She is, therefore, shocked the next morning when she paws through her bag for her phone—she bookmarked a frittata recipe on Instagram that she wants to try—and finds she has one missed call from Delilah, one from Phoebe, and three from Fast Eddie, the most recent one only two minutes earlier.
She figures Delilah and Phoebe are calling about pickleball—they’re going to play for the first time this week—but what is up with Eddie?
Then Sharon sees the alert from the Nantucket Current on her phone: Fire Destroys House in Pocomo, Woman Missing off Homeowners’ Boat.
Sharon can’t click fast enough. As she reads, she murmurs, “Oh my god, oh my god”—the Richardsons’ house burned to the ground. Their personal concierge has gone missing off their boat! Leslee and Bull apparently hosted a sunset sail, where they renewed their wedding vows. When they received word about the fire, they motored back, and only when they reached the mooring in Pocomo did they realize Coco was missing.
Sharon calls Fast Eddie. He picks up on the first ring, his tone somber. “Hey.”
“Is this a joke?” Sharon says. She realizes she sounds just like her twins. “The Richardsons’ house burned down?” Sharon thinks about the dual grand staircases, the pink lacquered shelves above the Lucite bar in the party room, the iconic octagonal deck. It’s all gone? That’s a minor concern, of course, compared to the missing personal concierge. “What happened to Coco?”
“Nobody knows. Lucy Shields launched a search; a copter flew over from Woods Hole; they had a fleet of ATVs searching the south shore, and they found her clothes washed up out at Smith’s Point. But they can’t find her.”
Tears sting Sharon’s eyes. “I don’t care about the Richardsons’ house…”
“Nor do I,” Eddie says. “As far as I’m concerned, the address of that place should be Six-Six-Six Pocomo Road.”
“Coco has to be okay,” Sharon says. “But what if she isn’t?”
39. There Is No Story Here
She hits the water with a smack that disorients her. Her shorts balloon, and her phone falls out of her hand; she grabs for it but then realizes it’s too late. The water is a green glass globe with a stream of translucent bubbles, her own breath escaping. Which way is up? For one panicked second, Coco isn’t sure. She kicks her feet, feels instinctively that she’s going down, not up, flips around, and pulls apart the water like she’s opening a heavy curtain until she breaks the surface. In the twilight, Coco can see the sailboat, but it’s cruising away from her, both motors churning.
She tries to swim toward the shore; the beach at Eel Point is probably only a few hundred yards ahead. But the water has other plans for her. The current carries her out; it’s one stroke forward, two strokes back. She tells herself not to panic—she knows that in a riptide, you swim parallel to shore. She does this for a while. Is she getting closer? Yes, she thinks so. Her sodden polo shirt is weighing her down, and she’s having trouble using her arms. She treads water for a second, though even this is a challenge. The water is muscular, insistent: She will do what it tells her. She wrangles off her polo, unbuttons her shorts, lets them both go. She’s lighter now, but she’s lost ground. She watches as the westernmost tip of the island, Smith’s Point, recedes.
So what now? She turns and sees land behind her. Tuckernuck, Whale Island. It looks close but she knows this is deceptive; it’s half a mile away. Her shoulders start to ache as she swims, and she can no longer feel her legs. She remembers swimming off Great Point, Kacy’s warning about sharks. She moves in the direction she knows land to be, though now the dark land is nearly indistinguishable from the dark sky. She doesn’t think about Leslee or Bull or Lamont or Kacy or her mother, Georgi, back in Rosebush, who is no doubt vaping at the picnic table out back of the house with Kemp. Or, rather, she does think about them but only to remind herself that she can’t waste her precious energy thinking about anything other than getting to shore.
Is she going to die out here?
Coco kicks, scoops her arms forward. She can swim. She has swum not only in her murky, turtle-infested pond but also in the cobalt water of the Lake of the Ozarks, the turquoise water of St. John, clear to the white sandy bottom.
She hears a helicopter, but it’s far away. Even so, she treads water, waves her arms, cries out. Someone is looking for her. She has to make it to Tuckernuck. There’s nothing but ocean between here and Portugal.
Coco’s arms grow heavy; she kicks with all her might just to stay above the surface. Waves smack her face, water goes up her nose, down her throat. She thinks she can still see the coastline but she’s not sure, and then she sees—or thinks she sees—a pinprick of yellow light. A moment later, it disappears. What did Lamont say about Tuckernuck? No electricity, only generators. She gazes up in the sky and sees stars, but navigating by them is a pipe dream. She tries to remember where she saw the light and swims in that direction. She has to stop and tread water in order to catch her breath; she flips onto her back and floats but she feels the current carrying her in what she’s certain is the wrong direction. She’s out of gas, plain and simple. She can’t move her arms; her legs are two lead weights pulling her down.
As Coco slips below the surface, she replays her favorite movie scenes in her head.
The hotel-bed scene in Lost in Translation.
Armageddon: The crew singing “Leaving on a Jet Plane” as they board the spaceship.
“O Captain! My Captain!” in Dead Poets Society.
Finding Nemo, the scene with Crush the turtle. Also the fish tank in the dentist’s office. Just keep swimming, Coco thinks. Her lungs burn; she lets her breath go.
Rocky running up the art museum’s steps.
All of Barbie.
And, of course, the final scene of The Player, which has long served as the touchstone for Coco’s artistic vision. She has a purpose. She is a screenwriter.
Coco fights her way up, breaks the surface, gasps for air.
There is no story here, Bull said. But he was wrong.
40. Friday, August 23, 6:15 A.M.
“Kacy!” The Chief’s voice booms and Kacy startles from a dream. She was in her apartment in San Francisco waiting for DoorDash. Alerts came onto her phone: Your driver is seven minutes away… Four minutes away… Your driver has arrived! Kacy opened the door, and a teenager handed over her food, and Kacy somehow intuited that it was Little G. He had lived, he had grown up. And when Kacy turned to Isla to say, Look, Little G survived after all, he’s here with our beignets from Brenda’s! she realized the person sitting at her kitchen table wasn’t Isla. It was Stacy Ambrose.
“Kacy!” Her father is in the doorway of her bedroom, using his police-chief voice. She’s in trouble, but why?
She opens her eyes. “Daddy?” Her father is in his pajama bottoms and a Cisco Brewers T-shirt; his hair is a mess. What time is it? Then Kacy remembers about Coco and sits up.
“They found her,” the Chief says. “On the south shore of Tuckernuck. Tate Cousins was out running and she saw something washed up on the beach. She thought it was a seal, but then she realized—”
“Dad,” Kacy says. “Is she alive?”
“She’s alive,” the Chief says.
Coco is admitted to Nantucket Cottage Hospital and treated for dehydration and exhaustion. As soon as the Chief gets the okay from the nursing staff, he and Zara go in to question Coco about what happened.
“I’m not sure,” Coco says. “I don’t remember.”
“Can you walk us through what you do remember?” Zara says. “Starting with when you all left to get on the boat. Who was the last one out of the house?”
“Leslee,” Coco says. “I went out to the boat early with the trays from the caterer, like usual. The guests came in stages on the dinghy. Leslee was the last one out of the house. She was in her white dress, because the vow renewal was a surprise and she wanted to make a walking-down-the-aisle entrance. It worked. Everyone on the boat applauded.”
“When you set sail, everything seemed okay at Triple Eight?” the Chief says. “There were no alarms going off?”
