Summerland

NANTUCKET

It was August, and the hottest, brightest, busiest days of the summer were upon us. The most important thing for the summer residents and renters and visitors seemed to be that everything was as hot and bright and busy as they remembered it from the year before, and the year before that. Sameness was the island’s currency. The families that had been summering on the island since 1965 or 1989 or 2002 had created traditions that had to be upheld. On their first night on-island they had to eat at the Brotherhood of Thieves, where they would order medium-rare bleu cheeseburgers with curly fries. They had to wait forty-five minutes in line for ice cream at the Juice Bar because nothing tasted better than a hot fudge sundae in a waffle cup when you ate it on Steamship Wharf as you watched the stream of cars unload from the ferry. They had to bike to Sconset and get turkey salad sandwiches from Claudette’s; they had to take their annual picture in front of the peppermint stick of the Sankaty lighthouse, where someone had to remark that erosion was most definitely eating away the bluff, and that if someone didn’t do something about it soon, the lighthouse would certainly topple into the ocean. They had to take the launch up the harbor to the Wauwinet for lunch, and someone had to recall the time Margie’s Peter Beaton hat flew into the sea and the captain of the launch fished it out-soggy but not much worse for wear-with an elderly gentleman’s cane. They had to drive onto the beach at Great Point with a case of cold Heineken and meatball subs from Henry Jr.’s. They had to meet Anne and Mimi at the Nantucket Yacht Club for doubles tennis followed by lunch, during which they would talk over the piano player, the same beautiful raven-haired woman every year, who never grew older and was always willing to play “As Time Goes By.” They had to “forget” to bring sunscreen to the beach at least one day-yes, they knew it was as bad for them as smoking a pack of unfiltered cigarettes-and go home feeling the warm, tight stretch of tanned skin. They had to attend the same parties every year-the Leeders’ party on Cliff Road, the Czewinskis’ in Monomoy, the fete for the Nantucket Preservation Trust, the Summer Groove for the Nantucket Boys & Girls Club.

More than one summer resident noticed that things weren’t quite the same this year at the O’Dooleys’ annual cocktail party on Hulbert Avenue. Everyone loved this party. The O’Dooleys sprang for a good dance band from New York, and a celebrity or two could always be counted on to attend-Martha Stewart, Samuel L. Jackson, Bill Frist. But this year the party wasn’t catered by Zoe Alistair, as it had been for so many years in the past; instead, Doris O’Dooley had brought her regular caterer up from New York, and the food wasn’t half as good. Guests missed Zoe’s crab cakes with lime zest and ginger aioli, as well as her hot corn fritters with maple syrup. Mr. Controne, of Squam Road and Louisburg Square, Boston, was overheard saying, “I’ve been dreaming about those corn fritters all year, dammit.”

That was the thing we realized: for visitors, Nantucket wasn’t just a place; it was also a fantasy of American summertime that kept people warm and happy all year long.

No one had the heart to tell Mr. Controne that the reason there were no corn fritters with maple syrup was that it was Zoe Alistair’s daughter, Penny, who’d been killed in the one-car accident out at Cisco Beach on graduation night, and that Zoe was consequently taking a break from catering.

It was at the O’Dooleys’ cocktail party, too, that two homeowners talked about the petty thefts from their houses. Mrs. Hillier had discovered an unopened bottle of Mount Gay rum missing from her liquor cabinet, a bottle she had planned on using to prepare her husband’s welcome-to-the-weekend cocktail. Where had the bottle gone? She had just purchased it from Hatch’s a few days before. The cleaners, she thought. It must have been the cleaners, because what burglar would come into the Hillier home and take only one bottle of rum? Standing next to Alice Hillier, Virginia Benedict nodded vigorously. “The strangest thing,” she said. She had noticed that two bottles of Chateau Margaux were missing from her wine cellar. There had been twenty bottles on Tuesday, but only eighteen on Friday. Virginia Benedict had a son, Blake, who was a sophomore at Dartmouth, and initially she had assumed that he was the culprit-though what a nineteen-year-old boy would want with some dusty old bottles of wine, Virginia had no idea. Now, talking to Alice Hillier, Virginia Benedict began to wonder if something else might not be going on. She wondered if she should report the missing bottles of wine to the police. Would that sound silly? They were worth several hundred dollars apiece.

“Well, I’m reporting it to the police,” Alice Hillier said. “A full bottle of Mount Gay, gone.”

We, the year-round residents of Nantucket, who bumped into one another constantly in the winter-at the gas station, at lunch at A. K. Diamond’s, at the community pool, at five o’clock Mass on Saturdays, among the shelves of Nantucket Bookworks, at the paint counter in Marine Home Center, and in the aisles of the Stop & Shop (we always saw at least half a dozen people we knew every time we set foot in the Stop & Shop)-rarely had any contact in the summer. In the summer we were busy working, or we went away to our houses in New Hampshire while renting out our Nantucket homes for ten thousand dollars a week. Or we took trips to the Grand Canyon, or had houseguests-our brother from Chicago with his wife and two kids-and found ourselves doing things like driving up to Great Point with meatball subs from Henry’s, waving to all the strangers on the beach. And then, of course, when we did randomly see one another-say, while waiting to use the ladies’ room upstairs at Le Languedoc-we were happy. Another Nantucketer! A member of our tribe! We talked quickly, eager to catch up but reluctant to stay away from the dinner table for too long.

It was during one such chance meeting-Sara Boule and Annika DeWan were both waiting for prescriptions from Dan’s Pharmacy, Sara for her Ativan, Annika for Augmentin to cure her son’s tenth ear infection of the summer-that the topic of Claire Buckley arose. Annika asked Sara, who was a great good friend of Rasha Buckley’s, if Claire was “okay.”

“Because I’ve called her to babysit no less than four mornings this summer, and all four times-maybe five, come to think of it-she turned me down. And then last week, when I took the kids to the Juice Bar for frappes, I saw that she wasn’t working there, either. Doesn’t that seem strange?”

Sara met this question with what struck Annika as a loaded silence. “Yes,” she finally said. “That does seem strange. I think perhaps there is something going on with Claire.”

And in this way, as only something as insidious as gossip could manage, the following was discovered:

Claire Buckley had been fired from her job at the Juice Bar, not because she had called in sick three times in a row with the stomach flu, but because when she finally did come in to work a shift, she left her post briefly to vomit in the back alley.

“This is ice cream,” the manager purportedly said upon finding Claire a retching, weepy mess. “There’s a line out the door, and every third one of those people is going to walk out of here with your germs because you weren’t considerate enough to think of our customers and call in sick.”

“I didn’t want to get fired,” Claire supposedly said.

“You’re fired,” said the manager.

Claire wasn’t going to field hockey camp at Amherst College this year, as she had done for the past two summers. In fact, she wasn’t planning on playing field hockey in the fall at all, even though she was slated to be the team captain. Kate Horner, the coach, was on a biking vacation in France and couldn’t be called upon to verify these claims, but surely she must have been crying into her Cabernet. To lose her best senior! We couldn’t believe it. We could hardly remember a time when we had seen Claire without her mouthguard.

Claire Buckley had been seen twice out in public over the summer. Once was on the fast ferry with her mother, Rasha. The girl, usually so peppy and outgoing, had on this occasion seemed pale and quiet and reserved. She was reading The Secret Life of Bees and barely looked up when Elizabeth Kingsley came over to say hello. It was Elizabeth Kingsley who made allowances for the fact that perhaps Claire wasn’t herself because of all that had happened with the accident. After all, hadn’t she been the one to sit at Hobby Alistair’s bedside when he was in his coma? “I think that accident affected our teenagers”-Elizabeth used the royal “our” here; her own kids were only eight, five, and three-“more deeply than we realize,” she said. “My babysitter, Demeter Castle, is totally changed. I can’t really say how; she’s just… different now.”

The other place where Claire Buckley was spotted was in the waiting room of Dr. Field’s office, again in the company of her mother, Rasha. More precisely, Claire and Rasha were holding hands, and Claire was visibly upset. This was reported by Mindy Marr, who conceded that the girl might still be shaken up by the accident-but while Ted Field was many things, he was not a shrink.

“No,” Mindy said. “I think Claire was there for another reason.”

“What reason?” we asked, as though Mindy Marr held the answer, as though she were something more than just a random person who happened to walk through the waiting room at the right time.

“She looked heavy,” Mindy said. “Heavier.”

Could be depression, we thought. But Mindy’s voice was coy; it contained unspoken possibilities. Something else? Another reason?

And then, instead of being disproved, as we were certain it would be, the suspicion was confirmed: Rasha Buckley confided in Sara Boule, and Sara Boule, constitutionally unable to keep a secret, told one of the rest of us: Claire Buckley was ten weeks pregnant.

“Pregnant!” We gasped. “Ten weeks pregnant!”

We were unable to say another word. But in this shared silence, it became clear that we were all thinking the same thing.

HOBBY

He had watched her go. They had been connected since before birth, so it seemed only right that he should be the one she’d choose. They were squeezed together in an unfamiliar place-not life, not death, but somewhere in between. It was as dark and moist as a womb, and he and Penny were face to face, and Penny was saying to him, clear as a bell, “Listen, I’m going.”

Casually, as though she were telling him she was walking home from the library:

“Listen, I’m going.”

He hadn’t had an answer ready; he had been unable to speak. He had a vague understanding that they’d been in an accident, and he figured he must be much worse off than Penny because she told him she was leaving while he couldn’t seem to get a message from his brain to his tongue. What would he have said? “I’m coming with you” was his first instinct. But then he realized that if he went with Penny his mother would be left alone, and he understood that he could not leave his mother alone. He wanted to say, “Don’t go. Stay. Please don’t leave.” But Penny was willful, stubborn, she did what she wanted, she would never listen to him, he couldn’t make her stay.

He remembered seeing her blue eyes get bigger and bigger until they were like oceans he could swim in. Then she evaporated before his eyes. She was gone, and he knew she wasn’t coming back.

