Summerland: A Novel (43 page)

“Just like we talked about,” Claire said. “You start.”

The phone in the house rang. Hobby’s heart seized. There were ringing phones and there were ringing phones, but this ringing phone was so ill timed that Hobby could imagine only that the person on the other end was someone who had chosen this precise moment to spoil their news. It must be Beatrice McKenzie, the librarian at the Atheneum, or Savannah Major, the principal’s wife, calling to congratulate Zoe after hearing “through the grapevine” that she was going to be a grandmother.

A grandmother.
Zoe was forty years old. Hobby burped again.

Inside, Zoe answered the phone, a fact that Hobby found startling. He heard her murmuring, using her private voice. It was the same voice she used when she talked to Jordan on the phone. Hobby wondered if there was any way the phone call could be from him. God, that would be something! But it was the middle of the night in Australia now.

Zoe stepped out onto the deck. She said, “Hobby, can I speak to you for a minute, please?”

Hobby twisted in his chair. His mother’s face was inscrutable, but he was no dummy, it was something bad. She
knew.
He felt his
insides start to roil; he burped again and tasted jalapeños. She knew. Someone else had told her. She wanted him… what? to come inside? She did realize that he had an eight-pound cast on his leg and that moving from one location to another was still an arduous task for him, right? He struggled to his feet. Even on his worst days he moved more gracefully than he was doing right now. Something about his mother’s face and Claire’s face—man, truthfully, Hobby couldn’t even
look
at Claire’s face, but he knew it was bad—and the hot sun and his aching, itching leg and the goddamned jalapeños in the salsa, and Penny dead, never to not eat jalapeños again or use her vocal cords again: all of these things conspired against him, and his stomach heaved, and he pivoted with the help of one crutch, and then he projectile-vomited off the deck, down into the dune grass below.

“Hobby!” his mother cried.

He vomited again. He hated to admit it, but it felt good, getting the poisonous stuff out. He could hear Claire making unpleasant noises behind him. She was probably going to sympathy-puke. This was like some godawful Monty Python movie. He closed his eyes and saw colors—swirling pink and orange—and he thought, Penny, can you help me here, please? She would probably refuse him. He could just hear her, wherever she was, saying that she was not some angel slave whom he could just summon whenever he got into a tight spot.

A glass of ice water appeared at his elbow. His mother. She said, “Are you okay?”

He wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand and accepted the water. “Yeah,” he said. “I ate too fast.”

She said, “I really need to talk to you inside. Privately.”

Hobby checked on Claire. She was sitting ramrod straight with her eyes closed and her legs folded in a way that reminded him of a yoga position. He said, “Claire? I’m going in for a minute.”

She nodded, though barely.

Hobby crutched his way inside and followed his mother into the nether regions of the house. Her bedroom. He looked around as though it were a room in a museum. It had been years and years since Hobby had done anything more than peek in here. Penny used to go into their mother’s room all the time, she would spend a string of nights sleeping in Zoe’s bed. Zoe and Penny had been ridiculously close, they’d had that best-friend thing going on, a girl thing, and Hobby had been more than happy to stand clear. Still, there were aspects of the room that Hobby had memorized long ago: the oval mirror with the gilt frame (true, not as big as Penny’s mirror, not even close), the dressing table with the engraved silver brush with the soft white bristles that, as a child, Hobby had liked to rub across his face, the photograph of Zoe and Hobson senior on the steps of the Culinary Institute, both of them in their chef’s whites and toques. A large pink conch shell that Zoe had gotten on a trip she’d taken, alone, to Cabo. The faded quilt on her spindle bed that she’d inherited from her mother’s sister, who had married an Amish man and lived somewhere in Iowa. Over the door, the enamel cross that Zoe had bought in Ravenna, Italy, where she had gone on vacation a million years ago with her parents. The one time Hobby had asked her about the cross, she’d said that she viewed it as a piece of art, not a religious symbol. The cut crystal candy dish filled with beach glass on her night table, next to a stack of books. The bottom book was
The Collected Works of M. F. K. Fisher
. This was Zoe’s favorite book of all time, and it had been Hobby’s father’s favorite book as well.

All of these things about his mother’s room were as familiar to Hobby as the parts of his own body, and yet somehow he’d forgotten about them.

