Summerland: A Novel (35 page)

The shade on the window was flapping in the breeze. Hobby inspected Penny’s bedside table. There was a glass of water,
evaporated down to an inch or so, with a film of dust across the top. A box of Kleenex. A copy of
Moby-Dick
, which Penny referred to as her independent reading. She’d been telling people this for at least nine months, but when Hobby checked now, he saw that she had read only up to page 236. She had died without even getting halfway through.

From the bedside table, Hobby could pivot and open Penny’s closet. On the inside of the door was a cork board displaying a photo montage of Penny and Jake. Penny and Jake in
Guys and Dolls,
Penny and Jake in
Damn Yankees,
Penny and Jake in
Grease
. Penny and Jake in the stands at one of Hobby’s football games, Jake carrying Penny down the beach on his back, Penny and Jake with marshmallows in their mouths, Penny and Jake at the prom. There was also a picture of himself and Penny on Christmas morning in front of the tree, Penny in some ridiculous high-necked flannel nightgown that made her look like Laura Ingalls Wilder, her hair in braids to heighten the effect, and him in boxers and one of his father’s vintage Clash T-shirts (his mother had kept his father’s concert T-shirts, and she gave Hobby one every year on his birthday). In this Christmas photo, Penny was beaming and apple-cheeked, and Hobby was bleary-eyed and scowling. It was this past Christmas. Penny had woken him up at seven-thirty. He would have been content to sleep until noon and then eat three quarters of his mother’s Christmas coffee cake and
then
open his stocking. But not Penny. She had been a freaking Christmas elf.

And that’s it for you and Christmas, Pen, Hobby thought. Maybe for all of them and Christmas. His mother had already talked about taking a trip to St. John at the holidays.

Penny’s clothes were hanging in the closet. His mother had said something about Goodwill, when she got around to it. Hobby fingered Penny’s favorite blue blouse, which had cost a fortune—two or three hundred dollars. Penny had seen it on line, she wanted to buy it with her own money, but Zoe said no, there was no reason
for a teenager to spend that kind of money on one article of clothing. And then a few weeks later, Penny had been asked to sing in front of the Boston Pops for the second year in a row, personally, by Keith Lockhart, and Zoe had bought Penny the blouse for the occasion. Hobby touched the silky material. The blouse was still here, but Penny wasn’t. It was messing with his head.

He hopped over to the edge of her bed. Her poster of Robert Pattinson was still hanging, her
Twilight
books were still on the shelves. Below her books were CDs—Charlotte Church and Jessye Norman next to Puccini’s operas next to
Send In the Clowns
by Judy Collins. Certainly Penelope Alistair was the only seventeen-year-old in the world to own a Judy Collins CD. That was truly the music she liked best, however: those godawful songs of the 1970s. Crystal Gayle, Anne Murray, Karen Carpenter. It was Penny’s dream to become one of these women. By the time she was “grown up”—say, in 2015—she figured the world would be ready to hear these songs again. If Penny ever made it onto
American Idol,
she planned to sing Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life.” She used to sing it all the time in the shower.

“Even your voice can’t save that song,” Hobby said. “Pick something else.”

“I’m afraid I have to agree with your brother,” Zoe said. Zoe had good taste in music. She was a Deadhead. She had a cardboard box with all of her bootleg tapes stashed under her bed. And she liked modern stuff, too—Eminem, Spoon, Rihanna.

But Penny continued to sing “You Light Up My Life.” And the soundtrack to
Fame.
Hobby would have laughed if it hadn’t been so tragic.

He closed the door to the closet. Penny had a drafting table instead of a desk, just as Hobby did in his room. Hobby had a drafting table because he wanted to be an architect; Penny had one because she was a copycat. She kept a sketchpad and a box of
colored pencils on her drafting table because she liked to “draw,” though she wasn’t much of an artist. But now Hobby stared at the sketchpad, wondering if his sister had left behind some sort of note. He had gathered—though no one had said it to him directly—that certain people thought the accident had been a suicide.

Hobby crutched his way over to the drafting table. If there was a note, he would have to show his mother. If it turned out that Penny had committed suicide, he was going to boil over in anger.

