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, you might 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 is so 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. 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 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 of God, capital, or a god, 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 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’s probably every last drop of her strength, to hold on as 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 , 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 has ever heard. It seems to as though in that exhale she’s going through visible changes, as
though 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
lead her along the length of the dock, across the patio, and to her back door.
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 sees a light switch on upstairs. This must be Juliana’s bedroom. 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.
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.