Summerland: A Novel (30 page)

They made love in frantic haste, standing up against the side of the snack shack. Zoe felt like a desperate teenager. She wanted to ask Jordan what he had done to honor the day, but she was afraid to ask. She wanted him to offer it up on his own, but she knew he would never risk hurting her feelings. She was elated and relieved that he had wanted to meet her today, on this holiest of married days, but it sickened her as well.

She straightened her skirt. In front of them were the starkly beautiful sand dunes of Dionis. September 30: the wind held a chill. It would be fall soon. She and Jordan had been seeing each other for three months.

She said, “We have to stop.”

“Zoe.”

“It’s your wedding anniversary,” she said. “How long have you been married?”

He cleared his throat. “Eighteen years.”

“We have to stop.”

“Zoe, no.”

“If you don’t want to stop, then leave her.”

“ ‘Leave her’?”

“Leave Ava.”

“I can’t leave her, Zoe. You know what she’s like.”

Zoe stared at him. Blue eyes, glasses, shaggy dark hair. She knew him, she understood him; they were the same person. Yes, Zoe knew what Ava was like. Yes, Zoe knew that Jordan wouldn’t leave her. He would stay with her forever, and Zoe would always, always come second. She would remain in the shadows, hidden, concealed, lied about.

Zoe walked to her car, climbed in, slammed the door, started the engine. Was she going to drive away? Jordan was approaching with long strides, his hands out, his face beseeching.

Zoe backed out. Drove away.

She spent a sleepless night wondering how she had gotten herself into this mess. It had been years and years in the making, she knew; she had loved the man ever since he asked her if she wanted to do puzzles, on Fathers’ Night at the Children’s House. He poured her wine, he lit her woodstove, he washed her hair, he kissed the back of her neck. She loved him.

She felt ill when she woke up in the morning, then worse when there were no calls or texts from him. So he had gone home and
taken Ava out to dinner and presented her with a bouquet of dahlias and a card. Goddamn him! Zoe wanted to scream. She wanted to throw something. But she had two kids to care for. Penny had madrigal rehearsal at ten, and Hobby had a football game at one, so Zoe found herself standing at the stove making her famous fried egg sandwiches on grilled English muffins with Swiss cheese and strawberry jam. Penny woke up in a Beatles mood, so they played “Good Day Sunshine” and “Drive My Car” and “Let It Be” as they ate, and Penny’s voice was so sweet, and Hobby’s shoulders were so broad and strong in his practice jersey, and the egg sandwiches were so delicious, that for one second Zoe thought, as she had for so many years before, Who cares about love? I have all the love I need right here in this room. Breaking up with Jordan had been the right thing to do. It had been the
only
thing to do. If the twins somehow found out what was going on in her head and her heart, if they knew how she spent her Tuesday and Thursday mornings while they were sitting in French class or American History, they would be destroyed. Zoe had always said they could tell her anything, but that didn’t go both ways. She had never been one to shelter her kids from the harsh realities of life, but this reality, yes. It was too private and awful to share. It would remain private, but it was no longer awful because it was over. She and Jordan had broken up. She was clean and righteous.

That feeling lasted until ten o’clock, when Zoe pulled in to the high school parking lot to drop Penny off. Penny kissed her and got out of the car and ran for the doors of the school—Mr. Nelson had told her if she was late one more time, she would lose her solo—and Zoe watched her daughter disappear into the building, and though she still had things to do (she had to go home, pick up Hobby, deliver him to pregame practice, and then help set up the concession stand), she felt an emptiness encroaching on her.

At that moment her cell phone rang.

Jordan.

“Hello?” she said.

“Will you stay with me?” he said. “Please?”

“Yes,” she said.

Now, in the car, at Cisco Beach, in the looming presence of the white cross, Zoe cried out, “I miss you!” Her voice was hoarse. “I love you!” She was a certifiable crazy person, yelling these things out to the dark interior of her car. But she had a freedom here that she lacked at home, where she had Hobby to think of.

“I love you!”

So there, she was admitting it to herself. Her anger at Jordan had been a carapace over her real feelings, but now it was cracking and falling off in pieces. It wasn’t Jordan’s fault that Penny was dead and Jake was alive, it wasn’t his fault that he couldn’t step inside her grief and discover just how unbearable it was. She had sent him away, and now he was gone and she missed him and she loved him and she missed Penny and she loved Penny.

