Page 106 of Swan Song

“I heard,” Lamont says. “She didn’t mean any of it, Coco, she’s just angry. It’s less than two weeks until Labor Day. We can tough it out.”

Coco would like to call Lamont weak for taking Leslee’s abuse, but she knows it’s strength. He would never let something Leslee said in the heat of the moment bother him.

“Sure, yeah,” Coco says. She has been nurturing an idea for revenge against the Richardsons, but it always seemed outlandish and beyond the scope of what she’s capable of doing. Until now.

38. Thursday, August 22, 8:00 P.M.

It’s Romeo’s turn to plan date night and he chooses karaoke at the Rose and Crown.

Really? Sharon thinks. If he wants to sing, they should go to the Club Car piano bar, but when she mentions this, he says, “It’s going to be a while before I can go back to that place.” Sharon chastises herself for being insensitive. After the whole debacle with Walker, she wouldn’t blame Romeo if he never went to the Club Car again. And so the Rose and Crown it is.

And guess what—karaoke is fun! Romeo and Sharon order beers and a plate of nachos. At the end of the bar, Sharon sees a girl named Woodlyn who used to babysit for the kids. Woodlyn, who has corkscrew curls and is wearing a top that is essentially a bra, buys Sharon and Romeo shots of Fireball. It’s the jet fuel Sharon needs to propel her onto the stage. She and Romeo decide to sing “Reunited” by Peaches and Herb, and they must sound okay because the crowd, urged on by Woodlyn and her bare midriff, chant for an encore, so they sing “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” by Elton John and Kiki Dee. After the song is over, Romeo sweeps Sharon up off her feet and carries her out of the bar, saying, “Always leave them wanting more.”

They hold hands as they stroll down Water Street toward the car, but then Romeo stops Sharon outside the Pacific Club at the bottom of Main Street. He takes a breath. “I love you, Sharon.”

Sharon, who at the beginning of the summer might have said she no longer believed in love, says, “I love you too.” Then she presses her head against Romeo’s chest and thinks, I love Romeo Scandalous Steamship Guy!

When they get home, Robert is awake playing a video game and Romeo tells Sharon, “I’m going to hang out with him for a little while if that’s okay.”

It’s more than okay. Sharon is only one scene away from finishing the short story for her online class. She sits down at the laptop and the words flow right out of her.

Later, Sharon and Romeo reunite in the bedroom—And it feels so good, Sharon sings to herself. As she falls asleep, she realizes that for the first time in years, maybe decades, she doesn’t know where her phone is and she doesn’t care.

She is, therefore, shocked the next morning when she paws through her bag for her phone—she bookmarked a frittata recipe on Instagram that she wants to try—and finds she has one missed call from Delilah, one from Phoebe, and three from Fast Eddie, the most recent one only two minutes earlier.

She figures Delilah and Phoebe are calling about pickleball—they’re going to play for the first time this week—but what is up with Eddie?

Then Sharon sees the alert from the Nantucket Current on her phone: Fire Destroys House in Pocomo, Woman Missing off Homeowners’ Boat.

Sharon can’t click fast enough. As she reads, she murmurs, “Oh my god, oh my god”—the Richardsons’ house burned to the ground. Their personal concierge has gone missing off their boat! Leslee and Bull apparently hosted a sunset sail, where they renewed their wedding vows. When they received word about the fire, they motored back, and only when they reached the mooring in Pocomo did they realize Coco was missing.

Sharon calls Fast Eddie. He picks up on the first ring, his tone somber. “Hey.”

“Is this a joke?” Sharon says. She realizes she sounds just like her twins. “The Richardsons’ house burned down?” Sharon thinks about the dual grand staircases, the pink lacquered shelves above the Lucite bar in the party room, the iconic octagonal deck. It’s all gone? That’s a minor concern, of course, compared to the missing personal concierge. “What happened to Coco?”

“Nobody knows. Lucy Shields launched a search; a copter flew over from Woods Hole; they had a fleet of ATVs searching the south shore, and they found her clothes washed up out at Smith’s Point. But they can’t find her.”

Tears sting Sharon’s eyes. “I don’t care about the Richardsons’ house…”

“Nor do I,” Eddie says. “As far as I’m concerned, the address of that place should be Six-Six-Six Pocomo Road.”

“Coco has to be okay,” Sharon says. “But what if she isn’t?”

39. There Is No Story Here

She hits the water with a smack that disorients her. Her shorts balloon, and her phone falls out of her hand; she grabs for it but then realizes it’s too late. The water is a green glass globe with a stream of translucent bubbles, her own breath escaping. Which way is up? For one panicked second, Coco isn’t sure. She kicks her feet, feels instinctively that she’s going down, not up, flips around, and pulls apart the water like she’s opening a heavy curtain until she breaks the surface. In the twilight, Coco can see the sailboat, but it’s cruising away from her, both motors churning.

She tries to swim toward the shore; the beach at Eel Point is probably only a few hundred yards ahead. But the water has other plans for her. The current carries her out; it’s one stroke forward, two strokes back. She tells herself not to panic—she knows that in a riptide, you swim parallel to shore. She does this for a while. Is she getting closer? Yes, she thinks so. Her sodden polo shirt is weighing her down, and she’s having trouble using her arms. She treads water for a second, though even this is a challenge. The water is muscular, insistent: She will do what it tells her. She wrangles off her polo, unbuttons her shorts, lets them both go. She’s lighter now, but she’s lost ground. She watches as the westernmost tip of the island, Smith’s Point, recedes.

So what now? She turns and sees land behind her. Tuckernuck, Whale Island. It looks close but she knows this is deceptive; it’s half a mile away. Her shoulders start to ache as she swims, and she can no longer feel her legs. She remembers swimming off Great Point, Kacy’s warning about sharks. She moves in the direction she knows land to be, though now the dark land is nearly indistinguishable from the dark sky. She doesn’t think about Leslee or Bull or Lamont or Kacy or her mother, Georgi, back in Rosebush, who is no doubt vaping at the picnic table out back of the house with Kemp. Or, rather, she does think about them but only to remind herself that she can’t waste her precious energy thinking about anything other than getting to shore.

Is she going to die out here?

Coco kicks, scoops her arms forward. She can swim. She has swum not only in her murky, turtle-infested pond but also in the cobalt water of the Lake of the Ozarks, the turquoise water of St. John, clear to the white sandy bottom.

She hears a helicopter, but it’s far away. Even so, she treads water, waves her arms, cries out. Someone is looking for her. She has to make it to Tuckernuck. There’s nothing but ocean between here and Portugal.

Coco’s arms grow heavy; she kicks with all her might just to stay above the surface. Waves smack her face, water goes up her nose, down her throat. She thinks she can still see the coastline but she’s not sure, and then she sees—or thinks she sees—a pinprick of yellow light. A moment later, it disappears. What did Lamont say about Tuckernuck? No electricity, only generators. She gazes up in the sky and sees stars, but navigating by them is a pipe dream. She tries to remember where she saw the light and swims in that direction. She has to stop and tread water in order to catch her breath; she flips onto her back and floats but she feels the current carrying her in what she’s certain is the wrong direction. She’s out of gas, plain and simple. She can’t move her arms; her legs are two lead weights pulling her down.

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