Summerland: A Novel (25 page)

“How was it?” he asked Jake later. Jake and Ava had walked in the door at quarter to seven, which had given Jordan enough time to drink three cups of coffee and four glasses of water, take a nap, take a shower, and make himself a sandwich.

“Mmmmm,” Jake said.

“And that means?”

“It was lovely,” Ava interjected. She kissed Jake on the cheek, and Jake made a face, but she didn’t notice. She was breezy and happy, she was humming. Of course spending the day with her family would make her feel that way. Jordan was surprised she wasn’t bubbling over with bits of news and gossip; probably she knew how little he wanted to hear any of it.

Ava disappeared into the front part of the house, and Jordan tried again with his son. “Can I make you a sandwich?”

“Yes, please.”

“Did you eat at the park?”

“Sort of,” Jake said. “I had a sausage, but that was a while ago.”

“Did you kiss your grandmother?”

“Yes.”

“And you met Greta and Noah and…”

“Yes, everybody. There are a million more cousins now. All with names like Doobie and Spooner and Pats. Xavier was the only one I remembered. I couldn’t keep the rest of them straight.”

“I’m sure no one expected you to.”

“One of Mom’s sisters married an Aboriginal guy? Those kids were the only ones I really liked. You could tell they felt as much out of place as I did.”

“May, your Aunt May. Married to… what’s the guy’s name?”

“I can’t remember.”

“Doug, I think. He works at a bank. So those kids were nice?”

“I guess,” Jake said. “They were all way younger than me. I mostly threw the ball with them and stuff.”

“I’m sure your aunt appreciated that.”

“Mom acted weird. She kept kissing me and touching my hair and asking everyone, didn’t they think I was handsome, and she told them all how I was going to be a senior, only she called it Year Thirteen, which bugged me, and then she said I was going to ‘uni,’ which bugged me, and then one of the uncles… the big guy with the mustache?”

“Damon,” Jordan said, proud of himself for remembering.

“He told me I should go to uni in Australia, and Mom sounded like she thought this was the best idea she’d ever heard. But just so you know, I’m
not
going to uni or college or whatever in Australia. I’m going at home.”

“Of course,” Jordan said. He pulled out some bread for Jake’s sandwich. “Did anyone ask about me?”

“Everyone did. Mom said you were at home resting.”

“Did she?” Jordan said. “Well, that’s an interesting reversal.”

Jake snorted. “To you, maybe.”

That night, after they got into bed and shut off the light, Ava rolled toward Jordan and slid her hand between his legs.

Jordan’s arm shot out and nearly hit her in the face. She continued on, undeterred. Her hand stroked the front of his boxer shorts.

Jordan didn’t know what to do. He was paralyzed with confusion. He and Ava hadn’t made love in four years.
Four years
. Since before Ernie. After Ernie, Ava hadn’t wanted to. She was too sad at first, and too angry, too bitter and resentful. After a few months Jordan had tried to reason with her: they could try again for another baby. They could make this a story with a happy ending. Surely that was what she wanted?

“If we have another baby, it won’t be Ernie,” Ava said.
“It won’t be Ernie!”

He knew what she meant. He saw that his own desire to have another child was nothing more than a selfish way of exonerating himself. He didn’t really want another child.

There was no sex at all that first year. During the second year Jordan tried again. He tried romance: on nights when Jake was sleeping over at the Alistair house, he lit candles and poured champagne. But he got nowhere with Ava. By then her anger and sadness had hardened into an enamel shell of indifference. She read
Moby-Dick,
she watched
Home and Away,
she didn’t care about anything. She asked him just to please leave her alone. Not even touch her.

Jordan came to terms with the fact that his intimate life with his wife was over. He threw himself into his work and raising Jake; he made sure he was so tired every night that all he wanted to do was sleep. Eventually Ava moved into Ernie’s nursery. He never entered; she never invited him in.

Then everything happened with Zoe. Did he need to explain how it felt to have a woman to love again? Someone to hold hands with, someone to kiss, someone to caress? He had been starving for affection, for physicality, for touch—and Zoe fed him.

Did he feel guilty about his affair with Zoe?

Yes.

