Summerland: A Novel (12 page)

Penny had said, “I’ll be sad to leave Ava.”

And then—then!—Jake remembered another thing Penny had said:

“I just want to stay in this moment forever. Like in a bubble, you know? You and me and the fire, staring at the edge of adulthood but never quite reaching it.”

Jake repeated these words to the Chief, and the Chief wrote them down carefully, then cleared his throat. He opened his mouth to speak, and Jake thought, Don’t say it.

“What else do you remember about the party?” the Chief asked.

What else? Kids drinking, smoking cigarettes, smoking weed, pairing off and heading down the beach to make out, kids talking to Jake and Penny, asking them what they were going to do over the summer—Jake was working at the newspaper, Penny had a job hostessing at the Brotherhood, and the last three weeks before school started, she was going to music camp in Interlochen, Michigan. Jake and Penny had repeated these plans to half a dozen people. What Jake didn’t say was that he was planning on taking Penny away to Boston, where they were going to spend the night at the Hotel Marlowe, which would cost a fortune, but Jake had been saving his money for something spectacularly romantic, something that Penny would never forget, and that was what he’d come up with.

“We hung out,” Jake said. “And then we left.”

“Okay,” the Chief said, scooting his chair forward. This was what he’d been waiting for, of course, the details of their leaving. “So whose idea was it to leave?”

Jake couldn’t remember, even though it had been less than two hours earlier. The party was breaking up, and Demeter materialized, her hair hanging in her face and her mouth slack, the way it got when she was smashed. Demeter was a nice girl deep down; she’d been a part of Jake’s life forever and ever, but something had changed in her, she had developed a sharp, shining edge that seemed dangerous. Jake knew enough about girls to know that it had to do with her weight and the fact that she didn’t have close
friends and didn’t do as well as she ought to in school. The edge was her defense. She could be mean, sarcastic, snide—even with Penny, and Penny was the only person who was always nice to her. When Demeter had texted earlier that night, above Jake and Hobby’s unspoken protests, Penny had said, “Let’s go pick her up. She’s just sitting home drinking, poor thing.” Demeter had taken up drinking with a vengeance, which Jake found ironic since her parents were teetotalers and pillars of the community.

On the beach Demeter had said, “I have to pee. Come with me, Penny.”

Penny had stood up, wiped the sand off her butt, and dutifully followed Demeter into the dunes. Now Jake wondered if Penny had had to pee as well or if she’d just gone along because Demeter asked her to. What he remembered now was that once the girls had vanished, he had gone looking for Hobby and found him drinking a beer, talking to Patrick Loom. Hobby had a way with people that Jake envied. Hobby was such a phenomenal athlete that people expected him to be as dumb as a bag of hammers, annoyingly self-congratulatory, or at the very least overly interested in the topic of sports. But Hobby socialized like an adult at a cocktail party. He held his drink a certain way, he tilted his head so that you knew he was listening, he asked perceptive questions. He shone so brightly that he made other people shine too. Jake had a lot going for him, everyone told him so, but he was envious of Hobby.

He’d nudged Hobby’s elbow. “Hey, man, we’re going.”

Hobby grinned. “Cool.” He scanned the dispersing crowd. “Have you seen Claire?”

“Not in a while,” Jake said. “Did you text her?”

“I did, but I got nothing back. She must have left.” Hobby looked wistful. He could have had any girl at Nantucket High School, he could have plucked them out one by one and used them like Kleenexes, but that had never been his style. He liked girls,
respected them, treated them like human beings. Claire Buckley was his current favorite, but she and Hobby were casual. Nothing like Jake and Penny: Jake would never have let Penny out of his sight at a party like this, even for a second. Except for right now—he realized that she and Demeter were taking a long time. Jake eyed the dunes; he could see people moving up there, but it was too dark to tell exactly who they were.

He said to Hobby, “I’ll meet you at the car.”

Hobby dumped his beer. “I’m coming.”

The next thing Jake had a distinct memory of was leaning up against the driver’s side of the Jeep, inhaling big gulps of night air. He was drunk enough that Penny would have to drive. He couldn’t afford to get pulled over. His father was the publisher of the paper, and if Jake got caught, his name would appear in the police blotter, a blanket of shame would shroud the Randolph name, and Jake’s prospects for Princeton or Dartmouth would be dashed, just like that.

Penny would drive. They would drop Demeter off first.

Then he realized something was wrong. Penny grabbed the keys out of his hand. She was crying. When Jake said, “Jesus Christ, Pen, what’s wrong?” Penny screamed. When he tried to pry the keys out of her hand, she swung at him. He had never seen her act like that before; it was as if she were possessed. He got a sick feeling that she had heard about what had happened between him and Winnie Potts in Winnie’s basement after the cast party for
Grease.
But what had she heard, and who had told her? Jake remembered looking at Demeter to see if she could shed any light on the situation, but Demeter’s face was closed up tight. Her eyes were blank, her motions robotic; she was shitfaced drunk. Maybe
that
was the problem, maybe Demeter had said something mean to Penny while they were in the dunes. Oh God, Jake hoped that was the case.

Demeter climbed into the back and fastened her seat belt, and
Jake tried not to notice how the belt cut into her belly. She had that shining edge, she kept it hidden most of the time, but then she unsheathed it. That must be it, then, and it had nothing to do with Winnie Potts, oh please.

Penny flung open the door. She was having a hard time catching her breath. The sobs kept coming, one more strangled than the next.

Hobby said, “Jeez, Pen, pull yourself together.”

Jake said, “Penny, what is it? What
is
it?”

Penny slammed the door and started the engine, and even though Jake had been drinking, he was coherent enough to realize that she was in no condition to drive. He tried to pull the keys from the ignition, but Penny batted at him with open palms and Hobby snickered in the back and Penny screamed again, and the scream reminded Jake of another time, another place: his mother when she found Ernie dead in his crib. Jake got goosebumps, his head started to spin, he feared for a second that he was going to puke. Penny shifted into drive, and they screeched around Lincoln Circle, and the motion made Jake feel even sicker and he thought, Please stop, Penny, please stop the car. But he was too nauseated to speak. He breathed in and out through his nose, he tasted the Jim Beam in the back of his throat.

To the Chief, Jake said, “I had been drinking, so Penny drove my car. Demeter was drunk, and Hobby doesn’t have his license. Penny was sober, but she was upset about something.”

“About what?” the Chief asked.

“I honestly don’t know,” Jake said. He had been hoping it was something Demeter had said in the dunes, or maybe it was something Penny and Demeter had seen—maybe Claire Buckley had been up there having sex with Luke Browning, and Penny was upset on her brother’s behalf. Maybe someone they knew had been shooting heroin or doing something even more heinous that Jake couldn’t conceive of. He had a ghastly feeling, though, that
this was about him and Winnie Potts and that night in her basement. Jake had been monitoring the situation for weeks, and he’d heard nothing. Winnie had been reserved but cool, but who knew what she’d said to her close friends, and who knew what those friends had said to others? If it was going to come out, it would be on a night like graduation night, when everyone was drinking. When secrets washed up like dead bodies on the beach. Jake needed to get Penny alone, they had to drop off Demeter and then Hobby. Maybe they could go for a walk on the beach so he could figure out what the problem was. He couldn’t do it with other people in the car, he couldn’t do it while she was driving. His more immediate problem was getting Penny to slow down, or they were going to get pulled over for sure. She was going fifty on New Lane and then nearly sixty on Quaker. She took the turn onto Hummock Pond Road so fast that Jake was sure the Jeep was going to flip. It wasn’t built to go that fast. His stomach lurched, he could feel the beer sloshing around inside him, and he imagined the Jim Beam lying on top of the beer, like an oil slick on water. He felt all hot and queasy. Penny rocketed up the hill by the Maria Mitchell Observatory, and Jake said, “Penny, slow down!” It was June, and the observatory sometimes had open nights when there would be all kinds of people crossing the street. Plus, the police liked to hide in a spot just below the crest of the hill to catch speeders.

But Penny didn’t slow down. She sped up and put all four windows down so that air whipped through the car in a way that was almost violent. Jake managed to glance at the backseat, where he saw Hobby pitched forward, his widening eyes on the speedometer, and Demeter with her hair blowing, a dreamy look on her face.

The wind made Jake’s eyes dry. His stomach had stopped churning and was now clenched in cold fear. He could see Penny’s leg tensed with the strain of pushing the pedal to the floor. He imagined the doors flying off the Jeep and the roof and the tires popping off and the whole thing lifting up into the night sky like
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Penny was biting her lower lip; her eyes were bright and brimming with tears.

She’s not right, Jake thought. He knew when a woman wasn’t right from watching his mother, and Penny wasn’t right. He thought of all the time Penny spent lounging across the bottom of his mother’s bed, worshipping at the throne of the manic-depressive queen. His mother had become some kind of role model for Penny—but why? Why?

“Penny!” he shouted. “You have to slow down! Please!”

She screamed. Jake saw something glittering in front of them. It was the ocean. This was the end of the road.

“Penny!” he said.

“Pull the brake!” Hobby shouted.

Jake thought briefly of the ruined transmission, thousands of dollars of repair work, but then he realized Hobby was right and so he yanked on the emergency brake, but he was too late, they were launching off the lip of the embankment.

They were flying.

T
he day after the accident, he didn’t know what to do, and so he worked. He was back in the office Sunday night at seven o’clock. He was the only one in, that was what he’d wanted, he needed a place to be alone, to think, to sort everything out. The phone rang off the hook—of course, people were hearing the news secondhand or thirdhand and wanted more information. In situations like these he usually leaned on the Web site, but at that moment the Web site featured a big picture of Patrick Loom in his cap and gown, pumping his fist in the air. The headline read: “Nantucket
Graduates 77 Seniors. More than 70% Headed for Four-Year Colleges.” On a deeper page, there was a picture of Penny singing the National Anthem, the hem of her blue flowered sundress lifted a little by the wind. The first thing Jordan did was delete that picture.

But that was all he could do.

He had never come across a story he couldn’t report. It was a commandment in the newspaper world: you printed the news, no matter what. You printed the story about the governor’s sleeping with prostitutes or the senator’s love child, even when the senator had been your college roommate or the governor was your wife’s uncle. Jordan’s grandfather’s brother-in-law had stolen a car and driven it into Gibbs Pond—a relative misdemeanor that was nevertheless the leading news story that week in 1930—and Jordan’s grandfather had put it on the front page, complete with his brother-in-law’s mug shot.

Jordan took a deep breath. He reminded himself that he didn’t have any actual information other than that Penelope Alistair, age seventeen, was dead, and Hobson Alistair, also age seventeen, was at Mass General in a coma. There had been a car accident; Penny had been driving a Jeep registered to Jordan himself. It was the Jeep that Jordan had given to Jake on his seventeenth birthday—because Jake had turned out to be a great kid, despite some pretty punishing circumstances.

Here were the other things that Jordan knew:

—Zoe had slapped him across the face in public, in the hospital waiting room.

—Zoe was not taking his calls.

—Jake Randolph had a bruised right knee and a cut across the top of his left cheek but was otherwise fine.

—Demeter Castle didn’t have a scratch on her but was suffering from shock.

—A nearly empty bottle of Jim Beam had been found in Demeter Castle’s handbag.

—Jake Randolph and Demeter Castle had been wearing seat belts. Penelope Alistair and Hobson Alistair had not been wearing seat belts.

—The airbags had deployed.

—Penelope Alistair had died of a broken neck. Nurses at the hospital had taken a blood sample for the tox screen, but the results had not yet been released.

—Nantucket Auto Body had hauled the Jeep up off the beach in the early hours of Sunday morning, and it was being kept, for now, in the back lot at the police station.

There were many more things that Jordan didn’t know. What had happened? Why had Penny been driving so fast? Jake claimed to have no idea, but Jordan sensed that his son was lying, or partially lying. He worried that Jake and Penny had had a fight, or that Jake had perhaps even broken up with her. But Jake was as enamored with Penny as Jordan could imagine any seventeen-year-old kid’s being. Had Jordan been flirting with another girl? Had he had five or six beers and done something stupid? He said no, he told Jordan that everything had been fine one minute, and then the next minute, not.

Jordan had been forced to wake Ava up out of a deep sleep to tell her that there’d been an accident and he was going to the hospital. Ava had opted to let him go alone, once she knew that Jake was okay. He said he’d call her with any news, but he was pretty certain she’d succumb to the Ambien in her bloodstream and fall back to sleep. And so he didn’t call. When he got back to the house at five-thirty, his cheek burning from Zoe’s slap, Ava was still asleep, and Jake was in his room bawling like a baby. Jordan was torn between going to console his son and telling his wife about the awful thing that had happened.