Summerland: A Novel (47 page)

He would bike to the cemetery, he decided, and sit on Penny’s grave. Whoa, that was morose, that was completely Emily Dickinson of him, but the cemetery was green and quiet and relatively nearby.

He strode out of the school, put on his sunglasses, and tried to look like he was moving with purpose, like he had somewhere to
be, an important meeting or a date. He had to remind himself that Penny wasn’t actually
at
the cemetery. His father had effectively made that point when they left for Australia. There was just a box in the ground that held her remains, marked by a stupid headstone that told nothing about her—but whatever. It was all he had.

He saw other seniors making an exodus. He saw Winnie Potts in her red convertible Mini backing out of a parking space, and to avoid another confrontation, he ducked around a tight corner—and there, sitting on a granite bench with one leg straight out in front of him, was Hobby.

Jake stopped in his tracks. He hadn’t admitted it outright to himself, but he had spent all day subconsciously avoiding Hobby. He had breathed a long sigh of relief when Hobby hadn’t turned up in his Physics class. Claire Buckley was in his European History class, but old-fashioned Mr. Ernest had sat them alphabetically, and so Claire was on the other side of the room, and no contact was required. He had noted that Claire’s physique had changed enormously; she was all rounded curves now instead of sharp angles. So what Jordan had reported must be true.

Hobby started a little. “Whoa, Jake! I heard you were back, man, but I didn’t believe it!”

“Yeah,” Jake said. He wanted to run away, he couldn’t say why, but seeing Hobby was
too much.
Hobby was Penny’s twin, he was the closest relation she had, he had been present for all of it, her freakout and the crash, and he had suffered in ways that Jake couldn’t even imagine. Furthermore, Jake had told Hobby about his mistake with Winnie Potts, which in retrospect had been a foolish thing to admit to. After a couple of months of ruminating on this, what must Hobby think of him? That he was a faithless bastard, that he hadn’t been committed to Penny at all, that he was an utter
hypocrite
for showing up wearing marked-up jeans?

Hobby said, “I’d stand up and hug it out with you, man, but I’m kinda slow on the uptake.” He nodded at his stretched-out leg.

“Oh, right,” Jake said. He stuck out his hand, and they shook, and Jake didn’t sense anything but Hobby’s usual good-guy-ness.

“Great to see you, man,” Hobby said. “I mean, it’s
really
good to see you. When you walked out of my hospital room that day, man, I thought maybe that was it. I thought you were gone for
good.
”

“Yeah,” Jake said. “I thought that myself.” If it weren’t for the grace of his mother, he would be attending the American School in Perth, wearing a blue suit and skinny tie like a Mormon, reading Yeats and Auden alongside the sons of foreign mining executives.

“Sit down,” Hobby said. He scooted over on the bench and moved the brown-bag lunch that Zoe had obviously packed for him. Jake recognized the chicken salad with pine nuts and dried cherries, the container of her homemade broccoli slaw, and the slumped brownies wrapped in wax paper. His stomach complained. The funny thing was that in all his deliberation about where to spend his lunch hour, he hadn’t once thought about food. But there was food—meaning pizza and takeout Thai, which Jake and his father were once again eating in order to survive—and then there was
Zoe’s
food.

“Um,” Jake said. Could he tell Hobby that he was on the way to the cemetery to sit on his sister’s grave? No. Never. “I don’t want to bother you.”

“
Bother
me?” Hobby said. “Dude, I’m here by myself. I don’t have my license, and I’m too gimpy to walk anywhere. Last week I ate here with Claire, but today she’s tutoring some freshman in geometry.” He popped a grape into his mouth. “It’s a thing she’s started doing. Looks good on the transcript.”

“Oh,” Jake said. “Well, what about Anders and Colin and those guys?”

“They’ve been going to Nobadeer,” Hobby said. “They swim and throw the football around, and I’m just not that mobile yet.” He took a bite of his sandwich, and Jake tried not to stare, though
it looked delicious, with baby lettuce peeking out like lace from between the slices of nutty whole grain bread. “Plus, Claire hates Anders. She thinks he’s common.”

This made Jake laugh. “She’s right.”

“She
is
right,” Hobby said. He chewed his sandwich, took a sip of iced tea out of his plastic thermos, then said, “So, I guess you’ve heard?”

