Summerland: A Novel (4 page)

“Yes,” Demeter whispered.

The nurse patted her on the back. She said, “The Chief is coming in to talk to you. Okay?”

Oh God, no, Demeter thought. Not okay. The Chief and her father were friends; they were in Rotary together. They passed the basket in church together. Demeter had known the Chief since she was little. She didn’t want to talk to the Chief.

She thought they would move her to another room, a square white room with a simple wooden table, like an interrogation room on TV. She thought they would transport her in a cruiser to the beautiful, brand-new, bajillion-dollar police facility on Fairgrounds Road. Demeter’s father had, thanks to his political clout, made it possible for that police station to get funded and built. Would the Chief take that into account when he was questioning her?

Oh God, the Jim Beam.

Oh God, the walk with Penny into the dunes at Steps Beach. What had Demeter
done?
It was true that Demeter had hated Penny a little, but she had loved her, too. A lot of love and a little hate, and maybe the hate was inexcusable, but Demeter dared the world to find a girl more worthy of hateful envy than Penelope Alistair—for her singing alone, her beauty alone, her relationship with Jake Randolph alone. They had all been friends since Montessori: Demeter, Penelope, Hobby, and Jake, sitting in a circle singing songs about magic pennies and grandfather clocks. They had painted in the art room, they had learned the names of the continents, they had sliced their own cucumbers at snack time. Penny and Demeter had sat together at lunch each day and talked about the things that four-year-olds talked about. Who remembered what those things were? They had played chase on the playground. Keep-away with the boys.

Penny was D.O.A.

The Chief walked into the ward. Demeter almost didn’t recognize him; he was in street clothes. A pair of jeans, a gray hooded sweatshirt that said
NANTUCKET WHALERS
across the front in navy letters. He pulled a chair to the side of the bed where Demeter was sitting.

“Demeter,” he said.

She nodded.

He put his face in his hands, and when he looked up, Demeter could see that he was close to tears.

He said, “Penelope Alistair is dead.”

Demeter pursed her lips and nodded. She wanted to tell the Chief that she knew this already and explain that her brain wasn’t allowing her an emotional response. Because she was probably certainly in shock.

“Hobson Alistair is in a coma. And he has sixteen broken bones. He’s been flown to Boston.”

Demeter gagged and spit in the bowl. Her body was in rejection mode. She made some ungodly retching noises. The Chief cast his eyes down.

“I have you, and I have the Randolph kid. It was Jake Randolph’s Jeep, but he wasn’t driving?”

“No, sir.”

“Penelope was driving?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Had she been drinking? You can tell me the truth. We’re going to do a tox report.”

“No,” Demeter said. “Penny wasn’t drinking. She doesn’t…” Demeter blinked. “She doesn’t drink at all, ever. Didn’t, I mean.”

“But the rest of you were drinking,” the Chief said. Somehow he made Demeter’s fake Louis Vuitton bag materialize, and he pulled out the nearly empty fifth of Jim Beam. “This. Where did you get this?”

Oh God. Lodged in Demeter’s mind was a boulder she couldn’t
budge. The truth was that she had stolen the bottle from the Kingsley house, on a night when she had been babysitting for Barrett, Lyle, and Charlie Kingsley. Demeter had been the Kingsleys’ babysitter for five years. The Kingsley parents went out a lot, and they paid Demeter well, and Mrs. Kingsley was always amazed and relieved to find that she was available. (“Because I have no life,” Demeter wanted to confess.) Mrs. Kingsley kept her pantry stocked with potato chips and Doritos and Triscuits and white cheddar popcorn and cheese-filled pretzels and Italian rosemary crackers; Mr. Kingsley called it the 7-Eleven. The fridge was always packed with dips and smoked sausages and hunks of cheese and leftover containers of potato salad or fettuccine Alfredo. The bottom drawer was filled with Cokes and ginger ale, grape soda, root beer. And every single time that Demeter had babysat for her over the past five years, Mrs. Kingsley had opened her arms as wide as they would go and said, “Help yourself to whatever you want.”