His mother asked him if he remembered anything about being in the coma. Had he had any dreams? Had he felt any pain? The answer to both of those questions was no. He’d been in a coma for nine days, they told him, but to him it had felt like only a few seconds. He remembered being in the car and Penny’s flooring it. Hobby had watched the speedometer out of sheer awe and stupid drunkenness. How fast could the car go? His thoughts were those of a child. He’d never believed they’d get hurt. Even when they approached the end of Hummock Pond Road and Penny sped up instead of slowing down, Hobby had thought only, Oh, shit, we’re going to crash. But he didn’t think of getting hurt, and he certainly didn’t think of dying. They were all seventeen years old, and seventeen-year-olds didn’t die. Their bodies were made out of things that bounced back: rubber and fishing line.

Then there were the moments with Penny, the two of them suspended like water vapor in some strange atmosphere. Then Penny said, “Listen, I’m going,” and Hobby decided to stay, and everything went black.

As he was regaining consciousness, he’d had some thoughts. He’d been aware that the world he was returning to didn’t have Penny in it. And he was aware of another shadowy presence that he wanted to grasp, hold on to.

Claire’s baby. His baby.

The nine days in a coma scared Hobby only now, in retrospect. He’d asked a couple of the doctors at Mass General if a person in a coma was technically dead or technically alive.

“Neither, really,” the doctor said. “You’re in a third state. The state that we call a coma.”

Another doctor said, “A coma is when your body is alive, but your brain is unresponsive.”

“So your brain is dead,” Hobby said.

“I didn’t say ‘dead,’ ” the second doctor corrected him. “I said ‘unresponsive.’ ”

What Hobby believed was that he had been partially dead for nine days. And then magically, miraculously, blessedly, he had returned to life. His mother had been sitting there. He remembered her face upon seeing him open his eyes-man, her face alone had made coming back to life worthwhile. He saw that he had made the right decision in letting Penny go by herself. His mother needed him more.

Claire had been at the hospital that day too, though it had taken a while for anyone to tell Hobby that. When he first returned (this was Hobby’s term; his mother preferred to say “woke up”), he saw his mother first, and then a whole slew of doctors and nurses came in to grin and gawk at him and announce that they had seen a miracle that day and praise the Lord, the boy was okay, they were just going to do some tests and did he know his name and did he know who this woman was and could he name the President of the United States?

When he croaked out “Barack Obama,” the whole room practically burst into the Hallelujah chorus.

They took his temperature and his blood pressure, and it was only then that Hobby realized he was in a shitload of pain. Pretty much all over his body. It felt like he’d been sacked forty times by that monster lineman from Blue Hills. He said, “Mom? I hurt.”

There was talk of upping his morphine, and seconds later the pain subsided, that was fine, his mother was still crying, that was fine, but Hobby sensed that he had a lot of other business to deal with, he felt jammed up, like he had a paper to write and a chemistry test to study for and nine innings of baseball to pitch before nightfall.

He said, “Mom?”

Suddenly the room cleared of nurses and doctors. Only his mother was left, and she was laying ice chips on his lips. The cold wet was like heaven. He was so thirsty.

His mother said, “You have some broken bones.”

He wanted to ask if he was paralyzed, but he couldn’t form the word; it had too many syllables. He tried moving his right hand, his throwing hand, and his right foot, and both of those worked, so he figured he wasn’t paralyzed. Nothing on his left side moved, but people didn’t get paralyzed that way, did they? Side-to-side?

His mother said, “Your clavicle, three ribs, your left radius, your left femur…”

Oh Jesus, his femur. His eyes fluttered closed, and he felt his mother’s icy fingertips on his forehead, brushing back his hair. She said, “Do you remember what happened, Hob?”

“Accident.”

There was a long pause. He opened his eyes to see if he was correct about the accident, though of course he was correct, he hadn’t broken all those bones in his sleep. His mother’s face was blurry. She was crying, that was the problem. She had her lips pressed together, and tears were streaming down her face.

She said, “I have something to tell you.”

He didn’t want her to say it. He wanted to stay in this not-knowing-for-sure state for a little while longer. He wanted to stay in the jubilant condition of newly-arrived-back-on-Planet-Earth-from-who-knew-where-the-fuck-he’d-been. But Zoe had shored herself up to say it, so she was going to say it: “Penny is dead.”

He nodded. It hurt to nod. His head hurt. It felt like a cracked egg. “I know,” he said.

“You know?” Zoe said. “How could you possibly know?”

“I saw her,” Hobby said.

“You saw her?” Zoe said. She was looming over him, the cup of ice chips rattling in her hand like dice. “You saw… what? Her neck snap? She broke her neck.”

Hobby shook his head, but gingerly, gingerly. How the hell could he explain this to his mother? “I saw her. She said, ‘Listen, I’m going.’ ”

“Going where? Leaving the party, you mean?”

Hobby shook his head again. He’d have to tell her later. But her mention of “the party” had brought something else to mind. “Claire,” he said.

“Claire,” Zoe said. “Sweet Jesus, I nearly forgot! Claire is here! She’s here at the hospital! I can send her in. Do you want me to send her in? Are you up for it?”

“Yes,” he said.

When he saw Claire, he knew she hadn’t done it. He knew this not from how her body looked-it was still too soon for that-but from the expression on her face. The unadulterated joy. And something else: a collusion. They had a secret, they still had it, thank God, thank God! If Hobby had had the energy, he would have burst into his own Hallelujah chorus.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” he said back.

He reached for her with his right hand, and without saying a word, she pressed it to her belly.

Life, he thought. Thank God.

The hospital, his return, his homecoming to Nantucket, so many well-wishers, enough to fill a stadium-all of those were fine. But there were many other things that followed that were not fine.

Penny’s funeral. Hobby went off his pain medication for a few hours because it was the funeral of his twin sister, and he wanted to be cogent for it; he wanted to remember every detail so he could tell her about it later. Hobby wasn’t a particularly spiritual person-his mother had never been big on church, and he certainly wasn’t mystical-but he felt very strongly that he would see Penny again, in the whatever-came-after. Their conversation wasn’t over. It couldn’t be over. She was his sister. She was his twin. When he died, and he hoped that would not be until seventy or eighty years in the future, she would be on the other side waiting for him. And he would tell her about everything. All that she had missed.

The funeral was sad, and Hobby was in pain, and he cried along with the rest of the people in the packed and stifling church. He cried for his mother. He had done the right thing, absolutely, in staying alive, because his mother couldn’t have sustained the loss of both of them. She was strong for the funeral, or sort of strong, but she was weird. She wouldn’t let Hobby speak, she wouldn’t let Jake speak. She couldn’t bear it, she said. Hobby protested, and she said, “Maybe I’m not being clear, Hobson. If I have to listen to you speak about your sister, I will break. The same goes for Jake Randolph. I’m keeping this service simple.”

Hobby saw his coaches at the funeral, and his teammates and the fathers of his teammates. They had all come for his sake, he knew, and not because they felt any deep connection to Penny. (Although she had diligently kept the stats on his basketball games at the Boys & Girls Club-had he ever thanked her for that? Probably not, dammit. He would have to do that later too.) Hobby accepted rushed, manly hugs from these men, but he saw the look in their eyes. His body was broken: he had sixteen fractures in all. His future career as a quarterback or a shooting guard or a pitcher was over. He would walk again, he would run, he would throw, but the 24-karat-gold caliber of his playing was gone forever.

Hobby listened to the madrigal group-all those pretty girls-sing “Ave Maria,” and he was filled with gratitude. It was music, and he could hear it. He cried just for that reason: he was alive. And elsewhere in this church, a tiny knot of a being the size of his thumb was alive inside of Claire. Penny was dead, but he would see her again, and he would tell her how beautiful her funeral had been. He would tell her about the music.

There were weeks of rehab at Nantucket Cottage Hospital. Time to allow his bones to heal. The start down the long road of physical therapy. That was all predictable. What wasn’t predictable was the stuff going on in Hobby’s mind. He became terrified of going to sleep, certain that if he did, he would never wake up again. He had a private room, thank God, and he asked for the lights to be left on at all times, along with the TV. The nurses reported this to Dr. Field; Dr. Field came in to see Hobby. It was like getting a visit from the school principal, except that the real principal, Dr. Major, was a lot less intimidating.

Dr. Field said, “They tell me you don’t want to sleep.”

Hobby said, “Can you blame me?”

Dr. Field laughed his dry laugh. Then his expression went back to being serious. “Your body needs sleep in order to heal, Hobson.”

“I take naps,” Hobby said. This was true. He was so exhausted during the day from not sleeping at night that he drifted off all the time, in brief catnaps where he was just beneath the surface of consciousness but always able to see some light. He had to be aware that life was continuing on around him.

“You need real sleep,” Dr. Field said. “I’ll have the nurses give you something.”

“I don’t want them to give me anything!” Hobby shouted. He never shouted except on the playing field, and certainly never at an adult. But he was scared. He was shouting now in the name of self-preservation. “What if they give me something and I don’t wake up?”

“Okay,” Dr. Field said. “Okay, fine. We’ll take it slow.”

Jake came to visit. Jake looked awful-of course he looked awful, he and Penny had been in love, really in love, not just saying they were. If Penny said her throat hurt, Jake would be up off the couch making her a mug of hot water with lemon before she finished her sentence. They read the same books, they practiced their lines for the musical together, they watched movies and laughed at the same things, they spoke to each other in French and Spanish and Latin. They drew pictures of the house they wanted to live in someday and made lists of names for their future children. When Penny sang, Jake closed his eyes to listen. He had taken good care of her.

Even in the relative isolation of the Cottage Hospital, Hobby had heard Jake’s name being bandied about in an unflattering way because Penny had died while driving his car. But that hadn’t mattered. Hobby wished he had the words to tell people what he knew: Penny was bound and determined to leave this world behind. If she hadn’t done it in Jake’s car, she would have found another way.

“Hey,” Jake said.

“Hey,” Hobby said.

They shook hands. Jake sat in the visitor’s chair that was most frequently occupied by Zoe, who was now back at work.

“How do you feel?” Jake asked.

“Like shit,” Hobby said.

“Good,” Jake said, and they both laughed. “Good that you can tell me the truth, I mean.”