Why were they talking in
her
room? Wasn’t the kitchen private enough? Or the hallway? This was very bad. This was what he’d been dreading, or worse.

Zoe closed the door.

Hobby collapsed on the bed. At that moment he yearned for his old body back. He wanted to run away as fast as he could. He wanted to jump fences and swim ponds. Anything to get away.

Penny, help me!

Zoe said, “Lynne Castle just called.”

Hobby thought, Oh, Jesus.

Zoe said, “Demeter is in bad shape. She’s going away to a hospital called Vendever to be treated for alcohol abuse.”

“What?”
Hobby said.

“They’re holding her right now at the hospital,” Zoe said. “And she’s asked for one thing before she goes.”

“What’s that?” Hobby said.

“She wants to talk to you.”

Hobby brushed his teeth and splashed cold water on his face. He thought, Demeter wants to talk to me.

In the living room he found Claire lying on the sofa with a wet washcloth over her eyes.

“She doesn’t feel well,” Zoe said. “Maybe she got too much sun. Or maybe the two of you caught a bug.”

“Not a bug,” Hobby said. He looked at Claire, his princess in repose. Her left hand was resting across her abdomen in a way that he felt stated the obvious. Should they tell Zoe now, before he went off on this heinous mission of talking to Demeter at the hospital?

“Mom…,” he said.

“I told Claire that we needed to run an errand,” Zoe said. “And that we’ll be back in an hour or so. That will give her a chance to rest.”

Claire nodded, and Hobby thought, All right, get this over with, then tell Mom. Tell her over dinner, like we planned.

“We’ll be back in an hour,” he said. “Maybe sooner.”

They used the Emergency Room entrance and found Lynne Castle waiting for them. Lynne reached out for Zoe, and the two women hugged for a long time. Zoe was crying and Lynne Castle was crying and there seemed to be a lot of apologizing going on: “I’m sorry…” “No,
I’m
sorry…” Lynne was so sorry for everything, Zoe was sorry for not calling Lynne back sooner, Lynne was sorry for her daughter’s behavior, Zoe was sorry that she’d had to be the one to blow the whistle. Hobby hung from his crutches and thought, Can we please get this over with? I have my own drama waiting for me at home. But Zoe and Lynne kept speaking in whispers, wiping away tears, squeezing each other’s hands. “I was so blind,” Lynne said. “I was a blind, stupid cow.”

“The important thing,” Zoe said, “is that now she can get the help she needs.”

Hobby let out an audible breath, a cue that his mother—being immune to his childish cries for attention—ignored but Lynne Castle picked up on.

She said, “Hobby. Thank you for agreeing to do this.”

“No prob,” he said. He crutched toward her, hoping to expedite the forward motion that would get this done and get him back home to Claire, then get them to the dinner table where he would tell his mother that he had fathered a child.

Lynne said, “I’ll take you up. Follow me.”

“I’ll wait here,” Zoe said. She eyed the chairs of the waiting room. The place was completely deserted; Dr. Phil was on TV. She put her hand to her mouth, and Hobby thought, This was the place where she learned that Penny was dead.

“Actually,” Zoe said. “I’ll wait in the car.”

Hobby and Lynne walked down the corridor in silence. They waited for the elevator.

Lynne asked, “How are you feeling?”

“Better,” he said. “Everything else works, just not the leg.”

“How much longer with the cast?” Lynne asked.

“They’re not sure,” Hobby said. “Three more weeks, maybe? I’m hoping to get it off before school starts.”

“That would be nice,” Lynne said.

Hobby nodded in agreement.

The elevator doors opened, they filed in, Lynne pressed the button for the third floor, the elevator doors closed. Hobby worried that he smelled like puked-up jalapeños and onions.

Lynne said, “Your mother told you what happened?”

“Not really,” Hobby said. “Just that Demeter is going to Vendever to be… treated.”

“She was caught stealing vodka from the Allencasts’ house while her landscaping crew was working there,” Lynne said. “You mom was the one who saw her do it, actually. And so Demeter got fired. When I asked Demeter, she said she wasn’t planning on
drinking
the vodka. She said she was going to give it away to friends. And I, like a fool, believed her.”

