Paula Oliveira

Paula Oliveira is Nick Schuyler’s girlfriend, the person whose private life becomes inseparable from the 2009 Clearwater boating accident once Nick and his three companions fail to return. Before the disaster, she represents home through intimacy, routine, and practical care; during the crisis, she becomes an anxious but resourceful link between the missing men and the Coast Guard; afterward, she helps Nick endure the psychological consequences of being the only survivor. Her importance lies in this movement from everyday beloved to witness, advocate, and patient companion in a recovery that does not end with rescue.

Identity and Relationship with Nick Schuyler

Paula’s relationship with Nick is presented through habits rather than grand declarations. When Nick left for the fishing trip, she was in the bedroom, and he called out a brief farewell before she asked him to come back for a kiss. He kissed her, and his last ordinary exchange with her became one of the memories that remained with him during the night at sea. Nick later recalled thinking constantly about how worried she would be, an awareness that kept Paula emotionally present even while he was stranded in the Gulf of Mexico.

Nick describes Paula as resembling his mother in the way she cared for people and enlarged small acts of kindness. She prepared breakfast in bed, cleaned the house, and discouraged him from worrying about the dishes, presenting care as something freely given rather than negotiated through arguments. He remembered their relationship as free of bickering and fighting. That domestic steadiness contrasts sharply with the violence and uncertainty of the capsized boat, making Paula a recurring image of the life Nick was trying to reach psychologically as well as physically.

Paula’s attachment to Nick was also embedded in a wider household of friendship. Will Bleakley was so close to Nick that he had his own bedroom and sofa in the Tampa house, and Paula called him “our son,” as did their friends. The joke expressed a real family-like arrangement: Nick’s closest friendship had been absorbed into the couple’s domestic world. This helps explain why Paula’s fear during the search extended beyond concern for a boyfriend; she was waiting for the return of a small household whose members included Will, Marquis Cooper, and Corey Smith.

Waiting and the Search for the Missing Men

Paula was away at a dance competition in Lakeland, Florida, on Saturday, and returned home around 9:30 or 10:00 that night. She fell asleep, woke around 12:30 or 1:00 Sunday morning, and discovered that Nick was still absent. Her first actions were intimate and familiar: she called Nick’s cell phone, then Will’s. Nick’s call went directly to voice mail, while Will’s phone rang once before doing the same. The ordinary communication pattern on which she depended had broken without explanation.

She slept fitfully, waking every thirty or forty minutes and repeatedly trying Nick’s phone. Sitting outside on the deck of the Carrollwood section of Tampa, she tried to preserve a hopeful explanation: perhaps the men had returned late from fishing, eaten at Marquis Cooper’s house, and fallen asleep. She also restrained the tone of her messages because she did not want to sound irrational or overly upset. Her text to Nick asked when the men would be home and urged him to call as soon as possible, combining alarm with the effort to remain composed.

Near dawn, Paula called the home of Rebekah Cooper and Marquis Cooper, only to learn indirectly that the family was moving and the number had been disconnected. Lacking Rebekah’s cell-phone number, Paula used her laptop to find the Coast Guard and called the St. Petersburg station. She apologized in case she had reached the wrong number, then reported that her boyfriend had gone fishing and had not returned. The officer already appeared to know Nick’s name and Paula’s, and asked her for identifying information: Nick’s date of birth, the spelling of his name, and a physical description. She supplied his height, weight, brown hair, green eyes, and muscular build, turning intimate knowledge of Nick into information needed for a formal missing-person response.

As Paula spoke with the Coast Guard, her phone beeped with a call from Rebekah. Rebekah was waiting in her car in the parking lot of the L.A. Fitness where Nick, Marquis, and Corey trained, intending to obtain Paula’s number when the gym opened. The Coast Guard had already passed Paula’s contact information to her. Their connection transformed isolated worry into a coordinated family response, with Paula serving as one of the first people to convert uncertainty into an organized search.

The morning’s chill also brought Paula into a religious space she had largely left behind. After opening the door for her three dogs and feeling the cold through her feet, she put on boots and a sweater and drove to St. Paul’s Catholic Church on North Dale Mabry in Tampa. Although she had been raised Catholic and no longer practiced, she arrived as the service was ending, entered in tears, and sat alone in a pew. For ten minutes she prayed that Nick, Will, Marquis, and Corey would be brought home safely and soon. She then drove to the home of close friends Nery Tijerino and Kendall Lawson, where the Coast Guard called late that morning and advised her that she might need to inform Nick’s family because the media would soon be alerted. Her movement from home, to church, to friends’ house charts the widening circle of a private emergency becoming public knowledge.