But the sketchpad was blank, except for a heart drawn in black pencil. A heart she was probably planning on filling with Penny + Jake, TL4EVA. It was something of a joke around school that Penny had graffitied every pair of jeans that Jake Randolph owned.

She would have been really upset to hear about Jake and Winnie. She would have done something drastic, maybe.

No suicide note. That was good. Hobby wondered if his mother had already been in here panning for one. She must have, right? Immediately afterward? But maybe not. This place looked untouched.

Hobby was about to vacate the premises. He couldn’t shake the feeling that Penny was watching him. “Matter cannot be created or destroyed”—so she existed somewhere, right? She would
not
like the idea of Hobby’s hobbling around her room on his crutches, poking through her stuff. So he would go.

But who was he kidding? He wasn’t leaving without the journal. He moved over to the dresser and, without looking at himself in the mirror, slipped the journal out from under Penny’s underwear. Then he lumbered out into the hallway and shut the door.

Wherever she was, she would
not
want him reading her journal. But what had Zoe said? “Sorry, Hob, I’m human.” Yep, Hobby got it. He thought, Sorry, Pen, I’m human. I can’t pass up the chance to read it.

None of the entries were dated, so Hobby had to orient himself based on content. The journal seemed to start a few years earlier because it referenced Mrs. Jones-Crisman, who had been Penny’s homeroom teacher during freshman year. In the very first entry, Mrs. J-C calls her out for kissing Jake in the hallway. In the next entry, Penny has a fight with Zoe because she kissed Jake in the backseat of the Karmann Ghia. Zoe said, “I don’t get paid enough to listen to the two of you swapping spit. Do it in private.”

Like where?
Penny wondered in her journal.
If I can’t kiss him at school and I can’t kiss him in the car, where am I going to kiss him?

Hobby worried that the whole thing was going to be about kissing Jake. And it was, for the most part—at least at first. Penny wrote about every time she made out with Jake; she compared kissing him to “eating something really delicious and you don’t want to stop. Like Mom’s apple fritters with the Bavarian cream.”

Hobby stopped. It was too bad Jake was in Australia. He would have appreciated that his kissing was on par with Zoe’s apple fritters. Hobby would have laughed at this himself if it hadn’t been so tragic.

He skipped ahead. He didn’t want to read about Penny’s getting felt up, or Penny’s discovering Jake’s erection. (He accidentally stumbled across the line
Do you feel yourself change when we do this?
) He didn’t want to read about Penny’s argument with her voice coach. He was looking for something better, more interesting.

He thought, Come on, Pen, give me something I can work with.

And then, two thirds of the way through the journal, the tone changed. Penny started referring to everyone by their first initials only. Jake became J. Hobby found references to himself and his mother:
H at practice, Z at work. J and I home alone but I don’t want to, I can’t explain it, I just don’t feel like it. I’m too sad. Sad about what? J asks me. He wants me to have a reason so he can fix it. But I don’t have a reason. I’m just sad, and
sad
isn’t even the right
word. I’m empty. Since I don’t have a reason, J applies his own reason: hormones.

A few pages later Hobby read this line:
A told me to read
Moby-Dick.
Says I’ll like it.

Hobby thought, A? A is the reason Penny spent nine months plodding through
Moby-Dick,
only to finally get bogged down on page 236?

A appeared more and more. Hobby couldn’t read fast enough.

J at paper all afternoon. I skipped madrigals, I don’t care if I lose my solo. I spent two hours in the bedroom with A.

Hobby’s head snapped up. While Jake was working on the newspaper, Penny had spent two hours in a bedroom with someone whose name began with an
A.
Hobby racked his shell-shocked brain. The only A he could come up with was Anders Peashway. Had his sister been fooling around with Anders behind Jake’s back? Anders
was
good-looking, he was a very fine athlete, a forward on the basketball team, the catcher on the baseball team, one of Hobby’s top lieutenants. But really? Penny and Anders? Anders seemed too clueless for Penny, too provincial. Anders Peashway would go to college someplace where he could play baseball—Plymouth State or, if he was lucky, Northeastern—and then he would return to Nantucket and work for his father building houses. He would buy a boat and fish, he would have children and watch them play in the same gym and on the same fields where he played. Penny could never be interested in someone like Anders, could she?

