“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?”