Dan pulled into the parking lot at Children’s Beach. Children’s Beach was a green park with a band shell, a playground, and an ice-cream shack fronted by a small beach right on the harbor. Connie tried to keep her emotions in check. She hadn’t been to Children’s Beach since Ashlyn was a little girl. There had been a few summers when Connie had brought Ashlyn here every day-Ashlyn had gone down the slides, complaining if the metal was too hot on her legs, and Connie had pushed Ashlyn on the swings, back and forth a thousand times. In those days, the ice-cream shack had been a breakfast joint with the best doughnuts on the island. God, it hurt to think about it. Connie had brought Ashlyn here on days that Wolf had been asked to sail, and then they’d walked to the Yacht Club to meet him for lunch, and Connie’s only worry had been that Ashlyn might misbehave.

Dan sprang into action, and Connie and Meredith followed suit. He took the fishing poles, the beach towels, a gas can. Connie took one end of the cooler and Meredith took the other. Meredith, too, had an eye on the action at Children’s Beach-the mothers trying to get their toddlers to eat one more bite of peanut butter and jelly, the kids building sandcastles, the orthopedist’s dream that was a twenty-foot-high cone-shaped climbing structure on the beach-but she snapped out of her reverie. Was she thinking about Leo? Meredith took three life jackets in her free hand. Connie grabbed her beach bag.

Dan’s boat was moored along the dock. They walked down to the boardwalk in front of the White Elephant Hotel and climbed aboard.

It was a beautiful boat, a Boston Whaler Outrage with dual engines off the back. Connie fell in love with it immediately. It had a horseshoe of cushioned seating in the back and up front, and room for two behind the controls under a bimini. Toby was a sailor-a skill learned in summer camp in Cape May and then honed at the College of Charleston-and Wolf had been a sailor as well, but Connie had never warmed to the sport. Sailing was so much work, a combination of physical work and intellectual work, and it required luck. Connie loved being out on the water, but it was much easier to do it Dan’s way-turn a key and inhale those exhaust fumes.

Connie helped Dan gather the rope that tethered them to the slip. He guided the boat out into the harbor. Meredith was sitting up front, waving to the people on other boats. Connie joined her. Meredith was beaming. Beaming! She felt comfortable enough to wave to people.

Connie said, “You’re glad you came, aren’t you?”

“Shut up,” Meredith said. She raised her face to the sun and grinned.


“Where do you want to go?” Dan asked. Connie was sitting next to him behind the controls.

“Anywhere,” Connie said. “Everywhere.” She was happy-giddy, if a teensy bit uncomfortable to be sitting next to him in the girlfriend seat. But it was nice, too, to be able to just go where they wanted as fast as they wanted without worrying about the mainsail or the jib. She had never sat next to Wolf on a boat. When they sailed, he was always moving, always monitoring.

They cruised up harbor, past the huge homes of Monomoy and the huger homes on Shawkemo Point. Dan singled out certain houses and told Connie who owned them-this famous author, that captain of industry. The island looked especially verdant and inviting today. The houses seemed to be stage sets for summer: flags were snapping, beach towels hung from railings. Meredith scanned the land, one hand shielding her eyes, and then lay back in the sun with her glasses off and her eyes closed.

They tooled up to Pocomo Point, where they came across a fleet of Sunfish with white sails-kids learning the basics.

Dan said, “As soon as we’re out of their way, we’ll anchor and go for a swim.”

He stopped the boat in a beautiful, wide-open spot. Great Point Lighthouse was visible to the northwest and the handsome Wauwinet hotel was due north. Without the noise of the engine, the only sound was that of the waves slapping the side of the boat, and Connie suddenly felt anxious.

“Let me pull out the wine,” she said.

“It’s dazzling here,” Meredith said.

“We’ll swim,” Dan said. “And then we can have lunch.” He looked at Meredith. “Do you swim?”

“Yes,” she said. “I do.”

Connie pulled the cork from a cold bottle of chardonnay. She felt her blood quicken. She couldn’t pour fast enough. She wasn’t sure what was wrong with her. “Meredith was a champion diver in high school. She came in third at the state finals our senior year.”

“Really?” Dan said. “Well, then, I have a surprise for you.”

Connie filled a red Solo cup with chardonnay and guzzled the top third of it down. A cool burn slid down her throat, and she felt her muscles go slack.

“Wine?” she asked Dan.

He was moving the cooler and rearranging some other things at the stern and he said, “I’ll get a beer, in a minute.”

