An ambulance arrived. There was a crowd around Tess’s gray, limp body, including Roxbury, Toxic Moxie, and Andrea, who was praying and standing as still as a statue of the Virgin Mary. The paramedics sliced through the bystanders, and as they did, Toxic Moxie put the breath into Tess that saved her. He blew death out. Tess coughed up harbor water, spewing out a whole stream in a projectile vomit, and then she pinkened. The crowd sighed, and Andrea wept as Tess opened her eyes. Andrea thought, I will become a nun.

She was forty-four years old now and swimming once again. She hadn’t swum in sixteen years; she had been too busy building sandcastles, and later watching her kids boogie board, pacing back and forth on the shore while they battled the pounding waves. But she was back at it religiously, half a mile of freestyle out past the breakers. God, it felt good! She wore goggles now, showing her age; her eyes couldn’t take the salt anymore. She swam and swam and swam—all the way down to Surfside—and then she swam back. When she climbed out of the water, her legs were shaky and weak from the workout. She was reminded of the superstar she used to be, the fastest swimmer in high school, and then in college. She had been named to the First Team All-American; she had broken four Big East fly records; she had made it to the Olympic Trials in Mission Viejo, where she missed placing in the 200-meter by three one-hundredths of a second.

During the years that her children had been small, Andrea had rarely looked upon her trophies or thought about her name on the record board that hung at the Boston College pool. But when she did, she wondered, was that swimmer really the same person as the one who was now mixing rice cereal with baby food? This summer, swimming as strongly as ever, the answer was yes. (She pictured herself flipping at the wall, or shaking her muscles loose on the blocks before tensing for the gun…)

Andrea DiRosa!

It was impossible to see with her goggles on—it was like looking through a windshield in a downpour. But when she emerged from the water, she thought she saw the Chief sitting on her towel. She removed her goggles. It was the Chief, Ed Kapenash, Eddie, her husband of eighteen years, sitting on her beach towel in his uniform. His cruiser was parked up on the bluff. From out of nowhere the feeling returned, the sick, panicked suspicion that she was sitting on air and was about to fall. It was five-thirty. The kids got off work at six and the Chief normally knocked off around seven, if there were no emergencies.

Was there an emergency now, or a lack of emergencies? Had he shown up to surprise her, to be romantic? The Chief had only one facial expression and that was stoic, but at this moment the stoic looked different, though Andrea couldn’t say how.

“Is everything okay?” Andrea said.

He patted the spot beside him on the towel. “Sit down.”

“Is it one of the kids?”

“No.”

She sat, dried her face, ran her fingers through her hair. Her book was there, The English Patient, open facedown. She had seen the movie but had not read the book, though she’d always meant to. And that was another treat of the Summer of Me—she was actually doing things she’d meant to do for years. The book, as it turned out, was sumptuous and textured, it was a feast for her mind. She had a college education, after all; she had majored in comparative literature, she had read Kafka and Saul Bellow and E. M. Forster, but the ideas and images that had been ignited by those books so many years ago were gone.

Reading again was a luxury and a delight. Until this second, seeing her paperback copy of The English Patient had made her feel privileged, intelligent, worthy. But now she got the strange feeling that she would never finish it.

“It’s Tess,” the Chief said. “And Greg.”

“They’re dead?” Andrea said. She said this only to eliminate it as a possibility.

“Yes,” he said.

When Tess was nine years old, when she nearly drowned on L Street Beach, the paramedics had, as a precaution, taken her to Children’s Hospital, and it was there that Andrea faced the rest of her family: her parents, Mikey and Rose; Tess’s parents, Giancarlo and Vivian; her grandmother; her aunts; Father Francis, the parish priest; and Sister Maria José, the nun from Guatemala who lived in a room in Mikey and Rose’s basement. Half the family thought Andrea was a hero—again, a hero!—for saving Tess, who had ventured out over her head. But there was a certain faction of the family—Aunt Agropina, who was not actually Andrea’s aunt but rather Vivian’s aunt, as well as maybe Giancarlo and Vivian themselves—who wondered how long Tess had been swimming before Andrea noticed her. Tess was not just any swimmer on L Street Beach, she was Andrea’s beloved younger cousin. Practically sisters, the two of them! Why wasn’t she watching? It’s family! Tess’s older brother Anthony had been on the beach as well, and he reported that he had seen Tess swim out, doing the butterfly. Andrea saw the imperceptible head shakes, she heard the soft clucking. Not only had Andrea not been watching, but she had not been watching as poor Tess struggled to swim the butterfly like her older cousin. Tess had been trying to impress Andrea, and she had nearly died.

Andrea was filled with regret and guilt and shame. She sat with Sister Maria José, who wore a starched white blouse, blue A-line skirt, and black and white wimple, and thought, I will become a nun.

When Andrea heard the Chief say that Tess and Greg were dead, she pitched forward, coming face-to-face with her own weary legs. She emitted a long, guttural moan, the kind of moan she had not uttered since childbirth. She felt the Chief’s arms close around her.