Summerland: A Novel (6 page)

Thank you, Herman Melville, Jordan thought when she told him that.

Ava Before was refreshing. She was intelligent and outspoken, she was a socialist in a good-natured Australian way, and she was an environmentalist before it was popular. She bought a secondhand ten-speed bike and rode everywhere with her straw bag tied to the back. She was a fierce volleyball player and a fearless swimmer—she had learned to swim when she was eighteen months old and happily took on waves Jordan wouldn’t even consider. She agreed to go on a date with Jordan, but she didn’t want anything serious, she said, because to her the idea of falling in love was about as attractive as the notion of having a piece of chewing gum stuck in her hair.

“Right,” Jordan said. “Good,” Jordan said. “I don’t want anything serious either,” Jordan said. “That’s the last thing I want.”

He took her to dinner at the Club Car, and to impress her he ordered the caviar, which was accompanied by a bottle of vodka encased in a block of ice. It cost seventy-five dollars, but it was worth every penny to watch Ava throw back shots of vodka and then grin at Jordan wickedly across the table. And then to have her, later, on top of him in the sand, kissing him, tasting of caviar. He took to picking her up on the nights when she didn’t have to work and driving her out to Madaket to watch the sun set. They drank wine, they opened clams and oysters she brought from the raw bar at work, they talked. Her life, his life. They had almost nothing in common. He had been raised extravagantly on a tiny island, she had been raised frugally on a giant island. He hated his father and pitied his mother; Ava adored her father and feared her mother. He liked poetry and short stories; she read big, sweeping novels like
Moby-Dick
and
The Fountainhead.
He was an only child; she came from a brood of six, with two sisters and three brothers. His experience growing up had been lonely and sheltered: hers had been rollicking and egalitarian. He had never been
in love; she had been, once, with a man named Roger Polly, who was fifteen years older than she, a relationship that had ended badly.

Jordan was working full-time at the newspaper, as second in command under his father. Jordan hated everything about Rory Randolph, but he couldn’t bring himself to hate the paper. He had been bred to it. His father was itching to retire and buy a fishing boat in Islamorada. Jordan wanted his father to retire. There was no conflict where the paper was concerned; the handover was going to be seamless. Another year at the most, and then Jordan would be in charge. Did this impress Ava? He had thought it might, but she simply said she felt sorry for him because he was chained to this tiny island.

He took umbrage. “I’m not chained,” he said. Ava stuck around until Columbus Day. Then the Rope Walk closed, and it became too cold to spend the day at the beach, and Ava announced that she was going home.

By that point, she and Jordan were spending every night together in the garage apartment that Jordan was renting on Rugged Road. He had gotten used to sleeping with Ava’s long hair across his face; he had gotten used to her penchant for playing Crowded House while she took a shower. Jordan was reading
The Fountainhead
at her insistence. But now, when he finished, she would be gone. There would be no one for him to talk about it with. So what was the point? She packed up the things she’d been keeping at Jordan’s apartment, and he threw the book across the room. Their eyes locked. She frowned at him.

Now, twenty-one years later, he thought, What if I’d just let her go?

Ava returned to Perth and got a job waitressing at one of the seafood restaurants in Fremantle. She was saving up money to buy a boat, she said. She wanted to sail to Rottnest Island on the weekends. Jordan wrote her letters proclaiming his love, even though
he knew it might be received badly. He called her on Sundays, when the rates were cheaper though still expensive.

He said, “I want you to come back.”

She said, “Why don’t you come here?”

He had no response to this. She laughed. “You can’t. Can you?”

He thought again now, What if I’d just let her go?

Jordan had taken a week’s vacation in the middle of March and traversed the globe to Perth, Australia. When he finally arrived, grungy and sleepless, at the cramped but charming bungalow on a tree-lined street on the banks of the Swan River—the childhood home of his beloved—Ava seemed more amused by his presence than overjoyed. She held him by the arm and introduced him to her siblings and her parents as though he were a curiosity at a traveling sideshow: “This is Jordan! He’s American!” It soon became clear to Jordan that none of the members of Ava’s family had ever heard his name mentioned before.