She was alone, profoundly alone.

No, she was not doing all right. She would never be all right again.

I
t was August, and the hottest, brightest, busiest days of the summer were upon us. The most important thing for the summer residents and renters and visitors seemed to be that everything was as hot and bright and busy as they remembered it from the year before, and the year before that. Sameness was the island’s currency. The families that had been summering on the island since 1965 or 1989 or 2002 had created traditions that had to be upheld. On their first night on-island they had to eat at the Brotherhood of Thieves, where they would order medium-rare bleu cheeseburgers with curly fries. They had to wait forty-five minutes in line for ice cream at the Juice Bar because nothing tasted better than a hot fudge sundae in a waffle cup when you ate it on Steamship Wharf as you watched the stream of cars unload from the ferry. They had to bike to Sconset and get turkey salad sandwiches from Claudette’s; they had to take their annual picture in front of the peppermint stick of the Sankaty lighthouse, where someone had to remark that erosion was most definitely eating away the bluff, and that if someone didn’t do something about it soon, the lighthouse would certainly topple into the ocean. They had to take the launch up the harbor to the Wauwinet for lunch, and someone had to
recall the time Margie’s Peter Beaton hat flew into the sea and the captain of the launch fished it out—soggy but not much worse for wear—with an elderly gentleman’s cane. They had to drive onto the beach at Great Point with a case of cold Heineken and meatball subs from Henry Jr.’s. They had to meet Anne and Mimi at the Nantucket Yacht Club for doubles tennis followed by lunch, during which they would talk over the piano player, the same beautiful raven-haired woman every year, who never grew older and was always willing to play “As Time Goes By.” They had to “forget” to bring sunscreen to the beach at least one day—yes, they knew it was as bad for them as smoking a pack of unfiltered cigarettes—and go home feeling the warm, tight stretch of tanned skin. They had to attend the same parties every year—the Leeders’ party on Cliff Road, the Czewinskis’ in Monomoy, the fete for the Nantucket Preservation Trust, the Summer Groove for the Nantucket Boys & Girls Club.

More than one summer resident noticed that things weren’t quite the same this year at the O’Dooleys’ annual cocktail party on Hulbert Avenue. Everyone loved this party. The O’Dooleys sprang for a good dance band from New York, and a celebrity or two could always be counted on to attend—Martha Stewart, Samuel L. Jackson, Bill Frist. But this year the party wasn’t catered by Zoe Alistair, as it had been for so many years in the past; instead, Doris O’Dooley had brought her regular caterer up from New York, and the food wasn’t half as good. Guests missed Zoe’s crab cakes with lime zest and ginger aioli, as well as her hot corn fritters with maple syrup. Mr. Controne, of Squam Road and Louisburg Square, Boston, was overheard saying, “I’ve been dreaming about those corn fritters all year, dammit.”

That was the thing we realized: for visitors, Nantucket wasn’t just a place; it was also a fantasy of American summertime that kept people warm and happy all year long.

No one had the heart to tell Mr. Controne that the reason there were no corn fritters with maple syrup was that it was Zoe Alistair’s daughter, Penny, who’d been killed in the one-car accident out at Cisco Beach on graduation night, and that Zoe was consequently taking a break from catering.

It was at the O’Dooleys’ cocktail party, too, that two homeowners talked about the petty thefts from their houses. Mrs. Hillier had discovered an unopened bottle of Mount Gay rum missing from her liquor cabinet, a bottle she had planned on using to prepare her husband’s welcome-to-the-weekend cocktail. Where had the bottle gone? She had just purchased it from Hatch’s a few days before. The cleaners, she thought. It must have been the cleaners, because what burglar would come into the Hillier home and take
only one bottle of rum?
Standing next to Alice Hillier, Virginia Benedict nodded vigorously. “The strangest thing,” she said. She had noticed that two bottles of Chateau Margaux were missing from her wine cellar. There had been twenty bottles on Tuesday, but only eighteen on Friday. Virginia Benedict had a son, Blake, who was a sophomore at Dartmouth, and initially she had assumed that he was the culprit—though what a nineteen-year-old boy would want with some dusty old bottles of wine, Virginia had no idea. Now, talking to Alice Hillier, Virginia Benedict began to wonder if something else might not be going on. She wondered if she should report the missing bottles of wine to the police. Would that sound silly? They were worth several hundred dollars apiece.

