Summerland: A Novel (24 page)

Everyone’s focus was on the TV. A game was on: rugby. And then Jordan remembered what he had read in the sports section of the
Sunday Australian:
the Australian national team was playing New Zealand. The All-Blacks. The All-Blacks were world-famous; they did a version of the traditional Maori Haka dance before each game. They were documented badasses.

Jordan moved toward the bar. He fought off the mental image of himself as an effete, intellectual newspaper editor hailing from a country that wasn’t even tough enough to field a national rugby
team. He was so far out of his element here that it was almost comical, but a beer might help.

The bartender—the same middle-aged woman as before—gave him a Carlton Mid-Draught, and while he had her attention he ordered a shot of whisky as well, and then, in order to gain a few more inches of bar space, he bought the muscled behemoth to his right—a man wearing a fluorescent green vest over his bare chest, who smelled like the lion cage at the zoo—a shot of whisky too. This man—he was a decade younger than Jordan—eyed the shot warily.

“What’s tha?” he said.

Jordan nodded at the TV. He didn’t want to speak and thereby reveal himself as an American just yet. “Game,” he said.

The man needed no further explanation. He threw back the shot. “Thanks, mate.”

“No worries,” Jordan said.

The man did edge off a bit, giving Jordan room enough to move his arm so he could get his beer to his mouth. There was a sudden outburst of raucous booing—the All-Blacks had scored—and the man to Jordan’s left stood up in disgust, leaving his bar stool empty.

Jordan waited a split second to see if anyone else was going to take the stool, someone with more of a national right to it than him, but no one stepped forward. So Jordan sat, moved his beer in front of him, and silently congratulated himself on acquiring this real estate. The whisky affected him in a way that made his situation seem wonderfully humorous. He was in a pub watching Australia battle the All-Blacks; he had a seat and a cold beer. If Ava could see him, she would think… what? That he’d done an admirable job of assimilating? Or that he was making a fool of himself or, even worse, sneering at the other men at the bar, condescending American snob that he was?

And what would Zoe think? He raised his face to the TV. Well, the old Zoe would have been happy beside him at this bar with a
cold beer. She would have thought that the players for the All-Black team were hot.

Jordan had another beer, another shot of whisky, a third beer. He was getting drunk; he should ask for a glass of water. He never let himself get carried away like this, or rarely did: there was that one night on Martha’s Vineyard, his first night with Zoe.

Oh, Zoe. Zoe.

Another beer, his fourth. He had to take a leak, but he was afraid of losing his seat. His eyes were glued to the TV, but the game was inscrutable to him. He yelled when the rest of the patrons in the bar yelled; he cheered when they cheered. He elbowed the man next to him and said, “Watch my seat, mate?”

The man nodded. “Sure, mate.”

Mate, mate, mate. Jordan stumbled to the bathroom, which smelled like piss and beer and smoke, and as he used the urinal, he puzzled over the word
mate.
Odd term for a friend, and especially so because Australians seemed to apply it most often to complete strangers. Jordan tried to wash his hands—one of the stained sinks gave him a trickle of water—and regarded himself in the clouded mirror. He was plowed.
Plowed
was, of course, Zoe’s word. She had endless synonyms for
drunk,
including
plastered, shitfaced, shattered, fucked up, schnockered, destroyed, toasted, wrecked, obliterated, blitzed, pissed, whipped, smashed, crushed,
and
labeled
. Jordan pushed his glasses up his nose. He was drunk at a pub while his poor son suffered through a barbecue with several hundred Price relatives at Heathcote Park.

No mention of Jake at all in that article. If Jake found out, he would be so hurt. Jordan didn’t think Jake had been using his computer. God, he hoped not.

The barbecue would be fine. Jake would be treated like a prince; the adults would swarm him. The other kids would ask him questions just so they could hear his accent. They would think he was cool; he came from the same country as the iPhone and
Kanye West and LeBron James and Stephen King and the Academy Awards. He would be a celebrity; it would boost his ego.

Jordan fought his way back to his seat. His mate at the bar said, “Had to rough a few up, but I kept it empty for you.”

“Appreciate that,” Jordan said. He ordered another beer.

There was no way he could ever have gone to that barbecue. He didn’t like the Prices, this had always been true. But he couldn’t face them now because he knew that some of them—Dearie certainly, Greta certainly, maybe all of them—blamed him for Ernie’s death.

