Summerland: A Novel (36 page)

“He’s gone,” she’d cried. “He’s gone!”

Hobby had never felt so helpless in all his life.

A is the only one who understands me,
Penny wrote.
I love A.

I
t was barely dawn when Jake walked into the garden. Ava was startled, thinking maybe it was an intruder, maybe it was a drunk from the corner pub who had stumbled home to the wrong house. Then she realized that the figure sneaking into the yard was her own child, and he was carrying his duffel bag. They locked eyes for a second, and Ava saw the desperation and defeat on his face. She felt a colossal relief that he was walking toward the shed and not away from it.

“Jake?” she said.

“Mom,” he said. “I need my bed.”

Ava took a drag of her cigarette—a nasty habit, one she would have preferred to keep secret from him. She exhaled, then nodded. She let him go.

For four years she had been adrift. She had lost a baby. Her son Ernie. She had carried him for nine months, pushed him out of her body without any drugs, she had nursed him and cared for him for eight weeks. These weeks had been blissful. Ernie was constantly in her arms, his hungry mouth tugged on her breast, his tiny hands grabbed at her hair. How smitten she had been, how helplessly in love. Jordan got tired and occasionally grumbled when he had to get up for a feeding, but she never complained. She wasn’t tired; she was bursting with purpose, dizzy with joy.

And then the inverse of that. The horror.

He had been perfectly healthy. Ava had just taken him for his two-month checkup, and Ted Field had declared him thriving. There was no discernible reason for the fact that he stopped breathing. And since there was no reason, it was impossible to comprehend. There must have been some mistake, he would wake up and be returned to her, squirming and flashing his toothless smile. For days afterward Ava had awoken each morning believing that she would find Ernie alive.

But no.

Jordan had been at the newspaper. He walked in a few steps behind the paramedics, holding his briefcase. Ava was confused by this at first. The head paramedic lifted Ernie out of her arms and laid him on a mat and tried to revive him, doing CPR with two fingers. Ava dissolved into Jordan, and he held her, both of them shaking, as they watched the fruitless efforts to save their son.

Jordan whispered, “I am so sorry, Ava. I am so, so sorry.”

The apology made sense only later, once she’d pieced together the fact that Jordan hadn’t been in the house that night. He had been at work.

Ava fancied herself a reasonable woman. She had grown up in a family of six children, she had lived on two continents, she had a
reservoir of understanding about human beings and the things that motivated them and the ways they sometimes acted.

But Jordan’s being at work, on the night Ernie stopped breathing? That was something she could not reconcile. She knew that Jordan’s absence hadn’t caused Ernie’s death, and yet the two facts were linked in her mind. Ernie’s death was a mystery. There was no one to blame. Jordan At Work was a reason Ava could cling to. It was a shard of obsidian that she polished over and over.

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

In the grip of Ava’s mind, Jordan was at fault. He hadn’t caused Ernie’s death, but he had made the circumstances of Ernie’s death unbearable.

Ava knew about Jordan and Zoe. She had first suspected they were having an affair in May of the previous year. Since Jake and Penny started dating, Jordan and Zoe had shared the responsibility of transporting the young lovers back and forth. One day Ava looked out the window of Ernie’s nursery and saw Jordan and Zoe sitting on the hood of Zoe’s orange car, talking. Jordan seemed happy and animated, and Ava thought, He never looks that way when he talks to me. Then she thought, He never talks to me.

And then, a month or two later, she climbed into the Land Rover to drive to the cemetery with a bouquet of while lilies for Ernie’s grave, and her senses were assaulted by a foul smell. It was a hot day, the car had been closed up overnight, and Jordan had left a crumpled brown lunch bag on the passenger seat. The bag had a dark stain spread across the bottom, and it was leaking some kind of milky liquid all over the leather. Ava carefully picked up the dripping bag and carried it to the trash can in the garage. Before she threw the bag away, she looked inside. There was a small Tupperware container—not quite closed—of spoiled, reeking coleslaw. That was the culprit. Also in the bag were some
sandwich crusts and a fudge brownie, wrapped in wax paper. Ava studied the brownie. This particular kind of brownie… in
wax paper
.

Ava thought,
Zoe.

