Summerland: A Novel (10 page)

Zoe sighed, and tears dropped down her cheeks. “As we were rushing to the platform to make our train, he collapsed. Now, your father was a big man. When he fell, a few other people around us nearly got knocked over. I screamed. Hobson was clawing at his chest. He was having a heart attack. The police were with us in seconds, and then the paramedics. They put Hobson on a stretcher, but it took three of them to carry him out to the ambulance. I followed the ambulance in the back of a police cruiser. There was a policewoman with me, trying to write down your dad’s information. I think she was worried that I was going to go into labor. I’m surprised I didn’t. I don’t know how to explain this, but I was very calm. It was as if I knew—somewhere deep inside me, I just knew.” Zoe stopped. Tears fell. She had never vocalized these thoughts to anyone, she realized, not even Jordan—but it seemed right that she should now be telling all of this to her unconscious son. “Your father and I had something so amazing and perfect that I had always feared it wouldn’t last. I had always thought he was too good for me, that his star was too bright. And I guess it was too bright, because it burned out. When I got to the hospital, they told me he was already gone.”

Zoe got up and went over to the side of Hobby’s bed. She touched his cheek. It was smooth; the nurses had taught Zoe how to shave him. It was one of the few things she could do for him. “But I kept you and your sister safe,” she said. “I did manage to do that.”

It was not at that exact moment but some minutes later—five minutes, ten minutes, twelve minutes—that Hobby opened his
eyes. It looked as if he were squinting at first, and Zoe thought it was a figment of her imagination. She became alert without letting herself feel too hopeful.

And then, just like that, his eyes opened all the way—they were meadow-green—and he was looking at her. He saw her, he recognized her.

And just as Zoe had once known, deep down, that she was going to lose Hobson, so did she realize now that she had known all along that Hobby would come back to her.

“Hi,” she said.

I
n the days following the accident, there had been room for only one thought: she wished it had been her who died.

She was a criminal. A thief and a murderer.

Demeter vacillated between telling the hideous truth and keeping the truth sheltered and secret inside of her, the coin at the bottom of the well that no one could retrieve.

The latter, she thought. For as long as she could, she would be a sphinx. She had the answer, but nobody knew the question.

From behind the locked door of her bedroom, Demeter heard her mother on the telephone, every second practically, talking to Mrs. Loom or Mr. Potts or Rasha Buckley. Or talking to Demeter’s father, who was at Mass General, where Hobby lay in a coma.

How did Demeter feel about Hobby’s being in a coma? She felt sick about it, just sick. She had been in love with Hobby when she was younger, and those years had been exquisitely painful. Demeter was overweight, doughy, and cumbersome. The boys in her class had called her a dog, a cow, an elephant, and—in sixth
grade, when they were studying prehistoric times—a mammoth. They told her she stank. To add insult to injury, she had braces on her teeth, and bits of food would get stuck in them, and her breath did stink. She was unwilling to get undressed to take a shower after gym class, and so on Tuesdays and Thursdays she reeked of body odor.

Demeter had looked upon Hobby, that classic Greek god of a human being, his muscles perfectly formed and tanned to gold, and wanted to
be
him. Her parents were such close friends with Zoe Alistair that Demeter had spent pretty much every weekend of her life in Hobby’s presence when they were growing up. In the spring they would picnic together at the Daffodil Festival in Sconset. Hobby and Jake Randolph would lob a lacrosse ball to each other on the lawn in front of the old water company, and Penny would inevitably have been asked to ride in someone’s antique car for the parade. How many times had Demeter stood on the side of the road, watching as Penny sat in the rumble seat of a Model A Ford, waving at the crowd like Miss America? Demeter had meanwhile stuffed her face with Zoe Alistair’s ribbon sandwiches and deviled eggs and curried chicken salad and double fudge brownies. That was all she was good at: eating.

