“Are you kidding? I worked my butt off. I had summer jobs from the time I was twelve. Babysitting. Mowing yards. I taught swimming a couple years. Spent three summers as a lifeguard.”
“City pool? Country club?”
“Nah, the real deal. Daytona.”
“Daytona Beach? Lifeguarding on the ocean?” She nodded. “Ever save a life?”
She smiled briefly. “Yeah. I did. I saved a life.” She looked away, somewhere into the past, then looked at me again. “But I lost one, too.” I waited, very still, hoping she’d go on. “My second summer, there was a girl — eleven, maybe twelve; she still had a kid body, and still had a kid’s innocence and exuberance. It hadn’t gotten complicated for her yet, the way things get for girls when they hit puberty, you know? Anyhow, she was bodysurfing on this gorgeous, gorgeous day.” I felt a rush of dread for the girl. “The waves were perfect — sweet little breakers, three, maybe four feet. That girl was having such a great time, just flinging herself into those waves with total abandon, riding them all the way in. She’d stagger up out of the foam with a suit full of sand and this huge, dazed grin on her face. Made me happy just to watch her. Then along comes this big-ass wave, twice the size of the others she’s been riding.”
“Oh no! What happened?”
“I can still see it so clearly. The top of the wave is just starting to curl when it gets to her. The wave lifts her up, and up — this twig of a girl, halfway up a mountain of water — and then it comes crashing down. I mean, that wave just explodes with her inside it.”
“God, how awful.”
“I see her tumbling, flipping end over end, then she smashes into the sand headfirst, like a post being pounded by a pile driver. When I got to her she was facedown, underwater, being pulled out by the undertow. I was sure she was dead, or worse — paralyzed, a quad.” I felt nearly sick just hearing about it. “But she wasn’t. Amazingly, she wasn’t. Her forehead looked like somebody’d taken a cheese grater to it, but once I got the water out of her lungs, she came to and she was okay. Coughing and crying, but okay.” In the candlelight, diamonds sparkled at the corners of Miranda’s eyes and then rolled down her cheeks. She wiped her eyes on her napkin, then blew her nose into it with a trumpeting honk. Then she laughed. “Miranda Lovelady: You can dress her up, but you can’t take her out.”
I felt as if I’d just ridden a roller coaster. “Wow. How come you never told me that story before?”
“We’ve never talked swimming before.”
“So that was, what, ten years or so ago?” She nodded. “Whatever happened to the girl? Have you stayed in touch with her?”
She shook her head. “Couldn’t. Didn’t know how. As soon as she came to, her parents yanked me off her, scooped her up, and skedaddled — straight to the ER, probably. Never asked my name or even said thank you. Too freaked out to be polite, I guess.” She shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. I’m still the one who saved her. Funny — I like to imagine I’m that girl’s hero; that she thinks of me as some sort of guardian angel watching over her. God knows, girls need all the watching over they can get.” She said it sadly, and I wondered if Miranda wished she’d gotten more watching over and guarding.
“You’re my hero, Miranda. You make me proud.”
“Thanks, Dr. B. Sometimes I make me proud, too. I did the right thing that time.” She looked away again. “Not so much the next time. The next summer. It was a guy that time — an adult. He got into a rip current, got carried out. By the time I saw him, he was out past the surf line. He didn’t know what to do, and he panicked; he was flailing, struggling to get back toward shore. Wrong thing to do. You can’t beat a rip current head-on; can’t outswim it. You’ve got to turn ninety degrees, swim parallel to the shore, till the current lets you go.” She paused, took a breath, then another. “His mistake was, he tried to fight it. My mistake was, I hesitated.” She shook her head, still angry at herself. “He was a big guy — taller than you, and stocky; I’d noticed him when he waded in — and when he got into trouble I hesitated, just sat there, because I was afraid he’d overpower me, take me down with him. Finally I grabbed a torpedo float and started swimming, but by then it was too late. He went under when I was halfway there; washed up two days later and a mile south, minus his eyes and his lips and his fingers and toes.” She drained her wineglass. “That’s still on my shame list, written in indelible ink. Thing is, I’m not sure I could’ve gotten to him in time even if I’d dived right in. But I’ll never know. Because at the crucial moment, I hesitated. God, I’ve wished a million times for a do-over, you know?”
“I do,” I said. “I’ve got a few of those, too. Who doesn’t? But from where I sit, Miranda, I see you do the right thing all the time, again and again.” I made her look at me. “Once upon a time, when I was wishing hard for a do-over, someone older and wiser told me that life’s a river. It’s not Daytona Beach, where the same water keeps washing up on the same damn spot again and again; it’s a fast-flowing river. That guy’s death? That happened way upstream, Miranda. Trying to swim back to that spot is like swimming against a rip current. Remember that girl you saved. You’ve spent all these years being her guardian angel. Let her return the favor. I bet she’d loan you some of that innocence and exuberance if you asked.”
She looked away as she parsed what I’d said, looking for any trace of insincerity or condescension, I imagined. Finding none — for there was none to be found — she smiled. This time, if there was wistfulness or poignancy in her smile, I couldn’t see it. And I was looking mighty close.
The candles were burning down and the night was getting cool by the time we left La Mirande. I wished I had a jacket to wrap around her shoulders; I considered wrapping an arm around her, but there was something fragile, something…sacred, somehow, in the air around us, and I didn’t want to risk disturbing it.
Thank you, I said silently to the universe, or to God, or to the river of life. Thank you.
The next morning, Stefan — low on sleep and high on irritation — was still struggling to install and debug the motion detector. I offered to help, though the offer was neither sincere nor particularly useful, given my ineptness with electronics. Blessedly, Stefan declined and actually shooed us away, which meant that I had Miranda to myself again. When we emerged from the palace onto the plaza, I felt almost giddy with freedom — a middle-aged schoolboy playing hooky. “What shall we do, Miss Miranda?”
“Let’s pretend we’re tourists,” she said. We dashed to Lumani. We arrived there in search of a guidebook; we departed with not only a guidebook but also a car: In a gesture of remarkable trust and generosity, Jean and Elisabeth loaned us their car, so — ensconced in an aging Peugeot and armed with a tattered English-language guide to Provence — we set out. Gingerly, for it had been years since I’d driven a car with a clutch, I eased us into the street and along the base of the ancient wall, which bristled with watch-towers every fifty yards. I checked the mirror often to see if we were being followed. Unless an eleven-year-old girl on a bicycle had been trained as an assassin, we were in the clear.
We started with a detour through the town across the river, Villeneuve-les-Avignon. Villeneuve meant “New Town,” Miranda translated; it was a name that had been accurate once upon a time, but that time was a thousand years gone. During the thirteen hundreds, Villeneuve, which was not so tightly cramped as Avignon, became a wealthy suburb of the papal city, and fifteen cardinals built palaces there, though none, as far as we could see, had survived. What had survived were two monumental structures: a 130-foot tower that once controlled the western end of Saint Bénézet’s Bridge, back when the bridge spanned the entire river; and a massive fortress that encircled the town’s hilltop. Both the tower and the fortress had been built to send a clear message to the uppity people of Avignon: The pope might hold the keys to heaven, but the king’s earthly army could break open the city gates on an hour’s notice, if papal push ever came to sovereign shove.