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And then she sees him.
She’d know him anywhere. She knows the shape of him: the tilt of his head, the lean lines of his silhouette as he stands against the sky. She knows him even though they’ve never met except at a distance, ever since that night when she ran away from Harold Chandler and stood on the pier as the sun went down. The boy on the bow of the boat. Since then, she has seen him countless times. His boat passes nearly every evening as it did that day, carving a shimmering path through the water as the last light slips from the sky, and nearly every evening, Miriam is there to watch it pass.
It has been four years since that moment, and she couldn’t say when going down to the pier began to feel like a ritual—or when she realized that it wasn’t really the sunset she was anxious to see, but him. Sometimes it would rain and she would be forced to stay indoors, wondering if he was passing by, and if, seeing the pier empty, he might wonder where she was. Did he feel the same magnetic pull as she did? Did he find himself thinking at odd times of the pier and the girl who stood there watching the boats, and the way the sun danced like liquid gold on the water as it stretched out between them? Sometimes she thought about waving or calling out to him, but then the moment would pass, and she’d be glad she didn’t. There was something delicious about it, the tension, the two of them watching each other to see who would make a move and break the spell. Lately it had occurred to Miriam that if they were both the same sort of stubborn, things might continue on like this for another four years, maybe even forever. Maybe they’d stare at each other from a distance until they were old and stooped and gray, go to their graves without ever even having said hello.
But now here he is, standing far above her but still closer than he’s ever been. He doesn’t see her. He’s focused, his body tense—and then he runs, leaps, and the sight of him with his arms outstretched is so beautiful that her breath catches in her throat. She watches him fold his body in the air and then plummet, headfirst, entering the water so cleanly that there’s barely a splash.
“Gosh,” says a voice behind her, and Miriam turns to see the rest of the group, four wide-eyed girls with Harold bringing up the rear. Dodie, the youngest, steps up next to Miriam and shakes her head. “Gosh, I wouldn’t dare. Do you think— Oh, but look, there he is!”
Miriam turns back to see the jumper: resurfaced and swimming easily back to shore. His head swivels toward the sound of Dodie’s voice, but he doesn’t look at Dodie. He looks at Miriam and keeps looking, even as the rest of the group begins to chatter among themselves, setting out towels and kicking off shoes and settling down to their picnic. She isn’t sure, but she thinks she sees him smiling.
The two groups make a point of ignoring each other, but Miriam no longer feels like an intruder; the boy from the boat keeps glancing at her and she at him, and it feels like a dance. Miriam looks at him, then looks away—and then looks over her shoulder to see Harold, who is sitting in the shade underneath a tree with a conspicuously empty space on the blanket beside him. She knows he wants her to join him; any moment, he’ll stop shooting her hopeful looks and actually work up the courage to ask, and she realizes that if he does, she’ll feel compelled to say yes.
“I think I’ll go for a swim,” she says, standing up.
Her bathing suit is the same bright yellow as the water lilies that dot the pond, a halter-style two-piece that reveals a strip of creamy skin just above her navel. When she comes out of the woods after changing her clothes, she can sense heads turning in her direction. Not just one, but everyone’s. The men on the ledge and Harold’s sisters and Harold himself, but he looks down at his own lap rather than meeting her eyes when she turns toward him.
“Are you sure you want to do that? There might be snapping turtles,” he says, and she feels a flare of annoyance.
“Don’t fuss, Harold,” she says, more sharply than she means to. She tosses her dress over a branch and enters the water in one motion, gasping a little as it closes over her shoulders, and swims away fromthe bank without so much as a look back, not even when Peggy calls after her to ask if it’s very cold. She doesn’t stop swimming until she’s halfway across, and then she rolls onto her back and floats, eyes closed, feeling the sun on her face and relishing the sense of being alone at last. Peggy and Dodie and their friends are still chattering away on the bank, but their voices are blissfully distant, just noise, like the birdsong in the trees or the occasional shout and splash of the local boys as they jump from the ledge. She drifts, weightless. Waiting. The trickle of water in her ears sounds like music—and then, very nearby, there’s a splash, and a light spray of water against her face.
“Hello,” a voice says, and Miriam’s eyes fly open. Her head bobs briefly underwater before she resurfaces with a splutter. She knows even before she swipes the water from her eyes that it’s him, and the skin on her arms ripples out in gooseflesh, not with the cold but with anticipation. Even with pond water in her eyes, and even with his hair slicked down to his head and the tip of his chin submerged, her first up-close glimpse of him is thrilling.
“Oh, hello,” she says, and he grins, showing an even row of teeth with the slightest gap between the front two.
“Ah, she speaks,” he says.
“Only when spoken to,” she says.
“Is that why you’ve never said hello to me?”
“Why, what do you mean?” she says, her tone teasing. “Have we met before?”
“Only about a hundred times, by my count. ’Course we’ve never been formally introduced. I’m Theodore Caravasios.” He smiles again. “Should we shake hands?”
Miriam laughs and extends her hand above the water, kicking her legs to stay afloat, and he clasps it briefly, sending another chill down her spine.
“I’m—”
“Oh, I know who you are, Miss Miriam Day. Your family is famous around here.”
She blinks, unsettled. “You know my father?”
“Not personally. But most every man with a fishing boat knows Roland Day. He used to do a good business with a lot of them, back before the Depression.”
“Fishing business?” Miriam says innocently, but the way Theo laughs, she can tell he knows that her father was pulling something a lot more lucrative than seafood out of the harbor in the dead of night—and that he knows she knows, too.
“That’s right,” he says. “Pretty funny-looking fish. Fetched quite a price, too, from what I hear. But that was before my time.”
“Are you a fisherman, Theodore Caravasios?”
“A lobsterman,” he says, and she can hear the pride in his voice. “Well, I will be, anyway. That’s my uncle’s boat I’m working on, but I’ll have my own someday.”
“Then maybe when you’re the captain, you’ll take me for a spin,” Miriam says. “Instead of just floating on by.”
“Just so long as you understand I intend to run a tight ship. You’ll have to earn your keep.”
“Fine by me.”
