Summerland: A Novel (15 page)

He stepped out onto the deck. “Zoe?” he said.

She looked up, unsurprised. “Hey,” she said.

“Hey”?
He didn’t know what to do with
Hey.
He’d been expecting a
Get out!
He’d been expecting a full glass of sauvignon blanc aimed at his head. But part of him had also held out hope that she’d jump into his arms.

He said, “I came to talk to you.”

She said, “Well, yeah, I expected that. Sooner or later.”

He didn’t dare sit on the chaise with her, though he could see the ghost of them making love there—both of them naked, Zoe riding him, her breasts swinging, him thrusting until she cried out. June 14. Twenty days earlier. A lifetime ago.

He pulled up one of the upright chairs that matched the chaise and rested his elbows on his knees. She was wearing white denim shorts and a navy halter top and the hideous blue rhinestone earrings that Hobby had bought for her the Christmas he was ten, which had become a family joke but which Jordan suspected were a joke no longer. Now she wore them in earnest; now they were likely her favorite earrings. Zoe’s hair was naturally dark, and she usually had it cut in an artful shag with the ends colored, but now the red had faded, and Jordan noticed some gray in her part. She looked pale and wore no makeup—she who liked always to be tan, even in the middle of January, and who favored electric-green eyeliner on a conservative day.

Jordan couldn’t take his eyes off her. This, he supposed, must be closer to what she’d looked like as a child. He could see Penny
in her today, when he had never really seen her there before. Was that tragic or poetic, he wondered—the mother’s starting to look more like the daughter only now that the daughter was dead?

“I don’t know what to say,” he said. He had thought of things in the middle of the night, that was his job as a journalist, getting to the heart of the matter, but all that he’d so carefully scripted escaped him now.

“Nothing to say,” she said. “It’s not your fault. There was nothing wrong with the car. Penny was just driving too fast. She was upset about something, Hobby said.”

“Upset about what?” Jordan said. “Did something happen?”

“She was a seventeen-year-old girl,” Zoe said. “Things were happening with her every second of every day. I go back and forth between wanting to know exactly what it was and being afraid to know. Does it matter? I ask myself. She was driving recklessly, and she knew better. She could have killed all four of them, Jordan, and that would have made this conversation a very different one.” Zoe looked at the ocean. “Can you imagine?”

If Jake had died in the accident? No, he couldn’t imagine.

“What do you feel like?” he asked.

“I can’t explain it.”

“Try.”

“I don’t want to try.” She slugged back some wine.

“Have you seen the tox report?”

“I have. She was clean,” she said.

“She was?”

Zoe flashed her eyes at him. “You didn’t doubt that, did you?”

“I didn’t know. The other kids were drinking… .”

“Well, Penny hadn’t had a drink since that horrible night at the Peashways’ house.”

“But she was the one driving because the other kids had been drinking. Do you feel angry about that?”

“Hobby said Jake offered to drive, but Penny insisted.” Zoe
rubbed her knees. “You didn’t need to come here, Jordan. I don’t blame you, and I don’t blame your son.”

“I did need to come here,” Jordan said. “I needed to come here because I love you.”

She laughed, a tired bleat. “Ah,” she said. “That.”

“Yes,” he said. “That. Our relationship. My love for you. Do you know how hard it’s been not being able to talk to you, Zoe? Not being able to hold you and mourn with you? You shut me out.”

“Why is it always all about you?” Zoe asked.

“I’m not talking about me,” he said. “I’m talking about us.”

“There is no us,” Zoe said. “You want to know why I slapped you? Because for nearly two years I believed there
was
an us. But when they told me that Penny was dead and Hobby was in a coma, I realized there was only a me. A me who had lost one child and nearly lost another. And there you were across the room. You were going to go back to your house with your son and your wife. I slapped you because I was angry and hurting, but also because you allowed me to believe that there was an us when there was no us. There was never an us, and there’s never going to be an us.”

“So what are you saying?” Jordan asked. “You want me to leave Ava? Yes, Zoe, yes: I will leave Ava.”

“Now?” Zoe said. She finished her wine and poured herself some more. “Now that I’ve lost a child, now because you feel sorry for me… .”

“That’s not why.”

“Why, then? Why now and not before?”

