Summerland: A Novel (48 page)

The game had yet to begin, so the crowd was still milling around: people greeted one another, found seats in the bleachers, and bought blocks of raffle tickets for the fifty-fifty, which supported the Nantucket Boosters. The Atheneum librarian, Beatrice McKenzie, and her husband, Paul, who had played for the Whalers in 1965, sat in the front row, just off the handicap ramp.

What many of us didn’t know was that Jordan Randolph and his son, Jake, were walking in the back entrance. Word had reached nearly all of us that Jordan Randolph had returned from Australia with Jake but without Ava. No one was surprised by this. We all understood that Ava came from and belonged to a city, a country, and a continent on the other side of the world. A few of us had heard that Ava was adopting a baby girl from China, which we agreed was a wonderful thing.

Jordan and Jake paid their five-dollar entrance fee and walked
down the hill to the northwest corner of the playing field. We thought they might make their way over to the bleachers, but they decided to hang on the fence. We remembered that Jordan had always been a fence-hanger. He liked to watch every down of the game, reporter-at-heart that he was, but Jake used to sit in the bleachers with Penny. Penny, unlike her scantily clad counterparts in the stands tonight, always wore her brother’s navy blue away jersey with
Alistair
printed in white letters across the back, above Hobby’s number, which was 11. It was hard for us to think about Penny in that jersey, and it must have been even harder for Jake to think about it. We understood why he was keeping his distance.

Standing together, Jordan and Jake Randolph looked remarkably alike. We were glad to have Jordan back at the helm of our newspaper, not only because some of us felt that the standards of the newspaper had slipped (the content of lesser quality, perhaps, and the editing not as sharp, a few more corrections appearing in the following week’s editions than we were used to seeing) but also because, for as long as any of us could remember, a Randolph had headed the
Standard
. We hoped we were right in assuming that Jake Randolph—despite all he’d been through in the past few months—would resume his position as editor of
Veritas,
the student newspaper, then go on to major in journalism in college, and come back and work alongside his father, and eventually take over the legacy.

But we were all of us finished with trying to predict the future.

The front center bleacher had been roped off as “reserved,” and we had our suspicions about why. Sure enough, a few minutes before the team took to the field, a hush came over the crowd, and Hobby Alistair, Zoe Alistair, and a pregnant Claire Buckley walked in single file in front of the stands, up the stairs, and into those reserved seats. The three of them looked good. Hobby loped along, barely limping, Zoe held her head up; her hair was back to
its artful shaggy style, the tips recently having been highlighted cherry-cola red. But it was Claire Buckley who stole the show. For the first time, possibly ever, her hair was down, flowing long over her shoulders, and the front of her sweater was filled out in a becoming way, and below her full breasts was a discreet swell.

We all wanted to comment on the three of them—how strong they looked, how luminous, and most of all, how unified. We wanted to comment on the mysterious aspects of life, those things almost beyond language, such as how it would feel to lose your seventeen-year-old daughter, or what it had been like for Hobby to spend nine days suspended in the netherworld of a coma, or how poetic and right it was that Claire had realized the sanctity inside herself and decided to keep Hobby’s baby. We wanted to explore these topics and more—What happened when we died? How were we to know that death wasn’t as profound an adventure as life was?—but just at that moment, the team stormed the field, and the crowd let out a great roar.

The names of the Nantucket Whalers were announced over the loudspeaker one by one, and while our eyes were on the field, they were also on Hobby. How would it feel for him to watch his former teammates being cheered, knowing that he could no longer play among them? How would it feel to hear Maxx Cunningham introduced as the team’s new quarterback?

Hobby handled it not only with grace but with exuberance. Despite his still-healing leg, he alone in the crowd stood for the announcement of each player. He clapped and whooped. When his lieutenants were announced—Anders Peashway, Colin Farrow—he whistled. And he cheered perhaps the loudest when his successor, Maxx Cunningham, rushed onto the field.

At the center of the field, Coach Jaxon took the microphone.

He said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to call Hobson Alistair onto the field.”

