Nicola
Juliana texts at 10:02 p.m . Monday night, asking if she’ll come over. thinks she means the next day, and she answers that she’ll be home after
work. Juliana replies: Now? With this emoji: .
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 has made her way down the dock. “It’s a seasonal blue moon, did you
know that?”
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 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 can see through the glass doors and knows to be the pendants that hang above the kitchen island. Even when turns to face the water she can feel the house behind her, the great brooding hulk of it.
“Is there anyone home?” 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 . 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 , then, before 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 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 her so 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, ,” Juliana says suddenly.
is, in a word, startled. In two words, she’s taken aback. “I know you’re not. I never thought you were.”
“I know I did some stupid things this summer—”
“Well, not stupid—” she begins, but Juliana cuts her off.
“Yes, stupid,” she says sharply. “But they were my own choices. I just thought...”
There’s such a long pause then that thinks she might have forgotten she hadn’t finished the sentence, so she prompts,
“Just thought what? Juliana, what is it?”
Juliana drains her flute and pours herself more. “Do you need a refill?”
“No, thank you.” has only had a sip. She’d brushed her teeth before she decided to make tea, and the taste of the champagne
mixed with mint made her shudder. She waits a minute to see if Juliana will pick up the train of her unfinished sentence,
which is currently dragging on the ground, and when she doesn’t says again, “Juliana, what is it?”
“My heart is broken,’” she says. “That’s all. My heart is broken.” Her voice cracks.
“Oh, honey,” she says. “Juliana. What happened?”
She swipes at her eyes and clears her throat. “It’s such a long story.”
tries not to peek at her watch. “That’s okay,” she says. “I have as long as you need.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Okay. Okay, thank you.” She takes a deep breath. “The first thing I should tell you is that I’m not really Juliana George.”
***
It’s true what Juliana first told . Jade Gordon never knew her father. But Jade Gordon’s mother didn’t die when she
was thirteen. There was no Gilmore Girls vibe, no mother-daughter bonding. Jade’s mother died when she was seven. A drug overdose. Jade doesn’t remember much about
her. Jade’s uncle, who she was sent to live with after, was an on-and-off-again addict.
That’s not right. There is no such thing as an on-and-off-again addict. There is only clearing yourself of the addiction or feeding it. Her uncle was an on-and-off-again feeder of his addiction.
Jade was nine years old when Talia came to live with them; Talia was three. She was the daughter of a girlfriend of her uncle,
who also lived with them for a time. Was her uncle Talia’s father? This was never clarified for Jade, but probably, yes. Because
her uncle and Talia’s mother were often out, Talia’s care often fell to Jade. Eventually Talia’s mother disappeared, yet Talia
remained.
“I realize, by the way,” says Juliana at this point, “that all of this sounds like a far-fetched plot for a network television
drama that would never get picked up because it’s too hard to believe. But this time, everything I’m saying is true. This
is the real story.”
In the sky, night clouds race by, covering the moon, then uncovering it once again. A small breeze comes off the water. Not
enough to require a blanket, though knows there’s a basket of them near the furniture, behind them.
“I don’t believe you,” says. “Go on. Please.”
Jade didn’t mind caring for Talia. In fact she loved it. She felt like Talia was a doll that had been given to her as a gift:
someone to dress up and play with, someone to keep her company. She loved Talia.
Time passed. Jade turned ten and Talia turned four. Jade went to school every day and Talia went to the subsidized preschool
attached to the same school. They took the bus there and back home at the end of the day, sitting together always, even though
other siblings split up to sit with friends on the bus. They were not really siblings, but it felt like they were.
When they were home, Jade spent hours braiding Talia’s hair, painting her tiny fingernails, reading to her. When the TV worked, which it didn’t always, they watched cartoons and shows on the Disney Channel. Jade knew the Disney Channel shows were meant for kids older than Talia, but still, this is something the two girls bonded over. The kids on Disney shows typically had stable families and social structures and tiny, easily surmountable problems within those families or social structures. Neither girl could get enough of those story arcs wherein things mostly turned out okay for everyone. Jade taught Talia the few life skills she herself had learned up until that point: How to call 911 in an emergency. How to cut an apple, peel an orange, recite your address to an adult at school. How to see if someone was following you without turning around.
