Summerland: A Novel (5 page)

D.O.A.

Coma.

“And then we crashed,” Demeter said.

S
he had seen Jordan at the hospital. He was in the waiting room with the Castles. Ava wasn’t there. The fact that Ava wasn’t there was a relief, but not for the usual reason. If Ava wasn’t there, Zoe thought, then things mustn’t be that bad.

The police had called Zoe and told her that there had been an accident and that she should come to the hospital right away. When she arrived and saw the expression on Lynne Castle’s face, she knew. It was death or near-death, but she didn’t know which child. She had read
Sophie’s Choice
along with everybody else, and along with everybody else she had thought, No, I wouldn’t be able to pick. If they made me choose, I’d tell them to put a bullet in my head. I’d rather die than choose one over the other. Dr. Field came out. Zoe had known Dr. Field for fifteen years. He had sewed up her forefinger after a particularly bad accident with her Santoku knife. He had treated her kids for strep throat and pinkeye and something like fifty-two earaches between them. He had been the one to pop Hobby’s dislocated shoulder back into place, right there on the thirty-five-yard line of the Whalers’ field. He had been the one to show up at the Randolphs’ house when Ernie Randolph died of SIDS. He was the island’s doctor, on-call something like 350 days a year. Zoe felt proud to be his patient. She brought him a jar of homemade mustard and a bag of her from-scratch soft pretzels every Christmas.

She had never seen him look at anyone the way he was looking at her now. Tenderly, and with fear.

“Zoe,” he said. “I need you to sit down.”

“Tell me,” she said. Her voice was froggy. The call had woken her up. “Just fucking tell me.”

“Penelope,” he said.

“Is dead.”

“Yes,” he said.

It was Penny, she thought.

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

Zoe swooned. The room melted, and she thought, I’m going down. She thought, Put a bullet in my head.

“Patsy!” Dr. Field called out. He had Zoe by both arms, he was holding her, but she was done, gone, checking out. There was no life for her without those two. She had made her own way and found a modicum of personal happiness, but there was no life left to her without the twins.

Patsy, the nurse, helped carry Zoe to the chairs.

“Get her water and an Ativan,” Dr. Field said.

“No,” Zoe said. She wanted a bullet, yes, but not drugs. She wouldn’t be weak like that. She opened her eyes and focused on the white of Dr. Field’s coat.

He said, “Hobby is alive. He’s on his way to Mass General. You have to get to Boston.”

“Okay,” she said. She was strong enough to open her eyes, but not strong enough to stand, and certainly not strong enough to get herself to Boston. “Can I ask? What happened?”

“There was a car accident,” Dr. Field said. His voice was floating over her head. “Penelope was driving. Hobson was in the backseat.”

“Whose car? Jake’s car? The Jeep?”

“Yes. Jake Randolph was in the car, as was Demeter Castle.”

“Are they dead?” Zoe asked, though she knew the answer.

“No,” Dr. Field said. “They’re fine. Cuts and bruises. A bad case of shock.”

Cuts and bruises. A bad case of shock. Not dead. Not in a coma. Zoe wished she were the kind of person who could be happy that other people’s children were alive and unharmed while her two children were dead and nearly dead—but she wasn’t.

“Mr. Randolph has offered to make sure you get to Boston safely,” Dr. Field said. “And the Castles have offered to help as well.”

Zoe pivoted her head and saw the three of them sitting in chairs. Jordan sat on the edge of his seat, staring at her, and Al and Lynne were huddled together. Lynne was crying, and Al—steady, solid Al—was rubbing her back. The Castles and their smug togetherness, their unassailable bond, made Zoe want to scream. She had—admit it!—used their marriage as a fortress. They were her closest friends, and Zoe had ridden on the coattails of their outstanding citizenship.

Al was a selectman, he owned the local car dealership, he knew everybody, and Lynne, no slouch herself, owned a title-search and permitting business that she ran from home so she could always be around to tend to the fire. They had two sons away at college—Mark at Duke, Billy at Lehigh—and they had Demeter, who was, like Penny and Hobby, in eleventh grade. Demeter was something of a sore spot.

But she was still alive.

I don’t have a daughter, Zoe thought. Anymore.

But no, this was impossible.