He hadn’t talked to anyone about this, except Zoe.

That March 30 four years earlier was a Sunday, two weeks before Town Meeting, and Jordan had fallen woefully behind at work. His copyeditor at the time, Diana Hugo, a twenty-two-year-old Yale graduate who was taking a gap year before attending the Columbia School of Journalism, had come down with mono. This was an unfortunate development because Diana was a whiz—she would work at the
New York Times
one day, Jordan was sure—and she had been single-handedly responsible for covering Jordan’s ass in the weeks after Ernie was born. He had taken entire days off so he could be at home to help Ava with Ernie; he took the baby for walks, he fed him bottles, he burped him and changed his diaper. He did the 9:00 p.m. feeding and the midnight feeding, after which he was in charge of putting him down for his longest stretch of sleep, from midnight to 4:00 a.m. Ava and Jordan were both showing signs of sleep deprivation; they were a dozen years older than they had been when Jake was a newborn, and Jordan, at least, felt it. Ava normally handled the 4:00 a.m. feeding, and then Jordan would get up with Jake at 6:30, make him breakfast, pack his lunch, and drive him to school. There were days when Jordan was too tired to go straight to the office. He would drop Jake off, drive home again, take a nap, and get to the office around 10:00. Such a
late start was unheard-of for him at the paper, but there were extenuating circumstances, his staff understood, and Diana was around to assign stories, edit and proofread stories, answer Jordan’s phone, and put out the small fires.

Town Meeting was two weeks away. He hadn’t read a single one of the articles.

Diana Hugo had been diagnosed with mono and would be out for three, or possibly four, weeks.

Those were just excuses, however.

March 30 was a typical Sunday, technically spring but really still winter. Gray skies, 45 degrees, winds out of the northeast at 20 to 25 miles per hour. Jordan lit a fire in the morning, then started in on the Sunday
New York Times.
Ava handed off Ernie to him, saying that she was going to exercise class. She had to get the baby weight off. Jordan poked his glasses up his nose with one finger, an involuntary gesture that Ava, over the years, had come to find hostile.

There was a minor exchange between the two of them. She, in a snippy voice, said that she was sorry to inconvenience him during his sacred reading of the paper. Inconvenience him with his own son, she added.

“Not an inconvenience,” Jordan said, accepting the squirming bundle that was Ernie. Although it was, sort of. The finest hour of Jordan’s week was the hour he took on Sunday morning to read the
Times.
Over the years he had encouraged—okay, maybe strongly encouraged, maybe enforced—a period of quiet during his paper-reading. That Ava was now invading that quiet wasn’t exactly ideal, but he understood. The exercise class was at ten, that couldn’t be changed; she wanted to get her body back, which was important, even though to Jordan’s eyes she looked fine.

The poking of the glasses was not really a veiled complaint, or at least he would never admit that it was. His glasses were merely slipping.

After Ava left, in something of an officious huff, Jordan placed baby Ernie in the electric swing, where he fussed for a few minutes before falling asleep.

When Ava returned an hour and fifteen minutes later, Ernie was still in the swing. He had slipped down a little; his head was cocked at an uncomfortable-looking angle, but everybody knew that babies’ necks were made of rubber.

Ava squawked, “Has he been in there the whole time?”

Jordan looked up from the crossword puzzle, which he always saved for last. “No.”

Jake, who was sitting at the kitchen counter eating a bowl of Golden Grahams, said, “Yes.”

“It’s a swing, Jordan,” Ava said, snapping off the power and unbuckling Ernie. “Not a babysitter.” She picked Ernie up. “And he’s soaked right through his outfit. Jesus Christ.”

Jordan raised his head and offered a half-hearted smile of apology, but really his mind was occupied with trying to summon up the French word for “winter.” Five letters.

Ava left the room.

Jake slurped his milk. “You blew it,” he said.

“Hiver!”
Jordan remembered.

Later, to make amends, Jordan offered to take care of the baby while he watched a March Madness game with Jake: BYU vs. Florida. Then he volunteered to run out to the Stop & Shop for a few things that Ava needed, and he said he would take the baby with him.

“It’s too cold for the baby to go out,” Ava said.