“Because I’ve learned about the power of my feelings. This thing, this crisis, has brought them into focus.”

“Do you know how ridiculous you sound?”

Yes, actually, he did know he sounded ridiculous. Yes, he did know he was a day late and a dollar short; he should have left Ava a long time ago. He had thought he was staying with Ava out of honor, but really he’d been staying out of cowardice.

“I want to be with you,” he said.

“I can’t be with you,” Zoe said. “It’s over.”

“Zoe…”

“For so many reasons,” she said.

“You’ve been through hell,” he said.

“Try not to explain my condition to me,” Zoe said. “Try to let me process this on my own terms. Let me make my own decisions.”

It was dark now. Jordan heard a popping noise, and he saw a flash of light in the sky. He stood up and moved to the edge of the deck. Down the beach, someone was setting off fireworks. He had either forgotten or simply not realized: it was the Fourth of July.

“And the decision you’re making is that our relationship is over?” he said.

“Over.”

“I don’t accept that.”

“You’re going to have to,” she said.

“I don’t.”

She stood up. She raised her hand, and he flinched, thinking she might slap him again. But instead she removed his glasses and wiped their lenses off on the hem of her blue cotton halter top, and the gesture was so familiar and so tender that Jordan nearly wept. When she placed the glasses back on his face, her hand grazed his cheek, and he feared this might be the last time she would ever touch him.

“Jordan,” she said. She paused. Down on the beach there was the keening of a bottle rocket, followed by a series of explosions. “Jordan, I’m sorry.”

That night Jordan drove around the island for hours. It was his home, he had lived here his whole life save for the four years he had spent in Bennington, Vermont, but on this night he drove on roads he hadn’t traveled in decades, and all the while fireworks were going off over his head, casting an eerie pink glow over the
evening. He drove out the Polpis Road, taking an inland detour at Almanack Pond, winding back in among the acres of horse pasture and secret stands of trees. He drove around to the Sankaty lighthouse, then through Sconset with its ancient, rose-covered cottages, then down to Low Beach Road, where the houses were ten times the size of those cottages, and all built within the last decade. He wound around through Tom Nevers and Madequecham; he had never been quite clear on how the dirt roads connected in Madequecham, and he ended up lost in a scrub-pine forest. He battled through, the brush on either side of the road pin-striping his car. He popped out on a deserted dirt road that eventually led him back to Milestone.

“There is no us,” Zoe had said.

He drove all the way out to the farthest edge of the Madaket coast, a trip that took him thirty minutes from the rotary. He and Ava had gone to a party out here years earlier, but he hadn’t been back since. From there he traveled to Eel Point and Dionis and out the Cliff and back around until he reached the turn for the place he knew he’d been headed all along: the end of Hummock Pond Road.

Someone had pounded a white cross into the sand. Taller than Jordan, it was decorated with streaming pink ribbons and had bouquets of flowers—some of them fresh—leaning against its base. Jordan wondered if Zoe had seen it.

He couldn’t believe that Zoe wanted to face the months and years of pain that were to come without him. But she had made up her mind, and he knew that she meant what she said and not the opposite: she was done. It was over,
for so many reasons.
He hadn’t asked her to give him a single one of those reasons, because the reasons didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he loved her and now he was alone with his love. He would leave Nantucket because he was weak, and because staying on this island without her wasn’t possible. The journey he’d taken that night, the drive down unfamiliar roads, was Jordan’s way of saying good-bye.

He started the car and headed back into town, toward home, thinking that he would drop by the hospital to peek in on Hobby, or stop at the cemetery and gaze at Penny’s grave or the grave of tiny Ernie Randolph, who had died at eight weeks old. He suddenly saw the appeal of a wide-open foreign land where every building and curve in the road was benign and bland, where nothing had memories attached, where nothing could pierce him.

At the turnoff for Bartlett’s Farm, Jordan’s engine began to sputter. He made it a few yards farther and pulled the car over to the side of the road. He had run out of gas.

“There is no us,” Zoe had said.

“For so many reasons,” Zoe had said.

Jordan climbed out of the car, tucked his keys in his pocket, and began walking toward home.

