“Sounds like he had his sales pitch down pretty well. ‘Ah, chérie, I am ze Frenchman. I must, how you say, cherchez la femme. Non? Oui!’ ” She laughed at the parody, and I felt doubly glad—glad to make her laugh, and glad to do it by skewering Stefan. “But you know what, Miranda?” I caught and held her eyes; she looked back skittishly. “Even if Stefan’s a womanizing jerk, that doesn’t mean you’re wrong about the other thing. You are something special. You’re lovely, you’re smart, you’re strong and brave and spirited. You’re amazing.”
She raised her wineglass in my direction. “I’ll drink to that,” she said, smiling . . . but the smile looked wistful. When she set down the glass, her fingers lingered on the stem, and I felt a powerful urge to reach across the table and squeeze her hand. But would the gesture be one of friendship and empathy, or something more complicated, something more like Stefan’s overtures? I hesitated, and while I did, she let go of the glass and took her hand off the table.
I retreated to safer, more neutral ground. “Before the year you went to Guatemala, how’d you spend your summers? Other trips abroad?”
“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.