Jake nodded, happy to have a topic to discuss that had nothing to do with him. “My dad told me. It’s true, then? You’re going to have a
baby?
”

“A boy,” Hobby said. “Hobson the third.”

A boy, Jake thought. Hobson III. Penny used to say that she wanted five kids—three boys and two girls—and the oldest child was going to be a boy and she wanted to name him Ishmael, after the protagonist of
Moby-Dick.
Jake had pretended to like the name Ishmael for her sake.

“That’s great, man,” Jake said. But he wondered,
was
it great? Having a
baby
in
high school?

“Well,” Hobby said. “It was unexpected. She, uh, got pregnant before the accident.”

“Oh,” Jake said. He hadn’t thought about that. “Wow.”

“And we’d pretty much decided to get rid of it,” Hobby said. “We were scared shitless, you know. But then when I was in the coma, Claire changed her mind. And when I came out of it, I was so happy that she’d decided to keep it. Man, it was the only thing that mattered.”

“Yeah,” Jake said. “I guess I can see that.”

“So now we’re having a baby and we’re psyched about it, and we’ve decided we’re still going to college—separately, you know, wherever we get in—and my mom and Claire’s mom are going to split time taking care of the baby.” Hobby swallowed. “It’s not a conventional arrangement, but Claire is bound and determined to get an education, and so am I, and we may end up together or we
may not, but the baby will have four people who love him, so hopefully that will be enough.”

Jake bobbed his head. He could barely keep up.

“Sit down, man,” Hobby said. “You look like you’re going to run for the hills. It’s making me nervous.”

Jake hesitated, then sat. This was the same granite bench where he and Penny used to sit and make out after school while they waited for their parents to pick them up. Mentally, Jake threw up his hands. It was impossible to escape places and objects and people that reminded him of Penny. This was their high school; it was saturated with reminders of her.

Hobby said, “You want the other half of my sandwich? My mom packed too much for me, as usual.”

Well, Jake wasn’t about to turn down
Zoe
food. He picked up the half sandwich and thought, This alone was worth coming home for.

Hobby said, “There’s something I want to tell you, man.”

Jake tried to concentrate on the perfect composition of the chicken salad sandwich: The tartness of the dried cherries, the tang of the mayonnaise, the succulent chicken. He didn’t want to hear what Hobby had to say. He just didn’t want to hear it.

“I talked to Demeter,” Hobby said.

Jake thought he might gag. He swallowed with difficulty, then reached for Hobby’s thermos of iced tea, even though Hobby hadn’t offered it to him. His heart felt like clay that was oozing through the powerful fingers of Hobby’s clenched hand.

“She told me what she told Penny in the dunes,” Hobby said. “And it had nothing to do with you.”

“What?” Jake said.

“It had nothing to do with you or what you told me before you left. Nothing at all.”

Jake took a breath in, then forced it out. He did a neck roll.

He didn’t believe it.

“I don’t believe you,” he said to Hobby.

“Well, I wouldn’t lie. What she said to Penny had nothing to do with you.”

“What was it, then?”

Hobby popped a handful of grapes into his mouth and stared across the street. “Here’s the thing,” Hobby said. “I can’t tell you.”

“Oh, come on.”

“I promised Demeter I wouldn’t,” Hobby said. “And man, you don’t want to know it anyway. It’s… it’s adult stuff, nothing to do with us, none of our fucking business.”

“Well, whatever it was made Penny pretty damn upset,” Jake said. “Whatever it was made her want to pile-drive the car into the sand.”

“Penny was sick,” Hobby said.

“What?” Jake said.

“She was sick,” Hobby said. “She was depressed. Messed up in the head. Emotionally disturbed. Whatever you want to call it.”

“No she wasn’t,” Jake said. But he knew, even as he denied it, that Hobby was right. Ava had confirmed as much. Penny was sad and fragile, she cried a lot, every hard knock floored her, she missed the father she had never known, she felt broken, damaged, confused. Even her voice weighed on her as a burden. No one had been able to make her feel any better—not Zoe, not Jake, not Ava.

“Ultimately it didn’t matter what Demeter told Penny,” Hobby said. “Anything could have set her off—the thing about you and Winnie, or the fact that Claire was pregnant and I hadn’t confided in her. For the longest time, I worried that
that
was the reason. I thought Penny had found out about my secret with Claire and flipped out. But it was this other thing. Or maybe it
wasn’t
this other thing, maybe she just
did
it, maybe she’d been planning to do it for a while, or maybe it just occurred to her in the moment. We’ll never know. Blaming ourselves or each other isn’t going to help. She’s not coming back.”

