Her next sighting came years later, when she was fourteen. She swam across the pond on a Saturday morning in late August and there was the boy, shirtless again, dragging a net on a pole through the water. A big yellow dog sat on the sand beside him. The boy’s skin was the same deep nut-brown it had been the first time she’d seen him, and he wore another faded bathing suit, this one red. He’d gotten taller, and his shoulders were broader, his forearms lean and corded with tendons that shifted beneath his skin as he moved the net. She could see a dusting of dark hair on his calves.
He lifted his head as Sarah approached. She kept her distance, treading water, waiting to see if he’d yell at her. Instead, he just looked out across the water, his face expressionless.
“What are you trying to catch?” she finally called.
He looked down at the net as if surprised to find it in his hands. “I don’t actually know,” he said, and shrugged. “I just found this in the boathouse…” He raised the pole and lifted the dripping net up and out of the water, so that Sarah could see a hole in the netting. “It’s ripped.” Before she could ask why he was wasting time dragging a torn net through the water, the boy said, “I was bored.” He smiled, and it transformed his face, turning it from sullen to almost painfully handsome. He waded out into the pond until he was knee-deep in the water, which reflected rippling sunlight into his bright-blue eyes. Sarah could hear the water lapping at the shore, and the sound of raised voices; a man’s deep voice, a woman shouting shrilly back.
The boy glanced over his shoulder, looking uncomfortable. “Do you know how to canoe?” he asked.
“Um, yeah,” said Sarah, who’d been on dozens of canoe trips through the marshes in her years at Audubon camp.
“Want to go?”
“Okay.” Sarah walked slowly out of the water. That summer, she’d been newly aware of her body. She braced herself for the kind of scrutiny she’d gotten familiar with at school, but the boy just set the ripped net and pole down on the sand and handed her a folded, threadbare towel. “My name’s Owen,” he said.
“I’m Sarah.” The towel felt warm from being left in the sun. Sarah wrapped it around her waist as the boy set off.
“Cool. C’mon. We’ll get the canoe.” He whistled, and the dog got to its feet, following them as Owen led her past the house, with its scabby paint and splintery wooden railings and the sounds of fighting still through its opened windows, to a boxy one-room concrete structure with the right side of its shingled roof almost completely caved in.
“This is the boathouse,” he announced.
“What happened?” Sarah asked, looking uneasily at the roof.
“Tree fell,” Owen said nonchalantly.
“Is it safe?” she asked.
Owen scratched at a mosquito bite on his arm. “I guess so. I mean, the roof hasn’t fallen in so far.”
Inside, the only illumination came from a single lightbulb on a string. Owen tugged it, and Sarah peered around the cobwebby dimness. She could make out a pair of canoes, a few paddles, a bicycle missing its front wheel, and a tennis racket that needed restringing. A volleyball net sagged against the wall next to a few rusty metal-legged beach chairs. At Owen’s direction, Sarah helped lift one of the canoes and carry it out to the beach. Sarah considered asking for a life jacket, which her mother always made her wear, then decided not to. The dog, whose name was Hopper, leaped into the center of the canoe and sat there, looking dignified and a little bored. Owen held the canoe steady as Sarah took the seat at the back of the boat. He towed the canoe out until he was knee-deep in the water before gracefully jumping up and in. He dipped his paddle, first left, then right, and Sarah matched her strokes to his as they started gliding toward the opposite shore.
Sarah learned that Owen lived in Westport, Connecticut, and he attended boarding school in Rhode Island. His parents were divorced, and both were remarried, and he spent every summer with his mother, Sass, and his stepfather, Anders, on the Cape.
“Me too,” she said. “I mean, not the divorce part. But we’re here all summer.”
“Do you live in Wellfleet?”
“Truro.” Sarah couldn’t see his face, but she could watch his back and arms and shoulders, the play of muscles beneath his skin. It was a hot day. The sky was cloudless and blue, with a breeze stirring the tops of the tall pine trees that circled the pond. A Sunfish with a yellow-and-white sail tacked across the water, a few other canoers paddled along the shoreline. On the public beach on the other side of the pond, little kids were splashing around in the shallows, while older kids sunned themselves or cannonballed off the raft.