Summerland: A Novel (7 page)

There was a green front lawn, divided into two squares by the stone walk. There were two limestone walls divided by a set of three steps leading to the front porch. At the base of each of the walls was a water garden growing tall white flowers on stalks.

“Look how green everything is,” Ava said. “This is winter.”

Yes, Jordan remembered this from his previous visits. The winter was lush and green; the summer was hot and dry, leaving the grass brittle and brown. Right now, in early July, the heart of winter, the sun was out, and the temperature was about 70 degrees Fahrenheit. It might even be colder on Nantucket, where it was summer.

The porch had a long bench swing made of teak.

“Handsome,” his mother said, touching it. If she sat on it, Jake was certain he would weep. How could she be returning to life when Penelope was dead?

There was a screen door, and beyond that, the house was open. There was no one here to meet them, though his mother had five siblings living nearby and he, Jordan, had twenty-six cousins. But his father had promised that for the first few weeks, it would be just the three of them getting used to things. Jake was grateful for that. In September he would enroll at the American School, but he would have to attend class only three days a week. The other two days would be dedicated to independent study.

The house smelled like eucalyptus. The floors were made of polished wood the color of Coca-Cola, but the rest of the house was finished in old wood pocked with nail holes and knots. The doors were mismatched, as if they had been salvaged from other houses. Jake moved tentatively forward. A doorway to his right revealed a bedroom with a stone fireplace, and on the left was the master, with its own attached sunroom and bathroom. Farther down the hallway was another door that opened up into the common space, a living room with wooden beams, a bigger stone fireplace, and a couple of comfortable-looking leather couches. Up one step was the kitchen, which had a red brick floor and a huge old stove with a blackened griddle. Next to the stove were a deep enamel sink and an old-fashioned refrigerator, white with rounded corners and a chrome pull handle. There were two sixteen-paned windows that faced the backyard, and in front of the windows a massive oak table with six chairs. A cast iron chandelier hung over the table. Jake liked the kitchen, then hated himself for liking it. His mother had stopped cooking after Ernie died, and she barely ate, and so what was the point of this warm, wonderful room? Maybe she was going to start cooking again, maybe the three of them would sit around the oak table and eat together as a family.
The mere thought made Jake livid. But why? He had wanted that for so long, ever since that painful morning four years earlier when he’d been awoken by his mother’s screaming.

“Mom?” Jake had called out. But she hadn’t heard him.

Afterward, Jake and his father had gradually adjusted to the way things were, to the disturbing mystery of a human being that Ava had become. Dinnertime was all about eating from pizza boxes and takeout cartons whenever they got a free minute—more often separately than together. But
now
, now that Penny was dead and they had moved halfway across the world,
now
Ava was going to become the Barefoot Contessa?

The three of them stepped, single file, out the back door and into the garden. The yard was enclosed on either side by waist-high limestone walls with a spiked wrought iron fence above. The garden was a rectangle bordered by beige pebbles. Inside the pebbles was grass, inside the grass was a bed of red and orange flowers, and inside the bed was a circular limestone fountain. There was a bench in the grass where his mother, in her former state, would have sat and stared at the shooting plume of water all afternoon.

Jake felt his father’s hand on his shoulder. Jake was going to start biting in a minute.

“And here’s the best part,” his father said.

There was a shed at the back of the property. But not a shed—a guesthouse. Jordan opened the door and stepped inside. One square bedroom with a sink and, behind a curtain enclosure, a toilet. There were two eyebrow windows high over the bed, two small tables flanking the bed, a bureau, a desk.

“Cool,” Jake said.

“It’s yours,” Jordan said.

“What?”

“This space is yours. For you. Your mother and I thought you’d appreciate the privacy.”

Jake made what Penny used to call his
face.
Well, forgive him,
but he was exhausted, and what the fuck was going on here, exactly? This space was
his?
Again, it was all he’d ever wanted: his own space, away from the sad bullshit of his parents. And they were giving it to him now, when it no longer mattered. What he wouldn’t have given for his own space on Nantucket when Penny was alive! As it was, they’d been forced to hang out in Jake’s room, which shared a wall with Ernie’s nursery. They’d never had sex in Jake’s bedroom because Ava was always in the nursery watching her stupid goddamned TV show, or reading aloud passages from Melville. They’d had sex in Jake’s Jeep (he couldn’t think about that ever again) and on the beach and in the bleachers next to the football field at school and, many times, in the Alistairs’ house while Zoe was at work.

