Summerland: A Novel (40 page)

Lynne picked up the water glass and emptied it into Demeter’s bathroom sink. She threw the lime wedge in the trash and carried the liner down to the kitchen trash. The bathroom trash seemed to be mostly crumpled tissues and dental floss and a bunch of wrappers from sugarless gum and breath mints. So maybe Demeter
was
having a relationship with someone at work—or, more likely, she’d developed a crush. Which could either end well or end badly.

Lynne went back up to Demeter’s bathroom and collected all the towels and the bathmat. She gathered the sheets as well and carried everything down to the laundry. Demeter would be angry when she found out that her mother had been in her room, but she’d appreciate having clean sheets and towels.

Lynne had work to do—three clients needed titles cleared—but she hated to leave a job half done. She lugged the Dyson up to Demeter’s room and found a yellow dust rag and fetched her bucket of cleaning supplies and the mop. The cleaners came once a week, so this kind of time-consuming effort on Lynne’s part had been rendered unnecessary in the rest of the house. But the cleaners weren’t allowed to go in Demeter’s room, and it badly needed cleaning.

That smell, Lynne thought. How did Demeter stand it?

Lynne dusted and vacuumed. This gave her a legitimate excuse to peek under the bed—nothing there but a dusty suitcase, which made her wonder if what they really needed was a vacation, which made her think of the Randolphs in Australia. They’d gone because, Jordan said, he needed to get Jake and Ava off the island for a while. Ava had been asking to move back to Australia for years, Lynne knew, but the accident was what had prompted their departure. So it seemed—to Lynne, and probably to the rest of Nantucket—as if they had left in shame. Lynne had heard people castigating Jordan for not printing anything about the accident in the paper, and she had done her best to correct this misperception by telling anyone who brought it up within her earshot that Zoe had asked him not to print a single word. His actions had been noble, she believed.

Lynne wondered if Jake had somehow been to blame for the accident. The police report had been so vague.

Lynne was glad that she hadn’t found any strange or unidentifiable objects in Demeter’s room. No weird altars or vials of tiger blood or voodoo dolls. Of course, she hadn’t looked through the drawers. She would look through the drawers—maybe—once she was done with the bathroom.

No one in the world enjoyed cleaning a bathroom, and this one smelled especially bad. Lynne was generous with the Windex; she tried not to gaze into the toilet bowl as she scoured it with the brush. She checked in the cabinet under the sink and saw that Demeter was down to her last roll of toilet paper and her final two tampons. Lynne replenished the supplies from the stockpile in her own bathroom. The girl was suffering from neglect.

Lynne struggled with the bathtub. She pulled Demeter’s hair out of the drain, then she took down the shower curtain. That could use a run through the washing machine as well.

She checked the medicine cabinet. There was a large bottle of ibuprofen that Lynne knew she herself hadn’t bought. Strange,
she thought. She checked the bottle’s contents to make sure it really was ibuprofen, and it was.

Okay, she was feeling paranoid now. Why would Demeter have spent her own money on ibuprofen? Why not just write it down on Lynne’s shopping list?

Lynne went back into Demeter’s bedroom and thought, I have to check her drawers. She didn’t
want
to check the drawers, but to be thorough, she had to. Then there was the dark screen of Demeter’s computer. Should she check the computer? Would she know what she was looking for? Demeter didn’t have a Facebook page, or she hadn’t the last time Lynne checked, which was some time before the accident. Even Lynne had a Facebook page, complete with 274 friends. Penny had been Lynne’s friend on Facebook, that was the kind of dear child she was, but Lynne hadn’t had the heart to go in and see if Penny’s page had been taken down yet. Lynne collapsed in Demeter’s desk chair and stared at the computer. There were so many places for kids to hide things. How were parents supposed to win at this game?

She would check the dresser drawers, she decided, but would leave the computer alone for now. She would ask Al about the computer, maybe. He had to pull his weight in this.

Lynne slid open Demeter’s drawers. She was holding her breath as though she expected to see a nest of snakes in there. But all she found was a mess of very large clothes—overalls, jeans, T-shirts, and the hooded sweatshirts that made Demeter look like a hoodlum from Jamaica Plain instead of a nice girl from Nantucket. This was Lynne’s chance to surreptitiously remove them, but she was so glad not to have found anything worrisome in the drawers that she let the sweatshirts remain, and even resisted her urge to fold and straighten them. She closed the drawers.