One night, sometime after 11 p.m ., Jade was making macaroni and cheese from a box. Why were they doing this so late? The girls were home alone, and they had
nobody to tell them to go to bed, nobody to feed them at a normal time. Where was the uncle? Who knows. He never told them
when he was leaving, and he never said where he’d been when he came back. Jade had climbed on the counter, the way she often
did, to reach a cupboard shelf high above her head. But the hinge to the cupboard door was broken, so when she opened it the
whole door came off in her hand, and she fell off the counter, hitting her head on the corner on the way down.
She was fine, as it ended up. Eventually. But there was a lot of blood; even minor head wounds can bleed profusely. A lot of blood. Talia screamed when she saw it, then she called 911, just as Jade had taught her. Life skills!
The EMTs who came, winding themselves up the narrow staircase with the gurney, took care of the head wound first. They loaded
Jade on the backboard, and then they turned their attention to the situation at hand. Two kids of those ages, alone, fending
for themselves so late at night? One of them hurt, bleeding from a head wound with only a four-year-old to call for help?
No. Not okay. The EMTs reported the situation at the hospital, and someone at the hospital called social services. After that
things happened quickly. Jade was treated for her wound, and Jade and Talia were both removed from the care of Jade’s uncle
and placed in foster homes. Separate foster homes.
Now isn’t looking at her watch anymore. She’s riveted by the story, which is giving off Dickensian vibes: Juliana (Jade) as Oliver Twist or Pip, dressed in rags, holding an empty bowl out to someone.
Please, sir, may I have some more mac and cheese?
She looks up and sees again the night-shining clouds—those thin clouds high up above Earth’s atmosphere. Scientists think
these are created from ice crystals that form on fine dust particles from meteors, which, if you think about it, is pretty
astonishing. It’s rare to see them too. It feels portentous.
Between the night she hit her head and the day she left for Boston College, Jade lived in nine different foster homes. The
American foster system, she told , like so many American systems, is broken.
“ Nine ?” says. “In eight years?” She thinks about the time her parents got rid of their ugly brown couch and replaced it
with a new piece from the store, which was easier on the eyes but far less comfortable. and her sisters lost their
minds over the loss of that couch. Change agents, they were not. And here was Juliana, moving from place to place, all of her things
thrown in a black garbage bag.
( adds the garbage bag to the scene for dramatic effect; maybe Jade had a suitcase or a duffle, she doesn’t ask.)
Nine places, Juliana confirms. The place with the cats. The one with the twin babies. The super-Christian one, the dirty one,
the clean one. The really dirty one. And so on. The one where the dad sat too close on the couch during TV time. The one with
no dad; the one with two dads.
In some of these homes she was welcomed; in others she was barely tolerated. In one she was the only foster kid. In another
she was one of five.
Her time in the foster system was a turning point for Jade academically. Previously she’d been a careless student, sometimes doing what she needed to get by, sometimes not even that much. She was bright, and she understood the concepts being taught almost immediately, but she was that kid who was constantly not working to her full potential. Who was anyone at the school going to tell? Nobody came to her parent-teacher conferences. Nobody answered the phone if a teacher called home. Eventually, overwhelmed by how many other students they had who needed help, how many other calls there were to make, the teachers stopped calling.
In the foster homes, that all turned around. Jade’s goal was to take up the smallest amount of space possible in any given
situation, and to be the best version of herself she could be. She wasn’t optimistic enough to think she could attract praise,
but she wanted to avoid attracting negative attention. Often this meant that when other members of the family were doing whatever
they were doing, Jade found a corner (not always literally a corner, but often enough, yes, a corner) and pulled out her books
and her homework and got to work. By sixth grade she was winning spelling bees. By eighth, placing into algebra so that in
high school she could double up math classes sophomore year and get to AP Calc by the time she was a senior. In tenth grade
she began prepping for the PSAT; when she took the test her scores were high enough to net her consideration as a National
Merit Scholar, which she then became.
“It was like a drug for me,” Juliana tells . “Achievement. I’d get some, and all I could think about was how I was going
to get my next bump.”
