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Oriana cocked her head, remembering how Rita had told her to pack a swimsuit, that she’d thrust her hand into her drawer and come up with a black bikini, a yellow one-piece. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d worn a swimsuit in public— let alone halfway around the world. She hadn’t even been able to verbalize her fears about her body to Reese, but now she heard herself say,“I feel so weird in a swimsuit now that I’m fifty.”
Brea nodded. “I feel like my body is abandoning me. The more I try to work with it, the more it works against me.”
Oriana wanted to cry again. This was the sort of conversation they should have been having for years— one that discussed every single era of getting older, from the twenties, through the forties, through menopause.
“Do you think it ever gets easier?” Oriana asked with a laugh.
Brea shook her head. “No, but I think it’s good to embrace the swimsuit. Our bodies are a sign of the years we’ve lived, ones we need to embrace and be proud of. If anything, we should be grateful.”
Thirty minutes later, Brea and Oriana were at the beach, wearing big t-shirts and shorts over their swimsuits. For a mile on either side of the white, sandy beach were no people, no tourists, and the palm trees around them shifted gently to and fro, majestic beasts beneath the shimmering blue. Oriana closed her eyes and listened to the subtle sweep of the water. And then, Brea’s hand found hers as Brea whispered, “Want to go in on three?”
This was what they’d done all those years ago when the ocean had terrified Oriana. She’d been so young, so little, armed with only a few weeks of swimming lessons. The ocean had been so sinister, this mass filled with sharks, whales, jellyfish, and mysterious sunken ships. But Brea had been unafraid, which had astounded Oriana. They’d probably been eight years old.
After they removed their t-shirts and shorts to reveal Oriana’s black two-piece and Brea’s blue tankini, Oriana tried to resist speaking ill of herself in her head. This was the body that had birthed two babies, the body that had brought her through time. She’d fed this body well. It had taken her on six-mile runs and on long walks through Central Park. This was the body that had loved Reese in innumerable ways, that had climbed mountainsides and skied down slopes.
“All right. On three. One, two, three,” Oriana said, and together, the two fifty-year-old women burst toward the blue, splashing through the very warm water until they got in up to their waists. Oriana laughed, amazed at how alike the water was to the air over them. It was seamless.
Brea shifted back to float on the water, her dark salt and pepper hair spreading out on the top of the water. Oriana could have cried at how beautiful she looked.
It was then that she allowed herself to ask the question that had been heavily on her mind for many years.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Brea’s eyes shifted toward her. “Tell you what?”
Oriana swallowed. “Why didn’t you tell me Kenny was so sick?”
Truthfully, that was probably the thing that stung the most.
“You were my best friend,” Oriana went on. “But Kenny was a dear friend to me and Reese. We should have known about it. We should have been there to take care of you both.”
Brea stood in the water, so her hair was flat across her chest and upper stomach. Her eyes were enormous. “I wanted to tell you. I just didn’t know how. That probably sounds crazy to you, so many years afterward. Because in our memories, we were always thick as thieves, weren’t we?”
“I like to think we were,” Oriana breathed.
“But I felt you falling away from me,” Brea offered. “I was so proud of you, the person you already were and the person you were going to be. But I felt like there was a shield around you.”
Oriana frowned. In her memory, she’d been a loyal friend to Brea, attempting to give her a leg-up in an industry Brea wasn’t quite ready for. But then again, the industry was cut-throat in ways that had nearly swallowed Oriana whole. During those early years, Oriana had had to push herself, if only to keep herself above water, metaphorically.
“I’m going to come with you,” Brea told Oriana again, her eyes heavy. “I’ve been away for too long. And I think, if you left me here alone to go back, my heart might break so much that it’ll stop beating. And I’ll just get older and older, without a heart.”
Oriana nodded, sensing Brea was right— that, now they were back together, they had to face this head-on.
“When this comes out,” Oriana offered, “we have to stand strong.”
“We will,” Brea said.
“But we’ll do it on Martha’s Vineyard. Where we’ve always belonged,” Oriana finished.
Back at Brea’s house, Oriana purchased two flights back to Boston to leave the following afternoon. This gave Brea just a few hours to tell her landlord she was leaving and pack up her few things.
“People do this kind of thing in Thailand all the time,” Brea explained. “They just take off. We’re all running away from something. But now, I’m running toward my past. How funny is that.”
ChapterNineteen
June 2000
The weather on Martha’s Vineyard hadn’t cooperated all June long. Tourists were miserable, cooped up in hotel rooms as a violent rain splattered across their windowpanes, and sailors protested, going south to the Caribbean to have the summers they’d dreamed for.
