Summerland: A Novel (37 page)

“You didn’t tell Dad?”

“No.”

“I knew you didn’t tell Dad,” Jake said. “He would have wanted to have a heart-to-heart about it right away.”

“No doubt.”

“In a way I’m kind of glad it didn’t work out,” Jake said. He took a deep breath. “Because I couldn’t stand to think about you being worried, not knowing where I was, not knowing where I was sleeping or what I was eating or who I was with.”

“Thank you,” Ava said.

“I know you love me, Mom.”

Ava felt tears burning her eyes. “You know I love you, but you’ll never understand how much.”

“You seem really happy here.”

“I never thought I would feel like myself again,” Ava said. “But now I do.”

“Dad’s not happy,” Jake said.

“No,” Ava said. “He’s not. I know he’s not.”

Jake said, “I wish there was a way that we could all be happy at the same time, in the same place.”

Ava had been stunned when Jordan came to her and said he thought they should move to Australia.

“We’ll go to Perth, we’ll rent a house, we’ll try it for a year,” he
said. “I can take a leave of absence; Marnie can run the paper, she’s more than capable.”

Ava said, “Jake? School?”

“He can go to school in Australia.”

“His senior year?” she said.

“Ava, we need to get him out of here.”

She had flared up with anger. She had been asking Jordan to move to Perth for
how many years,
and they were leaving now because
Jake
had to get off the island?

She said, “So this is all for Jake, then?”

“And you,” Jordan said. “Mostly for you. If I just wanted to get Jake off the island, if that was my only motivation, I could think of places we could go that are a hell of a lot closer than Perth, Australia.”

Yes, Ava thought. Anywhere was closer.

“But you want to move home, and I am taking you home,” he said.

Yes, Ava did want to move home. She was an idiot for playing devil’s advocate, but something wasn’t computing.

“And you’re going to
leave
the paper? And Marnie’s going to run it?” she asked.

“For a year, yes.”

It was inconceivable. Ava was missing something. She saw conviction in Jordan’s eyes. He meant it. He was going to leave the paper, leave the island; she saw that he
wanted
to. But why now, when before he had regarded even a two-week trip to Australia as a fate worse than death? Her mind raced. She thought back to the Fourth of July. Jordan had said he was driving on Hummock Pond Road when the car ran out of gas. That had seemed odd to her. Jordan wasn’t the type of man who ever let his car run out of gas. Ava had asked him, “What were you doing on Hummock Pond Road?”

“Driving around,” he said.

Ava had mulled it over for hours, willing her brain to make sense of it. They were moving to Australia for an entire year. Jordan wanted to go—for Jake, but also for her, he said. But no—she would offer her apologies here—she didn’t think Jordan Randolph was that selfless. Why would
he
want to go? Why would
he
want to get away?

And then she understood that it had to do with Zoe.

Zoe had turned him away.

Zoe didn’t want him anymore.

Since they had moved to Fremantle, Ava had been happier than she could have imagined. In the early-morning hours she drank her tea and worked her crossword puzzles. Then she made breakfast—eggs and rashers, grilled tomatoes, beans. She went to Woolies during the week for groceries, and on the weekends she shopped at the Fremantle Markets. She came home with mangoes and fresh Turkish bread and baby cos for Caesar salad. She spent time with her brothers and sisters and her mother; she saw friends from secondary school and girls she’d once waitressed with at Cicarella’s. She had been out with her old boyfriend, Roger Polly, on two occasions, and both times she had laughed as she hadn’t done in years. Was this how Jordan had felt when he was with Zoe—energized and young again, like a new person?

“I wish there was a way that we could all be happy at the same time, in the same place,” Jake had just said.

Ava tried to imagine what would have happened if Jake had journeyed across the country in some stranger’s van. What if she and Jordan had woken up that morning, and Jake’s bed had been empty, his things missing? Jordan, with his reporter’s instincts, would probably have headed into town first, and then maybe to South Beach, to grill everyone he saw about his son’s whereabouts.
He might have found someone who remembered Jake—Jake would have stuck out, as an American kid, clean, in expensive clothes, reading Hemingway. But what if they hadn’t found him in time? What if those people had kicked him out of the van on the scorching hot, deserted stretch of the Nullarbor, without any food or water?

Ava checked the clock. It was still only quarter after six. Outside the kookaburras were hooting. It had been quite a morning already.

“What is it you want?” she asked Jake. “More than anything else, what do you want?”