On and on goes the story: the guidance counselor, the scholarship. The college part. The early time in New York, where Jade met George and later David. The will, the children, the affidavit, the name change, the business. The paper millions, which, in just over two months, after the IPO, will be real, actual millions, an amount of money that simply can’t fathom. All of this brings Juliana around to where she started the story, with Taylor texting to meet her at the bottom of Mohegan Steps. Because Taylor, as it turned out, had excavated the land where Juliana thought she had buried the past. Taylor had brought a backhoe to the cemetery, and she was ready to bring up the bodies.
Enough of the metaphors. You get the picture.
can’t remember the last time she stayed up talking and listening like this. College, probably, when sleeping until
early afternoon the following day was an easy option. It was long enough ago that she’s forgotten how at one crucial point
fatigue overtakes you—for this happens around 1 a.m .—but if you push through, what happens is that the fatigue is replaced by a surge of energy, an exhilaration of sorts. The
next day, of course, brings the real fatigue, the scratchy-eye, scratchy-skin feeling, and she knows that’s what she’s in
for at work. But Juliana wants to talk, and has the only set of ears around. She takes a blanket after all.
“How’d she know all that?”
“Ohhh,” said Juliana. “I left that part out. Shelly Salazar told Taylor my old name and she ran with it.”
“Makes sense. She used to be a track athlete.” remembers someone telling a story about that at the wedding. She can
see it: the blond ponytail, the long legs and little shorts, the determined set of Taylor’s mouth. She can see her arms pumping
and her feet kicking up behind her. She can see her winning. (But is this the time for a joke? Probably not.)
Still visible, in the distance, is that green light at the end of Taylor and David’s dock. Green for money. Green for envy.
Green for go.
“What are you going to do?” she asks.
“I don’t have a choice. Taylor has me. I can’t have anything happen right now that would make the investment bank or the board
skittish. I can’t risk my business.”
“No,” agrees, even though really, what she knows about investment banks and boards and IPOs would fit on a baby’s pinky
nail. “No, you don’t want to make anyone skittish.” She waits some more and then she says, “Still. Your heart must be breaking.”
“You have no idea.”
is offended by this at first—who is Juliana to say if she’s ever had a broken heart?—until she keeps talking. “You
have no idea, , what it’s like to be loved by only two people in your life, and only briefly, and not to have them.
George loved me, and David loves me. That’s it, for my whole life. That’s not how it’s been for you.” She pauses, and
knows Juliana has more to say, so she doesn’t fill in the pause. “I can tell how many different people love you. People move
differently in the world when they’re loved by a lot of people. You have parents, friends, cousins, Jack Baker—”
“ Not Jack Baker,” breaks in. “That wasn’t love.” hates Jack Baker so much right then. She hates his breezy, athletic,
careless way of moving, and she hates the way he made her pay for five cocktails when she could barely afford one, and especially,
especially she hates the way she’s still so attracted to him that if he were to show up right now and hold out his hand and walk her
across the grass to her cottage she’d probably go with him. “That was just a stupid fling,” she says.
(She consoles herself with the thought that if her heart is big enough to hold all that hate for Jack, it’s big enough to
hold plenty of love too. Maybe not all of it right now. But in the future, for someone else.)
“Fair enough. Okay. But lots of others. You just... well, you have no idea. That’s one thing I love about David, you know.
All those family traditions and values, all that warmth and love. It just oozes out of both of you. You don’t know how foreign
that is to me, how exotic .”
doesn’t know what to say. Juliana is exactly right. has been loved unconditionally by her immediate family,
by David and his family, by too many friends to list at the moment. By Zachary, at one time. She’s given that same love back
to all of those people without thinking twice about it. It was easy, because the supply was replenishable.
“I mean, if you look at where you started, and where you are now...” gestures back toward the giant dark house behind them, then to Juliana, the girl reaching for the mac and cheese in that Lawrence two-family. “You’ve made it. You’ve made the quintessential American leap, from one social class to another. There are countries all over the world where that’s not an option. There are so many people in this country for whom that’s not an option.”
Juliana is silent for so long that wonders if she’s heard her. She pulls the blanket tight around her, and she waits,
and finally Juliana speaks.
“There is no American Dream,” she says.
“Oh, come on now,” says . “That’s like telling a six-year-old that there’s no Santa Claus.”