Huh?

Then she saw that there was a recipe card in the bag, folded in half.

It was a note. It said:
It’s ridiculous how much I love you.

Ava didn’t say anything to Jake about their encounter in the backyard of the bungalow in Fremantle, and eventually her silence was rewarded: on August 14, the coldest day of the winter—the temperature was a brisk 52 degrees Fahrenheit—Jake entered the kitchen at five-thirty in the morning. Ava was at the table, drinking Lady Grey tea and doing the crossword puzzle from the previous day’s newspaper. Jake was wearing a pair of jeans that Penny had scribbled on and his navy blue Nantucket Whalers sweatshirt. He entered the kitchen with an air of intent, as though he and his mother had an appointment, and Ava thought that while some warning would have been nice, she had no reason to be surprised. She had caught him at something, and Jake was the kind of kid who would want to explain himself.

Ava said, “Would you like some tea?”

“Actually, I’ve started drinking short blacks,” he said.

“Short blacks?” Ava said. She had to suppress a smile. She didn’t want him to know how much it delighted her to hear him use the Australian term. “Have you really?”

He gave a serious nod, and she brought out the French press and the espresso powder and started the kettle. This bought her some time. All she hoped was that Jordan would stay asleep. On Nantucket he was always up at the crack of dawn, but here he woke when he wanted to, sometimes as late as eight-thirty.

When the coffee was ready, Ava poured a cup for Jake and brought it to the table.

“Thanks,” he said, and he took a sip as she watched him.

“As good as at the Dome?” she asked.

“Better.”

He was lying, but it was sweet.

“So,” she said.

He took a big, heaving breath. Then he stared at her, mute.

She was afraid to prompt him. She was afraid of scaring him away.

Finally he said, “I want to ask you about Penny.”

“Penny?” she said.

“When the two of you… when she was with you in Ernie’s nursery, what kind of stuff did you talk about? I know you were close. I know she told you things, Mom.”

Ava had not confronted Jordan about Zoe. She had thought she might, especially in the first days after finding the note.
It’s ridiculous how much I love you.
Ava felt betrayed. Of course she felt betrayed! Ava and Zoe had been good friends before Ernie died. The five of them—she and Jordan and Zoe and Al and Lynne—had been a group, a merry band. All those weekends together, so many shared hours with the kids. Ava thought back to how Jordan and Zoe had acted together over the years. They had been close, they had been aligned, they had had that American camaraderie, they had the same political views, they liked the same music, that kind of thing. Ava had never cared about that. And the fact of the matter was, she didn’t care what Jordan and Zoe were doing behind her back now. Let them carry on like Penny and Jake, like a couple of horny teenagers! Let them leave little love notes for each other! Jordan had proved himself to be no better than his father, a common philanderer! Jordan could seek comfort in
another woman’s arms, even if that woman was Ava’s friend. Ava didn’t care. They could both go to hell. She had bigger things on her mind. She had lost her child.

Their affair alleviated her guilt. She had abandoned her marriage, and also her friendship with Zoe. Now the two of them didn’t need her anymore. They had each other. Ava wanted to be left alone. They would leave her alone.

In her more generous moments she thought, Jordan tried to love me through the worst of it, he tried to pull me out of the hole. She thought, Zoe tried too. She made and delivered all that food, and I never once thanked her, I never once reached out. She sent that beautiful letter, and I threw it away. I couldn’t talk to either of them, I couldn’t talk to anybody. So they turned to each other. Was that really such a surprise?

When had Penny first approached Ava? When had she first knocked on the door of Ernie’s nursery? When had she asked Ava what she was watching (the umpteenth rerun of
Home and Away
), when had she asked her what she was reading (Melville)? Ava didn’t remember exactly. One day when Jake wasn’t home, Penny had just appeared, and in that lovely, innocent way of hers, she had started talking—about Jake and school, and then about her voice, the impossible burden of it, and then about the leaden weight in her heart that she couldn’t account for, which she said she couldn’t tell anyone else about.

“You’re the only one who gets it,” Penny had said. “I can’t tell Jake, and I can’t tell my mother.”