Hobby turned to his mother. The crowd quieted. We watched
as Hobby scooted out past Claire and made his way down the stairs and through the gate that led onto the field. The players on the sideline parted to let him through. With what looked like painless ease, Hobby jogged out to the center of the fifty-yard line.

Coach Jaxon said, “Ladies and gentlemen, Hobson Alistair.”

Instinctively we all stood, and the applause was thunderous. Hobby looked shocked by the whole thing at first, but then he grinned and waved. We watched Zoe and Claire standing right along with everyone else, clapping. Claire gave a piercing whistle, loud enough to raise the dead.

Coach Jaxon held up the white home jersey, #11
Alistair,
that Hobby used to wear and would have been wearing right then if things had been different. He said, “Tonight we retire number eleven.”

The crowd went wild.

Coach Jaxon handed Hobby a football, and with the perfect spiral we all remembered, Hobby threw the ball to Maxx Cunningham, who, though startled, managed to put out his hands and catch it.

We thought we were witnessing the resolution of the story right there on the Whalers’ field, but of course there were other, connected narrative lines unfolding simultaneously elsewhere.

At seven o’clock in the morning in springtime air that smelled of a peppermint grove, Ava Price Randolph was finishing her second cup of tea and the previous day’s crossword puzzle. Her hands shook a little as she washed her teacup in the sink. She was nervous. In a scant hour, her sister May was coming to drive her to her first appointment with the adoption agency. When Ava had talked to Meaghan, the adoption counselor, on the phone, she had said that the adoption process could take up to five months, and that it would require patience and fortitude.

“I’m committed,” Ava said.

“Good,” Meaghan said.

Meaghan already knew the salient facts about Ava’s situation. The applicant was the mother of one son, age seventeen, who was currently living with his father in America, and another son who had died of SIDS at eight weeks old. She was single, but supported by the husband from whom she was now amicably separated. She had a large family with many helping hands all within a twenty-kilometer radius. She was committed to being a mother again.

Ava missed both Jake and Jordan enormously. For nearly twenty years she had been married, and for more than seventeen years, a mother. Now she was alone. She missed the sound of Jordan’s snapping open the pages of a newspaper and Jake’s humming along to the music on his headphones—but in the sunny bungalow in Fremantle, in contrast to the dark days she’d spent living in Ernie’s nursery in the house in Nantucket, Ava didn’t feel lonely. She liked the quiet, and when she closed her eyes, she saw a bright light that she knew was her future.

If Ava could have seen the action unfolding on the football field on Nantucket just then, if she could have seen Jordan and Jake and Zoe and Claire all applauding as Hobby took a bow for the crowd, raised two fingers in a V for victory, and yelled out, “Retired at age seventeen!” she would have smiled. She would have thought, They are where they’re supposed to be. And so am I.

Ava’s cell phone chirped. She had a text message from Roger Polly that said,
Good luck today!
She smiled, thinking, Such a lovely man. Although God only knew what would happen there. She texted him back,
Nervous!

Then she heard a car honking outside, and she checked out the front window to see her sister May idling at the curb in her minivan. God forbid any member of her family actually take thirty seconds to stop the car and come to the door.

Ava gathered her purse, her spring coat, and her documents,
which were nestled in a manila folder, and she closed the door behind her. She hurried down the steps.

“Come on!” May called through her open window. “Let’s go get ourselves a baby!”

At seven o’clock in the evening on that September Friday, Al and Lynne Castle were driving to Vendever to pick up their daughter, Demeter, who had successfully completed thirty days of treatment for alcoholism. It still boggled Lynne’s mind that this had actually transpired, that Demeter had developed this disease while living under her parents’ roof, and that she and Al had had absolutely no idea. Lynne had run through the gamut of emotions herself, from denial to anger to grief. She had questioned the very core of her being. She had thought of herself as a good mother, and yet her youngest child, her only daughter, had essentially slipped through the cracks into a dark and sinister netherworld
on her watch.
Lynne had been too busy to notice, too smug, too self-absorbed, too self-congratulatory. On the night of the accident, where had she been? She had been at a series of graduation parties for Pumpkin Alexander, Patrick Loom, Garrick Murray, and Cole Lucas. She hadn’t considered the fact that while she and Al were “putting in appearances” at no less than four parties, Demeter was sitting home alone. Of course the girl was drinking. In merely imagining the isolation and loneliness that her daughter must have felt that night, Lynne wanted to reach for a glass of bourbon herself. Lynne wasn’t the wonderful mother she’d thought she was. She was hardly a mother at all. She was a silly woman who had put her business and her clean, orderly home and her charitable boards and her committees and her position in the community ahead of her own daughter.

