Summerland: A Novel (22 page)

Jordan, it’s not your fault.

But during that brief interval when she was in his arms she seized the full rush of feeling for just a second, just long enough to
admit to herself that the real reason she hadn’t dated anyone in nearly ten years wasn’t the twins but rather the fact that for all that time she had been in love with one person: this man. He was the only thing she wanted in the world. But she wouldn’t get it. She pulled away. Jordan reached for her, he actually yanked at the sleeve of her coat, but Zoe stepped up onto the sidewalk and said, “I’m going home.”

“No,” he said.

She knew him well enough not to engage in an argument with him. To argue with Jordan Randolph was to lose.

Zoe headed down Centre Street toward her car, enjoying the small pleasure of her footprints in the fresh snow.

I
t was Beatrice McKenzie, the librarian at the Atheneum, who told everyone: Hobby Alistair and his mother had come in to the library at three o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon in the third week of July. Hobby was in a wheelchair, and his mother was pushing. The bandages had been removed from Hobby’s head, revealing that half his scalp had been shaved and that he had a five-inch run of spidery black stitches over his left ear. The wound was gruesome to look at, Beatrice said, plus the boy’s arm and leg were in casts, and his arm was in a sling. She couldn’t believe he was anywhere other than in the hospital or at home, though she was relieved to see him alive. Beatrice’s husband, Paul, now retired, was one of those old-timers who had made a point of watching Hobby play ball every chance he got. Beatrice and Paul had attended the candlelight vigil. On that night, Beatrice had closed
her eyes and squeezed Paul’s hand and prayed. And now here was the young man, banged up but alive, asking her for a book about colleges.

“And what about Zoe?” we asked. “How did she seem?”

“She was quiet,” Beatrice said.

A few days after that, a piece was finally published in the
Nantucket Standard
celebrating the life of Penelope Alistair. This article came as a shock to the summer residents who had arrived after the Fourth of July and missed the news about the accident. Most of us felt that the tribute was long overdue (it ran in the paper, we noted,
after
the departure of Jordan Randolph), and despite the fact that the horror of the accident had started to fade by then, we were glad that the article about Penny had bumped aside yet another account of a summer cocktail party or fund raiser or a report of Mark Wahlberg’s having dinner at the Pearl. It was important to us that the summer residents and the two-week renters and even the day-trippers realized that Nantucket was a community, with families and kids growing up. It wasn’t a magical kingdom; it wasn’t an amusement park for billionaires. It was a real place, home to real people, with all our messes, our disgraces, our steadfast beliefs, our triumphant hearts.

The tribute spoke of the Alistair family’s arrival on the island, when Penelope and her brother, Hobson, were two years old. The article chronicled Penny’s years at Island Day Care and the Children’s House. It recounted the “discovery” of her singing voice in third grade by Helen Yurick, the elementary school music teacher. Mrs. Yurick was quoted as saying, “Never in my life had I heard such a voice come out of so young a child. I knew at once that she was gifted.” The article went on to mention Penny’s travels to Boston to study with a renowned singing instructor, and then it listed her many accomplishments. She had played Lola in
Damn Yankees,
Sarah in
Guys and Dolls,
and Sandy in
Grease
. She had sung the National Anthem with the Boston Pops in 2010 and, at Keith Lockhart’s special request, again in 2011. In the tenth grade she had been selected to join a national chorus—composed of one singer from every state—that traveled to Orlando, Florida, Los Angeles, California, and finally Washington, D.C., where it performed for the President and First Lady. Penny was the lead soloist in Nantucket Madrigals, and Saint Mary’s had made a tradition of asking her to sing “Ave Maria” at Christmas Eve Mass. The article noted that earlier on the day of her death, Penelope Alistair had sung the National Anthem at Nantucket High School’s graduation.

Penny was acknowledged to be a good student who was also well liked by her peers. Annabel Wright, cheerleading captain, said: “Penny was a warm and kind person. She was always worried about others. I can’t believe she’s gone. I can’t believe school is going to start in September and she’s not going to be in the front row of French class with her hand in the air, answering Madame Cusumano’s questions with perfect pronunciation.”

