Nicola. 1
For the first three nights in her rental cottage, tries to ignore the sounds of the parties that reach her from the
grand house next door. The thump of music, the highs and lows of traveling laughter, the general rumble that signifies a crowd.
Rental isn’t accurate. She isn’t paying a penny. Borrowing is the word that fits. The cottage belongs to the father of her cousin’s wife—her cousin’s in-laws, the Buchanans, are the
Boston Buchanans. If you move in certain circles you will have heard of them. Buchanan Enterprises is the biggest property
development firm in Boston.
doesn’t move in these circles, but she now occasionally lingers on the outside of them. It was a Very Big Deal when
her cousin David married into Taylor’s family. A boy from Minnesota, a prankster, an extrovert, the son of a discount furniture
shop co-owner (’s dad being the other owner), who sometimes got into trouble but who also got into Yale. Taylor and
David met during freshman year, and except for a brief hiatus in their early twenties, they’ve been together ever since. They
are the kind of couple whose perfection people are constantly remarking on: Taylor so blond and porcelain-skinned, David tall
with a Kennedyesque head of dark hair. In fact, more than once the similarities between Taylor/David and Carolyn/JFK Jr. have
come up.
A little over two years ago Brice Buchanan, Taylor’s father, happened to visit Block Island from a friend’s yacht that docked at New Harbor for the night. And what did he see but a small, relatively unspoiled place—New England’s best-kept secret, some called it—crying out for development. Brice Buchanan, is, according to some, 80 percent to blame for what the island’s old-timers, its year-round residents, and its longtime summer renters and owners see as a burgeoning recklessness.
Residents have lots to think about, on an island like this: coastal resiliency, shoreline erosion, rising sea levels. Moped
rules. But those things are not top of mind for Brice Buchanan.
Buchanan bought David and Taylor’s house as well as the cottage is currently living in with plans to tear down and
rebuild the latter; in the meantime, David pulled a string or bent an ear or called in a favor, and so here she is. The cottage
has basic furnishings—these too will go when the cottage does—and a simple set of kitchenware, all of which suits perfectly,
because aside from the patio furniture and a bed, what more does she need?
Happenstance, a breakup, and a dramatic career change have brought to this place. She recently started a job as an
intern for the Block Island Maritime Institute, making her, she’s pretty sure, at twenty-nine, the Oldest Intern in the History
of the World. She tries not to think about this most days; some days, she can think of nothing else. She also tries not to
think about the law degree she’s no longer using, the live-in boyfriend with whom she’s no longer living, and the school loan
payments she’s no longer making, except for the very barest minimum to keep her out of default.
She tries not to think about the day she told Zachary she was moving out.
She tries to think instead about how close she is living to the ocean, and how, if she plays her cards right, she’ll never have to put on business clothes ever again. She thinks about the seals that gather at the north end of the island, and she thinks about how, if you really look at them, they seem to be looking back at you, as if they’re about to ask a philosophical question, or relate to you the secret of the universe. As if they can see into the very center of your soul.
comes from a loud, boisterous family in Minnesota, where she never got to visit the ocean or watch seals. She grew
up with three older sisters, the four of them born over a span of six years. They were the kind who barged in on each other
in the bathroom without compunction and shared jeans and nail polish and gossip. They fought and made up on a daily—sometimes
hourly—basis. When ’s family and David’s family combined, as they did every holiday, most weekends, and summers at the
family cottage on Pokegama Lake, the kids numbered seven. Which means has been very good at sleeping through distractions,
until now.
To combat the noise from next door she tries every trick in the book: AirPods, a noise machine, a fan, an app that plays soothing
ocean sounds designed to put one to sleep. (Ironic, this last one, because if only she turned off these electronics she might,
in fact, hear the actual ocean.) But all to no avail. Not even a speck of avail.
After the first party, she’s irritable. After the second, she’s bleary throughout her workday. During the third party, just
after midnight, the last straw bends, then breaks the back of the proverbial camel.
“That’s it,” she mutters to nobody. She switches on the bedside lamp, rises from her bed, removes her statement T-shirt (a
polar bear sweating on a tiny iceberg with the words NOT COOL above), dons a bra, and then puts the polar bear shirt back on. She turns on the light on her phone to guide her across the
grass—already dew-kissed—and to the house next door.
As it turns out, she doesn’t need the phone. Holy hell, the lights from the house are more than plenty. The house is lit up like a—well, like a house where every single light is on. There are people everywhere, just everywhere: spilling from the open back door to the slice of lawn between the house and Great Salt Pond, moving in and out of the shadows in the side yard, and even crowded on the dock that points like a finger out to the pond.
“What the major hell,” she grumbles. She knows she sounds like an old crank, but some people have to work in the morning.