“I want to go home,” he said.

A pink glow of possibility had been growing inside of Ava for weeks, an idea, a life change, but she had been afraid to tell anyone about it. She finally confided in her sister May over dinner at the Subiaco Hotel. They ordered glasses of the Leeuwin chardonnay and a bowl of chili mussels to share, and Ava nearly had to pinch herself. She was in
Subiaco,
having dinner with her favorite sister, exactly as she had fantasized about doing on so many bitter Nantucket nights. Ava’s prevailing thought was that now that she had this life again, she couldn’t let anyone take it away.

She said to May, “I’ve made a decision.”

May said, “Boob job?”

“No,” Ava said. “I’m going to adopt a baby.”

May clapped her hand over her mouth to keep from screaming. Her eyes bulged. Ava laughed.

“People are staring,” Ava said.

“Oh my God,” May said. “So much better than a boob job. I think that’s a bloody
brilliant
idea. I don’t know why you didn’t decide this sooner.”

“Well…,” Ava said. She wasn’t sure how much her family knew about her emotional state of the past four years. Probably they
would have said she was “going through a bit of a rough patch,” or perhaps acting “not quite herself.” That would have been an example of typical Australian understatement, or else a consequence of the fact that she lived ten thousand miles away. “I wasn’t ready before. But I’ve made up my mind, and I’m ready now. I’m thinking I want a little girl. From China.”

“Oh, Ava!” May said. She came around the table to give her sister a hug. Of all the Price children, May was the most like their mother, Dearie. She had the pillowy bosom and the pragmatic attitude. She had learned to knit and could make dinner for ten even if there was nothing in the fridge. She had gray hair already, but she didn’t care. With six kids of her own, an average week for her entailed four cricket matches, three trips to the dentist, and ten bloody noses. Who wouldn’t have gray hair? “Oh, I am so happy for you! This is a wonderful thing.” She sat back down, sipped her wine, leaned forward across the table. “And Jordan, is he excited?”

“Jordan doesn’t know,” Ava said. “This is my decision. It’s a decision I’m making for
me.
”

“So does that mean you’re leaving him?” May asked. Ava had expected her sister to be scandalized. There hadn’t been a divorce in the Price family in three generations. But May merely seemed matter-of-fact about it.

Ava had debated exactly when and where to talk to Jordan. One afternoon as she was walking home from the Fremantle Markets, she spied him drinking alone at the bar at the Norfolk Hotel, and she nearly walked in and tapped him on the shoulder, but she didn’t want the conversation to be an ambush. She needed a block of time and a safe, wide-open space—and so she arranged for May to take Jake overnight, and she booked the two of them a day trip to Rottnest Island.

She said to Jordan, “You and I are going to Rottnest Island tomorrow morning. The ferry’s at a quarter to nine.”

Jordan’s head whipped around so quickly that his glasses slid to the end of his nose. “No,” he said.

“No?”

“I don’t feel like an excursion,” he said. “I’m not up for it. And certainly Jake doesn’t want to go?”

“Jake’s not invited,” Ava said. “Jake is going over to May and Doug’s. This is for you and me.”

Jordan looked even more alarmed. “We’re not spending the
night?
”

“No,” Ava said. “Just a day trip. We’ll rent bikes. See the island. See the quokkas.”

“Oh,” Jordan said. His lips twisted in that disapproving way of his. “I don’t know. I had some things I wanted to do tomorrow.”

Ava studied her husband. She could have said, “What things are those? Drinking at the Norfolk? Watching the cricket on TV? Wallowing in your misery?” But instead she smiled. “Cancel them,” she said. “Because we’re going to Rottnest.”

She was jangling with nerves. The drive from their house to the ferry was perhaps the tensest eight minutes she had ever spent with her husband. He sulked like a recalcitrant child. He didn’t want to go on a day trip alone with Ava. The only saving grace was that she understood. If their roles had been reversed and it had been Jordan dragging
her
out—say, for a day trip to Tuckernuck Island—she would have been just as miserable. As she drove, Jordan pressed his forehead against the car window, like a dog being driven to the pound.

Once they were on the ferry, Ava stood out on the bow while Jordan sat in the cabin with a short black, rereading the very same newspaper that he’d read earlier that morning at home. It was chilly on the bow; the wind sliced through Ava’s sweater. Really, Rottnest was better appreciated in the summer, but what she needed to do
had to be done now. She looked out at the blue water frosted with whitecaps. She couldn’t believe they had stayed together so long. They had wasted so much time.