“Well,
I’m
reporting it to the police,” Alice Hillier said. “A full bottle of Mount Gay, gone.”

We, the year-round residents of Nantucket, who bumped into one another constantly in the winter—at the gas station, at lunch at A. K. Diamond’s, at the community pool, at five o’clock Mass on Saturdays, among the shelves of Nantucket Bookworks, at the paint
counter in Marine Home Center, and in the aisles of the Stop & Shop (we always saw at least half a dozen people we knew every time we set foot in the Stop & Shop)—rarely had any contact in the summer. In the summer we were busy working, or we went away to our houses in New Hampshire while renting out our Nantucket homes for ten thousand dollars a week. Or we took trips to the Grand Canyon, or had houseguests—our brother from Chicago with his wife and two kids—and found ourselves doing things like driving up to Great Point with meatball subs from Henry’s, waving to all the strangers on the beach. And then, of course, when we did randomly see one another—say, while waiting to use the ladies’ room upstairs at Le Languedoc—we were happy. Another Nantucketer! A member of our tribe! We talked quickly, eager to catch up but reluctant to stay away from the dinner table for too long.

It was during one such chance meeting—Sara Boule and Annika DeWan were both waiting for prescriptions from Dan’s Pharmacy, Sara for her Ativan, Annika for Augmentin to cure her son’s tenth ear infection of the summer—that the topic of Claire Buckley arose. Annika asked Sara, who was a great good friend of Rasha Buckley’s, if Claire was “okay.”

“Because I’ve called her to babysit no less than four mornings this summer, and all four times—maybe five, come to think of it—she turned me down. And then last week, when I took the kids to the Juice Bar for frappes, I saw that she wasn’t working there, either. Doesn’t that seem strange?”

Sara met this question with what struck Annika as a loaded silence. “Yes,” she finally said. “That does seem strange. I think perhaps there
is
something going on with Claire.”

And in this way, as only something as insidious as gossip could manage, the following was discovered:

Claire Buckley had been fired from her job at the Juice Bar, not because she had called in sick three times in a row with the
stomach flu, but because when she finally
did
come in to work a shift, she left her post briefly to vomit in the back alley.

“This is ice cream,” the manager purportedly said upon finding Claire a retching, weepy mess. “There’s a line out the door, and every third one of those people is going to walk out of here with your germs because you weren’t considerate enough to think of our
customers
and call in sick.”

“I didn’t want to get fired,” Claire supposedly said.

“You’re fired,” said the manager.

Claire wasn’t going to field hockey camp at Amherst College this year, as she had done for the past two summers. In fact, she wasn’t planning on playing field hockey in the fall at all, even though she was slated to be the team captain. Kate Horner, the coach, was on a biking vacation in France and couldn’t be called upon to verify these claims, but surely she must have been crying into her Cabernet. To lose her best senior! We couldn’t believe it. We could hardly remember a time when we had seen Claire without her mouthguard.

Claire Buckley had been seen twice out in public over the summer. Once was on the fast ferry with her mother, Rasha. The girl, usually so peppy and outgoing, had on this occasion seemed pale and quiet and reserved. She was reading
The Secret Life of Bees
and barely looked up when Elizabeth Kingsley came over to say hello. It was Elizabeth Kingsley who made allowances for the fact that perhaps Claire wasn’t herself because of all that had happened with the accident. After all, hadn’t she been the one to sit at Hobby Alistair’s bedside when he was in his coma? “I think that accident affected our teenagers”—Elizabeth used the royal “our” here; her own kids were only eight, five, and three—“more deeply than we realize,” she said. “My babysitter, Demeter Castle, is totally changed. I can’t really say how; she’s just…
different
now.”

The other place where Claire Buckley was spotted was in the waiting room of Dr. Field’s office, again in the company of her mother, Rasha. More precisely, Claire and Rasha were holding hands, and Claire was visibly upset. This was reported by Mindy Marr, who conceded that the girl
might
still be shaken up by the accident—but while Ted Field was many things, he was
not
a shrink.