A told me to read
Moby-Dick.
Says I’ll like it.
There was absolutely no way Anders Peashway had told Penny to read anything, much less an eight-hundred-page classic that dealt with what Anders would have referred to as “old-fashioned shit.”

Hobby kept going.
Lay down with A today. Talked. A understands me. A says that sometimes the heart pumps black blood. And that is exactly how I feel. I am poisoned with something, this evil
sickness, this lethargy, the inability to care. I’m supposed to be joyous about my voice, my “natural gift.” Z says I have a “responsibility to myself” to develop my talent. God gave me this voice for a reason, Z says. Everyone and their “reasons.” It’s like the rest of the world doesn’t realize that everything that happens is random. A woman kills her two teenagers, she shoots them. She’d had it, she says. They were mouthy. Everyone sympathizes with the kids, and I sympathize with the kids. But sometimes I sympathize with the mother. Sometimes I feel like I’ve had it.

Hobby shut the journal. He shouldn’t have opened it. He was going to have to show his mother. Or maybe not.
The heart pumps black blood.
There was a black heart on the sketchpad. Penny had been sick, and none of them had known it. Well, one thing had changed: Hobby no longer felt guilty about invading Penny’s privacy. He felt as if she’d meant for him to find her journal.

J is mad that I’m spending so much time with A. Not healthy, he says. He doesn’t get that A is the only one who understands me.

So Jake knew about A, Hobby thought. The idea that A was Anders Peashway still nagged at him. Jake would certainly have said that Penny’s spending so much time with Anders was not healthy. But the
Moby-Dick
thing? No. Not Anders. No way.

I ask A about her marriage.

Hobby was so surprised to read this line that he nearly ripped the journal in two, and a shooting pain traveled up his bad arm and throbbed in the spot where he’d broken his clavicle. A was a
woman,
a woman who either was or had been married. So that meant what, exactly? That his sister had been a lesbian? That she was having a relationship with a grown woman? She had been “lying in bed” and sharing her most intimate thoughts with an adult woman, and Jake knew about it and didn’t think it was healthy.

Then Hobby got it. He was daft, yes he was; another person—his
mother, for example—would have figured it out right away. A was Ava Randolph.

A says she’s felt alone ever since Ernie died; her loneliness is a shroud and a shield. She internalized the pain she felt over losing her son, and it ate up everything inside her. A is lucky. Ernie is her Reason. It’s something she can pinpoint. I feel like I’m being eaten away from the inside, but I don’t have a Reason. Then I wonder if my Reason is my father, the father who died before I was born. A touches my hair and says, “That’s possible.”

Jesus! Hobby thought. It sounded as if Ava Randolph had been mentoring Penny in the art of insanity and depression. How could Penny feel the loss of a person she’d never known? Hobby was in the same boat, he’d lost his father before he was born too, but he had hardly given it a moment’s thought. On Father’s Day he sometimes felt a twinge, or when he saw other kids throwing the baseball with their dads, but it wasn’t something he ever wanted to
cry
over. If anything, he was grateful to Hobson senior for giving him top-notch genes. He certainly hadn’t inherited his size or his athletic ability from Zoe.

The most notable thing for Hobby was that in the last fifteen or twenty pages of Penny’s journal, J was hardly mentioned at all. It was all about A.

A wants to move to Australia, but JR has work and J has school. A misses her family. I ask her why she doesn’t just move back alone, and she says she’s in a double bind.

Hobby knew there was no way he could show the journal to his mother. Zoe would hate the thought of Penny’s communing with Ava Randolph. Hobby tried to summon his own images of Ava Randolph, but as with so many of his memories, it was as if
someone had broken into the bank and stolen them all. Then he had one: Ava Randolph at the funeral for her baby. She had set the tiny coffin in the hole in the ground, and then she alone had taken up the spade and filled in the hole. The rest of them, including Jordan Randolph, including Al Castle, including the cemetery attendant, had just stood there and watched her. Hobby had been only thirteen years old, but he remembered how the muscles in Ava Randolph’s forearms had tensed, he remembered the way she’d smoothed the dirt across the top, he remembered how, when she was finished, she had stabbed the earth with the blade of the spade, and then she had turned to the rest of them and started to wail.