Nicola
For days after the dinner at the Buchanans, tries to pretend that none of them exist. She doesn’t go over to Juliana’s.
She doesn’t call David. She definitely doesn’t call or text Jack. The kids arrive for the Dolphin Program, and they’re all so busy that the days fly by. Anytime
she’s out on the island, she keeps her eyes peeled for one of Eben Horton’s glass floats.
One of the local interns, Madison, throws a party when her parents go to Boston for a night (Madison is young enough that
these things matter) and stays until the very end. On a Wednesday! There’s no celebrity DJ, no signature cocktail, no raw bar, and yet has as much fun as she’s had all summer. More,
maybe! When her mother calls to check in, they barely talk about David. As small as Block Island is, is living in a
whole different world.
Then, the next Sunday, a week after the dinner, she gets a text from David that says GO FOR A WALK WITH ME? At first, she thinks it’s a joke. David wants to go for a walk? David has never chosen to walk when he can drive, and drive
fast. She texts back, asking him what bar he wants to meet at. Poor People’s Pub? Ballard’s? Keep it closer to home and go
to The Oar?
NOT A BAR , he replies. I WANT TO GO FOR A WALK. SRSLY.
She thinks about it. OK. NATHAN MOTT PARK? Nathan Mott Park is a series of trails that connects to the Greenway trails and the Enchanted Forest. Madison has told her that in mid to late summer you can sometimes find blackberries growing on the trails.
WANT ME TO PICK YOU UP?
She answers that it’s okay, she’ll take her bike. It’s about three miles from where lives to the entrance of the park,
and she wants the exercise. She begins to regret her decision as soon as she turns onto Center Road, though. The hill is absolutely
vicious, and each muscle in both quads stands on high alert as she fights every urge to get off and walk.
A man in his sixties walking a doodle tells her encouragingly, “You’ll get there!” Easy for him to say, he’s walking, and
downhill, but she presses on, oddly buoyed by his belief in her.
David is standing near the sign at the entrance. She can’t read his expression; are they going to talk about the dinner? Are
they going to talk about Juliana? joins him and they read silently, learning that the park was the gift of Lucretia
Mott Ball, and that she was responsible for the statue of Rebecca at the Well in the center of town, erected by the Women’s
Christian Temperance Union. David points to that part and says, “Didn’t take, did it? The whole temperance thing.”
Okay. They’re not going to talk about it.
“A thousand bachelorette parties would agree with you.”
Thirsty from the bike ride, downs at least half her water bottle. Another car pulls up, and out jump two young women.
drinks more water while the two young women gaze at David while trying to look like they aren’t gazing—he does, she
forgets sometimes, give off the vibe of an Almost Famous Person, so tall and model-ish. The women finish gazing and go on
ahead, and and David start down the path after them.
“So what’s up ?” she says. “Why the sudden interest in nature?”
“I’ve always been interested in nature.”
She snorts. “No, you haven’t.” To the left of them are open fields bordered by stone walls, once used by farmers. The trail leads first into a set of dense shrubs. The scientist in wants to be aware of her surroundings, trying to identify shad and arrowwood and bayberry. (She’s an aspiring marine biologist first, yes, but she also picked up a weird amount about botany.)
There’s a long pause, and then here it comes. “I want to talk about Juliana.” He takes a deep breath. “No joking around, okay?
I really want to talk.”
“Go ahead,” she prompts. “I’m all ears, no jokes.”
They come out of the shrubby part of the walk and into an open field. In front of them flits a little orange butterfly, an
American copper. It stays just ahead of them as they cross the trail, as though it’s showing them the way, which thinks
is very hospitable of it. waits for David to say something.
They cross the open field and start on a gentle uphill. David sees something on the ground, a funny-shaped, sharp-looking
thing. “What is that?”
“Oh, that’s a deer husk.” explains that the husks come from the oriental chestnut, left by deer in the fall, who break
them open to eat the sweet meat inside.
“Encyclopedia ,” he says, and then they’re both quiet for a little longer. Then David finally begins. It’s the same
story Jack told her early in the summer, but from a different point of view—and as anyone knows, point of view is everything.
The party at Fashion Week, LookBook’s round of fundraising. Taylor in Europe with her father, the all-night walk around the
city. When David met Juliana, when he fell in love with her, she was smart and she was ambitious and she had a work ethic
that you can’t make up.
“Aren’t all of those things true of Taylor too?” says judiciously.
