Summerland: A Novel (34 page)

He said, “Claire, can I speak to you for a sec?”

Claire said, “Hobby, please go away.”

“Come on, Claire. Five minutes.”

Annabel Wright, who had cheered for Hobby since they were both eight years old at the Boys & Girls Club, was not cheering for him now. She said, “Hobby, leave Claire alone. You’re drunk.”

Annabel was right. He
was
drunk. He stayed put, his feet planted in the sand, his hand gripping the cheap plastic cup of not-quite-cold-enough beer that Demeter had poured for him from the keg. Annabel and Claire and the other girls wandered down the beach toward the dunes. At that point Hobby considered asking Demeter to let him have what was left of the Jim Beam. She would probably want to drink it with him, but that might not be too bad. Hobby liked Demeter; partly this was the result of conditioning by his mother, who believed Al and Lynne Castle to be the finest people on earth, and partly it was organic. Hobby thought Demeter was a nice person despite her self-destructive behavior. She had a weight problem, she wasn’t exactly going to be voted Homecoming Queen, but her isolation and her loneliness made her seem wise to Hobby, sort of like a solitary owl. He wondered what would happen if he told Demeter that he had gotten Claire Buckley pregnant. What would she say?

Hobby never followed through on this idea. He got to talking to one person and then another, then Jake found him and Hobby thought to look for Claire one more time—this time just to be polite, to say good-bye; she was, after all, carrying his child—but Claire was nowhere around. He tried texting her, but she didn’t answer, and Hobby was running out of time.

They were leaving the party.

By the beginning of August, Hobby was out of his wheelchair and on crutches. The physical therapist at the hospital, a woman named Meadow, said that he was the best patient she’d ever had. She
attributed this to the fact that he’d been so healthy, so strong, and such an exceptional athlete to begin with. But a lot of times, Meadow said, it was the former athletes who were the most challenging to work with, because they were used to having things come easily. They weren’t willing to try. Their fragile psyches didn’t allow for the possibility of failure.

Ha! Hobby laughed at this, while at the same time identifying with it. He wouldn’t be human if a part of him didn’t mourn, didn’t
ache
for his old, unbroken body and its talents. Coach Jaxon (football) stopped by twice to watch his physical therapy sessions, and both times Hobby saw the gleam of hope in his eyes. Hobby tried to eavesdrop on the whispered conversations between Coach Jaxon and Meadow while he did his twenty-five reps of a simple neck roll, but all he saw was Meadow shaking her head. He wasn’t going to be ready in September, nor the September after that; his body would never again be able to absorb the kind of trauma that football delivered. Another concussion, Meadow told Hobby, if it didn’t kill him, would most likely leave him a vegetable for life. He would never have the quickness or endurance for basketball at the level that he wanted to play it, and though his pitching arm was unharmed, his left arm would always be weak. He was lopsided now, off balance.

Hobby fought against self-pity. He had seen movies about embittered athletes battling back from injury (what movie was he thinking of? he could no longer remember things the way he used to). He wasn’t going to allow himself to become embittered. He could be like Penny, in a box in the ground. He could be brain-dead already, a vegetable that his mother would be saddled with the rest of her life. He wasn’t going to stress out about battling back. He was going to put in the work so he could do the normal things: walk, carry a bag of groceries, and toss a ball, someday, to his son or daughter.

Hobby liked his crutches. They were better than the wheelchair.
He had a lot more mobility. His mother didn’t fret about him as much. She started working almost normal hours at the Allencasts’. Hobby thought working was good for his mother; it kept her mind occupied. He was worried about her. She spent a lot of time on the back deck at night, muttering things at the ocean. One night her muttering sounded so conversational that he thought she was on the phone.

When she came inside he asked, “Were you talking to Jordan?”

“No!” his mother screamed. “I was talking to myself!” And she burst into tears.

His mother refused to see a therapist. Meadow had asked Hobby about this, as had Dr. Field. They had apparently both suggested it to Zoe, but to no avail. They thought if Hobby encouraged her, she might agree. He brought it up one night at dinner. The dropped-off meals had ended, thank God. His mother’s food was so much better. But dinnertime was tough. The two of them sat at the table out on the deck, which had three chairs. Penny’s place was empty.

Hobby said, “I think you should talk to someone, Mom. I’ll go with you if you want.”

Zoe said, “If you want to talk to someone, by all means, do it. I’ll set it up for you. But
I’m
not going.”

