Long Island, Summer, 1964

The shark attack lasted thirty seconds. Some people saw a fin. Some people did not. Everyone saw the girl. Everyone remembers the girl.

Bonnie and Barbara are twins, born just thirty seconds apart and identical in a carbon copy way. When Barbara picks up the beige receiver of the telephone in the hallway, people often say, “Well hello, Bonnie!” When Bonnie raises her hand in geometry, sure of the answer, her teacher smiles expectantly and calls out, “Barbara, do you want to solve the equation?” Walking side by side down the street, Bonnie and Barbara appear as if a polished mirror, like those in the changing room at Sears and Roebuck, were hanging between them.

And yes, twins grow up; twins grow up and they grow apart, but at sixteen years apiece, thirty-two years combined, Bonnie and Barbara are remarkably matched. Today they are swimming fast, clean breaststrokes parallel to one another, beyond the breakers. Orange buoys bob beside them, drop-off markers tipping and tumbling in their wake, slick with salt water and radiant with abundant sunshine.

Children on shore carry red pails full of ocean water, red pails full of sand. Bonnie and Barbara’s mother, bent over a cooler, is pouring lemonade into a tumbler the color of the sky. The sour liquid makes the ice cubes crack. Casey Dubois, last year’s senior high prom queen, is on her boyfriend’s shoulders in waist-deep water. Her blousy black and white two-piece flaps in the July air. Waves are hitting him square in the chest. Other sunbathers are splashing. Everyone else is splashing, splashing. And just then Bonnie and Barbara are sailing past. Bonnie and Barbara are identical fishes swimming past, and then—in the space and span of one single gasp of salted ocean air—the sync of their strokes suddenly snaps out of place. At once, Barbara is trailing.

Barbara is trailing Bonnie in the blue-green water. Barbara is just a stroke behind. Both girls are competitive swimmers yet people have called Bonnie a dolphin. It’s just a nickname, but it bothers her twin. It bothers Barbara just a little and it makes Bonnie blush. Bonnie’s fair cheeks turn pink when they compliment her form, saying, “Oh Bonnie, we’re not sure if you’re a teenager or a dolphin.” People don’t comment on Barbara looking like any sort of porpoise. People haven’t commented on Barbara’s swimming at all. Barbara can sing, though. She sang a tune by the Supremes at a talent show recently. The crowd gave her a standing ovation. It wasn’t just her parents standing, either—it was the whole audience. The whole audience was standing, standing and clapping. Someone asked, “Oh Barbara, where’d you get such soul?” And Barbara’s fair cheeks were just a shade pinker than usual.

Ten seconds. Every white, sun-bleached lounge chair is emptied by the commotion. Everyone is rushing toward the water, toward the bubbles, the gurgling, the arms and the wild screams. The empty chairs, left behind, are wooden, slatted and covered in abandoned towels. The towels are blue; the towels are fuchsia, teal, red, purple and green. From above, from the sky, the beach looks like a gumball machine. Every single body on that sandy white sand beach is ankle deep in ocean water, breath caught in their throats, salty air burning on stuck tongues. People are not sure what they are seeing, hearing. Not yet. The sunbathers and the swimmers, interrupting the blue-white-blue-green color of the ocean waves, wear swimsuits in the same color assortment as the towels on the empty chairs, and they also look like gumballs in a gumball machine. They look like chewy, sugary things.

Twenty seconds. People see a girl. People see one girl. Then, people see another girl. Or, the same girl? The water erupts: Silver, sunlight, glints of white, splashes of red, crimson. What is that? Casey Dubois is on shore. She is counting the seconds in her mind, her hand over her mouth. She isn’t aware that she’s counting or that the counting has turned the corner, now, becoming a countdown. She’s just counting: Nine, eight, seven, six… Pale arms are reaching for the sky…five, four…a foot breaks through a wave…three, two, one… Bonnie and Barbara’s heads appear on the surface, one no longer wearing a black bathing cap. The heads bob toward shore, one slowly towing the other.

“Not Bonnie!” screams the twins’ mother.

“Was it Barbara?” someone asks.

These questions and comments ripple across the sand.

The shark attack lasted thirty seconds. Five minutes after it began, two girls sprawled, eyes closed, on land amongst the crowd. Their mother and Casey Dubois and strangers in rainbow colors hovered over them, frozen, unsure. And Bonnie and Barbara—whichever was which—tried simply and desperately to steady their breath, to breathe in sync once more. A small, wide-eyed boy stepped out of the crowd, closer, only to have his mother pull him back into the mass, yank him away while trying not to look herself.

A siren’s wail drifted in then, stirring the stillness, rousing the gathering anew. But the identical girls only lay close on the sand, unmoving and identical still, but for the one that now seeped life, a part missing, a part removed in an instant, one hot summer day on Long Island.

Inspired by “Long Island, Summer, 1964,” an original Ian Dingman illustration.