Chapter 10
At four o’clock in the morning, my eyes flashed open. My brain was still on London time, ready to start the day. Delighted with itself, because something wonderful had happened. Some delicious thing hovered at the rim of my mind. Some small, sweet word.
I turned my head to the curtains, which I had forgotten to close. A faint gray dawn lay on the window glass.
Honey. That was it.
Last night, Sedge had called me Honey.
—
The first time I spoke to Sedge Peabody, I was rummaging in the ancient Summerly refrigerator for butter and cheese slices, because Laura and I were going to make toasted cheese sandwiches.
This was the day after we had officially met on the beach, and I didn’t yet realize that Laura had this obsession with making extremely decadent food, like toasted cheese sandwiches with avocado, or peanut butter caramel brownies, from which she would extract exactly one mouthful and then pick apart the rest and rearrange it on her plate to make it look like she’d devoured the whole thing like a wild animal.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing in our kitchen?” growled a voice at my shoulder.
I startled back and whipped around to a bare, wide, tanned chest. The cheese dropped from my hand to the linoleum. Somehow I held on to the butter.
“You’re such a dick, Sedge,” said Laura. “Pick that up for her.”
“Sorry.” The chest dipped, so I stared for an instant down the line of his back to the rim of a pair of salmon-pink Vineyard Vines swim trunks, before he straightened and held out the pack of plasticky orange squares, the best the Summerly fridge could provide. “I’m a dick.”
I recognized his face, of course, the same way I knew Laura’s face—from across the Club dining room, from the cereal aisle at the Winthrop grocery store.
Regular, handsome features; lean physique, just tall enough to be tall.
But I had missed the gleam of mischief in his eyes, the wetness of his eyelashes. The line of his jaw. His smile.
“I’m Lucy,” I said.
“I know. I’m Sedge. Here’s your cheese.”
I took the cheese. “Want a sandwich?”
“My dumb brother does not deserve a sandwich,” said Laura.
“Don’t listen to her,” said Sedge. “I mean, I might be dumb? But I do deserve a sandwich. Just for putting up with her shit.”
Unlike Laura, Sedge ate all his sandwich, then hoovered up the remains of hers. Then he looked covetously at my plate, which was empty. “You’re a good eater, Lucy,” he said. “I like that in a girl.”
At the time, I didn’t realize that he was directing this comment at Laura, in one of his lame but well-meaning attempts to encourage her to eat.
I just knew that my skin tingled when he said it, as the blood rushed to the surface and remained there until Sedge grabbed an apple from the fruit bowl and sauntered out of the kitchen.
“I’m sorry about that,” said Laura. “He can be such a pain in the ass.”
“No worries,” I told her.
—
So, yes. You could make the case that a tiny part of the allure of Laura’s friendship had always been the allure of her big brother.
Now this. Honey.
—
I sprang out of bed and pulled my old swimsuit out of the top drawer.
I was not into sports. Even before she started identifying as European, Maman had never been a soccer mom, or a tennis mom, or any kind of mom that involved schlepping kids from field to field or scrubbing grass stains out of T-shirts or getting up early on a Saturday morning, God forbid.
But she did believe in the healthful effects of wild swimming.
It keeps your skin young, she told me, and your arms toned.
At eighteen, I didn’t appreciate youthful skin or toned arms because I rolled out of bed with them each morning, but I did like the way it made me feel to course through the cold water. Alive.
The sea was even better. I loved the salt on my skin and in my nose; I loved the hugeness of the water, the fact that when the ocean held you inside itself, you were connected, molecule by molecule, to every ocean in the world—every inch of shore, every reef, every lobster and swordfish and porpoise and eel and plankton and blue whale.
Bigger than your imagination could possibly stretch.
I wore a practical old tank suit in navy blue, like your grandmother might wear, because your grandmother knew better than to wear a tiny string bikini while out in the ocean for an actual swim.
I walked away from the beach at Summerly, where Sedge Peabody might possibly look out his window and see me in my grandmotherly splendor, over the point and down to the less congenial but more deserted beach where Laura had found me reading four years ago.
The sun had just begun to streak across the surface of the water and light the bluffs behind me. The water was still asleep, flopping groggily against the sand. Cool and tingling against my legs. I waded to my hips and dove in.
