Summerland: A Novel (31 page)

“No,” Mindy said. “I think Claire was there for another reason.”

“
What
reason?” we asked, as though Mindy Marr held the answer, as though she were something more than just a random person who happened to walk through the waiting room at the right time.

“She looked heavy,” Mindy said. “Heavi
er.
”

Could be depression, we thought. But Mindy’s voice was coy; it contained unspoken possibilities. Something else? Another reason?

And then, instead of being disproved, as we were certain it would be, the suspicion was confirmed: Rasha Buckley confided in Sara Boule, and Sara Boule, constitutionally unable to keep a secret, told one of the rest of us: Claire Buckley was ten weeks pregnant.

“Pregnant!” We gasped. “Ten weeks pregnant!”

We were unable to say another word. But in this shared silence, it became clear that we were all thinking the same thing.

H
e had watched her go. They had been connected since before birth, so it seemed only right that he should be the one she’d choose. They were squeezed together in an unfamiliar place—not life, not death, but somewhere in between. It was as dark and
moist as a womb, and he and Penny were face to face, and Penny was saying to him, clear as a bell, “Listen, I’m going.”

Casually, as though she were telling him she was walking home from the library:

“Listen, I’m going.”

He hadn’t had an answer ready; he had been unable to speak. He had a vague understanding that they’d been in an accident, and he figured he must be much worse off than Penny because she told him she was leaving while he couldn’t seem to get a message from his brain to his tongue. What would he have said? “I’m coming with you” was his first instinct. But then he realized that if he went with Penny his mother would be left alone, and he understood that he could not leave his mother alone. He wanted to say, “Don’t go. Stay. Please don’t leave.” But Penny was willful, stubborn, she did what she wanted, she would never listen to him, he couldn’t make her stay.

He remembered seeing her blue eyes get bigger and bigger until they were like oceans he could swim in. Then she evaporated before his eyes. She was gone, and he knew she wasn’t coming back.

His mother asked him if he remembered anything about being in the coma. Had he had any dreams? Had he felt any pain? The answer to both of those questions was no. He’d been in a coma for nine days, they told him, but to him it had felt like only a few seconds. He remembered being in the car and Penny’s flooring it. Hobby had watched the speedometer out of sheer awe and stupid drunkenness. How fast could the car go? His thoughts were those of a child. He’d never believed they’d get hurt. Even when they approached the end of Hummock Pond Road and Penny sped up instead of slowing down, Hobby had thought only, Oh, shit, we’re going to crash. But he didn’t think of getting hurt, and he certainly didn’t think of dying. They were all seventeen years old, and
seventeen-year-olds didn’t die. Their bodies were made out of things that bounced back: rubber and fishing line.

Then there were the moments with Penny, the two of them suspended like water vapor in some strange atmosphere. Then Penny said, “Listen, I’m going,” and Hobby decided to stay, and everything went black.

As he was regaining consciousness, he’d had some thoughts. He’d been aware that the world he was returning to didn’t have Penny in it. And he was aware of another shadowy presence that he wanted to grasp, hold on to.

Claire’s baby.
His
baby.

The nine days in a coma scared Hobby only now, in retrospect. He’d asked a couple of the doctors at Mass General if a person in a coma was technically dead or technically alive.

“Neither, really,” the doctor said. “You’re in a third state. The state that we call a coma.”

Another doctor said, “A coma is when your body is alive, but your brain is unresponsive.”

“So your brain is dead,” Hobby said.

“I didn’t say ‘dead,’ ” the second doctor corrected him. “I said ‘unresponsive.’ ”

What Hobby believed was that he had been partially dead for nine days. And then magically, miraculously, blessedly, he had returned to life. His mother had been sitting there. He remembered her face upon seeing him open his eyes—man, her face alone had made coming back to life worthwhile. He saw that he had made the right decision in letting Penny go by herself. His mother needed him more.

Claire had been at the hospital that day too, though it had taken a while for anyone to tell Hobby that. When he first returned (this was Hobby’s term; his mother preferred to say “woke up”), he saw his mother first, and then a whole slew of doctors and nurses came
in to grin and gawk at him and announce that they had seen a miracle that day and praise the Lord, the boy was okay, they were just going to do some tests and did he know his name and did he know who this woman was and could he name the President of the United States?

