“Mine,” he said.
36
Girl #3
Tuesday, July 6; 2:00 p.m.
They kept calling herThree, as in Girl #3, to remind her that she was just a number, expendable, without any identity. But she had a name. Sometimes she thought they wanted her to forget her name was Caroline. It was weird, because in a way she wanted to forget—she didn’t want these things to be happening to Caroline, to the girl she had been. But she knew she had to hang on to everything she knew about herself. That’s how she would beat them.
Girl #3—Caroline—wore a tiara. She also wore the diamond ring. The woman did her hair so the tiara would stay put when she moved. They wanted her to believe that if she did what they wanted, all the jewelry would be hers one day.
She didn’t care one bit about any of that. When William, her true love, had proposed to her, he had told her he wanted her to pick out the ring—he hadn’t wanted to get her something she didn’t like. She had kissed him and said she didn’t need one. He said he wanted to give her something, though. It didn’t have to be a diamond, but he wanted it to be something that would last their whole lives.
A desk, she had said. Maybe a desk?
They had shopped for one. They had had so much fun going to antique stores, tag sales, and the big flea market in Norwich, but he had died before it could be delivered. William was such a fine sailor. He had been captain of the sailing team at the United States Coast Guard Academy, and he had been asked to crew onAlastair, a maxi boat in the Newport to Bermuda Race.
Caroline didn’t know that much about sailing. She had met William in New London, where she had attended Connecticut College.
She had majored in art history and minored in psychology and loved how they both told stories. In her art history classes, she would sit in the dark in the auditorium, gazing at paintings up on the screen, hearing her professors point out details that unlocked the world of the artwork. Psychology did that too—unlocked the mysteries and secrets of people’s lives.
It would be understandable to imagine she had met William at a college event, because Connecticut College was right across the street from the United States Coast Guard Academy, where he had attended. But that’s not how it happened. They had met at a bar on Bank Street.
She had known instantly from his haircut that he was a Coast Guard cadet. He had looked at her and smiled.
She had said, “Hi, Coastie.”
He had said, “How can you tell?”
“Hmm,” she said.
“Okay,” he said, smiling.
“It’s obvious,” she said.
“Why?” he asked.
“Things,” she said. He was so handsome, and she loved his eyes, and everything in her body swirled into a tornado.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I just . . .” she began.
“The way I look,” he said.
She said, “Not the haircut.”
“No, then what?”
“Your eyes,” she said.
She had gazed strong and hard into his eyes and knew that they had already spent a lot of time staring at the sea. Then she lowered her head and tried to think of how she could tell. When she looked up at him, she saw beautiful sage-green eyes that had gazed at the horizon but that were at that moment focused only on her.
“Because you want to save people who are lost at sea,” she said.
“Well, I am in the Coast Guard,” he said, and they both grinned.
Oh, and the time that had followed. They met each other’s families. After graduation, she got a job as an archivist at a museum. He shipped out, and it had been nearly unbearable for both of them. Somehow, they had survived his first deployment, gone crazy in love over his homecoming, and he had proposed. He had loved the fact that she wanted a desk instead of a ring.