As Al drove through the gathering dark, Lynne sighed.

In response, Al turned up the radio. He listened to the worst music ever made, what Lynne always thought of as A.M. Gold—
Tony Orlando and Dawn, Ambrosia, Dr. Hook. Listening to the radio with Al made her feel a hundred years old. And the fact that he
turned the music up
when he heard her sigh instead of asking her what was on her mind simply infuriated her. She nearly asked Al to pull over right that second so she could get out. He would never do that, of course. She would have to demand that
he
get out, and then she would have the satisfaction of leaving
him
behind as she sped off with some decent music playing. Lynyrd Skynyrd or Bruce Springsteen, something she had listened to back in the Mazda RX4 with Beck Paulsen.

But she would never do that, either.

If Lynne Castle could have seen the scene unfurling at the football field—Jordan and Jake approaching the stands and, after an affirmative nod from Zoe, taking seats on the bleachers directly behind her and Hobby and Claire, and the five of them standing as the elementary school music teacher, Mrs. Yurick herself, sang the National Anthem in her warbling soprano, and Zoe reaching back and squeezing the heck out of Jordan’s hand because every atom of her at that moment yearned for her daughter—well, Lynne would have wished only that she were among them. She would have acknowledged the new, startling circumstances of their lives—that Penny was dead, that Hobby was permanently sidelined, that Jordan and Ava had split, that Jake was heartbroken, that Demeter was an alcoholic, that Claire Buckley was pregnant, that Zoe loved Jordan but didn’t know how to make that feel right, that Jordan was determined to find a way to make it feel right, that none of them were quite the people they seemed, or even the people they thought they were—and she would have said, “Okay, fine, I’ll take it all. As long as we’re together.”

Demeter stood waiting at the exit of the facility, which was a hundred and twenty feet and a world away from the entrance she’d walked through a month earlier. She was thirty-one pounds lighter
and she was 80 percent clearer in the head, but the remaining 20 percent of her that struggled would, she realized, probably always struggle. She would struggle with her desire for a drink, the slow burn down the throat, the warm ball of honeyfire in her chest, the ensuing release. She would struggle with her weight. She would struggle with what she had said to Penny Alistair on the night of the accident. She would struggle with her relationship with her parents. She would struggle with unrequited love and sought-after friendships that would never come easily.

But, as her therapist here at Vendever, Sebastian, had said, only 20 percent of her was struggling, which was a lot better than most people. Sebastian had said, “You’re a good kid, Demeter. You’re going to be fine.” Sebastian was handsome and funny and immeasurably kind, and Demeter was half in love with him, as were all the other girls at Vendever, and so his words made an impact on her. If Sebastian thought she was a good kid, a kid worth rescuing, if he thought she was going to be fine, then maybe, just maybe, it was true.

Demeter’s mother had sent manila envelopes filled with Demeter’s schoolwork and assigned reading, and with each batch she had enclosed a simple note saying,
I love you, Demeter. xo Mom.
Demeter had kept these notes in a pile by her bed. She knew they were true, she knew her mother did, in fact, love her very much. Demeter had been a difficult child, and she meant to both change her ways and apologize. Along with her mother’s notes was a letter Demeter had received from Hobby that said a lot of things, and among them these most important lines:
You aren’t responsible for Penny’s death any more than I am responsible or Jake is responsible or my mother or Jake’s mother and father or your mother and father are responsible. The only person who was responsible for Penny’s death was the person who was driving the car that night, and that was Penny herself. I don’t know why she did what she did, but when
I see her again—oh, and I
will
see her again—I’m going to ask her why, and then pray for God’s help in understanding.