“How do you feel?” Hobby asked.

“Like shit,” Jake said. He teared up, then wiped away the tears with the back of his hand, and Hobby felt like telling him not to bother. Hobby was sick of seeing people try to hide their feelings. What had happened was tragic, and there was no reason to pretend otherwise, no reason to stop the tears. Who cared about being a man? That had no meaning anymore. Being human was far more important than being a man, and human beings expressed their emotions. “My parents are making me move,” Jake told him.

“Move?” Hobby said. “Are they sending you away to school?”

“No,” Jake said. “We’re moving, all three of us, to Perth, Australia.”

“Perth, Australia?” Hobby said. He was something of a geography buff, and as such, he knew that Perth was on the western coast of Australia; it was the most isolated capital city in the world. “For how long?”

“A year.”

“Your dad too?” Hobby asked.

“Yeah, my dad too.”

“Your mom’s from Perth, right?”

“Yeah. I’m not sure why she can’t just go by herself.”

Hobby had no answer for this. Jake’s mother was a mystery. Hobby had seen her maybe once in the last four years. She was like a cicada or a lunar eclipse.

“My dad doesn’t even want to go,” Jake said. “But he tells me we have to.”

“Because of the accident?”

“Because of something.”

Hobby wondered if his mother knew about this. She came in to sit with him every morning and every evening, but she hadn’t mentioned anything about the Randolph family’s moving to Australia. And Jordan Randolph was his mother’s best friend.

“So I wanted to tell you that,” Jake said. “And there’s something else I wanted to ask you.”

Hobby sensed a heavier topic. “What’s that?”

Jake puffed a few times into his clenched fist and Hobby thought, Oh, shit, what is it?

Jake said, “I want to know why.”

“Why what?”

“Why she did it. What the hell went wrong? She was fine right up until she went into the dunes with Demeter. And then she was a basket case, right? So something happened in the dunes. Either Demeter told her something or someone else told her something. A secret or whatever.”

“A secret?” Hobby said. His leg was starting to itch inside its cast, a condition brought on by stress, Dr. Field had told him, but it made Hobby want to cry out for amputation. He took a sip of the lukewarm water at his bedside.

“And I was wondering.” Jake went on, “if you might know what Demeter said. If you’d heard from anyone else what Demeter said. I know you’ve had a lot of visitors.”

“I haven’t heard anything,” Hobby said. “I think people are trying to shelter me from some of the difficult stuff. Have you asked Demeter?” It occurred to Hobby that Demeter hadn’t been in to see him. Her parents, Al and Lynne, had come; Al had apparently been with Zoe at Mass General for the first few days, and Lynne had organized the meal dropoff at his house. Zoe had brought in some of the dishes to share with Hobby, since it was better than the hospital food. But Demeter-nope. He hadn’t seen or heard from her. Was that weird?

“I asked Demeter,” Jake said. “I had to call her, like, sixteen times before she even answered the phone. I asked her what she and Penny had talked about in the dunes. And she said she couldn’t remember.”

“A secret or whatever.” A secret? Hobby was daft when it came to females, his mother and sister had been telling him this for years. He knew only that Penny had been determined to drive off the end of the road, and yes, obviously he knew she was upset, but he hadn’t gotten around to asking himself why. Why? His mother had tried to broach the question with him also, he now realized: “What was Penny like at the party? Did anything happen? Anything unusual that you can remember?”

But during the party at Steps Beach, Hobby had been preoccupied by two things. The first was thinking about Claire and the baby. And the second was getting drunk in order to forget about Claire and the baby.

He wondered if the “secret news” Penny had heard in the dunes was that Claire was pregnant. Oh God. He felt like he was going to vomit, and his leg-goddammit, his leg itched! He wanted to scour it with steel wool; he wanted to dip it in a vat of lye.

“So Demeter said she couldn’t remember,” Hobby said. “Well, she was pretty drunk.”

“That’s what worries me,” Jake said. He really looked green now, Hobby thought-as if he were about to puke. Hobby had a shallow dish next to his bed, and he nearly passed it over to Jake.

“Do you want some water or anything?” Hobby asked. “I’m sorry, if I’d known you were coming, I would have baked cookies.”

Jake held up a hand. He didn’t crack a smile or anything. His hair was greasy, sticking together in clumps, and he was wearing the jeans that Penny had written on. “Listen, I’m going to tell you something, but you can’t repeat it. Ever, to anyone. Okay?”

Hobby nodded. He had his own secret now, so he was newly attuned to the fact that some matters had to be kept completely confidential. “Of course. What is it?”

“This thing happened between me and Winnie Potts,” Jake said. “The night of the cast party. We were all in the Pottses’ basement, and we all stayed up late drinking. Not your sister, she went home. But I was there, and Winnie was, and some others, you know.”

“You raided Mr. Potts’s beer fridge,” Hobby said.

“Exactly. Anyway, everybody else left, so it was just me and Winnie. And she put the moves on me big time.”

Winnie Potts. Mmmmmm. Yeah, she was dangerous. She had been the first girl in their class with boobs, and she knew how to flaunt them. She had been Hobby’s lab partner in ninth-grade science, and what could he say other than that working with her had been distracting?

“I didn’t sleep with her,” Jake continued. “I got out of there long before that, but I did kiss her, and things got pretty heated. And I think she was pissed that things didn’t go any further, or she was angry and embarrassed that I ran out of there, and you know she’s always been jealous of your sister, and I’m afraid that for any or all of those reasons Winnie might have exaggerated what happened between us. I’m afraid she might’ve told someone about it, and somehow Demeter got hold of the information and told Penny.”

“Would Demeter do that?” Hobby asked.

“She might,” Jake said.

Hobby had to concede: she might indeed.

“But the thing is, it also might not have been Demeter at all. Penny might have run into Winnie in the dunes. Winnie might have told Penny herself.”

“Oh, man,” Hobby said.

Jake started to really cry now. He said, “I didn’t do it to hurt your sister, man. It just happened. Winnie was all over me. I was drunk, I wasn’t thinking. But I mean, I got my ass out of there. I ran out of there.”

“Believe me,” Hobby said, “I know how Winnie is.”

“You do, right? Everyone knows how Winnie is. Even your sister-especially your sister. But that wasn’t going to make things any better. If Penny heard that, she would be… well, she’d be…”

“Hysterical,” Hobby said.

Jake dropped his head into his hands.

Hobby said, “Yeah, but we don’t know for sure what it was that set Penny off.”

“What else could it have been?” Jake asked. His voice was so loud and so filled with anguish that Hobby was afraid it was going to attract the attention of one of the nurses.

“It could have been anything, man,” Hobby said. “This is my sister we’re talking about. Remember how she acted after the tsunami in Japan? She cried for three days. And right after your brother died? She had to go see a therapist. She was different like that, man. Stuff affected her. We don’t know what was going through her head that night, and we’ll never know. But it’s not going to do you any good to blame yourself. She loved you, Jake.”

Jake wiped at his eyes with the pointed collar of his shirt. He stood up. “I can’t deal with the fact that she’s gone, man, that’s tough enough, but thinking it’s my fault for doing something so fucking stupid.…”

“Jake, man,” Hobby said, “you can’t blame yourself.”

“I do, though,” Jake said. “I do. Even if Penny didn’t know about it, what I did was still wrong. And I’ll never get to make it up to her.” He put his hands in his hair and pulled, and his eyes popped out, and Hobby thought, He’s losing it. But then Jake composed himself, or he sort of did, and said, “I just had to tell someone.”

“Yep, I get it,” Hobby said. “And it ends with me, I promise.”

“Thanks,” Jake said. He reached out to shake Hobby’s good hand, and Hobby held on and said, “Hey, man, take care, be safe, okay? Stay in touch.”

“I will,” Jake said. “Thanks, Hob. And heal up. You’re the one lying there with all those broken bones, and I’m the one crying.”

“We’re all broken,” Hobby said. This was a heavier statement than he’d meant to make, but oh well, it was true.

Jake stared at Hobby for a second, then he backed out the door.

Hobby was certain he would see Penny again, but he wasn’t so sure about Jake. Jake might travel to the other side of the world and decide never to come back. It was unfair, Hobby thought. He’d already lost Penny, and now he was losing Jake, too. Jake was one of his best friends, not a friend the way the guys on the football team were friends-all jokey, back-slapping, hanging out-but more like a cousin or a brother. More like family. And there he went, out the door, leaving Hobby to sort through everything alone.

Jake with Winnie Potts. Was that the reason? Until Jake brought it up, it hadn’t even occurred to Hobby that there was a reason, but of course there was a reason. Still, the reason could just as easily have been that Penny found out that Hobby had gotten Claire pregnant and that Claire had an appointment for an abortion. It was a toss-up.

Hobby thought back to the fraught weeks before graduation. He had asked Claire Buckley to the junior prom. He had texted her between Chemistry and American History, when he knew that she had study hall and would be working out in the weight room alone. He pictured her in her team shorts and gray Whalers T-shirt, all sweaty, her blue eyes intense, her light-brown hair pulled back in that swingy ponytail she wore. He wanted her to see the text when she was alone rather than surrounded by forty girlfriends, as she so often was.

Be my date for prom?

He should have asked her in person, he wasn’t too daft to have figured that much out, but what people didn’t realize was that Hobby was shy with girls. This made no sense. He lived with two females, he had girls calling and texting him all the time, he had girls from other schools handing him roses and folded notes with their cell phone numbers on them: Call me anytime! Hobby could chat on a basic, friendly level, but as soon as the talk nudged toward romance (could it properly be called romance? he wondered), he fell behind. He didn’t know how to flirt; he was slow to pick up on cues. He wasn’t sure how he was supposed to kiss or feel up a girl whom he’d just met and still remain the kind of person he believed himself to be: a good guy, a gentleman.

