Summerland: A Novel (32 page)

“Like shit,” Jake said. He teared up, then wiped away the tears with the back of his hand, and Hobby felt like telling him not to bother. Hobby was sick of seeing people try to hide their feelings. What had happened was tragic, and there was no reason to pretend otherwise, no reason to stop the tears. Who cared about being a man? That had no meaning anymore. Being human was far more important than being a man, and human beings expressed their emotions. “My parents are making me move,” Jake told him.

“Move?”
Hobby said. “Are they sending you away to school?”

“No,” Jake said. “We’re moving, all three of us, to Perth, Australia.”

“Perth, Australia?” Hobby said. He was something of a geography buff, and as such, he knew that Perth was on the western coast of Australia; it was the most isolated capital city in the world. “For how long?”

“A year.”

“Your dad too?” Hobby asked.

“Yeah, my dad too.”

“Your mom’s
from
Perth, right?”

“Yeah. I’m not sure why she can’t just go by herself.”

Hobby had no answer for this. Jake’s mother was a mystery. Hobby had seen her maybe once in the last four years. She was like a cicada or a lunar eclipse.

“My dad doesn’t even want to go,” Jake said. “But he tells me we have to.”

“Because of the accident?”

“Because of something.”

Hobby wondered if his mother knew about this. She came in to sit with him every morning and every evening, but she hadn’t mentioned anything about the Randolph family’s moving to Australia. And Jordan Randolph was his mother’s best friend.

“So I wanted to tell you that,” Jake said. “And there’s something else I wanted to ask you.”

Hobby sensed a heavier topic. “What’s that?”

Jake puffed a few times into his clenched fist and Hobby thought, Oh, shit, what is it?

Jake said, “I want to know why.”

“Why what?”

“Why she did it. What the hell went wrong? She was fine right up until she went into the dunes with Demeter. And then she was a basket case, right? So something happened in the dunes. Either Demeter told her something or someone else told her something. A secret or whatever.”

“A secret?” Hobby said. His leg was starting to itch inside its cast, a condition brought on by stress, Dr. Field had told him, but it made Hobby want to cry out for amputation. He took a sip of the lukewarm water at his bedside.

“And I was wondering.” Jake went on, “if you might know what Demeter said. If you’d heard from anyone else what Demeter said. I know you’ve had a lot of visitors.”

“I haven’t heard anything,” Hobby said. “I think people are trying to shelter me from some of the difficult stuff. Have you asked Demeter?” It occurred to Hobby that Demeter hadn’t been in to see him. Her parents, Al and Lynne, had come; Al had apparently been with Zoe at Mass General for the first few days, and Lynne had organized the meal dropoff at his house. Zoe had brought in some of the dishes to share with Hobby, since it was better than the hospital food. But Demeter—nope. He hadn’t seen or heard from her. Was that weird?

“I asked Demeter,” Jake said. “I had to call her, like, sixteen times before she even answered the phone. I asked her what she and Penny had talked about in the dunes. And she said she couldn’t remember.”

“A secret or whatever.” A secret? Hobby was daft when it came to females, his mother and sister had been telling him this for years. He knew only that Penny had been determined to drive off the end of the road, and yes, obviously he knew she was upset, but he hadn’t gotten around to asking himself why.
Why?
His mother had tried to broach the question with him also, he now realized: “What was Penny
like
at the party? Did anything
happen?
Anything
unusual
that you can remember?”

But during the party at Steps Beach, Hobby had been preoccupied by two things. The first was thinking about Claire and the baby. And the second was getting drunk in order to forget about Claire and the baby.

He wondered if the “secret news” Penny had heard in the dunes was that Claire was pregnant. Oh God. He felt like he was going to vomit, and his leg—
goddammit,
his leg itched! He wanted to scour it with steel wool; he wanted to dip it in a vat of lye.

“So Demeter said she couldn’t remember,” Hobby said. “Well, she was pretty drunk.”

“That’s what worries me,” Jake said. He
really
looked green now, Hobby thought—as if he were about to puke. Hobby had a shallow dish next to his bed, and he nearly passed it over to Jake.

“Do you want some water or anything?” Hobby asked. “I’m sorry, if I’d known you were coming, I would have baked cookies.”