When he croaked out “Barack Obama,” the whole room practically burst into the Hallelujah chorus.

They took his temperature and his blood pressure, and it was only then that Hobby realized he was in a shitload of pain. Pretty much all over his body. It felt like he’d been sacked forty times by that monster lineman from Blue Hills. He said, “Mom? I hurt.”

There was talk of upping his morphine, and seconds later the pain subsided, that was fine, his mother was still crying, that was fine, but Hobby sensed that he had a lot of other business to deal with, he felt jammed up, like he had a paper to write and a chemistry test to study for and nine innings of baseball to pitch before nightfall.

He said, “Mom?”

Suddenly the room cleared of nurses and doctors. Only his mother was left, and she was laying ice chips on his lips. The cold wet was like heaven. He was so thirsty.

His mother said, “You have some broken bones.”

He wanted to ask if he was paralyzed, but he couldn’t form the word; it had too many syllables. He tried moving his right hand, his throwing hand, and his right foot, and both of those worked, so he figured he wasn’t paralyzed. Nothing on his left side moved, but people didn’t get paralyzed
that
way, did they? Side-to-side?

His mother said, “Your clavicle, three ribs, your left radius, your left femur…”

Oh Jesus, his femur. His eyes fluttered closed, and he felt his mother’s icy fingertips on his forehead, brushing back his hair. She said, “Do you remember what happened, Hob?”

“Accident.”

There was a long pause. He opened his eyes to see if he was correct about the accident, though of course he was correct, he hadn’t broken all those bones in his sleep. His mother’s face was blurry. She was crying, that was the problem. She had her lips pressed together, and tears were streaming down her face.

She said, “I have something to tell you.”

He didn’t want her to say it. He wanted to stay in this not-knowing-for-sure state for a little while longer. He wanted to stay in the jubilant condition of newly-arrived-back-on-Planet-Earth-from-who-knew-where-the-fuck-he’d-been. But Zoe had shored herself up to say it, so she was going to say it: “Penny is dead.”

He nodded. It hurt to nod. His head hurt. It felt like a cracked egg. “I know,” he said.

“You know?” Zoe said. “How could you possibly
know?
”

“I saw her,” Hobby said.

“You saw her?” Zoe said. She was looming over him, the cup of ice chips rattling in her hand like dice. “You saw… what? Her neck snap? She broke her neck.”

Hobby shook his head, but gingerly, gingerly. How the hell could he explain this to his mother? “I saw her. She said, ‘Listen, I’m going.’ ”

“Going where? Leaving the party, you mean?”

Hobby shook his head again. He’d have to tell her later. But her mention of “the party” had brought something else to mind. “Claire,” he said.

“Claire,” Zoe said. “Sweet Jesus, I nearly forgot! Claire is here! She’s here at the hospital! I can send her in. Do you want me to send her in? Are you up for it?”

“Yes,” he said.

When he saw Claire, he knew she hadn’t done it. He knew this not from how her body looked—it was still too soon for that—but from the expression on her face. The unadulterated joy. And
something else: a collusion. They had a secret, they still had it, thank God, thank God! If Hobby had had the energy, he would have burst into his own Hallelujah chorus.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” he said back.

He reached for her with his right hand, and without saying a word, she pressed it to her belly.

Life, he thought. Thank God.

The hospital, his return, his homecoming to Nantucket, so many well-wishers, enough to fill a stadium—all of those were fine. But there were many other things that followed that were not fine.

Penny’s funeral. Hobby went off his pain medication for a few hours because it was the funeral of his twin sister, and he wanted to be cogent for it; he wanted to remember every detail so he could tell her about it later. Hobby wasn’t a particularly spiritual person—his mother had never been big on church, and he certainly wasn’t mystical—but he felt very strongly that he would see Penny again, in the whatever-came-after. Their conversation wasn’t over. It couldn’t be over. She was his sister. She was his
twin.
When he died, and he hoped that would not be until seventy or eighty years in the future, she would be on the other side waiting for him. And he would tell her about everything. All that she had missed.