Hobby had lost his virginity the summer before to a college girl (a freshman at Amherst, she said, but he was pretty sure she meant UMass). She worked at Henry Jr.’s making sandwiches. Hobby had a job across the street loading lumber onto trucks at Marine Home Center, and he got his lunch from Henry Jr.’s every day. This pretty brunette with a killer smile remembered his order (two roast beef and herb-cheese subs with tomatoes, cucumbers, and horseradish mayo). “Are they both for you?” she asked sweetly. “Yes,” he said, “I’m a growing boy.” He learned that her name was Heather, and from then on he made it a point to say hello to her personally when he picked up his lunch and always to leave a dollar in the tip jar.

Hobby bumped into Heather unexpectedly at a beach party in Dionis. He was pretty drunk, he was out with Anders Peashway and the disreputable David Marcy, and when he saw Heather, he knew only that he knew her, but not how he knew her. She had been drinking, too, and she toyed with him, making him guess, until finally she said, “Normally when you see me I’m wearing a white apron.” And he said, “Henry! I mean, Heather!” They embraced like long-lost friends. After a few more beers, Heather was feeling very friendly. She led Hobby away from the party, down the beach, and they started kissing. And Heather, who was at least three years older than Hobby, took charge. Soon they were lying on Heather’s cashmere hoodie, and she was straddling him, and he tried to stop her because he was ready but not prepared-he didn’t have a condom!-but she told him she was on the pill, and he thought, Okay, then. And he thoroughly enjoyed himself, taking as much pleasure in being at last shed of his virginity as he did in the act itself.

But then a couple of days later, when Hobby walked into Henry Jr.’s beaming with excitement about seeing her again, Heather was short with him. Her sentences were clipped; she didn’t smile. She made his sandwiches, wrapped them in white butcher paper, and slammed them down on the counter. Hobby obviously knew something was wrong, but he had no idea what it might be. He had called her cell phone and left a nice voicemail about how much fun he’d had with her. What had gone wrong? He wanted to ask her, but there was a line of construction workers behind him, so there was no way he could broach the topic. He paid her, and she handed him his change, and he hesitated, wondering if he should leave a tip. Would the tip be misconstrued? Would she think it crass? If he didn’t leave a tip, would that seem crass? He’d always left a tip before, so he deposited a dollar in the tip jar, said thank you, and walked out of Henry Jr.’s into the hot parking lot, thinking, I just really don’t have any talent with women.

But with Claire Buckley, things were different. Hobby had put in a lot of time with Claire. They had gone to school together since kindergarten. He’d always known that Claire was smart, a cut above the other students. And she had developed into a phenomenal athlete as well, playing field hockey, basketball, and lacrosse. She was tall and strong, more interested in her quad muscles than in her breasts-though, as Hobby happened to notice, she had very nice breasts. But what Hobby found most attractive about Claire was her drive. Claire wanted to excel at whatever she did, just like Hobby.

She responded to his text:

Of course.

Of course she would be his date for the prom. Hobby got that text just before lunch, and he grinned and thought, Excellent. He ate two meatball subs draped in gooey, melted mozzarella cheese, and he thought again, Excellent!

One reason Hobby hadn’t asked Claire in person was that he feared she might say no. There had been a time-in late fall, between Thanksgiving and Christmas-when he and Claire were seeing each other every day. Basketball season had just started, and they were both in and around the gym all the time. Claire had a car, and she often offered Hobby a ride home. There had been one time when the moon was coming up over Miacomet Pond, big and round and shining a cool gold color. It looked like a giant sugar cookie, Hobby thought, but that was a stupid thing to say, so he kept it to himself. Claire pulled over on the dirt road that led to Hobby’s house so they could properly ogle this moon, and the next thing he knew, they were kissing and he was really turned on and so was she and he thought they might and she thought they might-but they were two good kids, and they didn’t want their first time having sex to be in Claire’s car on the side of the road, and so they stopped. Caught their breath. Stared out the window at the moon and the reflection of the moon on the pond.

The kissing and getting all worked up had subsequently continued-on one occasion, Hobby’s pants were around his knees, and Claire was sitting on his lap, but no, they still didn’t. Then Claire got sick with bronchitis, then Hobby went away for the weekend for a basketball tournament, then they were both busy studying for their SATs, then the boys’ team made it into the playoffs but the girls’ team didn’t, and Claire and Hobby lost the momentum that had been building between them.

And then Hobby heard a rumor that Claire had hooked up with Luke Browning, whose brother, Larry, was in the correctional facility in Walpole, which was exactly where Luke was destined to wind up too. Luke was known as something of a ladies’ man, but Claire Buckley was too smart to fall prey to his obvious charms. Right? Right? Hobby saw Claire in class and around the halls, and she was nice to him, but then again she was nice to everybody. She wasn’t going out of her way to start a conversation with him, and she didn’t offer him any more rides home. The good thing was that when he saw her out-at the second night of the school musical, Grease, for example-she was always with her girlfriends. So he thought maybe the rumor about Luke Browning had been just stupid Nantucket gossip, which bit its victims like a pit bull and shook them until there was no life left.

Hobby decided to ask Claire to the prom because he didn’t want to go with anyone else.

Of course, she said. As though it were a given.

Claire and Hobby had sex for the first time on the Wednesday morning before prom. They were supposed to be at school, but Hobby’s American History teacher had called in sick and the front office couldn’t find a sub, so he had a free period. He decided to work out in the gym, and he bumped into Claire by herself in the hallway in front of the locker rooms. She said she had been planning on working out, but it was such a beautiful spring day that she thought she might ditch for one period and drive to the beach. Ditch? thought Hobby. Seniors were allowed to leave school during their study halls and lunch period, but nobody else was. Still, Claire was right, it was springtime, the janitors had just cut the grass, and the scent wafted in through the windows. And they were practically seniors.

Hobby said, “I’ll go with you.”

They climbed into Claire’s car, and without their exchanging a word, Claire knew to drive right to Hobby’s house. He jiggled his leg; he couldn’t be misreading any cues. This was it.

Claire shut off the ignition in his driveway. “Your mother’s at work?”

“All day,” he said. He couldn’t stop his leg from doing its own dance.

“Are you nervous?” she asked him.

The cool answer would be no. Hobson Alistair Jr., who had scored the winning touchdown in a Hail Mary against the Vineyard with thirteen seconds left in the game, nervous?

“Yes,” he said. He was nervous about many things: he had never skipped school before, and he was afraid of getting into trouble. If he got caught, Coach might not let him pitch in the game against Dennis-Yarmouth, and it might go down on his school record, and what if some admissions director at Stanford or Duke noticed it? He was nervous that his mother might show up for some reason. Hobby’s bedroom door didn’t lock; Zoe would feel no compunction about barging right in, even if she did recognize Claire Buckley’s car in the driveway. And finally, he was nervous because he wanted this to go well. He wanted her to enjoy it. Probably this was her virginity they were talking about, and if it wasn’t, then Hobby wanted to be better than the other guy. That was just his competitive nature.

It went well. Very well.

Despite the fact that Hobby was openly nervous and Claire was nervous but hiding it, they took their time. They kissed without touching each other until they couldn’t stand it anymore, and then they touched each other. Claire was wet to melting; the sound that escaped from her lips when Hobby touched her was so erotic that he nearly came in his underwear. He climbed on top of her.

She said, “Yes, I’m ready. I’m so ready.”

She had said this at the exact moment when Hobby was reaching for a condom. He had a box of three, as yet unopened, under his bed. But when Claire said, “Yes, I’m ready, I’m so ready,” Hobby construed this to mean that it was okay for him to enter her right then, without a condom. He figured she must be on the pill. What he thought was, Okay, she’s on the pill, lots of girls are on the pill, it helps with acne or whatever. Heather was on the pill, even Penny is on the pill. Claire’s mother, Rasha, is cool, she must have made sure he daughter was on the pill, that’s what cool mothers do.

He entered her halfway-not wearing a condom-and checked with her. “You okay?”

“God, yes!” she said. “Go!”

So he went, slowly at first, gently, kissing Claire’s face, and then he went faster and faster, and Claire cried out and again the sound aroused him like nothing else had in his entire life, and he came all the way up inside her.

Eight days before graduation, on June 8, she was standing by his locker in the morning, and he knew. It was written all over her face. But maybe not, he thought. Maybe she just looked like that because she’d bombed her Chemistry final.

“Hey,” he said.

She dissolved. Tough Claire, cool Claire-she was a wreck. Hobby collected her in his arms. Claire was tall, but he was taller, tall enough to kiss the top of her head. To the rest of the runty adolescent population of their school, he supposed they looked like a couple of mating giraffes.

“Hey, it’s okay,” he said.

“It’s not okay,” she said. “I’m seventeen.”

Yes, that was something he could identify with. He was seventeen also. A daft seventeen-year-old boy. He’d assumed she was on the pill. Wasn’t she on the pill? he asked gently. And if she wasn’t on the pill, what had she thought they were using for birth control?

She’d thought he would pull out, she said. She had been with someone over the summer-not Luke Browning, but a summer guy by the name of Wils something or other-and Wils had pulled out and everything had been fine. Then, when Hobby came inside of her, she panicked a little, secretly, but not too much because she’d just finished her period, and anyway she went immediately on the pill-immediately as in later that same day. She’d had the pill pack sitting in her underwear drawer, she had gotten it back in December when things between her and Hobby were so intense, but then after things cooled off between them, she hadn’t seen any reason for birth control.

“It’s my fault,” she said.

“It’s my fault,” Hobby said. “I should have used a condom.”

“What are we going to do?” Claire said.

They were two good kids, among the best that Nantucket High School had to offer. Hobby was going to be given a free ride to a top-tier school. Claire would either shoot for the Ivy League or opt to play lacrosse someplace like Bucknell or Williams. They were rocket ships, side by side. A baby? A baby was unthinkable.

“Let’s wait a few days,” Hobby said. Just at that moment Patrick Loom walked by, slapping Hobby’s shoulder as he passed. Patrick Loom was headed to Georgetown in the fall. When Hobby looked at Patrick and thought about Georgetown, he saw everything he wanted for himself: brick buildings, manicured lawns, lectures and readings and film series and pretty girls in sweaters and crisp leaves underfoot and an indoor stadium packed to the rafters as Hobby jogged out onto the floor wearing a dove-gray Hoyas jersey, like Patrick Ewing.

