Page 22 of Swan Song

Coco drinks in the view. They pass an extremely fancy and beautifully appointed inn. “The Wauwinet,” Kacy says. “Super-bougie.” They hit a sandy road that cuts through the dunes and Kacy shifts the Jeep into four-wheel drive. They bounce around like they’re riding a rodeo horse and Coco grabs the roll bar while Kacy whoops. In another minute, they’re over the dunes and on the most pristine coastline Coco has ever seen. The golden sand stretches uninterrupted in front of them as far as she can see. The ocean is on their right, the dunes topped with swaying eelgrass on their left. Seagulls seem to hover overhead; smaller shorebirds scurry along the waterline, and a few yards off the coast, Coco sees a dark, sleek head.

“What is that?” she says.

Kacy follows Coco’s finger. “Seal.”

“There are seals here?” Coco says.

“Lots of them,” Kacy says.

Ahead in the distance, Coco spies the lighthouse. It’s white with a black top. This is exactly what she dreamed Nantucket would be like.

Kacy hits the gas and they go flying down the beach, sand spraying from the tires. Coco raises her arms over her head and tries to imagine what they look like from above—two women cruising down the beach in a Jeep, leaving tire tracks in their wake, not another soul in sight.

Free.

Later, Kacy will count her mistakes: forgetting the tire gauge, being smug with Pamela, blatantly breaking the speed limit—and drinking so much rosé.

In the moment, however, everything is coming up Kacy. They park just beyond the lighthouse on the very tip of the island. Kacy points out the visible line in the water that marks the cross-rip.

“It feels like we’re standing at the edge of the earth,” Coco says.

Kacy finds a flat spot for a picnic, spreads a blanket, opens the wine. Meanwhile Coco shucks off her shorts and her T-shirt and says, “I’m going in.”

“The riptide is notoriously bad up here,” Kacy says. She served as a town lifeguard as a teenager, but even she wouldn’t swim today. “Plus the seals mean there could be sharks. And the water is freezing this time of year.”

Coco skips toward the water, undeterred. “I’m a good swimmer,” she says. “I grew up in Arkansas with a pond in my backyard where I had to outswim the snapping turtles. Then I moved to the Lake of the Ozarks, where I had to avoid the water moccasins. I’ll take a shark over a swimming snake any day.” With that, Coco splashes into the water and freestyles out. She has a nice stroke and her kick is strong, but all Kacy can think of is the woman who went swimming out here at night—she and her friends called themselves the night swimmers—and disappeared. Kacy keeps her eyes trained on Coco, steeling herself every time Coco goes underwater. Coco dives, flipping her legs up like a mermaid’s tail. She’s down for so long that Kacy is about to go in after her—but then Coco surfaces, holding a sand dollar.

“Can you come in, please?” Kacy calls out, windmilling her arm. She knows she sounds like a mom, but the last thing she wants is for Coco to drown out here on her watch.

Coco rides the next wave to shore, shakes her short hair dry like a dog, and rubs at her face with a towel. “That was sublime,” she says. “Now, what did I do with my wine?”

The first bottle of rosé goes quickly. Kacy opens the second bottle (Andrea gave her a look, but thank god she brought two). She pulls out the sandwiches, the chips, a cluster of frosty red grapes. The wine goes straight to Kacy’s head; there wasn’t a lot of day-drinking in the NICU. “So tell me about you,” Kacy says.

“What do you want to know?”

“What was it like growing up in Arkansas? I can’t even picture it. And the only things I know about the Ozarks, I learned from the show. What about your parents, do you have siblings, why did you go down to the Virgin Islands, what’s on your bucket list, have you thought about the future?” Kacy takes a breath. “I know basically nothing about you.”

Coco reaches for her wine. “Well, for parental figures, it’s my mom, Georgi, and her live-in boyfriend, Kemp. Georgi works the deli counter at Harps, and Kemp owns a tobacco shop, which has become all about vaping. Both Kemp and my mother vape nonstop and will probably end up with popcorn lung. No siblings unless you count Kemp’s daughter, Bree, which I don’t. Their idea of vacation is survivalist camping. So when I was growing up, I learned how to make a lean-to, start a fire, track animals, shoot a bow and arrow, purify water—”

“You are kidding me,” Kacy says.

“Forage for nuts and berries and wild greens, identify trees, stuff like that.”

“That is so cool,” Kacy says.

“Or so lame,” Coco says. “My dream was to stay in a hotel with AC and a pool.” She sighs. “A pool with a sliding board. As a kid, I was always reading—my mother used to make fun of me for it. Then in high school I became close with Ms. Geraghty, the town librarian. My mother approached her at my high-school graduation and accused her of corrupting me by giving me so many books, but books are what saved me. The only reason I’ve even heard of Nantucket is because Ms. Geraghty gave me Moby-Dick.”

Kacy feels embarrassed that she’s never read Moby-Dick. Like all the other nurses on her unit, she reads Colleen Hoover.

“What about now?” Kacy says. “What do you want to do? You’re going to work for the Richardsons this summer and then… what? Go back to St. John to bartend?”

Coco shrugs. “I guess if things don’t work out, yeah.”

“Work out how?” Kacy asks.

Coco hesitates. She has been keeping her script a secret; like making a wish on birthday candles, she fears that talking about it will jinx it. But now that the script is finished and she has somehow managed to score a job with a movie producer and she seems to have made an actual friend, why not? “I’ve written a screenplay.”

“Oh my god!” Kacy says. “You’re kidding! What’s it about?”

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