Ava’s father, Dr. Price, gave the impression of being a thoughtful man. He was nearly seventy; heavily bearded, he smelled like pipe smoke and seemed always to be carrying the Book of Common Prayer. Ava’s mother, whom everyone, including her own children, called Dearie, was an imposing, full-bosomed field marshal of a woman, with copper-colored hair pulled back so severely into a bun that it seemed to stretch her mouth into a grim, unsmiling line. Jordan didn’t like to think ungenerously of anyone, but there was no way around it: the woman was imperious and terrifying. She sniffed at Jordan in greeting. She crossed her arms over her mountainous chest and said to Ava, “I guess he’ll want a shower, then?”

Jordan said, “Hello, Mrs. Price. It’s nice to meet you.” He handed her the jar of Nantucket beachplum preserves that he’d painstakingly transported—wrapped up in his softest T-shirt—ten thousand miles. Dearie squinted at the label and, plainly presuming that the contents were poisonous, set it on the kitchen
counter behind her. When Jordan, freshly showered and shaved, checked a little while later, the jar was gone. He suspected she’d thrown it away.

Jordan cornered Dr. Price on the second afternoon to ask for Ava’s hand in marriage. Dr. Price seemed confused, or possibly frightened, by the words Jordan was uttering. Jordan
was
making himself clear, right? (He was so woefully jet-lagged that the words sounded jumbled to his own ears.) “I want to marry your daughter. I want to live with her in America. I’d like your blessing to do so, sir.” Dr. Price clutched the Book of Common Prayer to his chest, and Jordan felt like some kind of demonic presence that the man was trying to fend off.

Dr. Price said, “Oh, well, I don’t know about that, son. You’ll have to ask her yourself.”

A couple of days later, Jordan chartered a sailboat with the last of his remaining money and proposed to Ava on the bow. He didn’t have a ring to give her, but he hoped that wouldn’t matter. If she said yes, he would buy a ring. He wanted to marry her. Would she marry him?

“
Marry
you?” Ava said. She looked as confused as her father, and perhaps a little bit horrified. “Are you
moving
here?”

No, he said. No, he wasn’t moving here. He wanted her to come live with him on Nantucket.

“I don’t get it,” she said. “You mean, leave Australia?”

Jordan had made the journey home shortly thereafter, sleep-deprived and brutally heartbroken. For three months, he licked his wounds. Ava was right, he’d realized that during his seventy-two-hour Australian odyssey: he
was
chained to the island. So, he would embrace it. He would love the island, he would marry the island.

And then in June—on the eleventh, to be exact (he would never forget the date)—Ava came walking into the newspaper office.
Jordan was sitting on the edge of his desk, eating an apple and talking to his layout manager, Marnie, about the size and placement of the Bartlett’s Farm ad. He looked up, and Ava stood there, grinning.

She said, “I thought I might find you here.”

Jordan reached out and touched Jake’s shoulder in the Sydney airport as they hurried down the corridor for the Qantas flight to Perth, which would take them even farther away from Nantucket than they were already. Jake didn’t turn around; he was as immune to Jordan’s touch now as Ava was. Jordan wanted to catch his son’s eye to make sure that Jake understood: they had left.

“For a year,” Jordan had told Marnie, who was now his managing editor. “I’ll be back next summer.” “For a year,” Jordan had told Ava. “I will give you one year.” “For a year,” Jordan had told Jake. “Just a year.”

“My senior year,” Jake had replied.

“Correct.” Jordan couldn’t figure out why Jake wasn’t grateful. After what had happened, getting through his senior year on Nantucket would have been a daily torture. Everything would remind him. The water fountain where he’d met Penny after her French class would remind him. Trying out for the school musical would remind him. Going to football games, organizing the car wash for the senior class, picking a theme song for the prom, opening his locker, hearing kids talk as they passed, confronting the sympathy in his teachers’ voices: all of these things would remind him. “It’s an island,” Jordan had said. “We’re contained. We’re like ball bearings in a bowl.”

“We’re running away,” Jake said. “I’d rather just stay and face it.”

That was because he was young, Jordan thought. And either brave or stupid.

“I’ll turn eighteen in May,” Jake said. “So I can come back then.”