The high school principal, Dr. Major: “A light has gone out. It is, of course, a tragedy to lose any young person, but losing a young person like Penelope Alistair is particularly difficult. She was one of the students who lifted up our school community. She was a shining example of the pursuit of excellence, and I know I am not exaggerating when I say that she served as an inspiration to the entire student body.”

Winnie Potts, close friend and castmate in
Grease:
“Penny was a paragon of goodness. I’m not going to lie: I was jealous of Penny. We all were, a little bit. It wasn’t just that she was so talented. She was just so good. She loved her mother and her brother. I used to wonder what Penny would do once she graduated, but I knew that whatever she did, she would make the rest of us really darn proud.”

Penny’s twin brother, Hobson, was described in the article as
“recovering from injuries sustained during the accident that claimed Miss Alistair’s life.” He said: “My sister was my hero. When we started kindergarten, I was too shy to order my own lunch in the cafeteria, so she used to do it for me.” Here, the writer noted, Hobby laughed with tears shining in his eyes. “Embarrassing, I know, but true. I needed her, I leaned on her. She was my other half. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do now. Keep going, I guess. Learn how to walk again. And figure out how to take care of my mother, who is hurting so badly.”

We all nodded at this. We thought Zoe Alistair might also be quoted, but she wasn’t. She must have been consulted for the article, however, because there was a double-page spread of photographs of Penny growing up: Penny at three or four years old, her face painted red, white, and blue for the Fourth of July parade; Penny doing a cartwheel on the lawn at Children’s Beach; Penny asleep in the sand with scallop shells placed over her eyes; Penny kneading what looked like bread dough with flour dusting the end of her nose; Penny on stage at the Boston Pops with Keith Lockhart and Carly Simon; Penny dressed as Sandy in the musical
Grease,
wearing a pink sweater and pink poodle skirt; Penny waving from the window of a Model A Ford in the Daffodil Parade; Penny and Hobby and Zoe posing together at a party. Those in the know identified this final picture as having been taken at Patrick Loom’s house, only hours before the accident.

Only hours before the accident.
To some of us it seemed ghoulish for this picture to be included, and yet this was the one we were most interested in; it was the one we studied the longest. There was no denying it was a wonderful shot of the three of them. Hobby was on the left, grinning, his golden hair catching the last of the day’s sunlight. He looked handsome and mature in his white dress shirt and his robin’s-egg-blue tie. He was a head and shoulders taller than his mother and sister; in the photo he was leaning in, his arm long enough to reach around both of them. Zoe was on the
right, and what could we say but that she looked just like herself? That wavy, layered hair with the hennaed tips, the green eyeliner and hot-pink lipstick, the gauzy top in stripes of green, blue, and purple that faded into one another like swaths of watercolor paint.

And in the center was Penny, her long, dark hair pulled back from her face by a headband, the blue of her sundress echoed in the blue of her round eyes. In this photo her mouth was partially open, as though she’d been caught laughing.

Laughing in the picture taken hours before her death. We could barely wrap our minds around it.

Overall, opinion on the article was good. Princess Diana had been no better remembered, we said. We took pride in that. Nantucket nurtured its own.

It did seem strange to us that there was no mention at all—none whatsoever—of Jake Randolph. Jake had been Penny’s boyfriend since freshman year, and the two of them were rarely out of each other’s sight. They had shared the kind of absorbing true love that only the luckiest among us found in high school. And yet the article hadn’t mentioned Jake, and none of Penny’s friends had mentioned Jake. We checked the byline: Lorna Dobbs. We wondered if maybe Lorna Dobbs hadn’t known about the salt- and-pepper, peanut-butter- and-jelly matched set of Penny and Jake. But how could she not have known? Then we wondered if the long arm of Jordan Randolph could be exerting its influence from half a world away. Maybe Jordan had instructed his staff not to pair the names of Penelope Alistair and Jordan Randolph. We noted that in this article there had been only passing reference to the accident that had caused Penny’s death. We initially thought that this was as it should have been. After all, the piece was meant to celebrate Penny’s life, not explain the circumstances of her death. But then we began to wonder if this might not be by design also.