“You know there isn’t one of those either, right?” They’re both staring straight ahead, and it’s pretty dark still. Then Juliana’s
voice turns serious. “I always thought it’s terrible that as a group, as a society , we let children believe in this thing knowing that one day they’ll find out that they’ve been tricked.”
“Do you feel like you’ve been tricked?”
“About Santa Claus?”
“No. I mean, do you feel like you’ve been tricked about the American Dream?”
“Not tricked, exactly. It’s more that... I can’t figure out how to say this the right way. Hang on, let me think about
it.” hears Juliana inhale, exhale, keeping her eyes fixed on the green light. “It’s more that they don’t tell you that
someone has to be a bridge between classes. You can’t skip that step—you can’t go right from one class to another and be comfortable
there.”
sits with this for a second.
“The money is so confusing,” Juliana adds.
“What’s confusing about it?”
Juliana lets out a puff of air—more than a breath, but not quite a sigh. “I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t know what’s the right way to spend it, or not spend it. I don’t have a healthy relationship with it. So I buy this house and throw these parties. But I throw them for the brand, not for myself. I don’t even like parties that much.” She shakes her head. “I can’t find the middle ground—I can’t just enjoy it, like a normal person who grew up around it would be able to. Like Taylor can. I either throw it around, or I hoard it... when I don’t spend it, I feel guilty. And when I do spend it, I feel guilty.”
“So you’re the bridge?”
“I’m the bridge. I’m a bridge. No matter how successful this IPO is, or what I accomplish, or how many whatever-under-whatever lists I’m on, I can
only ever be the bridge. I’ll never be the one who walks over it.” She pauses. “At least I helped Talia. Besides my foundation,
that’s the thing I did that I’m most proud of. She works for me now. She runs the New York office. She’s amazing—she works
so hard. She has shares, and I hope this IPO makes her really fucking rich. But she won’t know what to do with it either.
She’ll be a bridge too.”
thinks hard about this, trying to understand. “And who’s going to walk on your backs?”
“Our kids.”
This is the first time has heard Juliana mention children. She’d assumed that she didn’t want them—that she’d find
child-rearing incompatible with her career. Which isn’t fair of her, because a person of Juliana’s means can afford to rear
children in any way she wants, buying either the time to do it herself or the people to do it for her. “Do you want kids?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe you could start with a dog,” suggests. “A little rescue. Then you can get one of those bumper stickers that
says something like Adopt Don’t Shop or My Dog Thinks I Rescued Him but Really He Rescued Me .” She’s trying to lighten the mood, and she waits to see if it takes.
Juliana snorts. “I’ve never seen that second one.”
“It’s a good one.”
feels a shift in the air. It’s the first time she’s sensed that they’re turning a corner toward fall—there’s momentarily a briskness, a hint of what is to come. Then the briskness disappears and the air feels just as it has all night: a little heavy, very August-y. This is the kind of night when they would have caught fireflies as kids. doesn’t know if there were ever fireflies on Block Island but she knows they’re disappearing from many of their native habitats, victims of climate shifts and light pollution. Another vestige of childhood gone.
Then something happens. As the two of them sit there, both training their eyes across the water, the green light at the end
of David’s dock goes out. They both start, as though the light’s disappearance had been accompanied by a loud noise.
waits to see if Juliana will say something, acknowledge it in some way. Finally, after a yawning pause, she does.
She says, “Well. I guess that’s that.”
And before can stop her, she stands at the very edge of the dock, and she jumps off.
***
Lou: There’s three kinds of money on this island. Old money, new money, and no money.
Kelsey: No offense, Lou, but that is such a Boomer thing to say.
Evan: I heard Buchanan Enterprises is abandoning plans for the hotel altogether.
Betsy: They still own a home here, so I’m not betting on that. And they bought that big house out by Great Salt. The one with all
the parties.
Lou: Are we going to talk more about what happened the week after that party at Taylor Buchanan’s?
Kelsey: Do we have to?
Evan: I mean, yeah. Isn’t that what we’re here to talk about?
Kelsey: Even this long after, I can’t shake the image. I’ve seen dead bodies before, obviously. But a body that’s been in the water
for hours? That’s a whole different story.