Summerland: A Novel (27 page)

The other benefit to Demeter’s drinking all day was that she had effectively lost her appetite. She packed a banana for breakfast but never ate it. She sat with Nell during their lunch break, and while Nell ate her tofu and raisins out of a Tupperware container (a lunch that Demeter found revolting), Demeter drank her special water, and when Nell asked her why she wasn’t eating, she just said she’d had a “huge breakfast.” Coop and Zeus usually ran down to the strip to get a burger and fries or tacos and pizza, and though they sometimes returned with a paper sleeve of waffle fries or a slice of pizza that they couldn’t finish, Demeter wasn’t the least bit tempted. She was flying high, reaching for her sugarless spearmint gum.

If anything, Demeter hated it when the workday was over. They knocked off at three-thirty, at which point Nell and Coop generally headed to the beach for a swim. They started asking Demeter to join them, but there was still the bathing suit issue, so she always said no thanks, maybe another time.

On good days, her mother wasn’t home, and Demeter was able to walk into the house and tuck whatever bottle she’d stolen that
day into her closet. She was able to safely fill her special water bottle with vodka, tonic, and a squeeze of lime juice. Occasionally she nibbled on rice cakes or saltines, but more often the sun and the fresh air and the alcohol conspired against her, and once she saw the soft pillows and duvet of her bed, all she wanted to do was nap; sometimes she even slept straight through until morning. There had been three days when she had actually gone all day without eating a single thing—and for the first time in her life, she could tell she was losing weight. She refused to get on a scale to prove this, but the waist of her cargo shorts became loose. And from being outside all day she had gotten quite a tan on her face and her arms and her legs, and the blond streak in her hair was growing lighter, and she felt about fifty times more attractive than she had in recent memory.

Of course, there were afternoons when Demeter got home from work and her mother was home—in the kitchen mixing up a potato salad or marinating steaks—and Demeter knew that there was no way she would be able to get out of sitting down to dinner. On these evenings she swigged heavily from the whiskey bottle in her stash, and then she brushed her teeth and gargled and chewed wintergreen gum until her mother called her to the table. Acting sober was far more difficult with her parents because, unlike her new friends from work, Lynne and Al Castle knew their daughter and would detect aberrant behavior. Demeter had to watch herself. She had to focus on what her parents were saying, she had to formulate reasonable answers to their seven hundred questions, she had to keep from laughing at how pathetically clueless they were.

Then came the conversation of July 25.

Lynne: “What did you do at work today, honey?”

Demeter: “Um, I don’t know. Let me think.” The days tended to blend together, and sometimes they visited as many as six properties in a day. Often it was just easier to make things up to tell her
mother. “We were on Lily Street. And West Chester. I did window boxes.”

Lynne: “Window boxes! That sounds much better than weeding!”

Demeter (nodding): “
Much
better!” Of course, in reality, Demeter would never be allowed to touch anyone’s window boxes. Zeus did all of the containers, including window boxes, and he was very territorial about his work. But Lynne would never know this, and look how happy it had made her to think that her daughter, who only three weeks before had been dangerously close to being sent to some sort of juvenile prison, was now responsible for the beautiful window boxes that everyone admired so much when driving down Lily Street!

Demeter ate four bites of steak and half a plate of green salad. No potato salad, though her mother tried to force it on her three times. Demeter loved her mother’s potato salad, but she didn’t want food to interfere with her lovely state of intoxication. Everything was hazy and dreamlike, a colorful collage that she could take her time pondering. Her father stared at her a little too long at one point, and Demeter cleared her throat and took a long sip of her water. Did he suspect she’d been drinking? Maybe, but even if he did, he would never say anything. To say something would be to open a can of worms, one that would break her mother’s heart and disrupt the domestic bliss that the Castle household was famous for.

Lynne: “Oh, I forgot to tell you! Mrs. Kingsley called. She wants to know if you can babysit on Saturday night.”

Demeter chewed her steak into mush. She hadn’t yet reached the point where she excused herself to go to the bathroom and then did a shot of vodka
in the middle of dinner,
but she was tempted to do that now. Her father’s gaze was relentless; Demeter couldn’t bring herself to meet his eyes. He for certain
knew
that she had been in possession of a bottle of Jim Beam on the night of
the accident, but did he know that she had lifted it from the Kingsleys’ house? Did
anyone
know that? If Mrs. Kingsley had called to ask Demeter to babysit, then she must not have heard any rumors, or else not cross-checked any rumors she
had
heard with a survey of her liquor cabinet.