“I heard there’s a guy on the Cape,” Claire said.

“On the Cape?” Hobby said. He had thought they were certainly looking at a trip to Boston, or possibly out of state. He didn’t know. He was daft. So fucking daft.

“It’s supposed to be quick,” Claire said. “They knock you out and you wake up and it’s over and the guy gives you a prescription for Percocet.”

“That’s what you want to do?” Hobby said.

Claire nodded.

Yes, that was what Hobby wanted to do too. He wanted to fly to Hyannis-tomorrow wasn’t soon enough-and see this guy and have it taken care of quickly and painlessly. Relief flooded his chest cavity, but it was trailed by something unexpected and unwelcome: guilt. The course of action they had taken just thirty seconds to decide upon-say it out loud, an abortion-seemed so selfish. They were two good kids, but this decision felt sinister. And yet to decide otherwise would be to ruin two brilliant futures.

And yet, and yet.

Hobby kissed Claire gently on the lips, and she went to class. Hobby’s mother had asked him a few months earlier if he’d ever been in love, and then she’d asked about Claire specifically. Did Hobby love Claire? No. Hobby liked Claire, Hobby thought Claire was cool. He and Claire were friends, they’d been lovers, they had this situation now and they were going to deal with it together, like good business partners who wanted the same outcome.

And yet, and yet.

Hobby had learned most of what he knew about the adult world from listening to his mother and her friends-Al and Lynne Castle, Jordan and Ava Randolph-as they sat around the dinner table after the meal had been consumed, when all that was left was to finish the wine, watch the candles burn down to nubs, and talk.

He had once heard his mother describe what it had been like for her to get pregnant, unexpectedly, at the age of twenty-two. She had been in her final semester at the Culinary Institute, she was dating Hobby’s father, Hobson senior, they were in love and living together. Hobson senior was a master butcher, a professor of Meats, and Zoe was a superstar, she had accepted an externship at Alison’s on Dominick, which at the time was the most sought-after job in the whole city. But then she discovered she was pregnant.

Zoe hadn’t seen Hobby lurking around the corner. She thought he was in bed, fast asleep.

She told her friends, “I’m not going to lie to you. I wanted an abortion. I had a life to live. A career to pursue. I was too young to have a baby. But Hobson talked me out of it. We got married at City Hall in Manhattan. We had been married six months when he died.”

There was silence around the table. Hobby could remember seeing Lynne Castle hold her face in her hands. She was staring at Zoe.

Zoe said, “Thank God I kept those babies. They are so precious to me. They are all I have, sure, but they’re also all I want.”

Those words weren’t lost on Hobby. His mother had had a choice to make. She could have gone to some guy and had the embryos growing inside her taken care of quickly and painlessly. She could have pursued a career, made a name for herself, opened her own restaurant; she might be as famous as Mario Batali by now. But she had chosen him and Penny instead.

Claire called and made an appointment with the guy on the Cape. It was for Tuesday morning; she would have to skip school. Hobby convinced her to postpone it for a week, to wait until school was out, until after graduation. He didn’t tell her that he was having second thoughts because he wasn’t sure what kind of influence he would have with her. It was, after all, her body. It was ultimately her senior year that would be affected, and possibly her chances for college. Hobby wasn’t prepared to marry Claire. God, if he asked her, she would laugh at him. But he wondered if he could convince her to have the baby, and then they could put it up for adoption.

He tried to talk with her about it on the night of graduation. She was at Patrick Loom’s party, and Hobby cornered her by the food table. Her expression was that of a trapped animal. Her eyes kept darting around the party; she was looking for someone to save her.

Hobby said, “Claire, listen, I don’t know about this.”

She said, “Next year, this is going to be us. It’s going to be us graduating, going away to school, all the parents thinking we hung the moon.”

“You don’t have any doubts?”

She looked at him. Her eyes held a wild light. “Of course I have doubts, Hobby. But I’m seventeen. My mother is a single parent, your mother is a single parent. I am not going to be a single parent, and especially not at seventeen.”

He said, “Well, there’s adoption. We haven’t talked about adoption.”

“Adoption?” she said. Her voice was incredulous, as though he’d suggested doing bong hits in the steeple of the Congregational Church. She took a big sip of whatever was in her Solo cup-Hobby hoped it was seltzer-and excused herself to go to the bathroom.

He saw her later, at Steps Beach, where she was most definitely drinking beer. Or at least holding a beer. Hobby tried to discern how much of it she was actually drinking, but he was so smashed himself from swigging off the bottle of Jim Beam that Demeter had brought that he wasn’t turning out to be much of a detective. Claire was surrounded by her entire posse, and when Hobby approached, she glared at him. He knew he was being what his mother would call relentless, he knew he should wait and call Claire the next day, when their conversation would be both private and sober. But he had the nagging feeling that their decision had to be made that night.

He said, “Claire, can I speak to you for a sec?”

Claire said, “Hobby, please go away.”

“Come on, Claire. Five minutes.”

Annabel Wright, who had cheered for Hobby since they were both eight years old at the Boys & Girls Club, was not cheering for him now. She said, “Hobby, leave Claire alone. You’re drunk.”

Annabel was right. He was drunk. He stayed put, his feet planted in the sand, his hand gripping the cheap plastic cup of not-quite-cold-enough beer that Demeter had poured for him from the keg. Annabel and Claire and the other girls wandered down the beach toward the dunes. At that point Hobby considered asking Demeter to let him have what was left of the Jim Beam. She would probably want to drink it with him, but that might not be too bad. Hobby liked Demeter; partly this was the result of conditioning by his mother, who believed Al and Lynne Castle to be the finest people on earth, and partly it was organic. Hobby thought Demeter was a nice person despite her self-destructive behavior. She had a weight problem, she wasn’t exactly going to be voted Homecoming Queen, but her isolation and her loneliness made her seem wise to Hobby, sort of like a solitary owl. He wondered what would happen if he told Demeter that he had gotten Claire Buckley pregnant. What would she say?

Hobby never followed through on this idea. He got to talking to one person and then another, then Jake found him and Hobby thought to look for Claire one more time-this time just to be polite, to say good-bye; she was, after all, carrying his child-but Claire was nowhere around. He tried texting her, but she didn’t answer, and Hobby was running out of time.

They were leaving the party.

By the beginning of August, Hobby was out of his wheelchair and on crutches. The physical therapist at the hospital, a woman named Meadow, said that he was the best patient she’d ever had. She attributed this to the fact that he’d been so healthy, so strong, and such an exceptional athlete to begin with. But a lot of times, Meadow said, it was the former athletes who were the most challenging to work with, because they were used to having things come easily. They weren’t willing to try. Their fragile psyches didn’t allow for the possibility of failure.

Ha! Hobby laughed at this, while at the same time identifying with it. He wouldn’t be human if a part of him didn’t mourn, didn’t ache for his old, unbroken body and its talents. Coach Jaxon (football) stopped by twice to watch his physical therapy sessions, and both times Hobby saw the gleam of hope in his eyes. Hobby tried to eavesdrop on the whispered conversations between Coach Jaxon and Meadow while he did his twenty-five reps of a simple neck roll, but all he saw was Meadow shaking her head. He wasn’t going to be ready in September, nor the September after that; his body would never again be able to absorb the kind of trauma that football delivered. Another concussion, Meadow told Hobby, if it didn’t kill him, would most likely leave him a vegetable for life. He would never have the quickness or endurance for basketball at the level that he wanted to play it, and though his pitching arm was unharmed, his left arm would always be weak. He was lopsided now, off balance.

Hobby fought against self-pity. He had seen movies about embittered athletes battling back from injury (what movie was he thinking of? he could no longer remember things the way he used to). He wasn’t going to allow himself to become embittered. He could be like Penny, in a box in the ground. He could be brain-dead already, a vegetable that his mother would be saddled with the rest of her life. He wasn’t going to stress out about battling back. He was going to put in the work so he could do the normal things: walk, carry a bag of groceries, and toss a ball, someday, to his son or daughter.

Hobby liked his crutches. They were better than the wheelchair. He had a lot more mobility. His mother didn’t fret about him as much. She started working almost normal hours at the Allencasts’. Hobby thought working was good for his mother; it kept her mind occupied. He was worried about her. She spent a lot of time on the back deck at night, muttering things at the ocean. One night her muttering sounded so conversational that he thought she was on the phone.

When she came inside he asked, “Were you talking to Jordan?”

“No!” his mother screamed. “I was talking to myself!” And she burst into tears.

His mother refused to see a therapist. Meadow had asked Hobby about this, as had Dr. Field. They had apparently both suggested it to Zoe, but to no avail. They thought if Hobby encouraged her, she might agree. He brought it up one night at dinner. The dropped-off meals had ended, thank God. His mother’s food was so much better. But dinnertime was tough. The two of them sat at the table out on the deck, which had three chairs. Penny’s place was empty.

Hobby said, “I think you should talk to someone, Mom. I’ll go with you if you want.”

Zoe said, “If you want to talk to someone, by all means, do it. I’ll set it up for you. But I’m not going.”

“Why not?”

Zoe said, “Because I’m going to process my daughter’s death the way I’m going to process it. I don’t want anyone-not even the kindest, most perspicacious therapist on Earth-telling me how to go about it.”

“I don’t think they tell you anything,” Hobby said. “I think they just listen.” He paused. His mother was moving her corn salad around on her plate. “Don’t you want someone to talk to, Mom?”

Zoe didn’t answer. Hobby cleaned his own plate of corn and steak and greens and dug in for seconds. He asked, “Do you miss Jordan?”

Zoe eyeballed him. Her fork, with nothing on it, was suspended in midair. It felt to Hobby as if he had asked exactly the wrong question, the question that only a daft seventeen-year-old boy would ask.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes I do, actually. I miss him very much.”