He had striven his whole life to differentiate himself from his father, but he was cheating on Ava just as Rory Randolph had cheated on his mother. But, Jordan noted, there were differences. Ava had shut him out; Ava didn’t want him, and for years he had lived like a monk. He never thought that Ava might return to him in this way.

Now here she was, stroking him. She was making a purring noise. If he made love to her now, it would be like having sex with a total stranger. But it was a moot point, because his body wasn’t responding anyway. He was headachy and hung over from his afternoon at the pub, and Ava smelled like a dirty ashtray. She’d been smoking again—probably with her sister May and her brother Marco, but maybe with her ex-flame Roger Polly; maybe Roger Polly had showed up at Heathcote Park to play surrogate husband. Jordan couldn’t summon the energy to care. He was exhausted. But those were just excuses. He was a different man now than he had been then. Ava had come back to him, but it was too late.

“Ava,” he whispered.

She shushed him. Her hand, insistent, slid under his boxers. She wanted this to work. And didn’t he want it to work too? Wasn’t that why he’d brought her here? So she would be happy again? So they could try to reconcile?

She gave up after a few minutes and rolled over.

“You don’t want me,” she said.

He closed his eyes and tried to remember the woman he had fallen in love with: the volleyball player in the string bikini with
the ruthless serve and the bright smile. He tried to remember the young woman at the far end of her mother’s table, safely surrounded by her tribe. All he had wanted back then was to be able to touch her leg under the table, but she was too far away. Unattainable. It had driven him mad.

But that Ava was gone. And that Jordan was gone. Now they were just two older, sadder people who had done years and years’ worth of damage to each other.

Jordan opened his mouth to speak. But what to say? She would recognize an excuse. This was a big moment. It was, Jordan realized, the moment the whole trip had been about. He wished he were better prepared. All he was armed with was the stark truth.

“I can’t,” he said.

She kicked him, hard, under the covers. His shin hurt, but he didn’t make a sound. He could hear Ava next to him, breathing.

“They all asked about you, you know.”

“I know,” Jordan said. “Jake told me.”

“And what was I supposed to say? ‘Jordan didn’t come because he hates you. He fucking hates your guts, Mum, because you threw away his
beachplum jam.
’ ” Ava’s voice was nasty, but curiously, Jordan relaxed. The Ava who had tried to arouse him was a stranger, but this Ava he recognized.

He sat up. He could barely see anything of her in the dark, but he sensed her sliding out of bed. He saw the ghostly white of her tank top, the shadow of her legs. “I don’t hate anyone’s guts,” he said calmly.

“You didn’t come because you
never come.
You’re
never around.
You never once came back with me here to visit. Never once in twenty years, Jordan. You were always
working.
Always at the
newspaper
. God, how I despise that newspaper!” Ava said. “You know I never read a single page of it after Ernie died. Not a word.”

Jordan felt stunned by this. He hadn’t realized that Ava refused to read the newspaper. His newspaper.

“I offered to come back here with you after Ernie died,” Jordan said. “Remember, I mentioned it to you…”

“I didn’t
want
to come after Ernie died, Jordan,” Ava said. “How would that have felt? All of my sisters and brothers with their broods of beautiful, perfect children, and me showing up just after burying the baby I had waited
twelve years
for.”

“Okay, Ava, yes. Fine, I get it.”

“The only reason you offered to bring me back here,” Ava said, “was that you felt guilty.”

There was that word. Jordan had chewed on it all afternoon at the pub.

“Yes,” he said. “You’re right. I felt guilty.”

“Because you
weren’t home!
” she screamed. “Because at the one moment in my life when I needed you most—
the very most,
Jordan,
a life- and-death situation
—you weren’t there!”

“Ava,” he said. She was pacing the room now, shaking her hands. Probably she wanted a cigarette. “Ava, it would have made no difference if I’d been home. Ernie still would have died, Ava.”

“He was in distress. You might have heard him if you’d been home! You might have been able to save him!”

“No,” Jordan said. He couldn’t accept that he might have had the power to save Ernie and had failed. “No, Ava, things wouldn’t have been different.”

“But they might have,” she said. She was crying now. “We’ll never know.”

“
No!”
Jordan roared.

