes and puts herself back in Lucretia’stime. She has read that when Lucretia left this land to be converted into a public park, she was the first on the island to do something like that. Without her, there’d be no present-day conservation efforts on the island. “Thank you, Lucretia,” she whispers.
She opens her eyes, and David is pointing to something over to the right.
“What’sthat?” he asks.
“What?”
“Over there.” There is something, glinting in the sunlight.
“It can’t be.”
“What?”
“I don’t believe it!”
“What?”
She says, “Shhh,” as though it’s alive and might run away. Cherry had been right, at that barbecue back in early summer.You have to be open to it, without looking too hard.Nicola takes a couple of steps off the trail and picks it up, holds it in her hands like it’s something rare and beautiful, which of course it is.
It’s one of Eben Horton’s glass floats, with the number written on it. Thirty. Almost Nicola’s age. “I can’t believe it,” she whispers. “I can’t believe we found one. David! You found it.” She feels like Charlie Bucket, discovering one of the five Wonka Bars with the golden ticket.
“What is it?”
She tells David the whole story. She tells him how some people plan their whole summers around finding one of these. Some people bring entire crews of friends and family out to search. They flood small holes where the floats might be hidden, to bring them to the surface. They search far and wide. And here David has found one without even looking. It feels momentous.
“I don’t understand,” says David. “What do you do when you find one?”
“Yourejoice. You celebrate. Also, I think there’s some place online that you register it.”
“But do you bring it somewhere?”
“Where would you bring it?”
“Like, do you trade it in for something?”
“No.What would you trade it in for?”
“I don’t know. A reward?”
“It’s the thing itself that’s the reward. The finding of it.” David takes the orb from Nicola and examines it, turning it this way and that. She can see him work his way through this concept, eventually coming out on the other end. He hands the orb back to Nicola with a mournful sigh. He’s off the orb, and back on the disorder of his personal life.
“It’s going to be okay,” she tells him gently.
“I’ve made a mess of everything, Nicola,” he says. She’s never seen him so dejected. This version of David makes her sad. She wants the other version, the laughing, carefree version, even the version from fifteen minutes ago who told her her life has porpoise. She wants the version who swings Felicity up in the air until she squeals and begs to be put down, then, as soon as she’s been put down, begs to be picked up again.
“It’s going to be okay. But things are broken, David, and you have to fix them.”
“I don’t know how. I don’t know what to do.” He looks at Nicola, his eyes pleading. “Tell me what to do.”
She shakes her head. “I can’t. I can tell you about log fungus, but this you have to figure out on your own.” She looks around; there are several trails jutting off from the top, more than one way to get down. “Which way should we go?”
“You pick, Nicola, and I’ll follow. That butterfly is gone and without him I’m not sure where to go.”
“It was a girl,” she says.