That night Hobby had heard his mother crying in bed. He rubbed the heels of his palms into his eye sockets and thought, Penny, wherever you are, can you help me here? He thought of his sister as a magical force, potentially capable of performing any number of miracles now that she was dead. Can you please deliver Mom some comfort? he asked her. It occurred to Hobby that he was passing the buck to his sister yet again where his mother was concerned, and it further occurred to him that he had the power to comfort Zoe himself. He could tell her about the baby. The baby that they’d nearly aborted but that Claire had decided to keep when she found out there had been an accident and learned that Penny was dead and Hobby was in a coma. Life, Claire told him, had suddenly seemed like something else entirely, something huge and precious. And she had life inside of her, a life that was hers and his, and she wasn’t questioning what they would do or how they were going to make it work. She was just keeping his baby safe. She had stood in the midst of the nearly two thousand people who gathered on the football field for the candlelight vigil, and she had felt privileged to be carrying a part of Hobby inside her.

Hobby could tell his mother about the baby; it would, at the very least, distract her. But Claire wanted to keep the news a secret until after her first ultrasound appointment, which was scheduled for the second week of September. Claire’s mother, Rasha, knew about the pregnancy, and Rasha had told her best friend, Sara Boule. Hobby didn’t love the fact that Rasha Buckley and Sara Boule (a woman who basically gossiped for a living, as a receptionist for Dr. Toomer, Hobby’s dentist) both knew, while Zoe didn’t. However, Zoe’s reaction wasn’t something that Hobby felt he could predict. She might be overjoyed. Or she might not.

The door to Penny’s room had remained shut since Hobby’s return from the hospital. He knew the window in there was open because the door rattled in its frame with the breeze off the beach. At night this rattling was spooky because who wanted to hear rattling from the bedroom door of a dead girl? Hobby suspected that his mother had done nothing about Penny’s room-all her stuff was probably still in there.

One day after Zoe left for work, Hobby stood outside Penny’s door, balanced on his crutches. He looked at the door-just a crappy plywood box door painted white, with a dent that Penny had kicked in it… when? Shit, Hobby couldn’t remember. He tried to determine if he had the emotional fortitude required to open the door and look around. He was still mulling over what Jake Randolph had told him. He thought it was indeed possible that some real or exaggerated version of what had happened between Jake and Winnie in the Pottses’ basement had reached Penny’s ears, either through Demeter or through someone else, perhaps Winnie herself. And hearing that news, he knew, would have caused Penny to lose her shit, especially if it was exaggerated.

But in Hobby’s mangled memory, Penny hadn’t seemed angry at Jake. If the problem had been with Jake, wouldn’t Penny have said something to indicate that? Wouldn’t she have refused to drive his car home? Penny hadn’t said anything. She had just come completely unglued; if she’d gotten some kind of news, it must have been too horrible to repeat. This caused Hobby to worry that someone (Demeter?) might have told Penny that Hobby had gotten Claire Buckley pregnant. Was this the news that had tipped Penny’s fragile scales into mental illness? She would have been most upset about which part? he wondered. That Claire was planning to abort? Or that Hobby hadn’t confided in her himself? Her own twin. The truth was that Hobby hadn’t even considered telling Penny because he was afraid the news would make her hysterical. Penny didn’t like being confronted with the harsher realities of life.

Hobby’s conclusion was that Penny would have been devastated if she’d heard from a third party that Claire was pregnant. How devastated, he just couldn’t say. She also would have been devastated about Jake and Winnie Potts. He wished he remembered more about how Penny had been that night, but for all intents and purposes, his coma had started when they all gathered at Jake’s car. He didn’t have a single clear memory after that point.

He could call Demeter. They had always had a decent relationship; he might have better success with her than Jake had. But Al and Lynne Castle had dropped off the radar, and the one time Hobby had seen Demeter since the accident, she had completely ignored him. He was still in his wheelchair then, and his mother was pushing him around Miacomet Pond. It was a beautiful, balmy night, and Hobby was concentrating on taking huge gulps of sweet summer evening air, rather than feeling like the survivor of some private war. His mother had seemed better that night; she was the one who suggested the walk. They both saw Demeter’s car approaching, and Zoe said, “There’s Demeter.”

And Hobby said, “Yeah, you’re right.”

Zoe said, “Not a scratch on her.”

And Hobby said, “Mom, come on.”

Zoe said, “Sorry, Hob, I’m human.”

Hobby wasn’t 100 percent surprised when Demeter passed them without stopping or waving or anything. She hadn’t come to the hospital or to the house; she hadn’t sent a note. “She’s probably just not ready to deal with it all yet,” Hobby said as he watched the taillights of her Escape disappear down Pond View Road.

“She’s guilty,” Zoe said. “She can’t face us because she feels guilty.”

“You mean she’s got survivor’s remorse?” Hobby said.

“I mean, that girl is guilty,” Zoe said.

Hobby turned the knob on Penny’s door, and it swung open, of course-there wasn’t a door in the house that locked properly.

Penny’s room.

Okay, weird, Hobby thought. Weird in that it looked the same as it had six weeks earlier, back when Penny was alive. Her four-poster bed was neatly made with the blue flowered sheets and the sky-blue duvet and the two white eyelet pillows propped up against the headboard and a collection of her favorite stuffed animals-old Bear, Gladys the sock monkey, and a scrawny-looking tiger that Jake had won for her at the Tom Nevers Carnival-nestled between the pillows. Penny had been a young Nazi about her bed. She made it perfectly every morning and constantly smoothed the wrinkles out of the duvet. She said she couldn’t lie on it otherwise. The easiest way for Hobby to get Penny hysterical was to launch himself onto her bed, mess up the duvet, unprop the pillows, and start juggling the trio of sad little animals. She used to shriek. Hobby would have laughed remembering it if it wasn’t so tragic. He thought, Well, Penny, wherever you are, you can rest easy. Your bed is perfectly made. He smoothed out an imaginary wrinkle just to be sure.

There was her dresser with the big mirror, the biggest mirror in the house. Zoe came in here all the time to check herself out, and this, also, gave Penny fits. “Use your own mirror!” she would yell at her mother.

And Zoe would say, “Jeez, Pen, chill. I’ll be out in a sec.”

“Why don’t you use your own mirror? Seriously. We’re not poor, you could buy yourself a full-length mirror.”

Zoe never let Penny get her angry. She said, “Because I like your mirror better. It makes my ass look smaller.”

How many times had Hobby complained to his mother about Penny? “She drives me crazy,” he would say. “Why can’t she just relax like a normal human being?”

“Her heart is made from the finest bone china,” Zoe would answer. “Like a teacup.” And then Zoe would smile, and so would Hobby.

On Penny’s dresser was her paddle brush, filled with long, dark hairs. She used to keep it in the bathroom, but Hobby had protested when he found one of Penny’s hairs wound through the bristles of his toothbrush. There was her fancy perfume atomizer, which had never held a drop of perfume. There was her jewelry box made from bird’s-eye maple. Hobby opened it. He sorted through friendship bracelets woven out of embroidery thread, her real gold hoop earrings, her pearl on the gold chain that had been their grandmother’s, her pin from the National Honor Society, and a sea-foam-green box from Posh that contained a pair of silver dangly earrings edged in chips of blue sapphire. Jake had bought her those earrings for their two-year anniversary.

Hobby opened the top drawer of Penny’s dresser and found himself staring into a tangle of lacy underwear. Okay, embarrassing. He quickly shut the drawer, but as he did, he caught a glimpse of the edge of something red and shiny. A book. A journal. He nudged aside the lacy things to confirm that what he was looking at was the red leather cover of a journal. He flipped through the pages to make sure it was Penny’s handwriting-loopy and girlish-then he put the journal back and shut the drawer again. Original, Pen, hiding your journal in your underwear drawer, he thought. I found it in the first place I looked.

The shade on the window was flapping in the breeze. Hobby inspected Penny’s bedside table. There was a glass of water, evaporated down to an inch or so, with a film of dust across the top. A box of Kleenex. A copy of Moby-Dick, which Penny referred to as her independent reading. She’d been telling people this for at least nine months, but when Hobby checked now, he saw that she had read only up to page 236. She had died without even getting halfway through.

From the bedside table, Hobby could pivot and open Penny’s closet. On the inside of the door was a cork board displaying a photo montage of Penny and Jake. Penny and Jake in Guys and Dolls, Penny and Jake in Damn Yankees, Penny and Jake in Grease. Penny and Jake in the stands at one of Hobby’s football games, Jake carrying Penny down the beach on his back, Penny and Jake with marshmallows in their mouths, Penny and Jake at the prom. There was also a picture of himself and Penny on Christmas morning in front of the tree, Penny in some ridiculous high-necked flannel nightgown that made her look like Laura Ingalls Wilder, her hair in braids to heighten the effect, and him in boxers and one of his father’s vintage Clash T-shirts (his mother had kept his father’s concert T-shirts, and she gave Hobby one every year on his birthday). In this Christmas photo, Penny was beaming and apple-cheeked, and Hobby was bleary-eyed and scowling. It was this past Christmas. Penny had woken him up at seven-thirty. He would have been content to sleep until noon and then eat three quarters of his mother’s Christmas coffee cake and then open his stocking. But not Penny. She had been a freaking Christmas elf.

And that’s it for you and Christmas, Pen, Hobby thought. Maybe for all of them and Christmas. His mother had already talked about taking a trip to St. John at the holidays.

Penny’s clothes were hanging in the closet. His mother had said something about Goodwill, when she got around to it. Hobby fingered Penny’s favorite blue blouse, which had cost a fortune-two or three hundred dollars. Penny had seen it on line, she wanted to buy it with her own money, but Zoe said no, there was no reason for a teenager to spend that kind of money on one article of clothing. And then a few weeks later, Penny had been asked to sing in front of the Boston Pops for the second year in a row, personally, by Keith Lockhart, and Zoe had bought Penny the blouse for the occasion. Hobby touched the silky material. The blouse was still here, but Penny wasn’t. It was messing with his head.

He hopped over to the edge of her bed. Her poster of Robert Pattinson was still hanging, her Twilight books were still on the shelves. Below her books were CDs-Charlotte Church and Jessye Norman next to Puccini’s operas next to Send In the Clowns by Judy Collins. Certainly Penelope Alistair was the only seventeen-year-old in the world to own a Judy Collins CD. That was truly the music she liked best, however: those godawful songs of the 1970s. Crystal Gayle, Anne Murray, Karen Carpenter. It was Penny’s dream to become one of these women. By the time she was “grown up”-say, in 2015-she figured the world would be ready to hear these songs again. If Penny ever made it onto American Idol, she planned to sing Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life.” She used to sing it all the time in the shower.