Jake nodded. Penny wasn’t coming back. That was the simple, awful nut of the truth.

“We have to forgive ourselves, man,” Hobby said. “I’ve thought a lot about it. I even wrote to Demeter and told her not to blame herself because it wasn’t her fault either. It wasn’t anybody’s fault.”

“You did?” Jake said.

“I haven’t heard back from her,” Hobby said. “But I hope she took what I said to heart. We’re the ones who survived. We have to be grateful for that. We have to take care of ourselves.”

Jake finished the half sandwich in silence, and then, wordlessly, Hobby handed him the container of broccoli slaw, and he devoured that as well.

“Do you want a brownie?” Hobby asked. He unwrapped the wax paper. Zoe had packed two.

“I’d be a fool to turn that down,” Jake said.

They ate the brownies side by side, in silence. The convertible red Mini occupied by Winnie Potts and Annabel Wright pulled back into the parking lot, and when the girls got out of the car, they waved to Jake and Hobby, and Jake and Hobby waved back. A few seconds later, as Hobby was consolidating his lunch debris, Claire appeared before them.

She said, “Thanks for saving me some.”

Hobby said, “Sorry, my brother is back.”

Claire smiled at Jake. There was something incandescent about her now. “Ahhhh, yes, he’s back. The school is abuzz.”

Jake smiled despite himself. He said, “You know, I always wanted a brother.”

“You know,” Hobby said, “me too.”

They said this lightly, sidestepping the ghosts of Ernie and Penny, amazed that this could be done. Then the bell rang to announce the start of sixth period. Jake and Hobby stood up, and Hobby took Claire’s arm, and Jake found that he was happy to follow them inside.

T
he first home football game of the season was contested on the third Friday night in September. The weather on Nantucket had just started to turn; the evenings had a crisp edge to them, and the sunsets were spectacular sherbet swirls of pink and orange. Bartlett’s Farm had harvested its first crop of pumpkins, and on the night of the game, people wore jeans and sweaters.

It might be assumed that no one on Nantucket wanted to see the hot, luxurious days of summer end, but those of us who lived here appreciated the many charms of the fall: crisp apples, cranberries, available parking spots on Main Street, empty and windswept beaches, the leaves of the Bradford pear trees turning flame orange, the air the perfect temperature for a long bike ride or a run over the crimson-colored moors. And football, of course—we all loved our football team, the Nantucket Whalers.

Turnout for that first game was legendary. The high school parking lot overflowed, there were cars parked on the lawn of the school. Across the street, on Vesper Lane, cars were lined up as far as the eye could see.

Dr. Field’s wife, Anne Marie, was walking over from the hospital with Patsy Ernst, the nurse who had been working in the Emergency Room on the night of the crash, and they marveled at the size of the crowd filing in through the gates. It seemed like far more people than usual. They knew why. We all did. The previous school year had ended on such a tragic note, we all wanted to put our eyes on the kids and reassure ourselves that they would be okay.

It was old news that Hobby Alistair was no longer able to be the team’s quarterback, so the excitement of watching him in action and knowing we would win was missing. In Hobby’s place, Coach Jaxon had decided to start a sophomore named Maxx
Cunningham, who was broad-shouldered like Hobby and blond like Hobby but who seemed woefully young and inexperienced compared to his predecessor.

Still, we were excited by the bright lights shining down on the green field. We could smell the burgers and hot dogs on the grill, and it was chilly enough to enjoy cups of chowder. The cheerleaders were fresh-faced and peppy. Annabel Wright, the captain, had fashioned her usual long ponytail into three braids that whipped around like ropes. The kids in the stands seemed like just that—kids—though the boys wore flat-top Red Sox hats and baggy jeans low on their hips like rap stars. And the girls looked like nascent supermodels—some in tops that showed off their midriffs and pierced belly buttons, most wearing tight jeans and makeup and perfume—and we felt a mixture of sadness and nostalgia because we remembered these same girls when they were pudgy and freckled and wearing pink sneakers whose soles lit up when they ran under the bleachers chasing their brothers and their brothers’ friends.