Jake held up a hand. He didn’t crack a smile or anything. His hair was greasy, sticking together in clumps, and he was wearing the jeans that Penny had written on. “Listen, I’m going to tell you something, but you can’t repeat it. Ever, to anyone. Okay?”

Hobby nodded. He had his own secret now, so he was newly attuned to the fact that some matters had to be kept completely confidential. “Of course. What is it?”

“This thing happened between me and Winnie Potts,” Jake said. “The night of the cast party. We were all in the Pottses’ basement, and we all stayed up late drinking. Not your sister, she went home. But I was there, and Winnie was, and some others, you know.”

“You raided Mr. Potts’s beer fridge,” Hobby said.

“Exactly. Anyway, everybody else left, so it was just me and Winnie. And she put the moves on me big time.”

Winnie Potts. Mmmmmm. Yeah, she was dangerous. She had been the first girl in their class with boobs, and she knew how to flaunt them. She had been Hobby’s lab partner in ninth-grade science, and what could he say other than that working with her had been distracting?

“I didn’t sleep with her,” Jake continued. “I got out of there long before that, but I did kiss her, and things got pretty heated. And I think she was pissed that things didn’t go any further, or she was angry and embarrassed that I ran out of there, and you know she’s always been jealous of your sister, and I’m afraid that for any or all of those reasons Winnie might have exaggerated what happened between us. I’m afraid she might’ve told someone about it, and somehow Demeter got hold of the information and told Penny.”

“Would Demeter
do
that?” Hobby asked.

“She might,” Jake said.

Hobby had to concede: she might indeed.

“But the thing is, it also might not have been Demeter at all. Penny might have run into Winnie in the dunes. Winnie might have told Penny herself.”

“Oh, man,” Hobby said.

Jake started to really cry now. He said, “I didn’t do it to
hurt
your sister, man. It just
happened
. Winnie was all
over
me. I was drunk, I wasn’t thinking. But I mean, I got my ass out of there. I
ran
out of there.”

“Believe me,” Hobby said, “I know how Winnie is.”

“You
do,
right? Everyone knows how Winnie is. Even your sister—
especially
your sister. But that wasn’t going to make things any better. If Penny heard that, she would be… well, she’d be…”

“Hysterical,” Hobby said.

Jake dropped his head into his hands.

Hobby said, “Yeah, but we don’t know for sure what it was that set Penny off.”

“What else could it have been?” Jake asked. His voice was so loud and so filled with anguish that Hobby was afraid it was going to attract the attention of one of the nurses.

“It could have been anything, man,” Hobby said. “This is my sister we’re talking about. Remember how she acted after the tsunami in Japan? She cried for three days. And right after your brother died? She had to go see a therapist. She was different like that, man. Stuff affected her. We don’t know what was going through her head that night, and we’ll never know. But it’s not going to do you any good to blame yourself. She loved you, Jake.”

Jake wiped at his eyes with the pointed collar of his shirt. He stood up. “I can’t deal with the fact that she’s gone, man, that’s tough enough, but thinking it’s my fault for doing something so
fucking stupid.
…”

“Jake, man,” Hobby said, “you can’t blame yourself.”

“I do, though,” Jake said. “I do. Even if Penny
didn’t
know about it, what I did was still wrong. And I’ll never get to make it up to her.” He put his hands in his hair and pulled, and his eyes popped out, and Hobby thought, He’s losing it. But then Jake composed himself, or he sort of did, and said, “I just had to tell someone.”

“Yep, I get it,” Hobby said. “And it ends with me, I promise.”

“Thanks,” Jake said. He reached out to shake Hobby’s good hand, and Hobby held on and said, “Hey, man, take care, be safe, okay? Stay in touch.”

“I will,” Jake said. “Thanks, Hob. And heal up. You’re the one lying there with all those broken bones, and I’m the one crying.”

“We’re all broken,” Hobby said. This was a heavier statement than he’d meant to make, but oh well, it was true.

Jake stared at Hobby for a second, then he backed out the door.

Hobby was certain he would see Penny again, but he wasn’t so sure about Jake. Jake might travel to the other side of the world and decide never to come back. It was unfair, Hobby thought. He’d already lost Penny, and now he was losing Jake, too. Jake was one of his best friends, not a friend the way the guys on the football team were friends—all jokey, back-slapping, hanging out—but more like a cousin or a brother. More like family. And there he went, out the door, leaving Hobby to sort through everything alone.