“Even your voice can’t save that song,” Hobby said. “Pick something else.”

“I’m afraid I have to agree with your brother,” Zoe said. Zoe had good taste in music. She was a Deadhead. She had a cardboard box with all of her bootleg tapes stashed under her bed. And she liked modern stuff, too-Eminem, Spoon, Rihanna.

But Penny continued to sing “You Light Up My Life.” And the soundtrack to Fame. Hobby would have laughed if it hadn’t been so tragic.

He closed the door to the closet. Penny had a drafting table instead of a desk, just as Hobby did in his room. Hobby had a drafting table because he wanted to be an architect; Penny had one because she was a copycat. She kept a sketchpad and a box of colored pencils on her drafting table because she liked to “draw,” though she wasn’t much of an artist. But now Hobby stared at the sketchpad, wondering if his sister had left behind some sort of note. He had gathered-though no one had said it to him directly-that certain people thought the accident had been a suicide.

Hobby crutched his way over to the drafting table. If there was a note, he would have to show his mother. If it turned out that Penny had committed suicide, he was going to boil over in anger.

But the sketchpad was blank, except for a heart drawn in black pencil. A heart she was probably planning on filling with Penny + Jake, TL4EVA. It was something of a joke around school that Penny had graffitied every pair of jeans that Jake Randolph owned.

She would have been really upset to hear about Jake and Winnie. She would have done something drastic, maybe.

No suicide note. That was good. Hobby wondered if his mother had already been in here panning for one. She must have, right? Immediately afterward? But maybe not. This place looked untouched.

Hobby was about to vacate the premises. He couldn’t shake the feeling that Penny was watching him. “Matter cannot be created or destroyed”-so she existed somewhere, right? She would not like the idea of Hobby’s hobbling around her room on his crutches, poking through her stuff. So he would go.

But who was he kidding? He wasn’t leaving without the journal. He moved over to the dresser and, without looking at himself in the mirror, slipped the journal out from under Penny’s underwear. Then he lumbered out into the hallway and shut the door.

Wherever she was, she would not want him reading her journal. But what had Zoe said? “Sorry, Hob, I’m human.” Yep, Hobby got it. He thought, Sorry, Pen, I’m human. I can’t pass up the chance to read it.

None of the entries were dated, so Hobby had to orient himself based on content. The journal seemed to start a few years earlier because it referenced Mrs. Jones-Crisman, who had been Penny’s homeroom teacher during freshman year. In the very first entry, Mrs. J-C calls her out for kissing Jake in the hallway. In the next entry, Penny has a fight with Zoe because she kissed Jake in the backseat of the Karmann Ghia. Zoe said, “I don’t get paid enough to listen to the two of you swapping spit. Do it in private.”

Like where? Penny wondered in her journal. If I can’t kiss him at school and I can’t kiss him in the car, where am I going to kiss him?

Hobby worried that the whole thing was going to be about kissing Jake. And it was, for the most part-at least at first. Penny wrote about every time she made out with Jake; she compared kissing him to “eating something really delicious and you don’t want to stop. Like Mom’s apple fritters with the Bavarian cream.”

Hobby stopped. It was too bad Jake was in Australia. He would have appreciated that his kissing was on par with Zoe’s apple fritters. Hobby would have laughed at this himself if it hadn’t been so tragic.

He skipped ahead. He didn’t want to read about Penny’s getting felt up, or Penny’s discovering Jake’s erection. (He accidentally stumbled across the line Do you feel yourself change when we do this?) He didn’t want to read about Penny’s argument with her voice coach. He was looking for something better, more interesting.

He thought, Come on, Pen, give me something I can work with.

And then, two thirds of the way through the journal, the tone changed. Penny started referring to everyone by their first initials only. Jake became J. Hobby found references to himself and his mother: H at practice, Z at work. J and I home alone but I don’t want to, I can’t explain it, I just don’t feel like it. I’m too sad. Sad about what? J asks me. He wants me to have a reason so he can fix it. But I don’t have a reason. I’m just sad, and sad isn’t even the right word. I’m empty. Since I don’t have a reason, J applies his own reason: hormones.

A few pages later Hobby read this line: A told me to read Moby-Dick. Says I’ll like it.

Hobby thought, A? A is the reason Penny spent nine months plodding through Moby-Dick, only to finally get bogged down on page 236?

A appeared more and more. Hobby couldn’t read fast enough.

J at paper all afternoon. I skipped madrigals, I don’t care if I lose my solo. I spent two hours in the bedroom with A.

Hobby’s head snapped up. While Jake was working on the newspaper, Penny had spent two hours in a bedroom with someone whose name began with an A. Hobby racked his shell-shocked brain. The only A he could come up with was Anders Peashway. Had his sister been fooling around with Anders behind Jake’s back? Anders was good-looking, he was a very fine athlete, a forward on the basketball team, the catcher on the baseball team, one of Hobby’s top lieutenants. But really? Penny and Anders? Anders seemed too clueless for Penny, too provincial. Anders Peashway would go to college someplace where he could play baseball-Plymouth State or, if he was lucky, Northeastern-and then he would return to Nantucket and work for his father building houses. He would buy a boat and fish, he would have children and watch them play in the same gym and on the same fields where he played. Penny could never be interested in someone like Anders, could she?

A told me to read Moby-Dick. Says I’ll like it. There was absolutely no way Anders Peashway had told Penny to read anything, much less an eight-hundred-page classic that dealt with what Anders would have referred to as “old-fashioned shit.”

Hobby kept going. Lay down with A today. Talked. A understands me. A says that sometimes the heart pumps black blood. And that is exactly how I feel. I am poisoned with something, this evil sickness, this lethargy, the inability to care. I’m supposed to be joyous about my voice, my “natural gift.” Z says I have a “responsibility to myself” to develop my talent. God gave me this voice for a reason, Z says. Everyone and their “reasons.” It’s like the rest of the world doesn’t realize that everything that happens is random. A woman kills her two teenagers, she shoots them. She’d had it, she says. They were mouthy. Everyone sympathizes with the kids, and I sympathize with the kids. But sometimes I sympathize with the mother. Sometimes I feel like I’ve had it.

Hobby shut the journal. He shouldn’t have opened it. He was going to have to show his mother. Or maybe not. The heart pumps black blood. There was a black heart on the sketchpad. Penny had been sick, and none of them had known it. Well, one thing had changed: Hobby no longer felt guilty about invading Penny’s privacy. He felt as if she’d meant for him to find her journal.

J is mad that I’m spending so much time with A. Not healthy, he says. He doesn’t get that A is the only one who understands me.

So Jake knew about A, Hobby thought. The idea that A was Anders Peashway still nagged at him. Jake would certainly have said that Penny’s spending so much time with Anders was not healthy. But the Moby-Dick thing? No. Not Anders. No way.

I ask A about her marriage.

Hobby was so surprised to read this line that he nearly ripped the journal in two, and a shooting pain traveled up his bad arm and throbbed in the spot where he’d broken his clavicle. A was a woman, a woman who either was or had been married. So that meant what, exactly? That his sister had been a lesbian? That she was having a relationship with a grown woman? She had been “lying in bed” and sharing her most intimate thoughts with an adult woman, and Jake knew about it and didn’t think it was healthy.

Then Hobby got it. He was daft, yes he was; another person-his mother, for example-would have figured it out right away. A was Ava Randolph.

A says she’s felt alone ever since Ernie died; her loneliness is a shroud and a shield. She internalized the pain she felt over losing her son, and it ate up everything inside her. A is lucky. Ernie is her Reason. It’s something she can pinpoint. I feel like I’m being eaten away from the inside, but I don’t have a Reason. Then I wonder if my Reason is my father, the father who died before I was born. A touches my hair and says, “That’s possible.”

Jesus! Hobby thought. It sounded as if Ava Randolph had been mentoring Penny in the art of insanity and depression. How could Penny feel the loss of a person she’d never known? Hobby was in the same boat, he’d lost his father before he was born too, but he had hardly given it a moment’s thought. On Father’s Day he sometimes felt a twinge, or when he saw other kids throwing the baseball with their dads, but it wasn’t something he ever wanted to cry over. If anything, he was grateful to Hobson senior for giving him top-notch genes. He certainly hadn’t inherited his size or his athletic ability from Zoe.

The most notable thing for Hobby was that in the last fifteen or twenty pages of Penny’s journal, J was hardly mentioned at all. It was all about A.

A wants to move to Australia, but JR has work and J has school. A misses her family. I ask her why she doesn’t just move back alone, and she says she’s in a double bind.

Hobby knew there was no way he could show the journal to his mother. Zoe would hate the thought of Penny’s communing with Ava Randolph. Hobby tried to summon his own images of Ava Randolph, but as with so many of his memories, it was as if someone had broken into the bank and stolen them all. Then he had one: Ava Randolph at the funeral for her baby. She had set the tiny coffin in the hole in the ground, and then she alone had taken up the spade and filled in the hole. The rest of them, including Jordan Randolph, including Al Castle, including the cemetery attendant, had just stood there and watched her. Hobby had been only thirteen years old, but he remembered how the muscles in Ava Randolph’s forearms had tensed, he remembered the way she’d smoothed the dirt across the top, he remembered how, when she was finished, she had stabbed the earth with the blade of the spade, and then she had turned to the rest of them and started to wail.

“He’s gone,” she’d cried. “He’s gone!”

Hobby had never felt so helpless in all his life.

A is the only one who understands me, Penny wrote. I love A.

AVA

It was barely dawn when Jake walked into the garden. Ava was startled, thinking maybe it was an intruder, maybe it was a drunk from the corner pub who had stumbled home to the wrong house. Then she realized that the figure sneaking into the yard was her own child, and he was carrying his duffel bag. They locked eyes for a second, and Ava saw the desperation and defeat on his face. She felt a colossal relief that he was walking toward the shed and not away from it.