These questions nagged, but eventually we let them go. We saved the article, folded it carefully, and tucked it away in a drawer or scrapbook where we would find it years or decades later, only to be struck yet again by the sad mystery of it all.

J
uly was winter: he had to keep reminding himself of that. But winter weather in Fremantle was humid and balmy, much like a really good day in late May at home. It was 73 degrees Fahrenheit, without a cloud in the sky; it had been raining every night, and everyone’s garden was going gangbusters. The grass was so green it hurt Jordan’s eyes to look at it.

On the last Sunday in July, Ava took Jake to Heathcote Park for a family barbecue. Ava had brought her son back to Australia with her four times, but not since grade school, and neither Jake nor Jordan had seen anyone from Ava’s family since they’d been here this time. This had been at Jordan’s specific request. He wanted to give Jake a chance to settle in. And the last thing Jordan wanted was for their rental house to be inundated by Ava’s relatives. Things were bad enough as it was.

The person Jordan dreaded seeing most was Ava’s mother, Dearie. Dearie had been a perfect bitch toward him when he journeyed halfway across the globe to ask for her daughter’s hand in marriage, but she’d been even worse on the one occasion when she’d come to the States. On that visit, she had told Jordan that he was no better than a criminal in her eyes. He had abducted her daughter; he had broken up the freakishly close-knit Price clan. “As if losing Father wasn’t bad enough!” Dearie screamed at Jordan on the penultimate
evening of her visit, when she had drunk an entire bottle of Riesling by herself.

Jordan tried to point out that he hadn’t
stolen
Ava. He had asked her to marry him, she had said no, and he had retreated to the States with his tail tucked, a perfect gentleman. Ava’s return to Nantucket the following summer had come as a complete surprise to him; he’d had nothing to do with it. “She came back to me of her own volition,” he told Dearie. The reason for Ava’s return had never been clear to him—just one of many mysteries about the woman. But he refused to take the blame.

Because of his abhorrence of Dearie, Jordan had flat-out refused to go to the barbecue with his wife and son. This was very bad behavior on his part, and it led to a near-rebellion by Jake.

“I don’t get it,” Jake said. “Why do I have to go, but you don’t?”

“They want to see you, not me,” Jordan said. He thought back to the family dinner he’d suffered through on the evening he’d arrived in Perth so many years ago. All he’d wanted was five minutes alone with Ava so he could properly kiss her, but the house was so crammed with people that it verged on the comical. It was like dozens of clowns’ climbing out of a Volkswagen: just when Jordan thought there couldn’t possibly be any more relatives, another one would descend the stairs or pop out of the bathroom. Dearie had cooked three legs of lamb to feed everybody, and all Jordan remembered was that he was served the burnt ends. Ava, for some reason, had been seated at the opposite end of a very long table, and Jordan got the impression that though he had traveled ten million miles to see her, he hadn’t gotten any closer. “You’re their blood,” he told Jake now. “But I’m not.”

“God,” Jake said.

Jordan felt sorry for his son. Jordan had met the Price family twenty years ago, and since then everyone had married and reproduced. Ava’s siblings had a passel of kids among them. Ava’s oldest
sister, Greta, had a daughter named Amanda who was pregnant at eighteen. She was only a year older than Jake, and she was having a baby. Greta was going to be a grandmother at forty-seven. And the worst part was, nobody in the Price family saw the shame in this. Ava reported that Dearie was positively over the moon about it; she glowed as though she were the one who was pregnant. She was sixty-seven years old and about to be a great-grandmother.

The population of Western Australia was 2.3 million, and half of those people had to be Prices. In that family, progeny was more important than career or religion or net worth. This explained why Ava, when they first got married, had said she wanted “at least five” children. Jordan had laughed.
Five
children? Who, in this day and age, wanted
five
children? It was irresponsible. When Ava had trouble conceiving again after Jake was born, Jordan was inwardly relieved. Unfortunately, he’d made the grave error of letting his relief show. He’d said, “I was an only child, and I turned out just fine,” to which Ava had angrily responded, “I am
not
having an ONLY CHILD!” She was a Price, after all. Her sister Greta had six; her brother Noah had three boys already, and his wife was pregnant again with twin boys, which meant they would undoubtedly try for a sixth.