Typical man with his beer, Connie thought. Wolf had been a wine drinker. It had been one of the many elegant things about him. Connie took another sip. How often did men like Wolf come along?

“Meredith, wine?” Connie asked.

“No, thank you,” Meredith said.

Dan pulled something out of the back of the boat-a long white springboard. A diving board.

“There we go,” he said proudly.

“Oh, my God!” Connie said. “Meredith, a diving board!”

Meredith made her way to the back of the boat. She saw the springboard and put her hand to her mouth.

Dan said, “I got it for my kids. They love it.” He climbed up onto it, stripped off his T-shirt, which he threw into the well, and took a couple of test bounces. Then he approached the end of the board and did a soaring swan dive. He surfaced and rubbed at his eyes. “Your turn!” he called to Meredith.

Meredith looked at Connie. “I haven’t dived in years.”

“You were the best at Merion Mercy,” Connie said. “You held all those records.”

Meredith was pulling the bobby pins out of her head-off came the wig. Meredith’s real hair was matted underneath, and she shook it out.

“I can’t believe I’m going to dive,” she said. “Will I remember how?”

“Isn’t it like riding a bike?” Connie asked. She drank some more, and a feeling of well-being settled over her. Her arms tingled; there was a golden glow in her chest.

“I guess we’ll see,” Meredith said. She shed her cover-up and climbed onto the board. She walked to the end, then walked back. She gave it a few test bounces. Then, she composed herself at the back of the board, and, like a gymnast, she took one, two, three choreographed steps, bounced impossibly high, and folded her body into a perfectly straight up-and-down front dive. It was a thing of beauty. Connie blinked. She had gone to all of Meredith’s home meets in high school, and what struck her watching Meredith dive now was the time warp.

Dan whistled and clapped and shouted. Meredith surfaced, her hair wet and slick, and swam easily over to the ladder on the side of the boat.

Meredith said, “Just like riding a bike.”

Connie said, “Do another one. Do something fancy. Really show him.” She remembered Meredith once telling a reporter from the Main Line Times that a simple front dive or a reverse dive was the hardest to execute because her body wanted to flip and twist. Her body, she said, craved degree of difficulty.

Meredith climbed back up onto the board. She did a front one and a half pike. Her pike wasn’t as tight as it had been in high school, but that was to be expected.

Dan grabbed a towel and sat next to Connie. “Man,” he said. “Did you see that?”

“I told you,” Connie said. She drank her wine. She had two inches or so left in her cup. Another glass like that and she’d be ready for some food.

Meredith climbed back up onto the board. She walked out to the end with regal bearing and turned around.

Back dive. Her entry was perfect, her toes pointed, though she didn’t get the height she’d gotten in high school. God, Connie could remember the way Meredith had seemed to float in the air, the way she had seemed to fly.

“Do another one!” Connie said.

“I don’t know,” Meredith said. She mounted the board and did a backflip with a half twist.

Dan put his fingers in his mouth and whistled.

Connie said, “That was too easy!” Connie remembered Meredith stretching on the blue mats that the coaches laid out alongside the diving well. Meredith could put her face flush to her knees, her arms wrapped around her thighs. It hurt now just thinking about it.

Meredith did a simple inward dive. Then a reverse dive. Then, without any warning, she approached the end of the board and whipped into a front two and a half somersault, tuck. Dan hooted, and Connie wondered if she should feel jealous. She had been an aggressive field-hockey player in high school, but that didn’t inspire this kind of admiration. Connie touched Dan’s shoulder, to remind him that she was still there. “Are you ready for that beer?”

He said, “Aren’t you going to try?”

She filled her cup with wine-glug, glug, glug-and didn’t quite catch his meaning. Meredith executed something else; Connie only looked up in time to see Meredith’s legs enter the water. The key to a good entry was as little splash as possible.

Connie said, “Excuse me?” She corked the wine and stuck it back in the cooler.

“Aren’t you going to take a turn on the board?” Dan asked.

“Oh,” Connie said. “I don’t dive like that.”

“Come on,” Meredith said. “The water’s nice.”

“Come on,” Dan said, standing up. He climbed onto the board. “You must be hot.”

She was kind of hot, yes, but she didn’t like being pressured into things. And she still found the water too cold for swimming. But now if she said no, she would seem prissy and high maintenance or, worse, she would seem old. She would jump off the board once, she decided, and then she would drink that wine.