“Nonsense,” Jordan said. “We are a hearty, seafaring people.” He bundled the baby up, packed him into his bucket car seat, and set out for the store. He was more than making amends now; he was stockpiling chits. The shadows of Town Meeting and Diana Hugo at home with mono loomed. Jordan was tempted to stop by
the office—just for an hour or two—with Ernie. But no, that was a bad idea; Ava would need to breastfeed the baby. He would work later, he told himself. He would head in to the paper after Ernie was asleep.

Was there anything unusual about the nine o’clock feeding? About the midnight feeding? Later Jordan would rack his brain and come up with nothing. He gave Ernie a bottle at each feeding, and both times Ernie sucked it dry. Jordan burped him perhaps a little more thoroughly with the first feeding. At midnight, instead of feeling the leaden exhaustion that normally weighed him down at that hour, Jordan was agitated by his need to get to the office. He set Ernie down in his crib on his back. Ernie was asleep; he fussed for a minute, just long enough for Jordan to worry that he would wake himself up, which would mean that the process of putting him to sleep would have to be restarted. But then he quieted, and Jordan tiptoed from the room, closing the door halfway behind him, as Ava liked it, so she could hear the baby if he cried.

Jordan then, feeling like a cat burglar, or like a teenager sneaking out to meet his girlfriend, left the house. He went to work.

Ernie’s death was not Jordan’s fault. Intellectually, he knew this. He and Ava, just like most people, were educated about SIDS, or Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. But the possibility of its affecting them seemed remote. Neither of them knew anyone, or even knew anyone who knew anyone, who had lost a baby to SIDS. It was a tragedy that resided elsewhere—maybe in a trailer park somewhere on the outskirts of Detroit, where both parents smoked and the mother worked the third shift at the Ford factory and the father, who was only nineteen himself, put the baby to sleep facedown in smothering, too-soft covers. SIDS didn’t happen in a relatively affluent household with intelligent, doting parents.

Except it did.

Ernie’s death was not Jordan’s fault.

But Ernie’s head had been cocked at that funny angle in the swing for… forty-five minutes? an hour? Why couldn’t Jordan have just held him? Was that too much to ask?

And Jordan had taken Ernie outside in cold, wet, windy weather. Who knew how that had affected his lungs?

And when Ava was awakened by the hot, uncomfortable throbbing of her breasts (her milk was starting to leak); when she walked down the hall to the nursery, feeling astonished that Ernie had slept until five and ambivalent about waking him up to feed him; when she looked at Ernie and knew that something wasn’t right, that he was sick or something; when she picked him up and he didn’t yield and meld into her arms, he wasn’t warm, he wasn’t
breathing;
when Ava screamed (like a woman in a horror film, Jake would remember later, as if she were getting butchered by a chainsaw)—when all of that happened, Jordan wasn’t home. Ava was calling his name, she ran into the bedroom crying, jiggling the baby, slapping his tiny cheeks, trying to revive him.

“Jordan!”
she shrieked. “
JORDAN!”

At the moment when Ava called out for him, he was probably locking up the office, exhausted but satisfied with all that he’d accomplished. He was finally getting caught up.

“JORDAN!”

Ava had raced through the house, clutching lifeless baby Ernie to her chest; milk was flowing all over the front of her nightshirt. Her breasts were on fire, they hurt like hell. Ava sat at the kitchen stool and tried to nurse the baby, thinking that once he smelled the breast, he would wake up. But at the same time, she knew. Her engorged nipple dripped over an unresponsive mouth. She started bawling. Then there were hands on her. Jake.

Jake said, “Mom?”

She said, “Where’s your father?”

Jake said, “Um, I don’t know?”

Ava said, “Call nine-one-one.”

He said, “Why?”

Ernie’s death was not Jordan’s fault. But he could not bear to imagine those moments in the house—the moment when Ava discovered that Ernie wasn’t breathing, the moment when she tried to breastfeed him, the moment when Jake realized that his brother was dead—because the guilt leveled him each time.

He was not there.

He was at work.

When Jordan finally stumbled out of the bar at four o’clock, it was nearly dark. Nearly dark at four o’clock? He panicked. Would Ava and Jake be back? Jordan was drunk now. He needed a short black and a nap. Why was it so dark at four o’clock?

And then he remembered. It was July. Winter.