Two shadowy figures move past her, both laughing, and she says, “Hey!” and then says it again until one of the figures turns
toward her and says, “Yeah?” in a voice more curious than challenging.
“What’s going on?”
“Party,” said one of the figures, male. A vape pen moves in and out of his mouth; the smell of weed is prevalent.
“Well, yeah. I figured that much out. What I mean is, what’s the occasion?”
“No occasion,” explains the companion, female. “There are parties here all the time.”
“All the time?” is perturbed... and maybe a little envious. “Who knows enough people to have a party all the time?
On a small island?”
“Oh, you don’t have to know her to come to the parties,” says the girl, and the male confirms this, saying, “Half the time
you don’t even see her.”
“Half the time you don’t even see who?” ’s astonishment and perturbation begin to hew more closely to frustration. She
feels like these two are talking in riddles she’s too tired to solve.
“Juliana. Juliana George?”
“Should I know who that is?”
“She’s like totally famous,” says the girl.
“As what?”
“As what, again?” The girl turns uncertainly toward Vape Man.
“Tech stuff,” says Vape Man, with great (possibly unwarranted) confidence and authority. “I think? She started that company...”
His voice trails off.
“Right,” says the girl. “I can’t remember the name of it. But it’s really good for our platforms, being here.” As she says that she lifts her phone at a very specific angle, and she and her companion press their heads together and look up. The flash goes off.
“Well, what’s the company do?”
“Not sure,” says the girl vaguely. “But she made gazillions. She invented something?”
“Or discovered something,” offers the companion.
“Right. Or both? Or maybe it was an app—”
scans the scene. There’s no hope, she can see now, of asking the party host—Juliana George, whose name, she thinks,
might ring a bell; she pictures a magazine cover, a sharp suit and bright lipstick—to be a bit quieter.
“I’ve never seen her,” says the male. “And this is my third party in ten days. Hey, is that a polar bear?”
glances down at her shirt and says, “Yeah.”
He nods and says, “Nice.”
The shirt had been a gift from Zachary. They’d been together four years, sharing an apartment for two. They’d been in law
school at Suffolk University at the same time, studied for the bar together, had eaten dinner every Friday night at the same
Italian restaurant on Federal Hill when they’d both gotten jobs at different firms in Providence.
It was at this restaurant, not so many Fridays ago, that she’d told him about the internship.
He was halfway through his gnocchi (not just the same restaurant every Friday night, but the same order) ; he paused with a forkful in the air. “But you can’t take it. You have a job.”
“Not anymore. I quit today.”
Zachary had been suffering all week from a cold, one effect of which was that his normally vivid blue eyes had a rheumy opacity.
“You quit ? Why?” The forkful of gnocchi lowered somberly.
“I don’t like it. I don’t like being a lawyer.”
“But you went to law school.”
“I know.” She had the loans to prove it. She was good at the things that make good lawyers; she had an analytical brain, and
she was a good listener, and a good communicator. But she hadn’t thought through enough what the actual doing of the job would be like, and now that she’d done it, she knew it didn’t suit her. “I’m bored, Zachary. And I don’t want
to be bored for the rest of my life.”
“Bored?”
“Aren’t you ever bored?”
He blinked at her. “No?” In high school he’d been a middling backstroker, and he gave off a perpetual vibe of having emerged
from the deep end after a relay, shaking water out of his ears.
She tried coming at it from a different angle. “Do you—do you think maybe we act older than we are?”
“Is that a bad thing?”
“I mean, do you ever feel like we act like we’re sixty?”
“My parents are sixty.”
“Exactly.”
“And I think they have a really good life.”
She sighed. “Exactly.”
He lowered his voice and asked, “Is it the sex?”
Yes, thought, but didn’t say. “No. No .” Zachary looked relieved. “I just feel like I need—a change. Something different.”
has friends who are married or engaged to be married; her best friend from University of Rhode Island, Reina, who lives
in Brooklyn, already has a toddler and an infant. Two wholly separate lives, two beating hearts, four lungs, twenty fingernails
and twenty more on the toes, are dependent on someone who was a champion Flip Cup player until age twenty-five. It’s not that
doesn’t want to end up there eventually (maybe), it’s that she doesn’t want to go from one to the other with nothing
in between.
When Zachary had helped her carry the last box down to her car he’d cried. She tries not to think about that now.
“Honestly, I’m not even sure she comes to her own parties,” says the guy in front of her.
“I don’t think she does,” says the female. “Or she might make an appearance, sometimes.”
“Let me get this straight,” says. “This famous person named Juliana George throws these parties and doesn’t even come
to them? Why would she do that?” She’ll have to move her white noise machine closer to her head. Maybe she’ll prop it on her
pillow, where a romantic partner might go, if she had one.