Nick’s Return and the Burden of Survival

During the ordeal, Nick’s concern for Paula remained active even when his own physical strength was failing. When he realized he could no longer hold both Marquis and Corey, he understood that the limits of his body had become decisive. Before releasing Marquis, he told him that he loved him and would protect his family. Nick later also prayed specifically for Paula, asking God to protect her, give her strength, and let her know that he had always loved and appreciated her. He imagined that she would need a life after him and asked that she eventually find a man who would make her happy and love her as he had. The prayer reveals his love through responsibility, but also his expectation that he might die and leave Paula behind.

After Nick was rescued and brought to the hospital, his first urgent question was where his family was. He wanted to see them immediately, and Paula was among the people waiting for him. At his bedside she greeted him with “Hi, babe,” while he grabbed her hand and told her that he loved her. She was not crying, but she was nervous because officials were present and because Nick’s eyes sometimes rolled back. Her response contains both tenderness and vigilance: reunion did not erase the medical danger or the strangeness of the man returning from forty-three hours in the water.

The aftermath tested Paula differently from the rescue itself. Nick retold the story with increasing detail after returning from the hospital, and for the first few weeks she thought he was recovering well. Then he abruptly became withdrawn, silent, and mute, a sharp reversal from the person who was usually the life of the party and quick with a comeback. Paula found this change frightening. The survivor who had physically returned was not yet psychologically restored, and she had to recognize that rescue had opened a second phase of the crisis rather than concluded it.

Paula’s account also gives the recovery a concrete time scale. About six months after the accident, Nick’s mood finally began to brighten. He slowly became more talkative, laughed again, and recovered the sarcastic wit that she associated with him. Paula said that the experience had changed her as well and that surviving its consequences made her feel capable of enduring anything. Her statement does not reduce the disaster to a lesson or claim that the damage disappeared; it records a gradual return of personality and a parallel transformation in the person who remained beside him.

Survivor’s Guilt and Continuing Care

Paula’s role after the accident is especially important because Nick’s distress centered on responsibility as much as grief. He had asked Will to go on the trip, and Paula believed that letting Will go was the hardest thing Nick had ever done and something that would trouble him forever. Nick had been the last person with Will and with all three men, hearing their final words and witnessing their last breaths. The memory made survival feel morally charged: the question was not simply why he lived, but whether his living implicated him in the deaths of the others.

Nick’s dark moments could become explicit self-condemnation. He sometimes said that surviving might have been God’s way of showing that he should not have made it through, that he should have gone down with his friends, or that perhaps he should not have lived. Paula could challenge these statements when she was present, helping bring him back to reality. Her intervention is modest and immediate rather than therapeutic in a formal sense, but it supplies a continuing counterweight to the logic of survivor’s guilt: she refuses to let Nick’s pain become proof of guilt.

Dr. Mark Rumbak similarly distinguished survival from culpability, arguing that Nick did not kill the men or try to end their lives, and that their deaths resulted from how quickly they became cold and from circumstances that would have killed them regardless of his actions. Yet the clinical reassurance did not guarantee acceptance. The question of whether Nick could believe that distinction remained open, while Paula’s presence provided the practical, emotional setting in which that difficult belief might gradually become possible.

Narrative Significance

Paula broadens the story’s meaning beyond the physical mechanics of maritime survival. The men’s athletic identities and the public attention surrounding the deaths could make the disaster appear to belong to exceptional bodies and heroic endurance, but Paula’s experience returns the event to missed calls, an empty house, dogs let outside, a cold drive to church, and a partner waiting for news. Her perspective shows the crisis as a network of consequences distributed between the people in the water and the people who cannot reach them.

Her relationship with Nick also supplies the book’s strongest contrast between rescue and return. Nick was pulled from the Gulf of Mexico, but Paula’s account makes clear that the emotional emergency continued after the hospital: he became mute, revisited the story, and struggled with the fact that Will, Marquis, and Corey had not survived. Her patient recognition of his withdrawal and her relief when laughter and sarcasm returned frame recovery as relational and uneven rather than as a single victorious moment.

Paula therefore functions as both intimate witness and stabilizing presence. She remembers the tenderness of the farewell kiss, acts decisively when the phones go unanswered, prays for all four men rather than Nick alone, meets him with physical contact at the hospital, and confronts his statements that he should have died. Through her, the narrative holds together love, fear, faith, grief, and endurance. Nick’s survival becomes a continuing obligation not only to remember the dead but also to remain present with the living, and Paula is the person most consistently associated with that difficult return.