Her search had turned up nothing. Nothing except the Fitzgerald.

Lynne was about to leave the room when she caught sight of the
closet door. It was slightly ajar, which seemed like an invitation for her to open it and check inside. Lynne noticed how blank the door was, how blank the whole room was, really. There were no pictures of friends, no pictures of her or Al, or Mark or Billy, no trophies or awards or ribbons or framed certificates of achievement, no maps of places they’d visited, no posters of actors or rock stars. (Even Lynne, yes, straight Lynne Comstock, had had a poster of Lynyrd Skynyrd taped to her wall.)

Suddenly Demeter’s room seemed like the saddest place on earth.

Lynne took a step toward the closet.

“Mom?”

Lynne gasped.

“Jesus Christ,” she said to Demeter. “You scared the shit out of me.”

Demeter stared at her mother. Lynne wondered when the last time was that she had taken the Lord’s name in vain and sworn in the same sentence. College? She hadn’t always been such a straight arrow; she hadn’t always been such an upstanding citizen. She had listened to Lynyrd Skynyrd in the front seat of Beck Paulsen’s Mazda RX4. She had smoked Newports with Beck and drunk Miller beer from cans.

“What are you doing in here?” Demeter asked.

“Cleaning,” Lynne answered honestly. “It smelled awful. I took your sheets… .” Lynne nodded at the naked bed.

“Yes, I see that.”

“I cleaned your bathroom, you’re welcome. I’ll return your linens to you by dinnertime, freshly laundered, you’re welcome.”

“Wasn’t this room locked?” Demeter asked.

“Yes, but…”

“How did you get in?”

“I popped the lock.”

“You
popped
the
lock?
”

“With a pin,” Lynne said. Apropos of nothing, she laughed. She had broken into her teenage daughter’s bedroom, and she had nothing to say in her own defense. She had put so much effort into cleaning that she had lost track of time. Now she was busted, as though she were the teenager and Demeter the parent.

“Get out,” Demeter said.

“Honey, really, I just needed to get in here to clean—”

“If you really need to get in here, you ask me,” Demeter said. “You don’t
pop
the
lock
with a
pin
while I’m at
work.
You’re like a common thief.”

“Thief?” Lynne said. “I didn’t
take
anything.”

“A spy, then,” Demeter said.

“Honey, I wasn’t spying. I told you, the smell—”

“I
like
the smell.”

“Your sheets needed to be changed.”

“What happened to my water glass?” Demeter asked.

“I emptied it. It’s in the dishwasher.”

“I don’t know what you’re
doing
in here!” Demeter’s voice took on the shrill edge of hysteria. She was still in her work boots—which were, naturally, tracking dirt and sand into the newly vacuumed room. She was clutching her backpack to her chest like a shield, just as she had done the other night when she got home from babysitting.

Clutching her backpack. Okay, Lynne wasn’t naive, she wasn’t in the wrong here, this was her house, she was the mother and Demeter was the child and something was going on with Demeter and Lynne wanted to know what it was.

“Do you have a Facebook page?” Lynne asked.

“What?” Demeter said. “No, I don’t.”

“I can check, you know.”

Demeter said, “Fine, check. I don’t have one.” Her tone of voice was both calm and bored. Facebook wasn’t the culprit.

“Let me see your phone.”

“What?”

“Your phone. Let me see it.”

“My phone?”

“Your phone.” Demeter had an iPhone 4S that Lynne had bought for her in the spring. Lynne had noticed that she kept a passcode lock on the phone. Now she wondered, Why would she keep a passcode lock unless there’s something she’s trying to hide?

Demeter pulled her phone out of the pocket of her cargo shorts and handed it to Lynne.

“Unlock it, please,” Lynne said.

Demeter unlocked it. “You’re acting like a psycho.”

“No,” Lynne said. “I’m acting like a parent. Finally.” She looked at the face of the phone. Apps—she knew that those colorful squares were apps, but she didn’t know what to do with them. She was acting like a
clueless
parent. She had a cell phone herself, but she kept it in her car and used it only when she was on the road or away from home. She didn’t know how to text. Zoe knew how to text, and Jordan knew how to text—the two of them had been texting buddies for years, that was how they communicated. But not Lynne. She was a clueless parent and a fuddy-duddy who didn’t text and couldn’t navigate her way around an iPhone. She handed the phone back to Demeter.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” Demeter asked.