For months Ava had borne witness to the girl’s sadness, to the lows of Penny’s psyche—unfathomable, probably, to anyone
but
her. Ava had stroked her pretty head and said, “Yes, I know how you feel, darling girl.”

Ava had believed that Penny was suffering from the malaise common to all teenage girls: “No one understands me. My mom
and I used to be close, but now she doesn’t get it. She thinks I’m the luckiest girl alive. If I told her I felt like this, she would ship me straight off to a psychiatrist. She’s done that to me before.”

Ava had thought, Every girl needs a woman to talk to who is
not
her mother; every girl needs a place to vent her feelings where she won’t be judged. Ava was pleased that Penny had sought her out, she was gratified. She had won over Zoe’s daughter. She thought, I’m taking good care of her.

Now, with Jake, Ava faced a monstrous guilt. Ava
had
seen the warning signs, she
had
seen that Penny was capable of putting herself or others in danger, and she had done nothing to prevent that possibility. She should have told Jordan, or Lynne Castle. Or Zoe. Of course, she should have told Zoe.

Ava said, “She used to talk about what was on her mind, Jake. Her concerns, her worries, her sadness. She felt safe talking to me about those things, I think, because I was so sad too, about Ernie.”

Jake nodded. He sipped his coffee.

Ava said, “If I had it to do over, I would go to her mother. I would tell Zoe some of the things that Penny told me. I would try to get her some help.”

“It wasn’t your fault, Mom,” Jake said. “It was
my
fault. It was something I did.” He looked at her, and his eyes filled with tears, and then he was sobbing, and Ava went around the table and knelt in front of him and gathered him into her arms.

“Oh, honey, no,” she said. “You were wonderful to Penny.”

“No, I wasn’t,” he said. “I mean, most of the time I was pretty good, but not always.”

Ava shushed him and smoothed his hair. She had spent so long mourning the child she’d lost, she thought, that she had missed out on caring for the child she had. She said, “It’s impossible to do right by someone all the time, Jake. I am very much living proof of that. We hurt the people we care about, intentionally and unintentionally.
But if there is one thing I’m confident about, it’s that Penelope Alistair knew that you loved her.”

Jake sniffed and wiped at his nose with his sweatshirt, and Ava rose to grab a box of tissues. She eyed the door to the master bedroom: still closed.

Jake sighed and seemed to collect himself. He took another sip of coffee. “This is good.”

Ava refilled his mug. She wasn’t sure whether to stand up or sit down. He was talking to her and she was listening, but what Jake didn’t know, what he wouldn’t know until he was a parent himself, was how grateful she was. She didn’t deserve this.

He said, “So as you probably figured out, I tried to run away.”

She decided to sit. Her throat felt as if it were going to close.
Run away.
She said, “Where did you go?”

He said, “I went to South Beach. I hung out around this bonfire with a bunch of people I didn’t know. Ferals.”

Ava winced. The term was awful.
Ferals.
And yet such people had been hanging around Perth and Freo since she was a young girl, and that was what they’d always been called: feral. Ava had seen them at South Beach herself thirty years ago—the dreadlocks, the tattoos and piercings, the dirty mattresses that they dragged out to the park and lounged across as they smoked marijuana and played their guitars and sketched in journals and read Orwell or Proust. They cooked on camp stoves and slept with their dirty feet hanging out of the windows of their vans.

“One of them, this guy named Hawk, said I could ride with him across the Nullarbor, to Adelaide first and then across to Sydney.” Jake paused. “I gave him some money.”

“Oh,” Ava said. She tried not to sound alarmed. “How much?”

“Two hundred and sixty dollars,” Jake said. He stared into his coffee cup. “It seemed like kind of a bargain at the time.”

“So then what happened?” Ava asked.

“Well, then I had some beers, and I… smoked some marijuana,
or what I thought was marijuana, and then I blacked out in the sand. And when I woke up, they had taken the rest of my money and my credit card and my shoes and my camera, and they’d left.”

“Ah,” Ava said. She had heard from Jordan that Jake had
lost
the credit card, and that after giving him a lecture about fiscal responsibility, Jordan had called to cancel it. “I see.”

“So then I came back here,” Jake said.

“And that’s when I saw you sneaking in the side door with your bag,” Ava said.