The funeral was sad, and Hobby was in pain, and he cried along with the rest of the people in the packed and stifling church. He cried for his mother. He had done the right thing, absolutely, in staying alive, because his mother couldn’t have sustained the loss of both of them. She was strong for the funeral, or sort of strong, but she was weird. She wouldn’t let Hobby speak, she wouldn’t let Jake speak. She couldn’t bear it, she said. Hobby protested, and she said, “Maybe I’m not being clear, Hobson. If I have to listen to you speak about your sister, I will break. The same goes for Jake Randolph. I’m keeping this service simple.”

Hobby saw his coaches at the funeral, and his teammates and the fathers of his teammates. They had all come for his sake, he knew, and not because they felt any deep connection to Penny. (Although she had diligently kept the stats on his basketball games at the Boys & Girls Club—had he ever thanked her for that? Probably not, dammit. He would have to do that later too.) Hobby accepted rushed, manly hugs from these men, but he saw the look in their eyes. His body was broken: he had sixteen fractures in all. His future career as a quarterback or a shooting guard or a pitcher was over. He would walk again, he would run, he would throw, but the 24-karat-gold caliber of his playing was gone forever.

Hobby listened to the madrigal group—all those pretty girls—sing “Ave Maria,” and he was filled with gratitude. It was music, and he could hear it. He cried just for that reason: he was alive. And elsewhere in this church, a tiny knot of a being the size of his thumb was alive inside of Claire. Penny was dead, but he would see her again, and he would tell her how beautiful her funeral had been. He would tell her about the music.

There were weeks of rehab at Nantucket Cottage Hospital. Time to allow his bones to heal. The start down the long road of physical therapy. That was all predictable. What wasn’t predictable was the stuff going on in Hobby’s mind. He became terrified of going to sleep, certain that if he did, he would never wake up again. He had a private room, thank God, and he asked for the lights to be left on at all times, along with the TV. The nurses reported this to Dr. Field; Dr. Field came in to see Hobby. It was like getting a visit from the school principal, except that the real principal, Dr. Major, was a lot less intimidating.

Dr. Field said, “They tell me you don’t want to sleep.”

Hobby said, “Can you blame me?”

Dr. Field laughed his dry laugh. Then his expression went back to being serious. “Your body needs sleep in order to heal, Hobson.”

“I take naps,” Hobby said. This was true. He was so exhausted during the day from not sleeping at night that he drifted off all the time, in brief catnaps where he was just beneath the surface of consciousness but always able to see some light. He had to be aware that life was continuing on around him.

“You need real sleep,” Dr. Field said. “I’ll have the nurses give you something.”

“I don’t want them to give me anything!” Hobby shouted. He never shouted except on the playing field, and certainly never at an adult. But he was scared. He was shouting now in the name of self-preservation. “What if they give me something and I don’t wake up?”

“Okay,” Dr. Field said. “Okay, fine. We’ll take it slow.”

Jake came to visit. Jake looked awful—of course he looked awful, he and Penny had been in love, really in love, not just saying they were. If Penny said her throat hurt, Jake would be up off the couch making her a mug of hot water with lemon before she finished her sentence. They read the same books, they practiced their lines for the musical together, they watched movies and laughed at the same things, they spoke to each other in French and Spanish and Latin. They drew pictures of the house they wanted to live in someday and made lists of names for their future children. When Penny sang, Jake closed his eyes to listen. He had taken good care of her.

Even in the relative isolation of the Cottage Hospital, Hobby had heard Jake’s name being bandied about in an unflattering way because Penny had died while driving his car. But that hadn’t mattered. Hobby wished he had the words to tell people what he knew: Penny was bound and determined to leave this world behind. If she hadn’t done it in Jake’s car, she would have found another way.

“Hey,” Jake said.

“Hey,” Hobby said.

They shook hands. Jake sat in the visitor’s chair that was most frequently occupied by Zoe, who was now back at work.

“How do you feel?” Jake asked.

“Like shit,” Hobby said.

“Good,” Jake said, and they both laughed. “Good that you can tell me the truth, I mean.”

“How do
you
feel?” Hobby asked.