Zoe let out a high-pitched noise, a keening, a sound she had never made before in her life. Dr. Field was standing before her; she was staring at his belt buckle. He was an intelligent man, a distinguished man, and she needed him to fix this. When Hobby had taken that hit from the monstrous inside linebacker on the Blue Hills team and was lying on the field writhing in pain, Ted Field had jogged out and, with his magic hands, popped his shoulder back into place.

Zoe looked up at him. She was shaking, and this awful noise was escaping from her. Fix this! she thought. She had once carried Penny into the Emergency Room at two in the morning. Penny had been four years old, and she had vomited in her bed. When
Zoe touched her forehead, she felt as if it nearly scorched her hand. She hunted around awhile in the bathroom for a functioning thermometer—this was the kind of object she never seemed to have at the ready—then she gave up. The child was on fire; she needed a doctor. It had been hard as a single mother. She’d had to carry Penny out to the car, then go back inside and wake up Hobby and take him, too. (She had considered calling Lynne Castle and asking her to come over and watch Hobby, but back then, Zoe was determined to handle everything herself.) Penny’s cheeks had been bright pink, her hair damp around her face, but when Zoe had carried her into this very room so many years earlier, Ted Field had met them at the door and taken Penny into his arms. He had taken her temperature—104.5—and gotten some Tylenol into her. He’d discovered the problem: a raging double ear infection.

But he couldn’t fix this. Penny was dead.

“Do you want to see her?” he asked.

Zoe wailed. The mere question was hideous. Did she want to see her dead daughter? It was a decision from a nightmare. This would be followed by other unholy decisions, such as whether to bury her daughter or cremate her.

“No,” Zoe said. No: seeing Penelope dead would only do her further damage. Maybe that was the wrong decision; maybe another mother, a better mother, someone like Lynne Castle, would’ve been strong enough to look upon the body of her dead child, but Zoe couldn’t do it. I love you twice as much as any other mother loves her child, she thought. And therefore I cannot stand to see you dead.

Penny. Her dark hair and rosy cheeks and the spray of freckles across her nose. Zoe wasn’t religious, but every year the Catholics asked Penny to sing “Ave Maria” at their Christmas Eve service, and every year Zoe went to listen. Hearing her daughter sing that beautiful song made Zoe feel as close as she ever had to God.

The Castles had come over to her. They had been her friends
for fifteen years, but Zoe could see that they didn’t know how to proceed in this situation. They stood in front of her.

Lynne said, “Oh, Zoe.”

Zoe nodded.

“It’s too much,” Lynne said.

Too much
what?
Zoe wondered.

Al said, “Can we take you to Boston? There’s a flight leaving at five-thirty. I’ll have a car waiting in Hyannis. We’ll go with you.”

Zoe stared. Al was as bland-looking as a person could get, which was why people liked him so much. He had brown hair and a bit of a paunch; he wore slacks and tie clips. He embodied some kind of American ideal: the local businessman, the selectman, the affable, reliable type. Nothing hidden or surprising. He seemed a little milquetoast, but he had a way of getting things done. He would put Zoe on the flight, he would have a car waiting for her at the airport, he would be Zoe’s substitute husband now, on the worst night of her life, just as he’d been her substitute husband a hundred times before: scheduling her oil changes and her car inspections, checking her tire pressure before she drove out onto the beach, sending someone over to seal up her ocean-facing windows in the winter, calling the people at Yates Gas when they neglected to fill her tanks and her heat went off, giving her free tickets to the Boys & Girls Club clambake because he bought twenty-five for his employees and always had extras.

Al and Lynne Castle were her closest friends. But how to explain it? A chasm was opening between her and them now, expanding with every passing minute. Their daughter was alive, and Zoe’s daughter was dead. She couldn’t bear to be in their presence.

“I need to go alone,” Zoe whispered.

“You can’t go alone, Zoe. Don’t be ridiculous.” This came from Jordan. Jordan was looming above her now, but where had he been five minutes ago when Dr. Field delivered the blow? He
should have been holding her, steeling her. Jordan Randolph was her substitute husband in all the ways that Al Castle was not. Jordan sent her flowers, he put suntan lotion on her back, he made love to her every Tuesday and Thursday morning while the kids were at school. He washed her hair in the outdoor shower afterward. He kissed her fingertips, he ate the food she made for him. They’d spent exactly six nights together: two nights in New York City, two nights in Boston, one night on Martha’s Vineyard, and one night at the crummy Radisson in Hyannis. Those had been the six best nights of Zoe’s life.