In retrospect, maybe I should have let somebody know I was about to dive into the naked sea at dawn, all by myself.
Left a note or something. Sure, Winthrop Island nestles up close to the Connecticut shore, and Block Island—maybe thirty miles to the east—takes the brunt of the rollers hurtling in from the wide Atlantic.
But Winthrop stands at the far edge of Long Island, right where the tide squeezes through to fill the sound with seawater and empty it back again, and between the flexing of the flood current and the moods of the North Atlantic, if you’re perched along the exposed southeastern shore of Winthrop Island, you never know what that sea will throw at you.
The sea at that moment seemed harmless enough.
There were no breakers to speak of. I stroked hard for fifteen or twenty minutes, pitting myself against the current all the way up the shore as far as Summerly and back down again.
The white sun heaved itself aloft. The fishing boats crawled from port.
I turned on my back and floated, resting my spent muscles, taking the morning into my lungs.
The good salt air. The purity of the world.
When I looked up again, the current had carried me all the way down to Horseshoe Bay.
Shit, I thought.
I’d set out only about twenty yards off the beach, the water being so calm.
But here, where the bay dug into the shoreline, I found myself farther out to sea and the tidal current threatened to carry me past the little headland at the southwest curve of the bay and into the water that raced between the western end of Winthrop Island and the Fleet Rock lighthouse, about half a mile off.
I knew all this. I knew the shape of the shore like I knew the dips and ridges of my own body. But when you’ve walked on dry land for too long, you forget just how mighty water can be. Like wind, like weather, like teenagers and toddlers and old men, it likes to have its own way.
You need to pay attention, every second. You can’t let down your guard. You can’t just lie back and stare at the brave new sky and let the water carry you wherever it wants.
Don’t panic, I told myself. Don’t fight the current.
I turned on my front and stroked at an angle toward shore.
At first, I thought I was making progress.
The steep hillside at the bottom of the horseshoe grew larger, inch by inch.
Each time I glanced up to get my bearings, the details became finer.
I could make out the switchbacks of the trail that snaked down from the meadow.
I could see the narrow strip of beach at the bottom, where the cool kids made bonfires and hung out on weekends.
The rocky headland became individual boulders, became giant rocks and smaller rocks in a jumble left behind by the ancient glaciers.
I had caught myself in time, thank God. It would be a long walk back to the house, but I deserved a long walk after doing something so stupid.
Teach me a lesson. No harm done. We all need a little scare once in a while.
But as that first surge of adrenaline ebbed in my veins, I realized just how much strength the swimming had called from me.
I was exhausted before, as I floated on my back to catch my breath.
I hadn’t swum so far and so hard since the previous summer.
Now I struggled to lift my arms, to kick my legs.
Even my bones seemed to have had the life sucked out of them.
I hadn’t eaten since dinner last night.
Hadn’t drunk so much as a sip of fresh water.
And the shore was getting bigger, all right. But it was also sliding to my right, as the current carried me to the south and west. I wasn’t going to make it to the headland before the drift bore me past Horseshoe Bay and into the open water.
Don’t panic, I told myself.
Keep swimming.
That’s all you need to do. Keep yourself afloat.
You are not going to drown, for God’s sake. Nobody drowns. Nobody I knew had ever drowned. Drowning happened to strangers in the news, not to real people.
Not to you.
But then my mouth, bobbing for an instant below the surface, caught a tablespoon or so of salt water. I coughed up once, twice. Had to pause the swimming just so I could devote my remaining strength to staying afloat while I hacked the water out of my lungs. Arms pumping. Legs kicking.
Stay up. Keep your head out of the water while you cough and cough.
Another surge of adrenaline propelled me forward again. Second wind, maybe. My head filled with cold, clear light. I focused on a rock near the tip of the headland. My goal.
But those thirty seconds had cost me precious headway.
Every minute, the tidal current gained muscle while my own strength—underneath the adrenaline, underneath the numb charge that shocked my limbs into motion—ebbed away.
The rock. The rock ahead.
How many yards? The salt blurred my eyes.
I paused to blink. The rock—where was it? I couldn’t see. My arms thrashed. My legs. Where were my legs? I couldn’t feel them. I couldn’t move them.
Oh shit, I thought. I’m not going to make it.
—