Summerland: A Novel (21 page)

Then Zoe accepted the sweet package that was Ernest Price Randolph, and she quietly introduced herself to him. “I’m Zoe,” she said. “I’m your friend.” Then she named the other people in the room: “Your mommy, your daddy, your big brother, Jake. Dr. Field, who delivered you. And over there are my babies, Penny and Hobby. And that’s Al Castle and Lynne Castle and Demeter. Look how lucky you are, baby Ernie,” she whispered. She raised him up and kissed his impossibly soft cheek. “Look at all the people who love you already.”

Two months later, at six o’clock in the morning on Monday, March 31, Zoe got a dramatically different call from Lynne Castle. She could barely make sense of what Lynne was trying to tell her: Ava had gone into the nursery to check on the baby, and…

“What?”
Zoe whispered. She had heard what Lynne was saying—“stopped breathing,” “SIDS,” “died in his crib”—but her mind wouldn’t allow it. She had seen Ava and Ernie only a few days before, at the post office. Ava had been standing in line, waiting to pick up yet more baby gifts sent from Australia, and Zoe had offered to hold Ernie while she carried the presents out to her car. Ernie was more alert than the last time Zoe had seen him. He could focus his eyes, which were the deep, concentrated color that Zoe could think of only as Jordan blue. She had bounced him a little; the warm, curved weight of his head fit in her hand like a ball. She had kissed him repeatedly, and he had gurgled, then smiled. Zoe was in love with her twins, she positively adored them, but they were hitting the hard, bumpy road of adolescence. Penny
had just gotten her first period and was prone to unpredictable mood swings; Hobby’s feet stank up the whole house. Zoe held Ernie and thought, I want another little one just like this.

Ernie, baby Ernie, had stopped breathing. Ava had gone into the nursery and picked him up and he had been as cold and inert as a doll. He was dead.

Poor Ava, oh poor Ava!

At the graveside funeral, Ava wore a black dress. Beneath the dress, her breasts had been bound with Ace bandages to keep her milk from coming in. The other children—Jake and Hobby and Penny and Demeter—released white balloons into the sky, a gesture that Lynne had dreamed up as a way to help them grapple with this unexpected death: little Ernie’s soul had been released from his body and carried off by the wind, she told them.

Zoe thought this was a gross oversimplification with a little bit of mystical nonsense thrown in, but she sobbed along with everyone else when the balloons were released. She, along with everyone else, waved good-bye.

Lynne Castle took charge of organizing a meal dropoff for the Randolph family, but Zoe disregarded the schedule and took something of her own over every single day: white chicken chili for Jordan, a delicate vegetable terrine for Ava, pizza pot pie for Jake. She made blueberry muffins and squeezed pitchers of fresh orange juice. She baked loaves of sourdough bread. She made pan after pan of slumped brownies. Sometimes she handed these dishes to Jordan, who always thanked her with a depleted smile. At other times Jordan’s car was gone, which meant Ava was alone inside, but Zoe never mustered the courage to knock; she just left the dishes on the front porch.

If she wants to talk, Zoe told herself, she’ll call me.

But Ava never called, and what at first passed for a respectful silence turned into a gully, then a canyon.

Months passed, summer arrived. The Randolph family didn’t make it to the beach even once. Zoe called Jordan at the newspaper and begged him to let her take Jake to the beach with the twins. Just one Sunday? Just for a few hours?

Jordan breathed heavily into the phone. “My hands are tied,” he said. “Ava wants to keep him home.”

“For how long?” Zoe asked. “Jesus Christ, Jordan, the kid is thirteen years old. He needs to be
outside,
with his
friends.
”

“Zoe,” Jordan said. “Please.”

Zoe put a handwritten note in the mail to Ava:
I realize how badly you must be hurting. Please know I’m here anytime you want to talk.

Zoe heard nothing back. It began to feel as if they’d never been friends at all. Zoe attended all the usual summer parties alone, or with the Castles, and she fielded inquiries about how Ava was doing. At first she wasn’t sure what to say. Then she came up with a few lines and repeated them: “She and Jordan are circling the wagons, trying to get through this. Thanks for asking.” What she might just as well have said was, “Why are you asking
me?
I have no idea.”

Zoe broached the topic with Lynne Castle.