In the summer the Castles, the Alistairs, and the Randolphs all went to the beach together. When they were younger, they would play flashlight tag, light a bonfire, and sing Beatles songs, with Mr. Randolph playing the guitar and Penny’s voice floating above everyone else’s. But at some point Demeter had stopped feeling comfortable in a bathing suit. She wore shorts and oversized T-shirts to the beach, and she wouldn’t go in the water, wouldn’t walk with Penny to look for shells, wouldn’t throw the Frisbee with Hobby and Jake. The other three kids always tried to include Demeter, which was more humiliating, somehow, than if they’d just ignored her. They were earnest in their pursuit of her attention, but Demeter suspected this was their parents’ doing.
Mr. Randolph might have offered Jake a twenty-dollar bribe to be nice to Demeter because Al Castle was an old friend. Hobby and Penny were nice to her because they felt sorry for her. Or maybe Hobby and Penny and Jake all had a bet going about who would be the one to break through Demeter’s Teflon shield. She was a game to them.

In the fall there were football parties at the Alistairs’ house, during which the adults and Hobby and Jake watched the Patriots, Penny listened to music on her headphones, and Demeter dug into Zoe Alistair’s white chicken chili and topped it with a double spoonful of sour cream.

In the winter there were weekends at Stowe. Al and Lynne Castle owned a condo near the mountain, and Demeter had learned to ski as a child. According to her parents, she used to careen down the black-diamond trails without a moment’s hesitation. But by the time they went to Vermont with the Alistairs and the Randolphs, Demeter refused to get on skis at all. She sat in the lodge and drank hot chocolate until the rest of the gang came clomping in after their runs, rosy-cheeked and winded.

And then the ski weekends, at least, had stopped happening, because Hobby had basketball and Penny and Jake were in the school musical, which meant rehearsals night and day.

Demeter thought back to all those springs, summers, falls, and winters with Hobby and Penny and Jake, and she wondered how her parents could have put her through such exquisite torture. Hobby and Penny and Jake were all exceptional children, while Demeter was seventy pounds overweight, which sank her self-esteem, which led to her getting mediocre grades when she was smart enough for A’s and killed her chances of landing the part of Rizzo in
Grease,
even though she was a gifted actress.

Hobby was in a coma. Her mother was on the phone. She kept saying, “Zoe won’t talk to me. I don’t know why.”

Demeter wanted a drink, but there was no alcohol in the house.
She thought her parents must know about the bottle of Jim Beam because on one of the rare occasions during the past week when she had left her room—to get a sleeve of Ritz crackers and a jar of peanut butter from the pantry—she’d seen her mother standing at the sink with the bottles of vodka and gin and vermouth, sniffing their contents before pouring them down the drain. The jig was up: Demeter had been found out.

Demeter looked at her mother, and Lynne Castle looked back at her and smiled. She said, “Hi, honey. Are you feeling hungry for a snack?”

Demeter stared at the crackers and peanut butter in her hands as if astonished to find them there. A knife for the peanut butter would have been nice, but Demeter wasn’t willing to take one step closer to her mother or the bottles she was emptying. The cabinet above the refrigerator was hanging open. Her mother must realize that Demeter had drunk the vodka and replaced it with water, and drunk the Dewar’s and replaced it with iced tea. Lynne Castle
did
get it, right? Somehow Demeter didn’t think she did. Her mother was living in outright denial about what was going on. Ignore the obvious signs that your daughter is an alcoholic, but please make sure she has a snack if she feels hungry.

This depressed Demeter all the more. And made her angrier. She retreated to her room.

Jake called. The first time was Sunday night at seven o’clock. Demeter was asleep, but Lynne Castle slipped a note under her bedroom door:
Jake called. He wants to speak to you.

Okay, wait. This deserved some thought. How long and how desperately had Demeter waited for a boy to call her? How many times had she fantasized that someone like Hobby or Jake would discover something in her that no one else could see, not even Demeter herself? Some latent, hidden beauty, some spark, some capacity for happiness, for joy?

Demeter didn’t harbor fantasies anymore. Fantasies were all distinctly in the past. Jake wasn’t calling Demeter so they could commiserate, so they could cry together or hold on to each other, say “Oh my God, what the fuck?” or celebrate how fortunate they were to be alive, present some kind of united front or wallow together in their survivors’ remorse.

He was calling for one reason, and one reason only.