This place where he would now be living was a bribe from his parents. But it was a useless treasure.

Ava wandered back into the house. Jake turned to his father. “So will you and Mom be sharing a room again, then?” he asked. “Or will you have separate bedrooms?”

Jordan stuffed one hand into his pants pocket and rubbed at his eyes with his other hand. It was an awkward question, Jake realized that, but he wanted to know how things were going to be. “We’re going to try sharing a room,” Jordan said. “The master bedroom.”

“It’s been a while,” Jake said.

“That it has,” his father said.

W
e followed Hobby Alistair’s condition the same way we tracked the paths of hurricanes in September: hour by hour. There were updates at 11:00 a.m., 2:00 p.m., and 6:00 p.m. These updates were
provided by an email chain that originated with Lynne Castle. Lynne Castle was the point person, which made sense; we all knew she was Zoe Alistair’s closest friend. What we didn’t know was that Zoe found herself unable to speak to Lynne, and so instead she gave the information to Al Castle, who then passed it along to his wife. We had heard that there had been some sort of scene—a fight? an incident?—between Zoe Alistair and Jordan Randolph at the hospital, but nobody knew exactly what had happened. Al and Lynne didn’t say, and Dr. Field didn’t say; the only eyewitness who had let anything slip was Patsy Ernst, the E.R. nurse on duty that night, and she had been vague in her description. “Emotions were running high,” she said. To one person she said, “They had a fight.” To someone else she said, “There was an incident.”

We could see how Zoe Alistair might hold the Randolphs to blame, at least initially. It was Jake Randolph’s car, after all.

Day 1:
Hobby was in a coma, and the doctors didn’t know if he would come out of it. He had sixteen broken bones, all on his left side, including a broken femur, broken pelvis, three broken ribs, broken ulna and radius, and broken clavicle. There were fathers across the island who sighed deeply at this news. They would never speak the reason for their private despair, but they didn’t need to because we knew what they were thinking: Hobby Alistair would never play ball again. The greatest athlete the island had seen in decades, a boy Nantucket could call its own, who was destined for football at Notre Dame or basketball at Duke, or who might instead be drafted by the Pawtucket Red Sox right out of high school, had been shattered. Because his biological father was dead, any one of these men might claim him. They shared this right; he had played with their sons in their backyards. He had cracked the Glovers’ powder-room window with a line drive. He had gone with Butch Farrow and Butch’s son Colin to his first Patriots game. Anders Peashway’s father, Lars, had driven both boys to and from basketball camp in Springfield every June.

Hobby had bestowed a greatness on the island, a grace.

He would never play again, the fathers thought.

The mothers thought the same thing Zoe Alistair thought. Two words:
Wake up
.

Day 2:
No change.

Day 3:
No change. Al Castle reported that Zoe was refusing to eat. She wouldn’t leave the hospital, even though Al had booked her a room at the Liberty Hotel next door. She slept across the chairs in the hallway outside Hobby’s room. One of the nurses had brought her a pillow and a blanket.