I
t was big news: the Randolphs were moving to Australia for at least a year, maybe longer. Jordan Randolph was taking a leave of absence from the newspaper, and Marnie Fellowes would run it in his stead. People questioned the logic of pulling Jake Randolph out of school in his senior year. Was it kind or cruel? Was it
wise
from a college-admissions perspective? Some people said Jake didn’t want to go. Others said he couldn’t wait to get away from Nantucket. Even people who knew next to nothing about the Randolphs’ marriage knew that Ava Randolph was dying to move back to her homeland. If it hadn’t been for the accident, people would have seen this move as a valiant attempt to fix the marriage. But everyone knew the Randolphs were leaving because of the accident.

The accident was still lurking around the edges of our minds, but it was no longer front and center. It had been, after all, an
accident:
there was no one to blame. Penelope Alistair had been driving too fast, plain and simple. Dr. Ted Field released the tox report, but it turned up nothing. Penny hadn’t been drinking or on drugs. She had been upset. People hazarded guesses about the reason for that, but most of those guesses were so absurd that we disregarded them immediately. That the other kids had been drinking was whispered about, of course. If it had been during the school year, some of the parents might have rallied for an alcohol and drug awareness forum, but it was high summer. The mild June weeks turned into scorching July weeks. The summer people arrived in their Suburbans and Hummers, taking all the available parking spots, clogging up the aisles at the Stop & Shop, bringing vacation frivolity and a river of money to the island. Whole days passed during which we didn’t think about Penelope Alistair at all. Don’t think us callous; life was just moving on. It was summer. We had our own lives to live.

There were reminders, of course. The seven-foot white cross at Cisco Beach was the most visible of these. A few of the girls from the madrigal group started gathering at the cross every evening at sunset to sing. They sang the classical tunes they had practiced so hard, but as their audience grew (one night there were fifteen people, the next night twenty-three), they branched out to cover the Beatles and Elton John. As with anything else, there were detractors. It was in poor taste, someone said, singing each night at the spot where their friend had died. Others felt it was a fitting tribute. The cross itself put some people off. Cisco had been a popular surfing beach, but now a stretch of sand on either side of the cross remained unoccupied during the day.

One summer resident, the mother of two girls, said, “The cross scares my children. I wish they would take it down.”

H
er parents assumed she was a lost cause, and Demeter took great joy in surprising them. She told her father she intended to go to work for Frog and Toad Landscaping, just as she had said she would. Monday, July 2, was the day of Penny’s funeral—Demeter attended with her parents and left immediately after the service, surrounded by the mysterious aura of one who was intimately affected, though how profoundly, people could only guess—and so Demeter started work the next day, July 3.

Her parents had tried to talk her out of it.

“Are you
sure?
” her mother said. “I don’t think you’re ready.”

Her father had actually had the temerity to enter Demeter’s room, sit in her papasan chair with his hands tented like a preacher’s, and tell her that she was very courageous to want to move forward like this. Then he went on, “But your mother fears, as do I, that your starting a new job
tomorrow
might be taking on a little too much a little too soon. If you’re worried about money…”

Here Demeter giggled. She was drunk when her father came in. She had taken four bottles of wine and a full icy bottle of vodka—its contents no less precious to Demeter than liquid gold—from Zoe’s house. But now there was only half a bottle of wine left, and two fingers of vodka. Demeter knew one thing: there was no alcohol in this house. She had considered calling Mrs. Kingsley to let her know that she was available to babysit, but she was afraid that Mrs. Kingsley might have heard rumors about the bottle of Jim Beam found in her possession and connected it with the bottle of Jim Beam missing from the Kingsleys’ liquor cabinet. The Kingsleys were no longer an option. Demeter had to get out into the world, pronto.

“Something funny?” Al Castle asked.

Funny? Well, only if by “funny” he meant sad and pathetic. Demeter’s parents were experts in the field of doing her a disservice. They coddled her, they spoiled her, and they refused to hold her accountable for her actions. Every time Lynne Castle knocked on the bedroom door, Demeter was sure the beatings were about to begin—but it was only ever Lynne “checking in” to see if Demeter “needed anything.” Lynne Castle delivered snacks and meals on a tray, she carried away the dirty dishes and collected armfuls of Demeter’s laundry. She smoothed her daughter’s hair and let her know that she was loved and appreciated. Lynne said she thanked God every day that Demeter was safe.