Jake with Winnie Potts. Was
that
the reason? Until Jake brought it up, it hadn’t even occurred to Hobby that there
was
a reason, but of course there was a reason. Still, the reason could just as easily have been that Penny found out that Hobby had gotten Claire pregnant and that Claire had an appointment for an abortion. It was a toss-up.

Hobby thought back to the fraught weeks before graduation. He had asked Claire Buckley to the junior prom. He had texted her between Chemistry and American History, when he knew that she had study hall and would be working out in the weight room alone. He pictured her in her team shorts and gray Whalers T-shirt, all sweaty, her blue eyes intense, her light-brown hair pulled back in that swingy ponytail she wore. He wanted her to see the text when she was alone rather than surrounded by forty girlfriends, as she so often was.

Be my date for prom?

He should have asked her in person, he wasn’t too daft to have figured that much out, but what people didn’t realize was that Hobby was shy with girls. This made no sense. He lived with two females, he had girls calling and texting him all the time, he had girls from other schools handing him roses and folded notes with their cell phone numbers on them:
Call me anytime!
Hobby could chat on a basic, friendly level, but as soon as the talk nudged toward romance (could it properly be called romance? he wondered), he fell behind. He didn’t know how to flirt; he was slow to pick up on cues. He wasn’t sure how he was supposed to kiss or feel up a girl whom he’d just met and still remain the kind of person he believed himself to be: a good guy, a gentleman.

Hobby had lost his virginity the summer before to a college girl (a freshman at Amherst, she said, but he was pretty sure she meant UMass). She worked at Henry Jr.’s making sandwiches. Hobby had a job across the street loading lumber onto trucks at Marine Home Center, and he got his lunch from Henry Jr.’s every day. This pretty brunette with a killer smile remembered his order (two roast beef and herb-cheese subs with tomatoes, cucumbers, and horseradish mayo). “Are they both for you?” she asked sweetly. “Yes,” he said, “I’m a growing boy.” He learned that her name was Heather, and from then on he made it a point to say hello to her personally when he picked up his lunch and always to leave a dollar in the tip jar.

Hobby bumped into Heather unexpectedly at a beach party in Dionis. He was pretty drunk, he was out with Anders Peashway and the disreputable David Marcy, and when he saw Heather, he knew only that he knew her, but not
how
he knew her. She had been drinking, too, and she toyed with him, making him guess, until finally she said, “Normally when you see me I’m wearing a white apron.” And he said, “Henry! I mean, Heather!” They embraced like long-lost friends. After a few more beers, Heather
was feeling
very
friendly. She led Hobby away from the party, down the beach, and they started kissing. And Heather, who was at least three years older than Hobby, took charge. Soon they were lying on Heather’s cashmere hoodie, and she was straddling him, and he tried to stop her because he was ready but not prepared—he didn’t have a condom!—but she told him she was on the pill, and he thought, Okay, then. And he thoroughly enjoyed himself, taking as much pleasure in being at last shed of his virginity as he did in the act itself.

But then a couple of days later, when Hobby walked into Henry Jr.’s beaming with excitement about seeing her again, Heather was short with him. Her sentences were clipped; she didn’t smile. She made his sandwiches, wrapped them in white butcher paper, and slammed them down on the counter. Hobby obviously knew something was wrong, but he had no idea what it might be. He had called her cell phone and left a nice voicemail about how much fun he’d had with her. What had gone wrong? He wanted to ask her, but there was a line of construction workers behind him, so there was no way he could broach the topic. He paid her, and she handed him his change, and he hesitated, wondering if he should leave a tip. Would the tip be misconstrued? Would she think it crass? If he
didn’t
leave a tip, would
that
seem crass? He’d always left a tip before, so he deposited a dollar in the tip jar, said thank you, and walked out of Henry Jr.’s into the hot parking lot, thinking, I just really don’t have any talent with women.

But with Claire Buckley, things were different. Hobby had put in a lot of time with Claire. They had gone to school together since kindergarten. He’d always known that Claire was smart, a cut above the other students. And she had developed into a phenomenal athlete as well, playing field hockey, basketball, and lacrosse. She was tall and strong, more interested in her quad muscles than in her breasts—though, as Hobby happened to notice, she had very nice breasts. But what Hobby found most attractive about
Claire was her drive. Claire wanted to excel at whatever she did, just like Hobby.