Day 4:
The junior class, which was now the senior class, organized a candlelight vigil. Normally any collective action by the junior class would have been spearheaded by Jake Randolph, but Jake wasn’t part of this. Neither was Demeter Castle (though Demeter tended to run along the margin of things anyway). The general understanding was that Jake Randolph and Demeter Castle were both too intimately involved in what had happened to take part in the vigil. And so the vigil was led by other members of the junior class: Claire Buckley, who had gone to the prom with Hobby but who could not rightly claim to be his girlfriend, Annabel Wright, captain of the cheerleading squad, and Winnie Potts, who had played Rizzo in the musical
Grease
. These three girls wore flowing white dresses and handed out white taper candles and long-stemmed white roses (Mr. Potts was a florist in town). A group gathered at dusk in a circle on the newly mowed football field. At first it was just the core group of girls and their siblings and their parents and their friends, but then the crowd grew. Several employees from Marine Home Center—where Hobby worked every summer hauling lumber—showed up, as did many of Hobby’s teammates and parents of teammates and a handful of oldtimers who came to the games just to see Hobby play. The staff of Al Castle’s car dealership came, as did the waitresses from the Downyflake, who served the football team weekly spaghetti
dinners, and the volunteers from the Boys & Girls Club, where Hobby had honed his athletic skills as a kid, and the pilots who had flown Hobby and his teammates to their games off-island, and Hobby’s teachers, and every member of the Board of Directors of the Nantucket Chamber of Commerce, and a group of nurses from the hospital, including Patsy Ernst. Dr. Field attended, as did the high school principal, Dr. Major, and the superintendent and several policemen, including Chief Kapenash. These people we expected. The people we didn’t expect were the summer residents, newly arrived on island, who came to show their support because this, they suspected, was the real Nantucket. The summer people stood around the perimeter, nervously checking their Panerai watches and searching through their lightship baskets for a Kleenex. They weren’t sure they were welcome at this ceremony, but Claire and Annabel and Winnie gave each of them a candle and a rose anyway. Strength in numbers.

Winnie Potts spoke first. Her voice was strong and clear. She asked us to pray—first for the departed soul of Penelope Alistair, and second for the safe return to consciousness of Hobson Alistair. The mothers all prayed for Zoe Alistair—we had been too harsh on her in the past, we realized—and then the Reverend Grinnell of the Unitarian Church materialized out of nowhere with a cordless microphone. He led us in a resonant, if rambling, beseechment to the Higher Power. We wondered, of course, if the Alistairs had attended the Unitarian Church. No one remembered their ever doing so. The only church the Alistairs had set foot inside, once a year, was the Catholic one, on Christmas Eve, though we knew the Alistairs weren’t Catholic. We had a sneaking suspicion that the Alistair twins hadn’t been baptized at all—which alarmed some of us more than others—but if this was the case, then the Unitarians were certainly the safest bet. Their religion seemed like a wide basket that would carry even the least pious souls among us to safety.

We all said “Amen.”

Dr. Field, who was as spiritual a man as any of us, started the flame. He passed it to Chief Kapenash, who passed it to Claire and Annabel and Winnie, who each passed it along, and in this way the flame spread in concentric circles all the way to the slightly abashed summer residents hugging the outer border. Soon the football field was ablaze with golden light, and Winnie Potts started singing “Amazing Grace,” and the girls were weeping because who could sing this song—or any other song—without thinking first of Penny? Even so, the vigil was a success. We could imagine Hobby’s suspended consciousness hovering above the Earth, gazing down at the many-petaled flower of fire blossoming there on his beloved field, and deciding to come back down and join us.

Day 5:
The vigil was a romantic notion. It had been held more for us, it seemed, than for Hobby. There was no change in his condition.

Of note was that it was Thursday, which meant the
Nantucket Standard
came out, just as it did every week. We rushed to the Hub to get our copies, wondering who had written the article and whose quotes had been used and how the matter would be spun, considering that the accident had involved the son of the publisher of the paper. We were stunned to find no mention at all of the accident or of Penny’s death, except for a dry three-sentence blurb in the police blotter stating that at 12:53 a.m. Sunday, there had been a fatal one-car accident on Hummock Pond Road, which was still under investigation.

That’s
it?
we thought. Nothing
else?

Some people were outraged. Nantucket had only one newspaper. Didn’t it owe its citizens a report of what had happened? But other people understood. No one really knew what had happened. Mrs. Yurick, the elementary school music teacher, felt that
Penelope Alistair’s life should have been eulogized. Her picture should have been splashed across the front page. Some people thought that Jordan Randolph was trying to sweep the whole matter under the rug because Penelope had been driving his son’s car. Others suspected that Zoe Alistair had asked Jordan not to run a story at all—and could anyone blame Jordan if that was in fact true? There was talk that he was waiting to see if Hobson Alistair would recover before he published anything.