“Dunno,” says the girl. She takes the guy’s hand, the one not holding the vape, and turns to make her way back toward the
house, tossing an invitation over her shoulder. “Hey, Polar Bear Girl, you should come in. Get a drink.”
“No, thanks,” says . “I have work in the morning.” It doesn’t matter. The couple is gone before she’s finished talking,
and her words dissolve into the night air.
The next evening , tired and cranky, has been invited to have dinner with David and Taylor. She’s due at seven, so at
six-thirty she hops on her bike to make her way, for the first time, to the Carr-Buchanan home. She can practically see where
David and Taylor live by peering across Great Salt Pond, but, not being a fish or a bird, she has to bike out Corn Neck to
Beach to Ocean to West Side to Champlin before turning right on a dirt road, rutted and hilly, that leads past a gate from
an old horse barn, past meandering stone walls, and finally to the house.
And there, swinging open one of the double dark-wood front doors, cool as a frozen cucumber, is David, her favorite cousin, the brother she never had, her partner in crime on long-ago humid, firefly-laden summer nights at the lake. When David was fifteen and thirteen they once stole the neighbor’s pontoon—“Borrowed,” David corrects when they tell the story—went for a moonlit ride, and fell asleep once they’d moored it.
“Hey, Nicky,” he says, leaning against the doorjamb, one finger hooked casually in a belt loop, the still-high summer sun
illuminating his Hollywood-worthy good looks, those sapphire eyes. “Welcome to my little shack.”
“You know I’m rolling my eyes at you, right?” says , wiping the sweat from her brow. She wheels the bike up close to
the house and lays it ever so gently on the grass; the bike is just as borrowed as the cottage and has no kickstand. “We’re
not in Kansas anymore, are we?”
“Nope. But we never were.” He opens his arms, and they embrace, and David says, “Holy hell, you’re sweaty. Why didn’t you
tell me you were biking? I could have sent someone for you.”
“Sent someone?” can’t keep a straight face. “Help me, Officer. My cousin has been kidnapped.”
He waves a hand, dismissing her humor, and says, “Sorry, that made me sound like a jerk. I would have picked you up. You want
the tour?”
“Uh, obviously.” She punches him in the arm and says, “When’d you get so rich, David?” Brice Buchanan bought this house just
under two years ago, when his love affair with Block Island began, and knows it’s just the— a —summer residence, one of two or three, and that there’s also the home in Boston’s Back Bay, the ski condo in Montana, and
whatever else the Buchanan family owns around the world.
“September twenty-third, almost four years ago,” he said, grinning wickedly. Of course. His wedding day. “Let’s see. Follow me. Family room.” The family room contains every shade of white you can imagine: white couch, a slightly different shade of white armchairs, a white leather coffee table. The couch is dotted here and there with nautical accent pillows. A massive stone fireplace anchors the room; facing Great Salt Pond is a row of floor-to-ceiling windows, uncurtained, unshaded, the better to let the view in, and beyond, a patio and a giant square raised deck with weathered loungers cushioned in navy blue. “Pool,” said David unnecessarily, because that part is obvious, then, turning from the windows and leading toward the center of the house, “Kitchen.” Open-concept, slate-gray cabinets, wide-tiled floor, a woman in pinned-up braids busily chopping at an off-white island. Not Taylor. The woman doesn’t look up. Then hears footsteps clicking along from somewhere, and David calls out, “Come and say hello to . You know each other, right?”
“Of course,” says a voice from a distant, distant hallway. The voice comes closer, and here’s Taylor, saying, “The Country
Cousin.”
feels her skin warm just as David says, “Jesus, Taylor.”
“I’m kidding! Of course I know . We met at our wedding.” She kisses on the cheek. Taylor’s lips are cool against
’s hot face, and she wishes she’d rinsed off after the bike ride. “I married him for his looks, not his memory,” she
says. laughs uncertainly and looks back and forth between the two.
A moment passes when it seems that the mood could go either way—it puts in mind of the seconds after a child falls,
when he is deciding whether to wail or not—and finally David unleashes his megawatt smile again and says, “And I married Taylor
for her money.” They all laugh then, and Taylor tells David something about a meeting with a something-or-other guy about
a this-or-that permit. tunes out—she doesn’t speak Developer—and takes the opportunity to study Taylor.
She starts with her long, flaxen hair (that shade of gold can’t be natural—can it? It looks natural, but that’s what money can buy you, a natural version of unnatural). Then she moves on to her full-but-not-too-full lips, her prominent cheekbones. Her clothes—flowing, layered garments—give the impression of being pure silk, but it’s possible they are instead a very expensive sort of cotton. If Ivanka Trump and Blake Lively had a baby, decides, Taylor Buchanan could be the grown-up version of that baby.