There’s almost no time for it to hurt. It comes so fast.
Nicola
Nicola is fifteen years old. She’s struggling with Algebra II, and she has a crush on a guy named Jeffrey in her Spanish class. She’s a mediocre soccer player, a strong swimmer, a decent painter. She likes the Black Eyed Peas and her boyfriend-style ripped jeans that she used her babysitting money to buy from Abercrombie. Everything is ahead of her, and nothing is behind. She’s taking her American Red Cross lifeguard course, and she’s listening to the instructor, a man in his fifties, or, who knows, his seventies, because she’s fifteen and those ages look the same to her.
“In a moment of panic, you will be tempted to forget everything you know,” says the instructor. “Every rescue is not going to be textbook. You might be alone. You might be in the dark. Your victim might be intoxicated. Hell,youmight be intoxicated. But I’m imprinting these words on your mind.” He waves his hands over the students; it looks almost as if he’s putting them under a magic spell. “Reach, throw, row, but don’t go.” He has them repeat this, in unison, three times, then four, then five. Reach, throw, row, but don’t go. Don’t go.Don’t go!
Now, on Juliana’s dock, she processes all of this in three seconds, far less time than it takes to describe it. But wow, the temptation to go isso strong.
The moon is one day away from being full—this is a blessing. Juliana’s head is above water—this is a blessing too. Nicola pulls a pillow off the couch and throws it to Juliana. “Grab this!” she calls. “Hold on to it, you’ll be safe until I can get you!” Juliana doesn’t get it and it bobs away.
She turns on her phone’s flashlight and yells, “Look for the light, Juliana! Face this way! I’m right here!” She knows that a non-swimmer has only about thirty seconds before panicking and starting to inhale water.
And then she remembers the kayak paddles.
For the rest of her life Nicola will look back on what happened on the dock that night, and she’ll marvel at it. She’ll remind herself that any situation can change in an instant (wouldn’t be a cliché if it didn’t hold some truth), in the blink of an eye, the slip of the foot, the miscalculation of the wheel. She’ll think about this anytime she’s out on a boat during her graduate work, and, when she has her own children (not so long, after all, from now, as it turns out), whom she teaches, one day, to swim out to the dock at Pokegama Lake. She’ll remind herself that just as things can turn tragic in an instant, sometimes they can also turn good.
She’s reaching that paddle out as far as she can, into the darkness, into the water. Juliana grabs for it, misses, goes under. That could have been it.That could have been it!
But that night under the full moon it seems like there’s something supernatural or spiritual at work. The hand ofGod,capital, or agod,lowercase. Or maybe it’s neither of those; maybe it’s Juliana’s immense inner strength, the same strength that pulled her out of her dark childhood and gifted her the grit to transform herself into who she became, who she’s still becoming.
Because just after her head descends into the water it rises again, and she looks toward the light, and Nicola stretches just an inch more, maybe no more than a centimeter, and Juliana is able to wrap her shaking hand around the end of the paddle, and, with what’sprobably every last drop of her strength, to hold on as Nicola pulls her to the ladder of the dock, and then to pull herself up the ladder and lie, shaking and shivering, on the dock.
“What,” says Nicola, as she helps Juliana sit up, wraps her in one of the towels she’s pulled from the basket, “the fuck. Was that?”
Juliana shakes her head. “I don’t know,” she says. She’s quiet for a long minute, coughing, sputtering. “I don’t know anything. I don’t know why I did that. I don’t know who I am anymore.” She inhales, closes her eyes, then opens them and lets out the biggest exhale Nicola has ever heard. It seems to Nicola as though in that exhale she’s going through visible changes, as though Nicola can watch her go through all of her iterations: the girl, the teenager, the college student, the young woman, the business founder.
“You’re Juliana Fucking George, and your company is about to go public and kick ass. That’s who you are.”
The twinkling fairy lights of the stars will soon begin to give way to striations of color. Dawn will come. Every day, a new beginning.
“Okay,” says Juliana, in a tiny voice. Then she repeats it in a louder one: “Okay.” Then, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I did that.”
“It’s okay. I mean, yeah, I wish you hadn’t. But it’s okay. Are you going to go inside now?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe I’ll sleep out here.” Juliana is still shivering, holding the towel tight around her.
“I take it back. It’s not a question. You’re going inside, and you’re taking a hot shower, and you’re going to bed.”
“Okay,” Juliana says one more time, obediently, like a child, and there’s something childlike too about the way she lets Nicola lead her along the length of the dock, across the patio, and to her back door.
Nicola watches Juliana go inside, and she watches the lights in the house. The kitchen light goes on, then off again. This happens all the way through the house, the illumination tracing Juliana’s progress, until Nicola sees a light switch on upstairs. This must beJuliana’s bedroom. Nicola has never been upstairs. She watches until that light goes out too, then she makes the short journey between their two houses that she’s made so many times that summer.
It feels like the end of something, that journey, but it sort of feels like the beginning of something too.
Nicola sees now what kind of story she’s been in all along. It’s a story of money, yes—just look at this house Juliana has just gone into—new money, and old money, wealth and class, and the differences between the two. It’s a love story too, of course, which means it’s also a tragedy, as many love stories are.
Eventually she gets into her own bed and eventually, eventually, yes, she does fall asleep, but only just in time to wake up again, and to get to the Institute, and to hear, because news travels fast on a small island, that the story she’s been in is also a tragedy.
Nicola
A year passes both slowly and quickly, the way some years do. In that year, Nicola moves to Narragansett, turns thirty, joins Tinder, unjoins Tinder, joins again. Her mom buys a new car and gifts her her old Subaru. No more cycling! She lives in an apartment just one step above undergrad housing with two roommates that she found online—a boy named Travis, who is loud and drinks too much but is fairly tidy, and a girl named Maeve, who is quiet but leaves her socks in the living room and her bras in the corner of the bathroom. Also, she never unloads the dishwasher. Travis is a bartender at The Tavern, and Maeve is a graduate student in health care management at URI.
Nicola gets two jobs. The first is part-time, at the Save the Bay Exploration Center and Aquarium in Newport, where she doesn’t make nearly enough to live on but is able to continue the same sort of work she did at BIMI. The second is at the storied Coast Guard House, where she works two dinner shifts a week and brunch every other Sunday. This is where the real money is, and this is where the view is too; she loves the way if you look from a certain angle out the windows that line the far edge of the dining room you can’t see the rocks below and therefore you feel like you’re on a ship.
Travis is never home at night and Maeve is never home in thedaytime, which means that Nicola, with her irregular day-and-night schedule, is almost never alone in the house. This is mostly fine, but sometimes she longs for the relative solitude of her cottage off Corn Neck Road. What she doesn’t long for is the chaos that swirled around it—that swirled around that whole island.
Sometimes she even misses the uphill, bumpy bike ride to get to Taylor and David’s house.
