Charlie had taken to doing this, visiting the lake at all hours of night, which might have been dangerous, but she didn’t care. Her body had remembered the way that first night a week ago without needing to consult her mind. Past the ice cream shop and the empty soccer field, through the line of oaks fencing in the campus, straight out to the clearing.
And there it lay. Peaceful and calm, aglow beneath a luminous sky obscene with stars. She had forgotten it was like this here. She didn’t bother looking up in the city.
At the edge of the splintered pier, she pulled off her shoes and set them beside her. Didn’t even roll up her slim jeans, just dipped her toes into the cool water, leaning back on her arms, eyes closed, as though sunbathing. Her head spun from the anger and the wine. She wished so deeply to not be here now, but longed to be in this space two decades earlier, to undo and rewind. To have no history. Because beneath the spikes and armor, there remained that lit spark. Somehow. Impossibly. She hated it. But she had felt it tonight. Reignited by this setting and by the grip of memory.
She could still see those long-ago mornings right here. That first bet of theirs: the race to the other side of the lake. If he won, she would star in his Black Box show. She had secretly let him win, but just beat him the next time and the next and the next until he’d realized it. There had been that one night too, weeks later, after his show—their show. The kind of night your mind returns to again and again for years afterward.
The show was a one-woman one-act comedy, monologues of Shakespearean women talking about their terrible relationships: Lady Macbeth, Ophelia, Juliet, a whole mess of them. Nick had written it and been awarded the fellowship for it. But she had rewritten it with him that summer. And he’d let her, bristling only a moment before acknowledging she was right, which she loved him for. She had crystallized for him what he hadn’t been understanding from the resident dramaturge or even Grayson himself, with their vague touchy-feely direction: Push it further, challenge yourself, and come back. He had admitted to her, when they were on this very pier, in similar moonlight, still strictly friends, “I have no goddamn clue what they mean. If I did, I would do it. I feel like I reached a level I had no right to reach and now everyone will realize that.”
“Relax. Everyone of any real value feels like a fraud 90 percent of the time,” she had said like it was an artistic fact as basic as combining red and blue paint to make purple. “And the ones who don’t are pretty much always self-obsessed assholes. My research has shown.”
He’d smiled at this and let her read a few pages the next day.
“You’re missing out. This should be unexpected, unhinged. You have Lady Macbeth but really imagine Lady Fucking Macbeth on a bad date,” she’d told him. “It’s the experimental, edgy part of this theater, not the stuffy part that thinks it’s having fun if it does one play a season with no corsets.” They had sat shoulder to shoulder on the rickety pier, its wooden planks worn down by time. A bright sun rising in the hazy morning sky, clouds burning off.
“I’m not edgy. Or fun,” he’d admitted, toes in the water, eyes set in the distance. She’d let the silence wrap around them for a beat.
And then she’d pushed him in the lake.
One sharp shove.
When his head popped back up he was laughing. “Really? You just did that?” He’d shaken his head, water spraying, combed his hair back with his hands.
“See, you’re fun.”
“You’re lucky I’m a good swimmer.” He’d splashed water at her.
She hadn’t flinched, just let it hit her, hadn’t even closed her eyes. “You’re lucky you’re a good swimmer. I’m just lucky you stopped feeling sorry for yourself.”
The next afternoon, after she had read it all, they had met at the coffee shop, Bard’s Brew, a back table. He had nervously tapped his leg, shaking the table, and when she’d kicked his shin to stop, he’d tapped his fingers instead. He’d asked her to work on the play with him, looking through her with the same bright, intense eyes he’d had at dinner tonight. She had loved then that she could watch him think, could feel him listening.
She remembered it all, more clearly than she should. Lush, leafy branches rustled softly in the breeze, and she felt herself drifting off.
She awakened, surprised she had slept at all. She dug her phone from her pocket: nearly an hour; it was after 10 p.m. Texts from Matteo and Miles lit up her screen.
Grabbing her shoes, she took a few steps to leave. But stopped, not ready to go back yet, to the inevitable questions from her housemates. She let her shoes and phone drop from her hands onto the pier. A few paces back till her toes reached the edge, and she dived in, clothes still on. The crisp water enveloped her as she shot through it.
Then a flash of something else: that night in Boston Harbor.
She burst up to the surface, gasping.
Focused on her breathing, in and out, to slow it down, she treaded water. When she felt strong enough, she swam back to the pier and climbed out. She lay down on the grass now, her breathing still jagged. It was the first memory she had resurrected of the accident. Just slivers of sensation: bright streaks of city lights, the peace then sudden panic of waking engulfed by water.
Finally, wet feet shoved back into her shoes, she walked home.
Matteo was still awake, on the phone in his room, probably talking to Sebastian.
“Night, Charlie,” he shouted as she walked by, popping his head out of his doorway. He had done this the past six nights and it only now occurred to her that he might actually be waiting up.
She stopped, turned around.
“Call you right back, love.” He hung up on his husband. “The lake again?” he asked Charlie.
“Maybe,” she said, still clearly drenched.
“I don’t like this, just putting that out there, again. I get the baptism thing—”
“What baptism, it’s not—”
“I get the whole water-is-life symbolism thing.”
“No, that’s not what this is.”
“But I don’t like you there alone and—” He stopped a second. “Unless—did you have company? After your dinner?”
She didn’t answer, just exhaled, agitated.
“No. So I guess I don’t have to ask how it went?”
“No. You don’t.” She walked on, waving over her head. “Good night.”
“I do think he’s trying, Nick is,” Matteo called after her as she made her way upstairs to her room.
Well, Nick would have to try harder.