“Ava has gone completely silent,” Zoe said. “She’s shut me out.”

Lynne said, “I make overtures, but I don’t get very far.”

Zoe wanted to know what that
meant,
exactly. Did Ava
talk
to Lynne? Did she answer the phone when Lynne called?

“Jordan and Jake have been over for dinner a few times,” Lynne said.

Zoe’s thoughts fluttered like a flock of startled birds. “They’ve been over for dinner?” she repeated.

Lynne pursed her lips, as though tasting something sour. “I
think Ava is being especially hard on Jordan. Because of, you know…”

“Because of what?” Zoe asked.

Lynne sighed. “It’s just so
sad,
” she said.

As the holidays approached, Zoe took on more private catering jobs. She spent time with the twins, cheering at Hobby’s football games, delivering Penny to singing lessons.

She thought, Of course Lynne has had Jordan and Jake to dinner, she
can
ask them to dinner because she’s married to Al; they’re a respectable family. But if
I
asked Jordan and Jake to dinner, it would look like… well, it would look like something else.

Christmas Stroll weekend arrived. The Stroll was Zoe’s favorite event of the year. Downtown was a holiday wonderland. Christmas trees, lit and decorated, lined Main Street; the shop windows were filled with elves and candy canes and glittering glass balls. On the Saturday of Stroll weekend, Main Street was closed to traffic so the crowds could walk up and down the cobblestones, listening to the Victorian carolers, sipping hot chocolate, and waiting for Santa to arrive on the ferry.

That year was especially busy for Zoe. She was catering a large party Saturday night at a home on India Street. The woman throwing the party, Ella Mangini, was one of Zoe’s favorite new clients. She had silver hair that she wore in a swinging bob and an irrepressible sense of fun. She drank a glass of champagne with Zoe in the kitchen before the guests arrived, wearing just her slip and fuzzy slippers. Ella was unmarried, though she intimated that she’d had many, many lovers. She was aghast when Zoe said that she hadn’t dated anyone seriously since the children were small.

“The kids are enough to fill my emotional life,” Zoe said. “The kids are, most of the time, too much.”

“But you’re so young!” Ella said. “What about
your
needs?”

Zoe upended the contents of her champagne flute into her mouth.
Her
needs? There had been the occasional one-night stand; there had been the front-desk clerk at the hotel in Cabo five nights in a row, which for Zoe had constituted a long-term relationship.

“What
about
them?” Zoe said.

After the party was over, Ella returned to the kitchen alone, though Zoe saw a man in a tuxedo standing just outside the door. Ella poured Zoe another glass of champagne, pressed two hundred and fifty dollars into her hand, and said, “The food was outstanding—you’re a genius, and I adore you. Now go out and enjoy. The night is but a pup!”

Zoe had walked down the friendship stairs of Ella Mangini’s house just as it started to snow. All around her Christmas lights were twinkling, and snowflakes were drifting from the sky. The champagne had created a fizzy bubble of possibility in her chest.
The night is but a pup!
Penny was sleeping at Annabel Wright’s house, and Hobby was at a basketball tournament in West Bridgewater. Zoe could go home to her deserted, freezing-cold cottage, or she could proceed downtown and join the celebration.

Once at her car, she removed her chef’s jacket. Underneath she wore a sparkly red T-shirt, a concession to the season. She fluffed her hair in the rearview mirror, put on red lipstick, and thought, Okay, here I go.

She wandered down Main Street and stopped in at the Club Car, because she heard the strains of the piano and she knew that the owner, Joe, was sure to buy her a drink.

Once she had wedged herself into the packed bar, though, she felt self-conscious. She had been single basically her entire adult life; she was no stranger to walking into a bar alone. But in recent years she had grown used to the comfortable presence of the Castles and the Randolphs; without them she felt stripped,
vulnerable. The piano player was banging out “Hotel California,” and people were throwing back their heads and singing along. Zoe felt a pang of regret, because how wonderful would it be if she could just get a drink and join in? If she were anywhere else, she would do it, but this island was a fishbowl, and if the eyes and ears of Nantucket saw and heard her here alone on the Saturday of Christmas Stroll, drinking and singing, people would either feel sorry for her or suspect that she was up to no good.

Someone grabbed her arm, roughly, and she spun around and landed in an empty bar stool.