“Yes,” he acknowledges. “Yes. On paper.” But, he explains, something different sparked during that night. Not only did David think Juliana was fascinating—where she’d started and where she was headed, and the grit it took to get from one place to the other, the almost impossibly tall hill she’d climbed—but instantly David was struck by how Juliana valued him, David, as his own person, his own entity, with his own past that was worthy of value. He told her about the race cars right away. It didn’t feel embarrassing to share his passion with Juliana, it felt—normal. It felt exciting.
“That’s not the way it was with Taylor. Which I didn’t even notice in college, you know? I couldn’t believe someone like Taylor
was interested in someone like me, so I didn’t let myself think too much about it.”
“Someone like you ? You’re a catch, David. You must know that. It was a match made in New Haven.”
He snorts, then turns serious, shaking his head. “I didn’t feel like a catch at Yale. I always felt like an imposter there.
Everybody I knew was so polished. So bred for it. Juliana felt like an imposter in her life too. We connected on that right
away.” He gazes into the middle distance. “With Taylor, in the beginning, all the way through college even, I felt like I
gave her just as much as she gave me. But by the time I met Juliana that had changed.”
“What’d you give her?” is genuinely interested in the answer to this question.
“I felt like I could soften her hard edges, you know? She had this barrier around her, and I was the one who could break it down. I think part of it is her mom leaving and never really coming back,
and part of it is the money, and part of it is just how she looks—”
“Like a supermodel.”
“And part of it comes from growing up as her dad’s right-hand man.”
“So what changed?”
“Sometime after college it seemed like she didn’t need that from me any longer. She needed... I don’t know. She needed something different. And I became the tail to her comet.” (What a poetic visual, thinks .) “Time went on, and life was good enough. I mean, it was good , of course it was good, I’m not insane, but every time I brought up any of my own plans or dreams, like the race cars, it was
like Taylor couldn’t comprehend it. It was a real dream, though, . It was my dream.” His voice cracks.
“I know it was,” she says softly. “I know.”
David always seemed so perfectly David— so at ease in the world, with the beautiful family and all the money and not a care on him, that she too has forgotten that
all this time he’s had desire vibrating inside him.
“Well, it doesn’t matter anymore. Now I am finally, officially too old to be a race car driver.” He smiles shakily as they
pick their way over tree roots. Then he stops. “It’s not about the money, this story,” he says. “Okay, ?”
“Of course not.” But also, she realizes, it’s very much about the money. To the son of a Furniture Brother, Taylor’s wealth
must have seemed bottomless, unfathomable. It would be impossible for it not to be a little seductive, to a midwestern guy
with simple tastes.
Once they were engaged, she wanted him to find a cause to take up. Something he could be a spokesperson for. He looked good
onstage! Good in a tux at a charity event. “It was like she wanted me to be First Gentleman to her president,” he says. There
were so many places where he could be useful. Food insecurity or children with cancer. He had carte blanche to find something
close to his heart.
“What about the race car thing?” David ventured. He’d been talking about this for years—since college! She knew that this
was his passion. “ That’s close to my heart.” If only she’d known him when he had the Miata he was always tinkering with—or further back, when he was
ten, when he saw that first race at the Minnesota State Fair.
“That’s not a cause ,” said Taylor. “That’s a... hobby. Nobody actually becomes a race car driver. That dream is so... middle America. ”
“Ouch,” says .
“Yeah. I know.” She wanted him to quit going up to Monticello. It didn’t make sense! What was the endgame? To Taylor things mattered only when there was an endgame.
Sometimes David thought about what it would have been like if he’d broken up with Taylor after he met Juliana, when she returned
from Europe. Even on the eve of his wedding, when he got the email from Juliana, he thought about it. Especially then.
But he didn’t. He didn’t break up with Taylor during their engagement, and he certainly didn’t do it on the night before the
wedding, after Juliana sent him the email. On the day of the wedding there were 250 people gathered in Newport. He wasn’t
about to ruin Taylor. He loved Taylor. He really did. He just loved Juliana...
“More?” offers .
“Differently. More equally.”
He moved with Taylor to Boston, into the brownstone in the Back Bay, right after the wedding. And in a few months, Taylor
was pregnant.
“Were you in touch with Juliana at all?”
He hesitates. “Before the wedding, yes. And—a few times after.”
“David!”
“I know. I know! Phone calls. A few emails. We didn’t see each other.” Of course Juliana had dated people before and after
she met David; she wasn’t a nun , David explained. But she felt the same thing for David he felt for her.
As soon as Taylor got pregnant, David told Juliana he couldn’t be in touch with her anymore.