“Why not?”

Zoe said, “Because I’m going to process my daughter’s death the way I’m going to process it. I don’t want anyone—not even the kindest, most perspicacious therapist on Earth—telling me how to go about it.”

“I don’t think they
tell
you anything,” Hobby said. “I think they just listen.” He paused. His mother was moving her corn salad around on her plate. “Don’t you want someone to talk to, Mom?”

Zoe didn’t answer. Hobby cleaned his own plate of corn and steak and greens and dug in for seconds. He asked, “Do you miss Jordan?”

Zoe eyeballed him. Her fork, with nothing on it, was suspended in midair. It felt to Hobby as if he had asked exactly the wrong question, the question that only a daft seventeen-year-old boy would ask.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes I do, actually. I miss him very much.”

That night Hobby had heard his mother crying in bed. He rubbed the heels of his palms into his eye sockets and thought, Penny, wherever you are, can you help me here? He thought of his sister as a magical force, potentially capable of performing any number of miracles now that she was dead. Can you please deliver Mom some comfort? he asked her. It occurred to Hobby that he was passing the buck to his sister yet again where his mother was concerned, and it further occurred to him that he had the power to comfort Zoe himself. He could tell her about the baby. The baby that they’d nearly aborted but that Claire had decided to keep when she found out there had been an accident and learned that Penny was dead and Hobby was in a coma. Life, Claire told him, had suddenly seemed like something else entirely, something huge and precious. And she had life inside of her, a life that was hers and his, and she wasn’t questioning what they would do or how they were going to make it work. She was just keeping his baby safe. She had stood in the midst of the nearly two thousand people who gathered on the football field for the candlelight vigil, and she had felt privileged to be carrying a part of Hobby inside her.

Hobby could tell his mother about the baby; it would, at the very least, distract her. But Claire wanted to keep the news a secret until after her first ultrasound appointment, which was scheduled for the second week of September. Claire’s mother, Rasha, knew about the pregnancy, and Rasha had told her best friend, Sara Boule. Hobby didn’t love the fact that Rasha Buckley and Sara Boule (a woman who basically gossiped for a living, as a receptionist for Dr. Toomer, Hobby’s dentist) both knew, while Zoe
didn’t. However, Zoe’s reaction wasn’t something that Hobby felt he could predict. She might be overjoyed. Or she might not.

The door to Penny’s room had remained shut since Hobby’s return from the hospital. He knew the window in there was open because the door rattled in its frame with the breeze off the beach. At night this rattling was spooky because who wanted to hear rattling from the bedroom door of a dead girl? Hobby suspected that his mother had done nothing about Penny’s room—all her stuff was probably still in there.

One day after Zoe left for work, Hobby stood outside Penny’s door, balanced on his crutches. He looked at the door—just a crappy plywood box door painted white, with a dent that Penny had kicked in it… when? Shit, Hobby couldn’t remember. He tried to determine if he had the emotional fortitude required to open the door and look around. He was still mulling over what Jake Randolph had told him. He thought it was indeed possible that some real or exaggerated version of what had happened between Jake and Winnie in the Pottses’ basement had reached Penny’s ears, either through Demeter or through someone else, perhaps Winnie herself. And hearing that news, he knew, would have caused Penny to lose her shit, especially if it was exaggerated.

But in Hobby’s mangled memory, Penny hadn’t seemed angry at
Jake.
If the problem had been with Jake, wouldn’t Penny have said something to indicate that? Wouldn’t she have refused to drive his car home? Penny hadn’t said
anything
. She had just come completely unglued; if she’d gotten some kind of news, it must have been too horrible to repeat. This caused Hobby to worry that someone (Demeter?) might have told Penny that Hobby had gotten Claire Buckley pregnant. Was this the news that had tipped Penny’s fragile scales into mental illness? She would have been most upset about which part? he wondered. That Claire was planning to abort? Or that Hobby hadn’t confided in her himself? Her
own twin. The truth was that Hobby hadn’t even considered telling Penny because he was afraid the news would make her hysterical. Penny didn’t like being confronted with the harsher realities of life.

Hobby’s conclusion was that Penny would have been devastated if she’d heard from a third party that Claire was pregnant. How devastated, he just couldn’t say. She also would have been devastated about Jake and Winnie Potts. He wished he remembered more about how Penny had been that night, but for all intents and purposes, his coma had started when they all gathered at Jake’s car. He didn’t have a single clear memory after that point.