Lynne sighed. She wasn’t getting anywhere. “Demeter, what’s going on with you?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what’s going on? Something is funny. Something is wrong.”

“I’m working,” Demeter said. “I spend all day on my knees weeding. If I’m very, very lucky, I get to water. Or deadhead.” She held up one hand and clutched at her backpack with the other. Her hand was blotched with purple stains. “Daylilies.”

She clutched the bag, clutched the bag. Lynne said, “I’d like you to open your bag, please.”

“What?” Demeter said. She tightened her grip on her bag, which only made Lynne more determined to see what was inside it. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Set the bag down and unzip it for me, please,” Lynne said.

“I suppose the cavity search is next,” Demeter said. “Do I need to call my lawyer?”

“Just do it,” Lynne said.

Demeter did not release her hold on the bag. “I can’t believe you’re doing this. What is
wrong
with you?”

“What is wrong with
you?
” Lynne said. Her voice sounded positively lethal; she felt herself losing her grip. She rarely got like this. If Al had been home, she would have ducked out of there already. She would have made herself a cup of chamomile tea and gotten into a cool bath, played some Mozart, read some poetry. “Put the bag down, please, and unzip it.”

Demeter did as she was told. The backpack gaped open. Lynne took a step forward and peered inside, as though she expected to find someone’s severed head in there. But all she saw was a flannel shirt. She rummaged a little deeper. Two bottles of water, one of them with a lime floating in it—more Zoe water—and another rotting banana. That was all.

Lynne extracted the banana. “Waste of a perfectly good banana,” she said.

“Call the fruit police,” Demeter said.

Lynne held the black, weeping banana. She was so relieved, she thought she might cry.

Demeter collapsed against the closet door; it closed with a sound like a gunshot.

“Mom,” she said.

“What?” Lynne said.

“Get out, please?”

“Yes,” Lynne said. “Okay.”

Lynne was so embarrassed by the incident in Demeter’s bedroom that she said nothing about it to Al. She laundered Demeter’s sheets and towels and left them in a neat pile outside her daughter’s bedroom door. She swore to herself that she wouldn’t use the pin to force entry again. Demeter was a seventeen-year-old girl. She needed her privacy.

On August 14, Lynne was working in her home office. She was listening to a Bruce Springsteen CD, drinking freshly brewed iced tea with mint. She and Al had a date to meet at Ladies Beach at four o’clock. They did this every August, right when Al realized that summer was almost over and he hadn’t taken any late-afternoon swims. And this year, because of all that had happened, they hadn’t gone to the beach even once. Jordan was gone, and Lynne had been afraid to call and inflict herself on Zoe.

Lynne was looking forward to the swim. Afterward she would try to convince Al to go to Dune for dinner.

Downstairs, the phone rang. Lynne ignored it. God knew, if she picked up every phone call that came in to the house, she would never get any work done. Because of all that had happened this summer, she was running behind. The answering machine picked up. The Castles had to be the last family in America that even still had an answering machine. Everyone else used automated voicemail. Lynne tried not to listen to the voice on the machine—if she was so keen to know who was calling, she told herself, then she should have just picked up the phone in the first place. But she listened anyway, just long enough to discern that the voice belonged to Zoe.

Zoe. It was Zoe, finally calling her back. Lynne sprang from her desk and rushed down the stairs to get the phone, but by the time
she picked it up, she was talking to a dial tone. She was just about to call Zoe back when the phone rang in her office, and Lynne thought, Of course, Zoe would call my office phone next since she couldn’t reach me on the home phone. Lynne hurried up the stairs, calling out pointlessly, “I’m coming, hold on, here I come!” When she picked up the phone, she was out of breath. She was too old for this. But it was Zoe. At last! She couldn’t wait to talk to her.

“Hello?” she said.

“Lynne,” Al said. “I need you to sit down.”

Twenty minutes later Lynne and Al were meeting in the hot, unvented offices of Frog and Toad Landscaping with Kerry Trevor and a hysterical Demeter. It was difficult for the adults to talk about what had happened with Demeter making so much noise.