Demeter refused to take his calls. Her mother couldn’t really insist, though she did try reasoning (“You might feel better if you talked to someone else who went through this with you”) and pleading (“Demeter, honey, please call him back, he sounded perfectly
awful
”) and begging (“Darling, please, he’s called half a dozen times today alone”). But Demeter kept refusing; she said she was too upset to talk about it at all. When Jake rode over on his bicycle and knocked on Demeter’s bedroom door and called out her name, she nearly buckled and let him in. How many times had she fantasized about someone like Jake sitting with her in her room, looking at her books, sneaking sips off whatever bottle she had hidden under her pillow, growing buzzed and giggly with her, reaching out to touch her hair? She did, after all, have great hair, chestnut-brown and thick, with a streak of natural blond in the front. He might let her put her hands on his back—he was forever asking Penny to massage his back, and Penny always refused, but Demeter would be glad to do it, wouldn’t she?

But no, sorry, no, she said nothing, she stayed as still as a corpse until Jake gave up and she heard her mother say, “I guess she’s just not ready.”

He wanted the coin from the bottom of the well. He was the only one who might suspect there even
was
a coin, or a well.

She wanted a drink, she
needed
a drink. On Saturday night, the one-week anniversary of the accident, Demeter was freshly struck by the reality of what had happened. It was as if she had been
wrapped in cotton batting in the interim—that was certainly probably the shock—and now, all of a sudden, she was exposed and vulnerable.

Penny Alistair was
dead.

Hobby Alistair, ninety miles away at Mass General, was lying in a coma.

Demeter couldn’t handle it. She yanked on her long, straight, thick hair and considered cutting it all off with a pair of her mother’s garden shears. That was something a crazy person would do, and Demeter was, now, rapidly approaching crazy. But no, not her hair, she didn’t have anything else to be vain about aside from her hair, and she was keeping it.

Try another tack, Demeter. She had a criminal mind, she should use it. Use it! She needed a drink, so she would get a drink. But where? And then, of course, she knew.

That night she waited until her parents were asleep. She had thought her parents’ routines and rituals might change after the accident, but once her father came home from Boston, he and Lynne slid back into their usual ways. If they weren’t out (and they wouldn’t go out under the circumstances, no way, they might not go out once all summer), they turned the TV off at ten and climbed the stairs together to their bedroom. Lynne Castle always paused by Demeter’s door—to check if her light was on, to see if she could hear any noises coming from her room—then sighed and moved on, announcing their retirement for the night with the click of their door.

Demeter had shut off her light intentionally. She sat in the dark, counting her breaths. Ten minutes, fifteen minutes, thirty minutes. Her plan was so twisted, so truly evil, that she couldn’t believe she was really going to execute it.

But, yes, she was. She had to.

Out the window, down the sloping roof, and boom! onto the front lawn. The lawn had just been cut that day, Demeter had
heard her father out on the mower, and this reminded her that she had a job set up with Frog and Toad Landscaping for the summer. She had spent the previous two summers working at Island Day Care, looking after the infants. She had spooned pears and sweet potatoes into their mouths and changed their diapers; she had held and rocked the babies, sterilized their pacifiers and mixed up formula for them. Demeter had a way with babies, or so she liked to think. Babies didn’t threaten her; babies didn’t know she was fat. Babies just needed love, and believe it or not, Demeter had plenty of love in her heart to give. But the day care was an indoor job, the air at the day care center was stuffy and overly warm and redolent of souring milk.

Her father had offered her an office job at the car dealership, but that held even less appeal. And so, during a moment of belief that self-improvement was possible, Demeter had decided to pursue an active summer job that would permit her to be outside in the sun, but not a job lifeguarding or camp counseling, for which she would have to wear a bathing suit. And certainly nothing in food service. Demeter eventually set her sights on landscaping. She would wear cargo shorts and work boots, she would push a mower in the sun all day, which required no actual athletic ability but would enable her to lose weight and get a tan. She would work with El Salvadoran men and improve her Spanish. The man who owned Frog and Toad, Kerry Trevor, was a friend of her father’s. Kerry bought and serviced his fleet of trucks at Al Castle’s dealership, so securing Demeter a spot on one of his crews had been a piece of cake.