Demeter: “Really?”

Lynne: “She sounded desperate. But I told her you were working for Frog and Toad now and might be too tired to work at night… .”

So her mother had provided her with an out. Demeter could say no. But if she said no, would it seem as if she were avoiding the Kingsleys? She had never turned Mrs. Kingsley down before. And her old logic still reigned: babysitting on a Saturday night was far superior to staying home alone on a Saturday night.

Demeter left two bites of steak untouched and turned down the offer of blackberry pie with homemade whipped cream. Instead she went to the phone and called Mrs. Kingsley back and said that yes, certainly she could babysit on Saturday night. Mrs. Kingsley sounded like her grateful, happy self, utterly relieved that despite the tragic events of graduation night, she hadn’t lost her most reliable babysitter.

“Seven o’clock?” Mrs. Kingsley said.

“See you then,” Demeter said. She hung up the phone, thanked her mother for dinner, got herself a tall glass of ice, and retreated to her bedroom.

At six forty-five on Saturday night, Demeter was driving her Escape on Miacomet Road toward Pond View, which was where the Kingsleys lived, when she saw something moving up ahead. At first she wasn’t sure if it was one person or two—the sun was descending, shining right into her eyes—and then she saw that it was two: a low, squat figure with a taller figure behind. It was Zoe Alistair pushing Hobby in his wheelchair, heading in her direction.

Demeter hit the brakes so hard she bucked in her seat. What to do? She knew the three
F
s of threatened animal behavior: Freeze, Flee, or Fight. Freezing, which was her first instinct, wouldn’t be effective; she couldn’t just sit in her car in the middle of the road. So she would flee, turn the car around and hide out on Otokomi Road until Zoe and Hobby rolled past. But that could take a while; they weren’t going very fast, and Demeter didn’t want to be late for Mrs. Kingsley.

Demeter pulled down the eye shade and adjusted her Ray-Bans. She would simply drive past them. She knew they would recognize her car: Zoe, Penny, and Hobby had all been at her sixteenth-birthday “party,” when Al Castle had presented it to her, tied up with a big red bow. Demeter had given Penny and Hobby a ride around the neighborhood in it, and Hobby had played with the sunroof and asked questions about the gas mileage. Penny had said, “Hobby wants his own car
so
bad.” So bad, and yet he had never made a move toward getting his license.

Demeter stepped lightly on the gas, and the car inched forward, closing in on the two approaching figures. Demeter tried to decide what to do. She hadn’t heard from Hobby since his return from the hospital, and she counted this as a good thing. He didn’t have probing questions to ask her about what had happened in the dunes, as Jake did. The shameful thing was that Demeter hadn’t called either Hobby or Zoe to offer her condolences. She just couldn’t. Did they understand why she couldn’t? She had been right there, an integral part of it all, and their families had so much history together, and for both of those reasons, she couldn’t just
call
and say she was
sorry,
the way the rest of the island had done.

Should she wave and breeze on by? That was a hideous notion; to wave would be to acknowledge their presence, while at the same time letting them know that they weren’t important enough for her to stop and talk to. She should stop. She should… say something. This was a sign from above, this random encounter
with no one else around, and for the first time in days, Demeter was sober. She hadn’t had a drink since the night before—well, that wasn’t true, she had done a shot of vodka at ten o’clock that morning to stop the uncontrollable shaking of her hands, but that was all. She wanted to be sober and alert for Mrs. Kingsley and the three Kingsley children.

Demeter got closer, close enough to see that Hobby had his arm in a sling and his leg in a cast and that half his head was shaved. Zoe was pale, and her hair was flat. Zoe was saying something to Hobby, and Hobby was craning his neck to look at her. Demeter, coward that she was, took this opportunity to step on the gas and cruise right past them, her mouth set tight, without giving them a wave or a glance or anything.