“We’ll never know!” Ava said. “But I will always wonder.
I! Will! Always! Wonder!
”

“I’m sorry!” Jordan said. “Is that what you want? I am
sorry,
Ava. I’ve never been sorrier about anything in my life! I was at work! Trying to do my job, to run the paper that has provided my family with a livelihood for eight generations! I didn’t know
anything was going to happen to Ernie! I loved him too! I’ve been hurting too! But since then, you have been so focused on your own pain and your own grief that nothing else has mattered to you. You let your whole life fall away! You let me fall away! Because deep down,
you blame me!
”

“There is no one else to blame!”
Ava shrieked.

Jordan sank his head back into his pillow. She was right about that, he thought. There was no one else to blame.

I
n his shed, even with the door closed and a feather pillow over his head, he could still hear them: “You’re never around… . Always at the newspaper. God, how I despise that newspaper!”

“I’m sorry! Is that what you want?… You let me fall away!”

Jake sat up in bed. There was a momentary quiet; he could hear the gurgle of the fountain. He felt a little dizzy, which was probably due to the fact that he’d drunk three beers at the barbecue, grabbed from the eskie by his cousin Xavier, who had been nicer and cooler than the bratty kid Jake remembered. Somewhere in the middle of the third beer, sitting at the foot of an enormous Norfolk pine, overlooking the Swan River and the Perth city skyline across the river, Jake had confided to Xavier that he hated Australia.

As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he worried that Xavier would be offended. Xavier had lived in Western Australia his whole life. All of the Price family had.

“It’s not the place, exactly,” Jake said. “It’s my parents. They fight all the time. And I miss home.”

Xavier bobbed his head. “Man,” he said. “You should just head back to the States, then. You should just bolt.”

He
should
just bolt. Jake had seventy Australian dollars, three hundred American dollars, and a Visa card that his father had given him in case of emergencies, but if he used the Visa card, it would take Jordan and Ava only about five minutes to figure out where he was. They would find him and come get him. He was still a minor.

Or at least those had been Jake’s thoughts earlier, at Heathcote Park. Now, having just heard his parents fighting
again,
he climbed out of bed and got dressed. He wasn’t going to stay here. He packed a duffel bag with clothes, his running shoes, the Hemingway novel, his camera, and one picture of Penny. He stuffed all of his money and his credit card into his jeans pocket. He jammed his earphones into his ears and walked out the door of the shed and through the garden, quietly, quietly, until he was out the side gate and on the street. It was 11:00 p.m.

He had nowhere to go. Most of Fremantle was closed up by this time of night, except the pubs, which he was too young to enter. He walked toward South Beach because that was the direction his feet seemed to want to take him. A crescent moon hung out over the Indian Ocean. Jake was chilly; he hunted through his duffel bag for his navy blue Nantucket Whalers sweatshirt.

His parents had been fighting about Ernie. If Ernie were alive, he would be four and a half years old now, a little kid who could ride a tricycle and ask Jake for piggyback rides.

Jake stuck to sidewalks and then moved over to the bike path that meandered through the park leading to the beach. He wondered if he should be worried about getting mugged. He wished he had another beer. He looked at his iPod, and despite the fact that he knew it would make him feel even worse than he already felt, he played the track of Penny singing “Lean on Me.”
Lean on me, when you’re not strong:
her voice sounded real, close, nearly
three-dimensional. It was like a silken rope that he could climb up, maybe, until he reached her.
Lean on me. When you’re not strong.
He was not strong. He wanted to lean on her. More than anything, he wanted to hold her, tell her he was sorry, he would take the blame, it was his fault for what he’d done with Winnie, the kissing, the touching, the way his body had betrayed him. What he wanted to make clear was that he hadn’t stopped loving Penny, not at all, not for a second. He had run from the Pottses’ basement. He hadn’t followed his lustful seventeen-year-old desires; he had understood, even while he was captive to them, that they were wrong. He should have told Penny about it himself and not let Demeter, or possibly even Winnie, tell her in the dunes.

He should never have given her the keys to the car. He should have yanked the emergency brake. He had been worried about his transmission, for crying out loud. He’d never in a million years thought Penny would keep going, faster and faster.