Jordan had nodded. To fight Jake at this point would be fruitless.
Jordan was thinking like a typical parent: the change would be good for his son. Jake needed to see another place, breathe different air, walk on different beaches, hear different points of view. They were getting away, not running away.

“I can’t stand to be where she’s not,” Jake had said.

Jordan had closed his eyes and let that sentiment pierce him.

“She’s dead, Jake,” he’d said. “She’s not on Nantucket.”

H
e had been to Australia before with his mother on three separate occasions, but that was before Ernie died, and the last time they’d come, which was the only time Jake could really remember, he was nine years old and they’d stayed with his grandparents in Applecross. Now he and his parents would be living in a rented bungalow in Fremantle, the port city twelve miles south of Perth. His mother loved Fremantle; she called it Freo. It was a magical place, she said. Like Nantucket, she said.

Whether she was being ironic or mean, Jake couldn’t tell.

Out the car window, he spied streets of one-story limestone bungalows with brickwork around the windows, deep front porches covered by aluminum bullnose awnings with lush green plants hanging from them. Rocking chairs, a curled-up orange cat, bicycles, surfboards.

There was a bong sitting on the top of someone’s front wall. His mother must have seen it too, because she laughed.

“I forgot what this place is like,” she said.

Jake glanced at his father. Was his father finding Ava’s apparent transformation as amazing as he was? It incensed Jake because it made it seem like his father had been right, or at least partially so.

“If we leave, things will be better for you,” Jordan had said. “And they’ll be better for your mother.”

“Not better for me,” Jake had responded. Then, meanly, he’d added, “And Mom is beyond help.”

But here she was, laughing.

Jordan stopped the car in front of a house. The car was a beat-up Holden Ute; Jordan’s father had bought it from the rental place. He’d bought it rather than rented it because this wasn’t a vacation: they were
moving
here. The steering wheel was on the wrong side, everybody drove on the wrong side and parked on the wrong side, tight left, wide right—it made Jake dizzy just to watch. Twice during the drive, he’d been sure they were going to crash; his muscles and tendons had tightened like steel cables. One of the benefits of moving to Australia: he would never, ever drive here.

He was overtired, punchy, ridiculously sad. He wanted Penny. He loved her to distraction, had loved her since preschool, when he’d picked daisies for her on the playground and drawn a crayoned heart and left it in her cubby. They had been dating since ninth grade and having sex since the start of their junior year, and most of the time Jake had felt like nothing could separate them, though more and more often he had begun to suspect that Penny nurtured an interior life that he couldn’t access. She was a complicated and serious person—that was good. She had more soul than the other girls in their school. But she harbored demons—that was bad. Her father had died before she was born, and so, in Penny’s words, it was like there was half of herself that she didn’t recognize and couldn’t understand. She had shadows to dodge, but so did Jake, because his baby brother had died. “You just have to focus on the here- and-now,” he had told Penny. Jake had a list of personal goals: he wanted to follow in Patrick Loom’s footsteps and be valedictorian, he wanted to be president of the senior class, president of the school chapter of the National Honor Society, and
editor of
Veritas,
and he wanted the lead role in the musical again. And he also wanted to be elected Homecoming King if Hobby didn’t get chosen. There was a lot of pressure for Jake to succeed on multiple fronts; expectations were high.

Expectations were high for Penny, too. She had
serious
talent, talent that was too big for Nantucket. She didn’t like opera, but she could sing on Broadway, or off-Broadway, or she could travel with the cast of
Mamma Mia
or
The Lion King.
She was that good. She would go to college at Juilliard or Curtis or Peabody in Baltimore, and someone would discover her, and she would be whisked away from him. But Penny didn’t worry about things like that; increasingly her mind seemed to be elsewhere, on another plane, in another stratum. Her voice, she believed, was an accidental gift. “It’s like it has nothing to do with me,” she said. “With who I am inside.”

His parents got out of the car. His father pulled their bags from the back.

Jake wanted Penny. He wanted to be standing on the ground where she was buried. His brother, Ernie, had been buried in the same cemetery, his body contained in a coffin the size of a shoebox. How could his mother stand to be half a world away from Ernie? Jake would have thought this impossible—but here she was, headed up the walkway to the house, making happy, breathy sounds.