She wondered if they were turning around in disbelief, asking each other, “Was that Demeter who just drove by?” She didn’t check her rearview mirror; she just kept driving with a mounting sense of relief. She had escaped a painful and difficult situation. This relief was quickly followed by man-eating guilt. It was all her fault. She could tell herself that it was Penny who had flipped out, Penny who had been driving the car, Penny who had put their safety in peril. But it didn’t take away her certainty that she, Demeter, was to blame.

She had had the best intentions for the evening, but the sight of Zoe and Hobby toppled her like a house of cards. Demeter hurried the night along: she put the three Kingsley children in the bathtub, then handed them towels and clean pajamas. She offered them each a bribe of two Oreo cookies and half a glass of milk in exchange for an earlier bedtime. She supervised teeth brushing and read them a chapter from
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
in such a way that she heard herself saying the words aloud even though her mind was elsewhere. She was back on Miacomet Road, watching Zoe push her son in his wheelchair along
the edge of the pond, pointing out wild irises or red-winged blackbirds or this house or that house where she had catered a fancy party. Or perhaps they were talking about Penny—how she had been crazy about chocolate-chip cookie dough but not about chocolate-chip cookies, or how she had prayed for snow so she could go sledding in Dead Horse Valley, flat on her back on the ancient Radio Flyer that Zoe had bought at a yard sale. If she didn’t become a professional singer, Penny used to say, she wanted to be an Olympic luger.

Demeter’s leg was twitching as she lay between Lyle and Barrett Kingsley. She had to get downstairs. Before she left (Mr. Kingsley had not been around, and his absence had not been addressed), Mrs. Kingsley had said those fateful words that Demeter both longed and dreaded to hear: “Help yourself to anything you want.” Demeter checked to see how many pages were left in the chapter. Three.

Demeter thought about Zoe. She thought, I am to blame, but no one is innocent in this. She thought, It’s worse to be the mother of the hurt person than the hurt person herself.

She kissed the Kingsley children good night (she had missed them), and then she hurried downstairs. The sun had set, the house was darkening, and despite the late-hour injection of chocolate into the children’s bloodstreams, they were quiet upstairs.

Stillness.

“Help yourself to anything you want.” The pantry, as usual, was filled with bags of barbecue-flavor Fritos and Funyuns and pretzels and cheese curls; there were boxes of crackers and cookies and cherry hand pies. The fridge held dips and cheeses and salamis and containers of broccoli slaw and lobster salad from Bartlett’s Farm.

But food no longer appealed to Demeter. “Help yourself to anything you want.” She couldn’t possibly pour herself a drink, she thought, not after what had happened. But she found herself
powerless. She opened the Kingsleys’ bar and discovered a brand-new bottle of Jim Beam sitting in the exact same place where the other one had been. This spooked Demeter; she shut the liquor cabinet. She went to the freezer and pulled out a frosty bottle of Ketel One. The shaking had returned to her hands, but this might be due to anticipation, she realized. She brought the bottle to her lips and drank until her eyes watered and the vodka burned the lining of her throat. She gasped for breath.

Zoe Alistair had looked… well, she had looked ruined. The strange thing was that Demeter’s mother hadn’t said a word about Zoe in weeks. To Demeter’s knowledge, Lynne Castle hadn’t seen or spoken to Zoe since that night at the hospital, though she still maintained tight control over the dropoff dinner schedule.

Demeter took another pull off the vodka bottle. The reassuring feeling returned: everything was going to be okay. She poured three fingers of vodka into a juice glass and added ice. It looked just like water. She would drink just this much, and then she would be done.

Just as she brought the drink to her lips, she heard the mudroom door slam, and she nearly dropped the glass on the floor. She set it down on the counter and whipped around in time to see Mr. Kingsley breeze in. He was sweaty, wearing white shorts and a white polo shirt and carrying a tennis racquet. He seemed as stunned to see Demeter as she was to see him.

“Hey!” he said. He squinted at her and smiled, and she thought, I’ve babysat for these people for five years, and he’s forgotten my name.

“Hey, Mr. Kingsley,” she said. Her head was spinning from the vodka. If he discovered what was in her glass, her life was over. But Demeter felt strangely calm. There was something about Mr. Kingsley that she recognized immediately, something in his demeanor, in the way he was swaying while standing still: he was drunk. He threw his tennis racquet to the floor with a clatter, and
Demeter instinctively looked up the stairs, to where the children were sleeping.