“No, youdon’t,”says Juliana. “No, you don’t.”
“Careful,” said Taylor. “Careful. You don’t know what you don’t know about someone else’s marriage. You don’t know what goes on.”
“But you—”
Taylor speaks over her. “Trust me. You don’t know. Which do you love more, my husband or your business?”
Juliana blinks at Taylor—this must be a rhetorical question, right?
Right?
But, no... Taylor’s eyes are wide and expectant. She’s waiting. She folds her arms and doesn’t let her gaze leave Juliana’s; she looks like someone who could wait all day. Juliana thinks back to her younger self, to all the versions of her younger self. The girl in that dirty apartment in Lawrence, always looking for a way out. The foster kid, shuttled from place to place. The scholarship student at Boston College, often alone, but not really lonely, because she always had her ideas. She always had her focus. The girl who thought of LookBook. It really was like a light bulb turning on in her brain, a single, beautiful idea, pure and ready. The building of it, the working, always working, always striving and climbing. The grind, and the joy. Just keep moving, the past so dark but the future so bright.
“Which one, Juliana?” prompts Taylor. “I don’t have all day.”
Then she thinks about David, and what she’s yearned for since meeting him, and what it’s been like to be with him this summer. She’ll never connect on that level with anyone in her life. She knows that. You don’t get that chance twice; a lot of people would give up everything for it.
But a lot of people would give up everything for their brainchild too—Juliana already has. She’s given a whole decade of her life, and her energy, and her heart. She has hundreds of people counting on her.
“My business,” Juliana says finally. “I’ve given all of me to my business. If I lose it, I’ll have nothing.”
“I thought so,” says Taylor. “So that’s settled, then.” She looks at her watch and says, “Well, that all went faster than I expected. I think I’m going to make it back to the building site after all.” She folds up the blanket and puts it into the straw bag, then picks up therocks glasses and packs them into the bag. “I’d give you a card, but you don’t need to worry about getting in touch with me. I’ll have my office get in touch with you, once your house is listed.”
Without another word Taylor turns and picks her way easily back over the sand. The rocks between the beach and the sand are treacherous, they look almost like an intentional barrier, but Taylor seems to take these with no problem too, and Juliana remembers that she read somewhere that Taylor had been a track athlete—a hurdler—and she retains a hurdler’s grace and agility.
The figures on the beach are gone; it’s only Juliana, the waves, the rocks, and the vast clay cliffs rising above her. Long ago, she learned earlier in the summer, the Niantic and the Mohegan battled over supremacy of the island, until the native Niantic forced the invading Mohegan over the cliffs to their death. This was five centuries ago, and here humans still are, battling, struggling, seeking.
Nothing, it seems, is going to change that. Alone on the beach Juliana turns toward the water and unleashes the most primal of all screams. She screams and screams until she can feel her face turning red, her throat growing sore, the small vein in her temple pulsing. She screams until she is all screamed out; until there’s nothing left inside.
Nicola
Juliana texts Nicola at 10:02p.m. Monday night, asking if she’ll come over. Nicola thinks she means the next day, and she answers that she’ll be home after work. Juliana replies:Now?With this emoji:??.
Nicola is ready for bed, with a mug of tea steeping on her night table, like a proper grandmother. She grumbles a little, and very quietly, as she changes from her pajamas back into shorts and a sweatshirt. She crosses the lawn between her cottage and Juliana’s house, heading for the back door, the way she has gotten used to doing, when she hears Juliana calling her from the dock.
“Check out this moon,” says Juliana dreamily once Nicola has made her way down the dock. “It’s a seasonal blue moon, did you know that?”
Nicola peers up at the sky. The moon is certainly full, almost obnoxiously so. It makes her think of Eben Horton’s floats; she feels as though she could reach up and pluck it right out of the sky, check its back for a number.
Juliana is sitting at the end of the dock, the way Nicola had seen her the first night, looking out at the green light across the way, the light at the end of David’s dock. Behind them the house is almost completely dark, save two circles of light Nicola can see through the glass doors and knows to be the pendants that hang above thekitchen island. Even when Nicola turns to face the water she can feel the house behind her, the great brooding hulk of it.
“Is there anyone home?” Nicola asks. “Where’s Allison?”
“I gave her a few days off. We have some crazy times ahead with the IPO. I need her to recharge.”
“Where’d she go?”
“She went home. To L.A.”
“Ah.” L.A. That tracks, thinks Nicola. Allison has a certain West Coast confidence, a way of moving through time and space that they don’t cultivate in Minnesota. Something about the long winters, the endless frozen lakes, disallows that.
Next to Juliana on the dock sits a bottle of champagne and an empty flute. She’s drinking from a flute, and without asking she fills the empty one and hands it to Nicola, then, before Nicola has even taken a sip, she says, “Do you want something else? I’m sorry, I didn’t even ask. I can run inside if you want something different. The bar is fully stocked. We have a bunch of seltzer—”
“No!Geez, please don’t. I don’t need anything.” For some reason Juliana’s offer makes Nicola sad but it also irritates her. She’s tired of all of it: the drinking, the desperate hostessing, the treating, the constant offering of things. It sounds like a stupid thing to complain about, because after all Juliana has been generous to her. But it’s all made herso tired.Everything feels easier at the Institute, with the tanks and the sea creatures, and suddenly she wishes she was living with the other interns, away from this craziness. Who cares if she has a decade on some of them. She could have been like the cool aunt who poured them drinks and looked the other way when their boyfriends slept over.
“I’m not a fool, you know, Nicola,” Juliana says suddenly.
Nicola is, in a word, startled. In two words, she’s taken aback. “I know you’re not. I never thought you were.”