When they disembarked on Rottnest, Ava was so overcome with nostalgia that she nearly forgot the purpose of her mission. The Price children had stayed here for a week every year over the school holidays in January. They had always rented pushbikes, and after a certain age they had been allowed to explore the island on their own. It wasn’t a lush tropical paradise by any means. The landscape was stark and barren, an expanse of parched brown acres with scattered eucalyptus trees and low-lying scrub brush. Ava’s father used to award a dollar coin to the first child who spotted a quokka, the strange-looking marsupial indigenous to the island. The Price family would camp in a tent just off Geordie Bay, and the best night of the trip was always the night they ate sandwiches and played billiards in the pub at the Hotel Rottnest. That was thirty years ago. Now Rottnest was posher. There was a Dome, and a Subway, and a waterfront café. People came from Perth on their sailboats or motor yachts and anchored off the beach and snorkeled.

Ava stepped onto the dock and inhaled the scent of salt water and eucalyptus. “My God,” she said, “I love it here. I’ve always loved it here. And I never thought I’d see it again.”

Jordan made a snorting noise.

They rented mountain bikes with twenty-one gears, a far cry from the bikes of Ava’s youth, which hadn’t even had hand brakes. Ava took a map from the young man behind the rental counter and said to Jordan, “We have to do the whole circuit, all the way down to Fish Hook Bay, and we have to go and see the lighthouse. We’ll have lunch at the hotel. That’s where we used to go with Mum and Dad.”

Jordan shook his head. He didn’t want to be here.

They climbed onto their bikes and started riding. How long since Ava had been on a bike? Her first summer on Nantucket, she had ridden a used ten-speed all over the island, sometimes in her bare, sandy feet. One time Jordan had pulled his Jeep up alongside her and tried to convince her to accept a ride, but she had turned him down. She would pedal herself.

Now she and Jordan struggled up the hill toward the Vlamingh Lookout. At the crest Ava stopped, a little winded, and pointed across the island toward the Basin and Little Parakeet Bay. The day was clear enough that she could just pick out the coastline of the mainland, five miles away.

Jordan followed Ava’s finger with dull eyes. He swigged from his water bottle. “What are we doing here, Ava?” he said.

“You don’t like it?” she said. “In the summer you can swim at these beaches. You can snorkel. We used to collect these purple sea urchins, and my brothers used to fish for skippies with nets.”

“What are we doing here?” he asked again.

She had hoped to make it to lunchtime, to a booth in the pub of the hotel, where they could relax and have a pint. Ava closed her eyes. The pub used to have a jukebox. Ava and her siblings would play Bruce Springsteen and the Who, but her mother would always choose “Waltzing Matilda,” and then her mother and father and a few of the drunk strangers sitting at surrounding tables would belt out the lyrics together.

“I’m going to adopt a baby,” she said. “A little girl, from China.”

This was met with silence, which Ava had predicted. She couldn’t look at Jordan’s face. She desperately wanted a cigarette.

“No,” he said. “I am not adopting a baby. I am not raising another child. I am not.”

“You weren’t listening to me,” Ava said. “I said
I
am going to adopt a baby.”

“So what does that mean?” He drank from his water bottle,
then spit the water into the grass on the side of the road. “What does that
mean,
Ava?”

“It means… I want to stay here, for good, and I want to adopt a baby. And I think you and Jake should go home.”

“What?” Jordan said. “What
is
this? This is you… what?
Leaving
me? You brought me here to godforfuckingsaken
Rottnest Island
so that you can tell me you’re leaving me and you’re going to adopt a baby?” He got off his bike and threw it onto the road, where it jumped and clattered. “This is
bullshit,
Ava!”

“Jordan.”

“This is
bullshit!
I gave up my life for you, I left my
entire life
back on Nantucket and brought you here because that was all you ever wanted. You never wanted to live on Nantucket with me, that was perfectly clear twenty fucking years ago when I showed up here the first time and you laughed in my face and showed me the door. But you came back to me,
you came back to me, Ava—
and yet I’ve spent most of this marriage feeling as if I were the one who was making you miserable. I was the reason we couldn’t get pregnant again, I was the reason Ernie died, I was the one who was too absorbed with work, everything was always
my fault.
And so now I do the selfless thing, I act in the name of our
marriage,
in the name of our
family,
and you tell me that you’re adopting a baby and that Jake and I should go
home?
”