“And you kept to that?”
“Absolutely. When Felicity was born, everything changed. For a while, life was perfect.”
“For how long?”
“Two weeks.”
clears her throat. “That’s not very long.”
“No.” David stops walking for a minute and considers the sky, as if there’s additional information to be found in one of the scudding clouds. “No, it was brief.”
They had a night nurse, so they actually slept like, well, pardon the expression, but they slept like babies. Taylor’s father
promised, for the first two weeks, to call Taylor only once a day with an update on the business, not two zillion times the
way he typically did. For two weeks, they were a family, a cocoon of love and nursing and lying together watching Felicity’s
eyelids move while she slept.
It was the first and last time Taylor didn’t put her work, and by extension herself, first. Then she started interviewing
for a day nanny to go along with the night nurse and announced that she was going to begin weaning Felicity so she could go
back to the office.
“Wean her?” asked David. “Already?”
If David could have grown breasts and filled them with milk he would have done it.
“I’m glad you didn’t,” says . “But I get what you’re saying.”
“We don’t need the nanny every day,” David says he told Taylor. “I’m right here! I know how to hold a bottle!”
“I know you do, darling. But it’s hard to get anyone good if you can’t offer full-time hours.”
The nanny was hired, and after that, well, David grew bored. He missed the little triumvirate they’d briefly been. He had
no real skills, no true experience, nowhere to put his energy. They lived far from Monticello now; even if Taylor had been
okay with his returning, it no longer made sense.
Time went on: one month, two, a year, a year and half, two. David didn’t want a sugar mama. He wanted a partner. He wanted to talk to Taylor about the funny things Felicity had said that day, but instead he found himself telling the nanny. He should have thought more about what he wanted to do with his life earlier, in the years after college, but somehow time had gotten away from him, and now the idea of a whole lifetime of leisure was terrifying. He’d tucked his racing dream away and now, if ever it emerged, it did so only to announce that he was too old, his time had passed.
Almost two years ago, Taylor told David about an investment property her father had bought on Block Island. He was going to
renovate over the next year and a half, and then he wanted Taylor, David, and Felicity to summer there. He’d give them a budget
for decorating. They could return every summer, until Buchanan Enterprises decided to sell. But that wouldn’t be for a while.
Property values on the island were only going up and up and up. He wanted Taylor to oversee a couple of projects. Brice would
be mainly in Boston for the summer; ground was breaking on a skyscraper. And he had a trip to Malaysia planned. Taylor would
be his boots on the ground on the Block.
The house on Block Island was a chance at something different; David saw it as an opportunity to reconnect. But on the island,
Taylor was busier than ever. Her dad was all over her to make sure the new homes off Beacon Hill Road were on track. They
were trying to get approval for the hotel and spa. Many locals were against the hotel plan, so there was a lot of diplomacy
involved. There were meetings, and when those meetings were done there were more meetings. She was home less than ever.
“Can I help?” David asked her once.
She was putting lip gloss on in the mirror. It often fascinated him, how much attention she gave a small task like that, how
much there seemed to be to it, because there wasn’t just gloss but there was apparently a primer to go under the gloss and
some sort of a sealant to go over. And when it came to other tasks, tasks having to do with him or Felicity, she seemed to
have no time at all. Not that spending time with her husband and daughter was technically a task . But sometimes, from this end of things, it felt like it.
“With what I’m doing now? My lips?”
“ No! With the work stuff. The approval process.”
She turned to him in amazement and said, “You?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“Well. Mostly why not because last I checked you weren’t an expert on approval processes.” She snapped the top on the gloss
and told him she had to go; she was late for a meeting.
Sometimes David thought about calling his father and asking if he could be trained to run Furniture Brothers. He thought a
lot about Minnesota, about returning to his roots, about raising Felicity with the solid midwestern values he himself had
been raised with. The streets with cul-de-sacs, summers at Pokegama. He knew, obviously, that Taylor would never go for this.
Taylor couldn’t do her job from Minnesota, and even if she could, she wouldn’t want to. She had been to the lake only one
time. But he couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was always humming in the background, this desire for something different.
Once, getting Felicity dressed for the day before the nanny arrived, he reached for a dress in the back of the closet, a little
orange sundress she’d never worn. Still with the tags on it. Three hundred dollars. Felicity was going to outgrow the dress
in about thirty seconds, and yet Taylor had spent three hundred dollars on it. This kind of wealth disgusted him, but it fascinated him too, just as it had for years, how easy everything seemed for people with money, how the wheels were greased before they even knew that the wheels existed. Even though
he was now part of it, he was still awestruck and repulsed by it.