Yes, Hobby thought, that was foolish. Demeter drank all the time, she drank a lot. She was… well, other kids like Anders Peashway called her a lush. But maybe Mrs. Castle hadn’t realized that Demeter drank, or maybe she’d known that Demeter drank but not how much. Parents were funny that way, always wanting to believe the best about their kids. When Hobby was a father, he was going to be the ultimate realist. He wasn’t going to believe a word his child said. He was going to be a vigilante—especially if he had a girl.

Lynne went on: “Then I found, oh, maybe two dozen empty bottles in her closet and an additional eighteen bottles that were still full. Vodka, tequila, wine. I could hardly believe it.”

Hobby’s eyebrows jumped.
Really?
Man, that was something.

“All of the bottles were stolen,” Lynne said. “She took them
from the houses where she was landscaping. Oh, and she stole from the Kingsleys, the family she babysits for. That was where she got the bottle of Jim Beam you were all drinking on the night of graduation.”

“Ah,” Hobby said. To say anything more seemed unwise.

“She stole the bottles because she had to have the alcohol and we don’t keep any around the house,” Lynne Castle said. “Not a drop. And she had to have it. Because she’s an alcoholic.”

Hobby clenched the grips of his crutches.

“An alcoholic at seventeen,” Lynne said.

The elevator doors opened—Thank you, God, thought Hobby—and he and Lynne Castle filed out. Hobby followed Lynne down the corridor. His hospital room had been on the second floor and not the third floor, that was a small blessing. As it turned out, the third floor was even bleaker and more hopeless-seeming than the second floor. Hobby broke out in a sweat despite the air-conditioning. It was hard to be back here.

Demeter was the only person in a double room. Hobby had pictured her lying in bed wearing a johnny, like a sick person, but she was in her regular clothes—cargo shorts and a T-shirt—sitting on the side of the bed, reading a book. When she saw her mother and Hobby, she set the book aside and gripped the edge of the bed as if it were a ledge she was about to leap from.

Lynne said, “Look who I found!” As though Hobby’s sudden presence in the room were a happy surprise and not 100 percent by design.

Demeter stared at him. Her eyes were vacant, and Hobby thought, They’ve drugged her.

“Hey, Meter,” Hobby said.

She gave a little smile, and Hobby had a flashback to sitting in the circle at the Children’s House next to her when they were little. He remembered her dimpled knees and pigtails. He remembered the cream cheese and jelly sandwiches in her lunchbox.

“Hey,” she said.

She didn’t look half bad. She was tan, and she was thinner. She had brushed her hair, and it hung down long and straight and shiny. The blond streak was so pretty that Hobby wanted to reach out and touch it.

Lynne Castle said, “Well, I guess I’ll leave you two alone.” As though they were on a date or something. Hobby looked down at the floor and counted this as one of the most awkward moments of his life, and to make matters worse, Lynne Castle, instead of leaving as she had just promised, lingered for a few strangled moments longer, looking from her daughter, Demeter, an alcoholic at seventeen, to Hobby, who had recently lost his twin sister and spent nine days in a coma. She was no doubt thinking about the children they had once been and wondering what had gone so horribly wrong, and whether it was her fault or just bad luck visited on them from above. Probably Lynne wanted to stay and hear what Demeter had to say, and could Hobby blame her? He was both dying of curiosity and waiting in dread.

What? What was she going to say? What did she have to tell him?

His leg itched in its cast.

Lynne Castle sighed, then turned and left, closing the door firmly behind her.

H
e looked supremely uncomfortable, dangling from his crutches like a scarecrow propped up in a cornfield.

“Do you want to sit?” she said.

“No,” he said. Then he changed his mind: “Actually, yes.” He
moved to the chair and sat down, his left leg straight out in front of him in its cast.

She didn’t know how to start. She sort of felt like she should thank him for coming.

He said, “Jesus Christ, Meter, what is it? Just tell me!”

She had rehearsed it in her head. “I told Penny something in the dunes.”

“About Jake?” Hobby said.

About
Jake?
she thought.

“What
about
Jake?” she said.

“About me, then?” Hobby said. His eyes were rolling, and his forehead was sweating. “Did you tell her something about me?”

“No,” Demeter said. “I told her something about your mom and Jordan Randolph.”

Hobby narrowed his eyes, and his nose twitched. He leaned forward in the chair, and Demeter noticed the toes on his cast-foot wiggling. “What?” he said. “What did you tell her?”