The nine months she lives in Narragansett, she spends a lot of time near the water. On the mild days, of which there are too many (the planet is warming, which means the oceans are warming, which means every October day she doesn’t need a sweatshirt her heart breaks for her aquatic buddies), she walks on the town beach, near the Coast Guard House.
You cannot, of course, see Block Island from Narragansett, the island is too far out to sea, but she imagines that she can. She thinks about how people there were careless: careless with each other’s hearts, and sometimes with each other’s bodies, and sometimes with their own bodies, and it ended in tragedy for Shelly, though it could easily have been any of them. It was just an accident in the dark, nobody knew what happened.
In the course of that year she goes on five dates total: three from Tinder (two terrible, one okay), and two with guys she met through friends (one okay, one terrible). She understands that this is a pretty small number of dates for a single person her age, but she’s mostly fine with that.
Fall goes by; the water becomes too cold to put her feet in when she walks on the beach. In December, at the urging of her boss at Save the Bay, she applies to the Master of Arts in Marine Affairs program at her alma mater, URI.
There’s a four-day period in March when she’sthis closeto moving back to Minnesota. She misses her family, and she misses her home state. Rhode Island is beautiful, but it’s never been home. Undergrad was so long ago she’s forgotten some of the state’s quirks, andnow they seem quirkier than they did before. Milkshakes are called cabinets; water fountains are bubblers; milk comes in coffee flavor? Maybe marine biology isn’t for her after all. March in New England can be dreary: gray-hued skies, streets of dirty melting snow, cold rain, and all of this is harder to swallow without the built-in friends and social life that come effortlessly in college.
She wonders if these last several months have been a fever dream, an overcorrection to the breakup with Zachary. Her sister Shauna is going to have a baby in May, and Nicola could be there for the birth, the first days of the baby’s life. She could audition for the role of Fun Aunt.
She calls home, to take the temperature of the family. Her mom answers and tells her all about Shauna’s last appointment, and how Shauna and her husband have known the sex of the baby forever but refuse to tell anyone.
“I wanted to throw them one of those gender reveal parties!” she complains. “I was really deep into my Instagram research. There was this piñata...” Her voice trails off. “Anyway. Never mind that. What’s going on with you, sweetie?”
“I was thinking of coming home.”
“Great. Yes! Book a flight. We’d love to see you. Long weekend, or could you spare a whole week?”
“No, Mom. I meanhomehome. I was thinking aboutreallycoming home.”
“Movinghome?”
“Well, yeah. I was sort of thinking about that.”
“Hang on, Dad wants to talk to you—”
“I could use someone in the office,” says her dad. “You could start with payroll and paperwork and in no time at all you’d be running the place.”
Her father has tried to lure each of them into the family business at one point or another. Maybelureis too strong of a word.Invite.That’s kinder.
(“Lureis toogentleof a word,” her sister Kristin would say. “Coerceis closer.”)
“I’m not a brother,” she says. “You’d have to rebrand.”
Nicola pictures herself in ten years, wearing, who knows, a long flowered skirt and a pastel button-down. Brow furrowed, pale from spending all of her time under fluorescent lighting, mildly depressed but too caught up in her routine to notice. She’d be single, or she’d be married to another Minnesotan, and maybe they’d have kids or maybe they wouldn’t. Any weekend she didn’t have to work they’d be up at the lake.
Her mom gets on the phone and says, “Nicola? I’m taking you off speaker.” There’s a pause, and Nicola imagines her moving from the living room, where she would have been, to the kitchen. “Don’t you dare move home.”
“Okay,” says Nicola, taken aback. “I mean, I won’t if you don’t—”
“It’s not that we don’t want you. Ofcoursewe want you. We always want you. It’s that you put yourself on a path for a reason. Don’t get off because you got nervous. Nicola? Do you hear me?”
“I hear you,” says Nicola. “I hear you.”
Throughout that year, and especially during conversations like this one, Nicola thinks about what Juliana said to her when they sat on her dock that very last night.
I can tell how many different people love you.And:People move differently in the world when they are loved by a lot of people.
In April she’s accepted to the program and given research assistant funding. After she gets her email she holds her phone, unsure who to call first. Her parents? Reina? One of her sisters? All of them would be happy to hear from her, appropriately proud and interested.
She looks at her phone, considering, and almost without thinking she’s calling a number she hasn’t used in nine months. She’s calling one ofForbes’s wealthiest self-made entrepreneurs. She’s not expecting an answer.
But the call connects almost immediately. “Nicola? I can’t believe it! How are you?”
She tells her about the acceptance.
“That’s amazing!” says Juliana. “I’m so happy for you! That’s really fantastic, Nicola. It’s the perfect thing for you.” All of this feels sincere to Nicola—earned and sincere.