Here interjects, “David. I looked up your Porsche. Those cars cost almost two hundred thousand dollars.”
She watched the tips of his ears turn red, then redder still, as he says, “Well, now. To be fair. It’s a 2021. So, less.”
rolls her eyes so hard she almost strains a muscle. More softly, David continues: “It doesn’t even have the control-arm
front suspension of the newest model.”
“I’m sorry you have to suffer like that.”
He grins then, and he’s the same old David he always was, the kid at the lake who swam farther than everyone else, the teenager who drove faster, the guy who made all the hard stuff look easy. Then he says, “I could live without any of the material things, really I could.”
feels like she has to call BS on that. “I feel like the only people who say that are people who will never actually
have to live without any of the stuff they have.”
David thinks about this—really thinks about it, letting a big chunk of time and a lot of stepping over roots pass before he
answers. “Maybe,” he says finally.
In June, two months after they’d moved in, he learned from that Juliana lived on the other side of the pond.
had them over for drinks, and he remembered what it was like to listen to another person, and to be listened to. He felt all
the same things he had felt all those years ago in New York, that night they walked to Battery Park, but stronger now. He
didn’t want to feel those things. He didn’t! But they were there. It was all still there. Something that had been sleeping
inside him woke up.
Juliana cared about David, and she let him care about her. She told him things that scared her or worried her; she was vulnerable.
She needed him in a way that Taylor never did—never would. And the more time he spent with Juliana the more David began to
suspect that this was what might bring him down. This was what might ruin his marriage: his need to be needed.
He had his suspicions that something was going on with Taylor, eventually confirmed. Jack, ever the player ( cringes),
was out and about in town, here and there and everywhere, and he heard something about Taylor and this guy Henry, the foreman
on the four houses Buchanan Enterprises was building.
Understandably, this broke David’s heart. Taylor had made him into the kind of man he was, a playboy without skills, without
a career path, literally loafing around in loafers , and now, apparently, she wanted a different kind of man, the kind who wore hard hats and worked with his hands and could command a construction crew.
“ I could have been a man in a hard hat!” he says. “I could have worked with my hands! But Taylor didn’t want that.”
“Yeah?” isn’t sure about this, David in a hard hat.
“Okay, maybe not a hard hat,” he concedes. “But like some kind of hat.”
The summer went on. In some ways, it was the first time in a long time their marriage had felt equitable, because they were
both looking for something else. In some ways, he said, the month of July felt like a long goodbye to their marriage, a slow
burn of the inevitable.
Then, Juliana ended up at their house for dinner, and David expected a scene. Why else would Taylor invite her? But Taylor
caused no scene. The opposite. Taylor was the consummate hostess, more present at the table, maybe, than she’d been all summer.
She asked Juliana questions about her company—insightful, sharp questions that David wouldn’t have thought to ask, had never
asked. There were so many things about business that Taylor understood and he didn’t.
David thought Taylor wanted to bring things to a head, to hasten the inevitable. He thought she wanted to skip to the last
page in the book. In a way, he was relieved by this prospect. Terrified, but relieved. There was so much pressure building
inside that house all summer, and if someone didn’t stick a pin in it and let some air out the whole place was going to burst.
He thought Taylor was the pin.
But he understands now that it was more complicated than that. When Juliana came to dinner, David realized that Taylor had
changed course. She didn’t want to confront David with what she suspected. She wanted to show Juliana that David was hers.
She’d made a decision, and the decision was to do what it took to keep her marriage.
In the end, of course, Juliana was the pin.
Juliana left soon after Jack and Shelly and . And with Caroline gone too, and Felicity by that time sound asleep, David and Taylor were alone. Taylor cleared the table, loaded the dishwasher, washed by hand the delicate wineglasses. She was calm at first, stacking, carrying.
David began to help her. He shook out the place mats and napkins and carried them to the laundry room. There was a smear of
Juliana’s lipstick on one of the napkins, and David noted that. Taylor put some music on, country ballads. Taylor never listened to country, but there was something about the mournful music, the simple, tragic lyrics, that fit the situation.
Then, when the cleanup was done, Taylor put her hands on the edges of the sink, and David noticed that her shoulders were
shaking. Taylor was crying. Taylor never cried. In fact, since the day they’d met at Yale, he had not seen her cry.