He could call Demeter. They had always had a decent relationship; he might have better success with her than Jake had. But Al and Lynne Castle had dropped off the radar, and the one time Hobby had seen Demeter since the accident, she had completely ignored him. He was still in his wheelchair then, and his mother was pushing him around Miacomet Pond. It was a beautiful, balmy night, and Hobby was concentrating on taking huge gulps of sweet summer evening air, rather than feeling like the survivor of some private war. His mother had seemed better that night; she was the one who suggested the walk. They both saw Demeter’s car approaching, and Zoe said, “There’s Demeter.”

And Hobby said, “Yeah, you’re right.”

Zoe said, “Not a scratch on her.”

And Hobby said, “Mom, come on.”

Zoe said, “Sorry, Hob, I’m human.”

Hobby wasn’t 100 percent surprised when Demeter passed them without stopping or waving or anything. She hadn’t come to the hospital or to the house; she hadn’t sent a note. “She’s probably just not ready to deal with it all yet,” Hobby said as he watched the taillights of her Escape disappear down Pond View Road.

“She’s guilty,” Zoe said. “She can’t face us because she feels guilty.”

“You mean she’s got survivor’s remorse?” Hobby said.

“I mean, that girl is guilty,” Zoe said.

Hobby turned the knob on Penny’s door, and it swung open, of course—there wasn’t a door in the house that locked properly.

Penny’s room.

Okay, weird, Hobby thought. Weird in that it looked the same as it had six weeks earlier, back when Penny was alive. Her four-poster bed was neatly made with the blue flowered sheets and the sky-blue duvet and the two white eyelet pillows propped up against the headboard and a collection of her favorite stuffed animals—old Bear, Gladys the sock monkey, and a scrawny-looking tiger that Jake had won for her at the Tom Nevers Carnival—nestled between the pillows. Penny had been a young Nazi about her bed. She made it perfectly every morning and constantly smoothed the wrinkles out of the duvet. She said she couldn’t lie on it otherwise. The easiest way for Hobby to get Penny hysterical was to launch himself onto her bed, mess up the duvet, unprop the pillows, and start juggling the trio of sad little animals. She used to
shriek.
Hobby would have laughed remembering it if it wasn’t so tragic. He thought, Well, Penny, wherever you are, you can rest easy. Your bed is perfectly made. He smoothed out an imaginary wrinkle just to be sure.

There was her dresser with the big mirror, the biggest mirror in the house. Zoe came in here all the time to check herself out, and this, also, gave Penny fits. “Use your own mirror!” she would yell at her mother.

And Zoe would say, “Jeez, Pen, chill. I’ll be out in a sec.”

“Why don’t you use your own mirror? Seriously. We’re not poor, you could buy yourself a full-length mirror.”

Zoe never let Penny get her angry. She said, “Because I like your mirror better. It makes my ass look smaller.”

How many times had Hobby complained to his mother about Penny? “She drives me crazy,” he would say. “Why can’t she just relax like a normal human being?”

“Her heart is made from the finest bone china,” Zoe would answer. “Like a teacup.” And then Zoe would smile, and so would Hobby.

On Penny’s dresser was her paddle brush, filled with long, dark hairs. She used to keep it in the bathroom, but Hobby had protested when he found one of Penny’s hairs wound through the bristles of his toothbrush. There was her fancy perfume atomizer, which had never held a drop of perfume. There was her jewelry box made from bird’s-eye maple. Hobby opened it. He sorted through friendship bracelets woven out of embroidery thread, her real gold hoop earrings, her pearl on the gold chain that had been their grandmother’s, her pin from the National Honor Society, and a sea-foam-green box from Posh that contained a pair of silver dangly earrings edged in chips of blue sapphire. Jake had bought her those earrings for their two-year anniversary.

Hobby opened the top drawer of Penny’s dresser and found himself staring into a tangle of lacy underwear. Okay, embarrassing. He quickly shut the drawer, but as he did, he caught a glimpse of the edge of something red and shiny. A book. A journal. He nudged aside the lacy things to confirm that what he was looking at was the red leather cover of a journal. He flipped through the pages to make sure it was Penny’s handwriting—loopy and girlish—then he put the journal back and shut the drawer again. Original, Pen, hiding your journal in your underwear drawer, he thought. I found it in the first place I looked.