This had been a rare form of torture, especially after the kids were in bed and Demeter was faced with empty hours of homework or independent reading or the two hundred channels of the Kingsleys’ satellite TV. Demeter’s cell phone lay charging on the Kingsleys’ granite countertop, but no one ever texted, and no one ever called. That wasn’t strictly true: at least once a night, Demeter’s mother, Lynne, would text her to ask how things were “coming along.” Demeter never responded to these messages; she found receiving texts from her mother humiliating. Now and then Demeter sent a text out to Penny, but that was a shot in the dark. Demeter would write something general and innocuous like,
what u doin?
And on occasion, Penny would text back,
hanging with J.
Or, sometimes,
hanging with A,
who was Ava, Jake’s mother. To Demeter, Ava Randolph was a tragic figure along the lines of Mr. Rochester’s crazy wife locked in the attic in
Jane Eyre
. But to Penny, she was more like Sylvia Plath or Virginia Woolf: brilliant, artistic, bipolar, possibly suicidal.

“Is Mrs. Randolph okay?” Demeter had asked her mother once.

“ ‘Okay’?” Lynne Castle said.

“I mean, I know she’s still really sad about the baby,” Demeter said. The baby had died when Demeter and Jake and Penny and Hobby were in seventh grade. “But what does she do? Like, with her life, what does she
do?
”

“That’s an interesting question,” Lynne Castle said. This was the kind of answer that made Demeter want to scream. Her parents were all about validation. What Demeter wanted was the truth.

“Tell me, Mom,” Demeter said.

“She’s just…” Lynne held her hands out, as if checking for rain. “Well, it seems to me that Ava is lost.”

Lost? Demeter was alarmed to learn that a person could make a career out of being
lost
. She worried that this might someday be
her
career.

“Did someone sell it to you?” the Chief asked. He held the bottle in two hands. “Someone on-island?”

Demeter was startled. Her thoughts had digressed so dramatically that she had forgotten she was under this line of questioning.

“No,” she said, honestly.

“Someone off-island?” the Chief asked. He sounded relieved, and she couldn’t blame him. He didn’t want to have to shut down a local business for selling liquor to minors. Demeter knew she should just tell him she had bought the Jim Beam off-island. “Off-island” was the whole rest of the world, an infinite bigness filled with people and places and things. It was impossible to police “off-island,” because where would you start?

Did Demeter want to lie? No, she did not. Her alternative was to admit that she’d stolen the Jim Beam from the Kingsleys, but to explain that it hadn’t felt like stealing because Mrs. Kingsley always said, “Help yourself to whatever you want.” And so last
week, on a particularly fragrant spring night, the night of the Nantucket High School awards ceremony, which Demeter wasn’t attending because she hadn’t been selected to receive any awards, she had helped herself to the bottle of Jim Beam. And what she wouldn’t be able to tell Chief Kapenash was how happy and liberated taking the bottle had made her feel. It was secret and contraband; it was a bandage to have ready for a time in the future that might be even worse than that night. It was numbness in a bottle, oblivion in liquid form. Demeter knew this because she had already systematically run through every drop of alcohol in her parents’ house. Al and Lynne Castle weren’t drinkers—not a beer at a ball game, not a glass of wine at book club. At dinner Al had water and Lynne drank a glass of milk, like a child. That they even kept any alcohol in the house stunned Demeter. She had stumbled across the stash by accident one night when her parents were out and she was ransacking the kitchen looking for chocolate. In the never-opened cabinet above the refrigerator, she discovered a bottle of vodka, a bottle of gin, a bottle of dark rum, a bottle of scotch, a bottle of vermouth, and a bottle of Kahlua. All of the bottles were opened, with an inch or so missing from each. They had been bought for some party years earlier and hadn’t been touched or thought of since.

Demeter had drunk it all. The Kahlua with a little milk was her favorite. She drank the vodka with fresh-squeezed O.J. She mixed the gin with the vermouth—a martini! She replaced the missing vodka with water, the Dewar’s with iced tea. Would her parents ever discover her treachery? No, Demeter was certain they wouldn’t. Lynne Castle had forgotten that the bottles existed; even when company was over, they were never pulled out. By the time Al or Lynne happened upon these bottles, Demeter would be safely out of the house. At college, or beyond.

“Off-island,” Demeter said. She willed herself not to flash the Chief shifty eyes.

He was scribbling on a pad. “And you’re certain Penelope wasn’t drinking?”

“She was not drinking.”

“What about the boys?”

Demeter needed water. Her mouth was coated with a film of vomit. She asked the Chief if she could have some.

“Uhhhh… .” He glanced around and caught the attention of the short Hispanic man who’d had the good fortune to clean up Demeter’s Jim Beam–and-cheese-puff vomit. “Agua? Por favor?”