“Hey,” said David. “Hey, hey, come here. Turn around.” He said this gently, and he touched her on the shoulder, not sure how
she would react to his touch. He thought she’d flinch and push him away. But she didn’t; she collapsed into David, sobbing.
She got her mascara all over his white shirt.
has stopped walking, trying to square this image of Taylor with the Taylor she knows. “What’d she say?”
“She said, ‘Why don’t you like me best, David? I like you best. Why don’t you like me best?’”
“Wow.” breathes the word out softly; more a sound that an actual word. “That’s heartbreaking.”
“ Heartbreaking ,” David agrees, and his voice cracks.
“So what’d you say?”
“What could I say?” He looks up at the sky for a long, long moment. He’s not, realizes, going to tell her any more
than that. She waits and waits, but that’s all there is.
She holds up her finger and David says, “What are you doing?”
“Listening for frogs.”
“Why?”
“Because behind those shrubs,” she says, “is a vernal pool.”
“A what ?”
“Vernal pool. Sorry, has the walk become too educational?” She’s trying to make him smile.
He shakes his head and, yes, he smiles. “Okay, I can’t stand the suspense. Please enlighten me. What is a vernal pool?”
“I’m glad you asked! A vernal pool is a seasonally wet body of water.”
“That’s good to know. I’m sure that will come in handy in my life as a...” He paused and seemed to be searching for the
right word. “As a—oh, geez, . I don’t know what to call myself.”
“As a philanderer?” she suggests.
He punches her on the arm, but only lightly.
“Sorry,” she says. “I couldn’t help it.” When they were kids it would have been a real punch. David and his brothers didn’t
believe in treating and her sisters any differently because they were girls. “Very funny,” he says. Then he says, “I’m
so jealous of you, you know.”
“Of me ?”
“Yeah. You’ve got a plan.”
“Uh, incorrect. My ‘job’ is over in a few weeks. I’m only living where I’m living because of you. If I go back to school,
I’m accruing more debt while simultaneously avoiding paying off the rest of my law school loans.”
“You’re living where you are because of Taylor and her father,” he corrects. “But you have something you’re passionate about,
something you’re pursuing.” He waits a beat and says, “You serve a porpoise .”
guffaws. “Have you been waiting all summer to use that one?”
“Just since early July.”
He’s right. When she leaves this place, and leaves behind all these unstable, unhappy people, she does have something else to think about. She has work to do that she believes is important and necessary.
“Listen, David—” She wants to say something here about him and the cars, about that day at the state fair, about the fact
that nobody’s dreams are worthless.
“Yeah?”
But she can’t really say any of that; it doesn’t feel like the right time to strike an emotional chord that deep. So she settles
for this: “I’m no expert, believe me. But I bet your Porsche goes pretty fast, almost as fast as a race car.”
He’s quiet for a long time and she worries that she’s tried too hard to make light. But then he cracks a smile, a real one
this time, not at all shaky, and he says, “It does. It goes pretty fast. It really does.” He points at a log just off the
trail covered in leathery orange layers.
“What’s that, professor?”
She peers at the log. “Looks like a fungus.”
“Ew.”
She rolls her eyes. “Calm down. It’s part of the ecosystem. It has a job to do, like anything else.”
“Rub it in, why don’t you,” says David. “Even the fungus has a job.”
They walk on a bit longer. consults her map. “This is the Enchanted Forest,” she says.
David looks around. “This? Are you sure?”
“That’s what the map says. And also this.” She points at the sign ahead of them, wooden with white letters spelling out ENCHANTED FOREST .
“Is that a trick? The fact that the arrows are pointing in both directions? Do you think the sign was put here by a hobbled
old woman with crooked teeth and a basket of apples over her arm?”
“Kind of feels that way.” She suspects that in fact it was courtesy of the Block Island Nature Conservancy.
David seems disappointed. “I thought an enchanted forest would feel much more magical than this. I thought there would be
more trees.”
pulls out her phone, checks for a signal, taps a query into google. “Here’s the explanation.” She reads from the website:
“‘The Enchanted Forest was a grove of trees planted by the Nathan Mott Park Corporation in the 1940s. It was one of the only
large stands of trees on the island and provided excellent habitat for nesting and roosting birds, particularly owls. In the
early 2000s, the Enchanted Forest was cut down because the trees were causing a navigational hazard for planes landing at
the nearby airport.’”
“ That’s a downer,” says David.
“You can say that again.” It’s the oldest story in the modern world, though, isn’t it? The crossroads of nature and progress,
the ebb versus the flow. They are always coming up against that crossroads in the marine world. Just ask any right whale scarred
by a propeller blade, ask any dolphin with plastic trash caught around its beak.