“Zoe.”

Zoe looked up, suspecting that the grabber was Joe, the owner, but as it turned out, it wasn’t Joe at all.

It was Jordan.

Jordan had her by the arm. Jordan was sitting on the stool next to hers. Jordan had a beer in front of him and a glass of water. He always drank the two things side by side so he wouldn’t get “carried away,” a habit that Zoe found absurd.

“Jordan?” she said. The last person she’d ever expected to see
out
at the
Club Car
on the
Saturday
of
Stroll weekend
was Jordan Randolph. He hadn’t set foot out of the house other than to go to work (and, she supposed, to dinner at the Castles’) in eight months.

Zoe scanned the seats next to Jordan, looking for Al Castle or Marnie Fellowes, his managing editor, or someone else who would help make sense of his presence here—but on Jordan’s other side was an attractive older woman wearing Botox, a fur coat, and a New Jersey accent, the unofficial uniform of Christmas Stroll.

Zoe squinted at him. The evening had been surreal enough thus far that she believed this might be a vision or a dream, like something out of
A Christmas Carol,
Jordan appearing next to her like the Ghost of Best Friends Past.

“I’m sorry,” Zoe said. “What are you doing here?”

He raised his hand and ordered her a glass of champagne. She waited for the drink to arrive, and then she raised the glass to him and said, “Happy Stroll.”

He didn’t respond. He raised his water glass and touched it to hers.

She said, “I’m curious enough to ask again: what are you doing here?”

He spun his glass of water, then drank it down until the ice rattled. “I thought getting out would make me feel better,” he said. “But I feel worse.”

Zoe nodded. She could see how this might be the case. She said, “Want to go for a walk?”

He pulled out his wallet and put a twenty on the bar, and Zoe took another pull off her flute of champagne, then followed him out. The piano player was just launching into “Daydream Believer,” which was an old favorite of Zoe’s, and she felt another pang of regret at leaving, but if the point of “going out” was to commune with other people and make a meaningful connection, then she could leave the song behind and walk up Main Street in the falling snow with her broken friend.

It was after that very short walk—less than two hundred yards to where Jordan had parked his new Land Rover (new since Ernie’s death, a kind of consolation prize for Ava, who had been asking for a new car for years, though now she drove the thing only to the cemetery to place flowers on Ernie’s grave)—that Jordan told Zoe the thing that had eluded her but that somehow explained everything.

He leaned against the driver’s side of the car, snow falling on the shoulders of his shearling jacket, snow falling in his dark curls, snow falling on the lenses of his glasses. She was tempted to take his glasses off and clean them on the hem of her shirt, but she was
afraid that any sudden movement on her part might break the spell. Something was happening here, but she didn’t know what.

Jordan wiped his glasses himself, then he said, “I was at work.”

“Ah,” Zoe said. She thought he meant earlier that night, but his tone indicated that he was making some sort of confession. “You were at work? And then you decided to come out?” she prompted.

“No,” he said. “The night Ernie died. I wasn’t home.” His eyes locked on Zoe’s face. She saw the culpability; some of that, no doubt, he felt himself, but some of it must have been pressed on him. “I was at work.”

Zoe nodded slowly. He opened his mouth to speak, but she raised her hand. “You don’t have to explain,” she said. “I get it.” Zoe understood everything in that instant. She knew why Ava couldn’t talk to anyone, she knew why Jake was in lockdown, she knew it all, suddenly, with that one sentence: “I was at work.” She knew why the Randolph family was so lost.

Zoe reached out for him. It was the only thing she could think of to do. Jordan gathered her up in his arms and held her against him. They hugged fiercely, she breathed in the smell of him, she absorbed the shuddering of his sobs, she shushed him as she would have done with one of her kids. She was aware of his body, a man’s body up against hers after so much time. She felt the heat and the chemistry. “What about
your
needs?” Ella Mangini had asked. How easy it would be to get drawn in here, how easy to raise her face and kiss him! But Zoe was not that woman. She wasn’t going to capitalize on Jordan’s sadness. And she didn’t give him the words he so desperately needed to hear—though she did indeed believe them to be true—until ten or twelve minutes later, when she was back on India Street and safely tucked into her Karmann Ghia. It was only then that she texted those words to him: