Summerland: A Novel (17 page)

A half hour passed, then an hour. She had half a bucket of weeds, but she was only now getting the hang of it, how to dig down and extract the hook of the root. It was sort of like pulling her long hairs out of the shower drain. The weeding left divots in the perfect dirt, which Demeter then smoothed over as though she were icing a cake. This image made her hungry. Her banana was in the truck, growing warm and soft.

Demeter scrutinized the front of the house as she crept along the edge of the flower bed. It didn’t seem like anyone was home. But was the house open? And if it was, would she be able to pop inside to, say, use the bathroom? She kind of doubted it. Zeus and Coop most certainly relieved themselves outside, but what about Nell?

She weeded, she weeded. She had to kneel; it was the only effective position. Demeter’s mother had a foam pad that she placed under her knees when she weeded. Tomorrow Demeter would bring it to work with her. And her music—music would make things better. Anything would be better than kneeling in the heat
with nothing to occupy her mind but the weeds and their tenacious grip on the earth.

Penny was buried in the earth, in her coffin. The coffin was made of glossy wood and had brass handles. Jake Randolph and Patrick Loom and Anders Peashway and some of Hobby’s other teammates had gripped the brass handles when they lifted Penny’s coffin off of the trestle and loaded it in the back of the hearse. Demeter had swooned at the sight of those handsome young men carrying Penny’s coffin. It might be worth it to die if she could be sure those same boys would carry her to her final resting place. They had all cried for Penny. None of them would cry for Demeter.

Demeter hadn’t focused on it at the time, but Penny was
in
that coffin. Her D.O.A. body, her corpse. Demeter had taken Penny into the dunes. Demeter had been drunk, but she hadn’t lied or embellished her story. She had told only the truth, and the truth wasn’t her fault.

Demeter had been one of the last people to see Penny alive. Driving down Hummock Pond Road, Penny had pressed the gas pedal to the floorboard. Penny had wanted to die, Demeter understood then. Probably she had been wanting to die for a long time, since long before Demeter took her into the dunes. Penny had carried around a burden as heavy as Demeter’s extra weight, only Penny’s weight was inside of her. Who knew where it came from? Possibly she had been born with it, the way Demeter herself had been born with the predilection to overeat. Penny had driven that car with the intent to kill—it wasn’t a game or a dare, she wasn’t just trying to scare them or thrill them, she was for real, she meant it. She didn’t care if she killed herself. She didn’t care if she killed them all.

Coop had finished mowing and was now edging the yard with a weed whacker.

Demeter needed a drink.

She was nearly done with the beds. She was pleased with herself
because even she could see that they looked neater. She could tell the difference between where she had weeded and where she hadn’t.

She stood up and dusted off her knees, which held the imprints of the grass.

She walked around the house. Zeus was watering the containers that surrounded the flagstone patio, and at the edge of the property, closest to the wild grasses that preceded the pond, Nell was still weeding the back beds. She was doing the same work as Demeter, but with a water view.

“Hey,” Nell said, looking up. “You’re not done, are you?”

“I’m almost done with the beds,” Demeter said. Her head was spinning. It hadn’t occurred to her before that Penny had been trying to kill
her
. “I have to pee.” She paused and widened her eyes. “Badly.”

“Oh,” Nell said.

“Is there protocol?”

“Yeah,” Nell said. “Squat behind a tree. Or hold it.”

“We can’t go in the house?” Demeter asked.

“God, no,” Nell said.

Demeter felt her heart drop an inch. “Not ever?”

“Well,” Nell said. Her voice was a whisper. She glanced at Zeus. “Some houses, yes. Some houses have pool houses or guesthouses or staff houses where we can use the bathroom. Some owners invite us in or have an open-door policy. But in general, no.”

“No one’s home here,” Demeter said. “Can’t I just check to see if the door is open?”

Nell bit her lower lip. She was being nice when she could have been a total bitch. “You can check. But be quick and take your shoes off, okay? And be clean, you know.”

“Of course,” Demeter said. She ran to the side door, which was out of Nell’s view. She should grab her backpack. But there wasn’t time, and Coop might see her. She tried the knob: the door was
open. Amazing but not
that
amazing—Demeter didn’t know a single islander who locked his or her door. However, an open door indicated that the people who owned the house were on the island but just not home at the moment, which meant they might come back any second.

Demeter moved through the house. Where to look? In the fridge? There was a bottle of wine in the fridge, an unopened bottle of chardonnay whose absence would most decidedly be noticed. The freezer? There was half a bottle of Finlandia vodka in there. Oh, how Demeter yearned to take it! But no, not the whole thing. She opened the bottle and took a healthy swig. The vodka stung her throat and burned all the way down until it settled with a flutter in her chest. She threw back another shot, then another. She heard the ticking of a clock somewhere in the kitchen, and outside the buzzing sound of the weed whacker. Demeter put the vodka back where she’d found it and tightly closed the freezer door. The kitchen was bright and sunny and had a lot of expensive-looking polished surfaces. Where did they keep the bar? The vodka was starting to warm her; for a second she felt
totally great
. Out the window she saw Nell weeding and Zeus watering, and she could hear Coop. She opened cabinet doors until she hit paydirt: bottles and bottles and bottles in neat, sparkling rows. She gasped as someone else might do upon discovering a hidden altar. She reached for a bottle of Jim Beam, but who was she kidding? She would never be able to drink that stuff again. She took a full bottle of Finlandia and slid it into the pocket of her cargo shorts, where it was hidden by the folds of her tied flannel shirt. She closed up the cabinet and slipped out the same door she’d come in through, then she hurried for the truck. She swaddled the bottle inside her flannel shirt and tucked the whole bundle into her backpack.

She felt winded but lightheaded. It had been so easy.

She strode back out to the front beds and put on her gloves. She still had weeding to do.

J
ake could see why his mother loved Fremantle. It was perfect, in the same way that he imagined San Diego in 1955 must have been perfect. Each day was sunny and beautiful, the gardens were in full bloom, the houses were occupied by smiling blond people who always seemed to be out front washing their cars or returning home with their reusable shopping bags filled to bursting with fresh produce—lettuces and strawberries and mangoes and pineapples—from the Fremantle Markets. But these things didn’t keep Jake from hating the place.

He wanted to go home. He thought about locking himself in the shed and refusing to come out. He thought about staging a hunger strike. How many days would he have to go without food before his parents would agree to take him home?

When he was younger, his mother had often read him a book called
Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day,
in which, in fact, one very bad thing after another happened to Alexander, and all Alexander dreamed about was moving to Australia. This book had been a favorite, not of Jake’s but of Ava’s. It was as though Ava were Alexander and her life on Nantucket were one endless loop of no good, very bad days that could be fixed only by her moving back to Australia.

The sad thing was how desperately Jake now longed for this hypothesis to fail. He wished with all his heart that his mother would not find happiness in Australia, that she would be disappointed and disenchanted and they would all be allowed to go home to Nantucket.

But in just the way that water was supposed to swirl down the drain in the opposite direction in the Southern Hemisphere (clockwise instead of counterclockwise), and just as the seasons were
opposite to those back home, a reversal seemed to Jake to be taking hold of his parents.

His mother was slowly coming back to life, like a person who had been frozen and was now thawing. She moved easily around their new house; she cut flowers from the backyard and put them in a vase. She put music on in the kitchen—sometimes classical, sometimes acoustic coffeehouse stuff, sometimes the Beatles or U2. Once Jake even caught her humming. She now had places to go and people to meet. She took a picnic to the green acres of Kings Park with her sister, she spent afternoons shopping in Subiaco, she went with her nieces on an outing to the Perth Zoo. She spent one Sunday sunbathing on Cottesloe Beach, and the next sailing on the Swan River with her brother Noah. She was up early, chipper and smiling; she had literally become a
new person,
a person Jake had never met. He tried to recall what his mother had been like before Ernie died, but all that lingered in his memory was an Ava who, while not wracked with grief, had been preoccupied with having another baby and was overprotective of Jake himself, alternately distracted and annoying.

Now she was—well, she was better. She had stopped watching that moronic TV show, a total irony because here in Australia,
Home and Away
aired every night at seven-thirty. Jake had expected Ava to be glued to the set as she had been at home. But being in Australia had eradicated her need to watch a show set in Australia. Plus, she was too busy for TV. She didn’t mope around the house the way she used to do on her sad days, or stalk like a hungry tigress on her angry days. Now she hit an evenhanded balance. She offered Jake a host of potential activities: sailing lessons at the Fremantle Yacht Club, an internship at the Science Museum (set up by his Uncle Marco), a visit with his cousin Xavier, who was not quite a year older than Jake.

“You used to love playing with Xavier,” his mother said. “Don’t you remember?”

What Jake remembered was that Xavier had given him an Indian rope burn and cheated at thumb wrestling.

“I’m too old for a play date, Mom,” Jake said.

Ava insisted that he needed something to do. The American International School kept to the same schedule as schools back home, so classes wouldn’t begin until September. He couldn’t just sit and rot for the next two months.

He turned down all of his mother’s overtures. He seethed at how happy she seemed. All it had taken was Penny’s death.

His parents still fought all the time—Jake overheard them from the private distance of the shed—but now it was for different reasons. Now his father was the one who didn’t want to go anywhere or do anything. Jordan refused to see anyone from Ava’s family: “They all blame me, Ava,” he said. “You poisoned them against me.” Now his father was the one who paced the floor, impatient and restless, as if waiting for someone to rescue him.

Their first family outing was to the Harborfront for fish and chips, his mother’s idea. There were half a dozen huge establishments with picnic tables overlooking the water, and they all sold the same thing: fried haddock or whiting with pale, limp “chips,” which were french fries, or sort of. The restaurants also specialized in fried shrimp, fried clams, and something revolting called fried whitebait, a little fish that looked like a minnow; you were meant to eat the eyes and tail and everything.

Ava had waited tables at Cicarella’s as a young woman, and so they selected an outdoor table there. Ava said, “I’m going classic: fried whiting and chips. Gentlemen, what would you like?”

Jordan said, “Nothing for me, thanks.”

“What do you mean, ‘nothing’?” Ava demanded.

“I mean I’m not eating.”

“But you agreed to come.”

Jordan sighed. “Yes, Ava, I agreed to come.”

“So if you agreed to come, you have to eat. Eating is part of the deal.”

“Is it?” Jordan asked.

They were going to fight again, and out in public this time. Jake agreed with his father, he didn’t want to eat here either. This place was seedy; in America it would be considered almost honky-tonk, with its stench of frying oil and its scores of cawing seagulls. But his father’s refusal to eat came across as being juvenile and mean, and Jake felt a stab of sympathy for his mother, who obviously had dreamed of eating here at least forty-two thousand times over the past two decades.

Jake said, “I’ll have the fried shrimp.”

“Prawns,” Ava said.

“Whatever.”

“Or you could have yabbies,” Ava said. “Which are a bigger bug, sort of like crawfish.”

“Please don’t call them bugs,” Jake said. “I’ll have the shrimp.”

Ava stood to order the food, and Jake was too embarrassed to look at his father, whom he felt he’d betrayed somehow. Jake was used to the usual teams—himself and his father on one side, his mother (and in some weird way, Ernie) on the other—and totally unprepared for the way their roles had switched. Jordan was, quite clearly, the bad guy now, the spoiler, while Ava was the good guy. His mother was just trying to have a pleasant evening out with her family, to show them a bit of the culture she’d grown up in.

Ava brought the fish and chips to the table wrapped in white paper, and when she unfolded the paper, they were all enveloped by steam and the smell of fried fish. Ava closed her eyes and inhaled. Then she wielded a squirt bottle of vinegar and doused her food with it, giving the whole mess a new smell.

Jake said, “Ketchup? Because I’m American?”

His mother laughed, the short, high-pitched yelp of a Yorkie.

His father said, “I’ll get it.”

Ava dug into her meal with a voraciousness Jake couldn’t remember seeing in her before. This, to her, was the best food on Earth.

Jake’s father was taking a long time getting the ketchup, and Jake’s shrimp were rapidly cooling; in another few minutes, he knew, the fries would be stiff and inedible.