They start on the steepest part of the hike, which is not very steep, but for a few minutes they do need to concentrate on
their footing, making sure their feet don’t catch on the tree roots.
David breaks the silence first. “I remember when we were little and we used to think the grown-ups had it all figured out.
Right? Don’t you remember that feeling?”
“Yeah.” Here comes a memory. There’s a float about one hundred meters out in the lake, and every summer morning, right after
breakfast, the kids would swim out there, the group of them, a great posse. They were all strong swimmers, and nobody had
ever had any trouble making it to the float.
But something happened to one day. Maybe she’d had too much breakfast—David’s mom had made her famous blueberry pancakes—and she couldn’t make it to the float. For years she’d been making this swim, and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, she began to struggle. Then a pair of strong arms lifted her up, then another pair, and another, until they were all at the float, and these sets of hands collectively got onto it. She lay there for a few minutes, heaving, spitting out water. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them she saw the eyes of her sisters and her cousins all looking at her with a concern that was almost panic.
’s mom came running out of the house. She had seen a commotion from the screened-in porch. She was wearing a bathrobe,
not a bathing suit, and they were all out on the float, so she stood on the dock, waving her arms, calling out to see what
had happened. Soon after came David’s mom, and David gave them a thumbs-up. remembers she turned her head and she saw
the two of them at the shoreline and she thought, Oh, good. The adults are here. Everything is okay now.
But it hadn’t been the adults who saved her. She didn’t know then that the grown-ups were just guessing about everything,
about the world, about how to live in it, same as and David are now.
“Yeah,” she says again. “I remember that feeling.”
“I think the dirty little secret of the world is that the adults never had it figured out.”
“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. 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. closes her eyes and puts herself back in Lucretia’s time. 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’s that ?” 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. 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 ’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?”
“You rejoice . 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 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 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, ,” 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 , 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, , and I’ll follow. That butterfly is gone and without him I’m not sure where to go.”
“It was a girl,” she says.
“Oh, come on ,” says David. “There’s no way you could tell that.”
She shrugs. “Larger spots in the forewing.”
“I thought you were a marine biologist.”
“Aspiring. But I have a thing about butterflies too. I have a thing about all of nature. The natural world makes a lot more
sense than all the rest of it.”
“You can say that again.”
There are so many loops and trails to choose from up here. She wants someone else to make the decision. She wants both her
and David to be kids again, swimming out into the center of the lake, secure in the belief that inside the house the adults
have everything under control.
Host: You know the drill. This is Life and Death on an Island , episode two, “The Town Council.” Remember the code lifeanddeath gets you ten percent off at any of our sponsors. Kelsey,
you mentioned that something happened at a party at Taylor Buchanan’s house that you thought was relevant.
Kelsey: Yeah. Why Shelly Salazar and Taylor had a very public heart-to-heart at Taylor Buchanan’s party, nobody was sure. People
were drinking a lot. Did that have something to do with what happened later? It’s impossible to say. Summer and alcohol make
strange bedfellows, as the saying goes.
Betsy: That’s not how the saying goes.
Lou: We were all invited. Town council, planning board, the whole kit and kaboodle. Clearly she was trying to do something. Win
us over. But I didn’t go. I can’t be bought.
Betsy: Even Zoning was invited.
Evan: And nobody ever invites Zoning to anything. Don’t tell them I said that.
Lou: I actually can be bought. But my granddaughters were in from Newport. I chose them. I’ll always pick my granddaughters, if
it’s a choice between them and someone else.
Betsy: I didn’t go out of principle. There’s something I don’t trust about those Buchanans. I still come upon Henry at the oddest
moments when he looks like he’s been crying. Blames it on allergies, but I’ve known him since he was a baby and he’s not allergic
to anything. Something or someone did a real number on my Henry.
Kelsey: I go to every party I’m invited to. I’m twenty-seven years old and I live on an island that basically shuts down in the winter.
I’m not going to miss a party.
Evan: There was a signature cocktail. I’ve never been anywhere where there’s a signature cocktail. My wife had three of them. We
had a sitter for only the second time all summer.
Kelsey: In case you’re wondering it was Prosecco with a locally made mint blueberry syrup.
Evan: Went down like Gatorade after the Shad Bloom trail run. Which is to say, fast and easy.
Kelsey: I saw them talking. But I wasn’t close enough to hear everything. So this is like thirdhand. But my sources are pretty reliable.