She loved him so much. He was
that man
for her. The one who made everything matter.

His dark, curly hair was matted. The lenses of his glasses were smudged. How many times had she lifted Jordan’s glasses from his face, breathed on them, and wiped them off on her own shirttail?

He said to the Castles, “I’ll take Zoe to Boston.”

Zoe got to her feet. She slapped Jordan across the face, as hard as she could. Lynne Castle gasped. Jordan’s glasses were askew. He set them straight again. He said nothing.

H
is father had cheated. Rory Randolph had conducted a classic martini- and-high-heels affair with the arts editor from the
Boston Globe;
for months he had kept a suite at the Eliot Hotel. There was a long-standing dalliance with a socialite from Philadelphia named Lulu Granville, who summered on Monomoy Road. Rory seduced one of his copyeditors; rumors flew that he had gotten her pregnant, then paid for her to have an abortion. Who knew if that was true? What
was
true was that the copyeditor had quit the
newspaper after a tearful scene behind the closed door of Rory’s office, on the night of a
deadline.
And then there was the nineteen-year-old journalism student who worked on the classifieds desk. She later went to law school and filed a retroactive sexual harassment suit that Rory had to spend ten thousand dollars to make go away. Those were the women Jordan knew about.

In his day, Rory Randolph had been the most powerful man on Nantucket. He was handsome and charming, he drank good scotch, he smoked a pack of Newports a day, he had a Purple Heart from Korea, he’d gone to Yale on the G.I. Bill, and he didn’t care what people said. He was convinced of his own superiority. His family owned the newspaper and always had. He was the island’s voice.

Jordan had grown up despising his father. He hated the cheating and the lying, the stink of cigarette smoke, and the taste of whisky. He hated that his mother threw away the hotel receipts with a sigh. She and Jordan never talked about the other women, though she knew that he knew, and he knew that she knew that he knew.

She cooked the roasts, she poured the scotch. She said to her son once, apropos of seemingly nothing, “I take the bad with the good.”

Jordan took pleasure in doing things differently. He went to Tabor instead of Choate and Bennington instead of Yale, he smoked marijuana instead of cigarettes, he drank wine instead of whisky, he was a Democrat instead of a Republican, he was humble and self-effacing instead of pompous and self-congratulatory.

What was Jordan like with women? Well, like his father, he’d never had a problem there. He wore his hair over his collar, he wore rimless glasses, he wore faded jeans and flip-flops. He taught himself to play the guitar. There were always women. But Jordan wasn’t interested in a wife, wasn’t interested in a
family—
people
he would inevitably let down. After watching his father for all those years, he decided it would be better for him to stay free and not owe anybody else a thing.

Then, one summer, there was Ava.

The best thing about Nantucket was that its allure drew people from all over the world. Jordan had grown up spending his summers with wealthy children from Manhattan, Boston, Washington, London, Paris, and Singapore. But he had never met anyone as bewitching as Ava Price.

She worked as a waitress at the Rope Walk. The first time Jordan saw her, she was wearing her uniform: Nantucket-red miniskirt, white T-shirt, white sneakers. She was bending over a table, clearing plates piled high with lobster carcasses. Her honey-blond hair was in one long braid down her back; she had a pencil tucked behind her ear. But what had gotten him was her accent. What American didn’t love a British accent? Which in Ava’s case was actually not British but Australian. Jordan didn’t learn this until later, though, when he saw her at the beach, playing volleyball in her string bikini. It was a Saturday, a day he took off from the paper, and he was at the beach with a bottle of wine and a book of Robert Bly poems. He placed himself advantageously. The volleyball landed on or near his towel no less than half a dozen times, and each time Ava came to fetch it with increasingly amused apologies.

She said, “Perhaps you should move your towel.”

He said, “Why would I want to do that?”

That was Ava Before: a twenty-three-year-old goddess from Perth, Australia, who had come to Nantucket for the summer because her father had read
Moby-Dick
out loud to her and her five siblings. It had taken them three years to finish it, she said. But as a result of that reading, Nantucket was the one place in the world she’d always wanted to visit.