I went away to college when I was seventeen. Everyone forgets that. They think I’m one of the islanders who never left, and sometimes I think of myself that way, too. But I had almost an entire semester in Providence before I came back to the island.

I took four classes. Intro to psychology, intro to Shakespeare, library research, and a freshman seminar about modernism. I had notebooks labeled with the name of each class, and very little in life had given me as much joy as all that blank paper.

I liked school. I liked my professors. I liked my roommate, who struck me as supernaturally uncomplicated. She was sleepy when it was time to sleep, she woke up when it was time to wake up, and she was hungry when it was time to eat. When it was chilly she said, “I’m chilly,” and put on a sweater.

I liked campus, all the old brick buildings with their domed windows and iron gates. The buildings I was used to on Wolf Island felt like extensions of the island itself, gray and brown wooden things, driftwood and bone. But in Providence the buildings were massive red and gray boxes, with pretty roofs and orderly windows.

Mostly I liked the town itself, with its brick sidewalks, its galleries and coffee shops. There was a footbridge I walked over almost every day so I could look down into the Providence River and think about how it ran into Narragansett Bay and then opened into the ocean.

One night in September I stumbled upon a tradition I hadn’t known about before. The river, I found, was on fire. At least one hundred tiny bonfires were blazing on the river itself, lit by men and women in gondolas with long torches who floated silently past, leaving fire in their wakes. Water fire. I felt the shock of it deep in my system, the beauty of the flame and the cool water reflecting it. I’d never felt a contradiction so viscerally before.

I was only seventeen. Everything was new to me, and not just the buildings and the river and the classes. The sensations were new. The feeling of being alone in the world. I missed my mother, and I missed Lucas, but even missing them was a good feeling, because unlike missing Baby B or my dad, I would see them again, at Thanksgiving.

But when I’d been at school for almost six weeks, my mom called to tell me that Lucas was on top of the lighthouse.

“Again?” I said.