The man nodded. He reappeared a second later with a small blue cup of tepid water. Demeter was so grateful, she nearly cried. She sipped the water, though she wanted to gulp it.

“So, I was asking…”

Yes, Demeter knew what he was asking: he was asking her to rat out the boys. The truth was, both Jake and Hobby had taken swigs off the bottle. And then the four of them had gone to a bonfire on Steps Beach. It was just a general graduation party, there were lots of seniors there—refugees from earlier, legitimate parties—but there were juniors in attendance as well, and some sophomores. The party had livened up when Demeter arrived with Hobby and Jake and Penny. Everyone on earth loved those other three, and Demeter was lucky enough to be with them because she had texted Penny and said that she had a bottle, and not only that—she wasn’t sure that one bottle of Jim Beam would offer enough allure—but there was something BIG and IMPORTANT that she needed to tell Penny. Something ginormous.

There had been a keg at the bonfire, sitting in a trash can filled with ice. There was a line for the keg, but somehow Demeter found herself in charge of the tap. She was a good pour, someone said. Not too much foam. She filled a hundred plastic cups at least. How many of those had been Hobby’s or Jake’s? Two or three apiece, maybe? And Demeter herself had had three or four beers, though after all the hard stuff she’d drunk at home alone, beer
had very little effect on her. For her, drinking it was like drinking juice.

“We were at a bonfire on Steps Beach,” Demeter said. “We were drinking beer.”

“Hobson and Jake were drinking beer?”

“Yes.”

“And then what happened?” the Chief asked.

Demeter drank her water down. She needed a hundred more cups just like that, but preferably colder.

“After that?” Demeter said. She wouldn’t talk about after that. She couldn’t. Besides, she was getting confused. Had the party she was talking about taken place that very night? Because it seemed like days ago. Last week. And was Penny really dead? She couldn’t be dead if only hours before she had been talking to Demeter in the dunes. And was Hobby really on a helicopter, in a coma? Sixteen broken bones? Demeter had been in love with Hobby when she was younger. She had berated herself for how unoriginal this was, for everyone on Nantucket was in love with Hobby Alistair—every girl, every mother, every father. Eventually Demeter had grown out of it and moved on to being in love with Patrick Loom, then Anders Peashway, then Jake Randolph, but Jake only because Penny loved him, and Demeter wanted to be like Penny.

Demeter let her face fall in fake disappointment-in-herself. “After that, I can’t remember.”

“You don’t remember getting into the car?” the Chief asked.

Demeter gnawed on her lower lip. She had tried out for
Grease
this past winter—she’d desperately wanted to play Rizzo—but she’d gotten only a part in the chorus, so she’d quit, much to her parents’ dismay. What Mr. Nelson and Mrs. Yurick hadn’t realized during the auditions was that Demeter was an excellent actress.

“I remember getting in the car,” she said. “I sat in the backseat, on the right. Hobby was in the backseat on the left. Jake was in the front passenger seat, and Penny was driving.”

“Penny was driving even though it was Jake’s car?”

“She was the only one who hadn’t been drinking,” Demeter said.

Even so, Jake had tried to take the keys. He’d held Penny’s wrist and tried to pry open her fingers, but she had swung her arms at his face as if to hit him, and he’d backed off. Penny had been in full freak-out mode. That was exactly what Demeter had thought at the time: She’s freaking out. Freaking freaking.

Hobby had said, with his unflappable calm, “Jeez, Pen, pull yourself together.”

“Please,” Jake had said. “Please let me drive.”

Penny had screamed. No words, just a scream.

Demeter had felt her stomach do funny things. She was certain Penny was going to spill the beans, even though Demeter had made her promise. Had made her swear.

“And Penny drove out to Cisco Beach,” Demeter said. “And she was going really fast.” Even while they were still on the road, the car was shuddering. Jake was pleading with Penny to slow down, while Hobby was leaning forward, trying to see the speedometer. He seemed most interested in finding out how fast the Jeep could go. Demeter was in a drunken daze, a dreamlike state in which she wasn’t sure if what seemed to be happening was really happening. She was, however, wearing her seat belt. And Jake was wearing his. That, she thought, was the result of good parenting. The twins were unbuckled because that was the kind of house they’d been raised in—an unbuckled household. Zoe laid down no rules. “Listen,” Zoe had said recently to Lynne Castle. “Raising them without hard- and-fast rules has worked. Look how wonderfully they’re turning out.”