“Jake?” she said.

“Mom,” he said. “I need my bed.”

Ava took a drag of her cigarette-a nasty habit, one she would have preferred to keep secret from him. She exhaled, then nodded. She let him go.

For four years she had been adrift. She had lost a baby. Her son Ernie. She had carried him for nine months, pushed him out of her body without any drugs, she had nursed him and cared for him for eight weeks. These weeks had been blissful. Ernie was constantly in her arms, his hungry mouth tugged on her breast, his tiny hands grabbed at her hair. How smitten she had been, how helplessly in love. Jordan got tired and occasionally grumbled when he had to get up for a feeding, but she never complained. She wasn’t tired; she was bursting with purpose, dizzy with joy.

And then the inverse of that. The horror.

He had been perfectly healthy. Ava had just taken him for his two-month checkup, and Ted Field had declared him thriving. There was no discernible reason for the fact that he stopped breathing. And since there was no reason, it was impossible to comprehend. There must have been some mistake, he would wake up and be returned to her, squirming and flashing his toothless smile. For days afterward Ava had awoken each morning believing that she would find Ernie alive.

But no.

Jordan had been at the newspaper. He walked in a few steps behind the paramedics, holding his briefcase. Ava was confused by this at first. The head paramedic lifted Ernie out of her arms and laid him on a mat and tried to revive him, doing CPR with two fingers. Ava dissolved into Jordan, and he held her, both of them shaking, as they watched the fruitless efforts to save their son.

Jordan whispered, “I am so sorry, Ava. I am so, so sorry.”

The apology made sense only later, once she’d pieced together the fact that Jordan hadn’t been in the house that night. He had been at work.

Ava fancied herself a reasonable woman. She had grown up in a family of six children, she had lived on two continents, she had a reservoir of understanding about human beings and the things that motivated them and the ways they sometimes acted.

But Jordan’s being at work, on the night Ernie stopped breathing? That was something she could not reconcile. She knew that Jordan’s absence hadn’t caused Ernie’s death, and yet the two facts were linked in her mind. Ernie’s death was a mystery. There was no one to blame. Jordan At Work was a reason Ava could cling to. It was a shard of obsidian that she polished over and over.

“He was in distress. You might have heard him if you’d been home! You might have been able to save him!”

In the grip of Ava’s mind, Jordan was at fault. He hadn’t caused Ernie’s death, but he had made the circumstances of Ernie’s death unbearable.

Ava knew about Jordan and Zoe. She had first suspected they were having an affair in May of the previous year. Since Jake and Penny started dating, Jordan and Zoe had shared the responsibility of transporting the young lovers back and forth. One day Ava looked out the window of Ernie’s nursery and saw Jordan and Zoe sitting on the hood of Zoe’s orange car, talking. Jordan seemed happy and animated, and Ava thought, He never looks that way when he talks to me. Then she thought, He never talks to me.

And then, a month or two later, she climbed into the Land Rover to drive to the cemetery with a bouquet of while lilies for Ernie’s grave, and her senses were assaulted by a foul smell. It was a hot day, the car had been closed up overnight, and Jordan had left a crumpled brown lunch bag on the passenger seat. The bag had a dark stain spread across the bottom, and it was leaking some kind of milky liquid all over the leather. Ava carefully picked up the dripping bag and carried it to the trash can in the garage. Before she threw the bag away, she looked inside. There was a small Tupperware container-not quite closed-of spoiled, reeking coleslaw. That was the culprit. Also in the bag were some sandwich crusts and a fudge brownie, wrapped in wax paper. Ava studied the brownie. This particular kind of brownie… in wax paper.

Ava thought, Zoe.

Huh?

Then she saw that there was a recipe card in the bag, folded in half.

It was a note. It said: It’s ridiculous how much I love you.

Ava didn’t say anything to Jake about their encounter in the backyard of the bungalow in Fremantle, and eventually her silence was rewarded: on August 14, the coldest day of the winter-the temperature was a brisk 52 degrees Fahrenheit-Jake entered the kitchen at five-thirty in the morning. Ava was at the table, drinking Lady Grey tea and doing the crossword puzzle from the previous day’s newspaper. Jake was wearing a pair of jeans that Penny had scribbled on and his navy blue Nantucket Whalers sweatshirt. He entered the kitchen with an air of intent, as though he and his mother had an appointment, and Ava thought that while some warning would have been nice, she had no reason to be surprised. She had caught him at something, and Jake was the kind of kid who would want to explain himself.

Ava said, “Would you like some tea?”

“Actually, I’ve started drinking short blacks,” he said.

“Short blacks?” Ava said. She had to suppress a smile. She didn’t want him to know how much it delighted her to hear him use the Australian term. “Have you really?”

He gave a serious nod, and she brought out the French press and the espresso powder and started the kettle. This bought her some time. All she hoped was that Jordan would stay asleep. On Nantucket he was always up at the crack of dawn, but here he woke when he wanted to, sometimes as late as eight-thirty.

When the coffee was ready, Ava poured a cup for Jake and brought it to the table.

“Thanks,” he said, and he took a sip as she watched him.

“As good as at the Dome?” she asked.

“Better.”

He was lying, but it was sweet.

“So,” she said.

He took a big, heaving breath. Then he stared at her, mute.

She was afraid to prompt him. She was afraid of scaring him away.

Finally he said, “I want to ask you about Penny.”

“Penny?” she said.

“When the two of you… when she was with you in Ernie’s nursery, what kind of stuff did you talk about? I know you were close. I know she told you things, Mom.”

Ava had not confronted Jordan about Zoe. She had thought she might, especially in the first days after finding the note. It’s ridiculous how much I love you. Ava felt betrayed. Of course she felt betrayed! Ava and Zoe had been good friends before Ernie died. The five of them-she and Jordan and Zoe and Al and Lynne-had been a group, a merry band. All those weekends together, so many shared hours with the kids. Ava thought back to how Jordan and Zoe had acted together over the years. They had been close, they had been aligned, they had had that American camaraderie, they had the same political views, they liked the same music, that kind of thing. Ava had never cared about that. And the fact of the matter was, she didn’t care what Jordan and Zoe were doing behind her back now. Let them carry on like Penny and Jake, like a couple of horny teenagers! Let them leave little love notes for each other! Jordan had proved himself to be no better than his father, a common philanderer! Jordan could seek comfort in another woman’s arms, even if that woman was Ava’s friend. Ava didn’t care. They could both go to hell. She had bigger things on her mind. She had lost her child.

Their affair alleviated her guilt. She had abandoned her marriage, and also her friendship with Zoe. Now the two of them didn’t need her anymore. They had each other. Ava wanted to be left alone. They would leave her alone.

In her more generous moments she thought, Jordan tried to love me through the worst of it, he tried to pull me out of the hole. She thought, Zoe tried too. She made and delivered all that food, and I never once thanked her, I never once reached out. She sent that beautiful letter, and I threw it away. I couldn’t talk to either of them, I couldn’t talk to anybody. So they turned to each other. Was that really such a surprise?

When had Penny first approached Ava? When had she first knocked on the door of Ernie’s nursery? When had she asked Ava what she was watching (the umpteenth rerun of Home and Away), when had she asked her what she was reading (Melville)? Ava didn’t remember exactly. One day when Jake wasn’t home, Penny had just appeared, and in that lovely, innocent way of hers, she had started talking-about Jake and school, and then about her voice, the impossible burden of it, and then about the leaden weight in her heart that she couldn’t account for, which she said she couldn’t tell anyone else about.

“You’re the only one who gets it,” Penny had said. “I can’t tell Jake, and I can’t tell my mother.”

For months Ava had borne witness to the girl’s sadness, to the lows of Penny’s psyche-unfathomable, probably, to anyone but her. Ava had stroked her pretty head and said, “Yes, I know how you feel, darling girl.”

Ava had believed that Penny was suffering from the malaise common to all teenage girls: “No one understands me. My mom and I used to be close, but now she doesn’t get it. She thinks I’m the luckiest girl alive. If I told her I felt like this, she would ship me straight off to a psychiatrist. She’s done that to me before.”

Ava had thought, Every girl needs a woman to talk to who is not her mother; every girl needs a place to vent her feelings where she won’t be judged. Ava was pleased that Penny had sought her out, she was gratified. She had won over Zoe’s daughter. She thought, I’m taking good care of her.

Now, with Jake, Ava faced a monstrous guilt. Ava had seen the warning signs, she had seen that Penny was capable of putting herself or others in danger, and she had done nothing to prevent that possibility. She should have told Jordan, or Lynne Castle. Or Zoe. Of course, she should have told Zoe.

Ava said, “She used to talk about what was on her mind, Jake. Her concerns, her worries, her sadness. She felt safe talking to me about those things, I think, because I was so sad too, about Ernie.”

Jake nodded. He sipped his coffee.

Ava said, “If I had it to do over, I would go to her mother. I would tell Zoe some of the things that Penny told me. I would try to get her some help.”

“It wasn’t your fault, Mom,” Jake said. “It was my fault. It was something I did.” He looked at her, and his eyes filled with tears, and then he was sobbing, and Ava went around the table and knelt in front of him and gathered him into her arms.

“Oh, honey, no,” she said. “You were wonderful to Penny.”

“No, I wasn’t,” he said. “I mean, most of the time I was pretty good, but not always.”

Ava shushed him and smoothed his hair. She had spent so long mourning the child she’d lost, she thought, that she had missed out on caring for the child she had. She said, “It’s impossible to do right by someone all the time, Jake. I am very much living proof of that. We hurt the people we care about, intentionally and unintentionally. But if there is one thing I’m confident about, it’s that Penelope Alistair knew that you loved her.”

Jake sniffed and wiped at his nose with his sweatshirt, and Ava rose to grab a box of tissues. She eyed the door to the master bedroom: still closed.

Jake sighed and seemed to collect himself. He took another sip of coffee. “This is good.”

Ava refilled his mug. She wasn’t sure whether to stand up or sit down. He was talking to her and she was listening, but what Jake didn’t know, what he wouldn’t know until he was a parent himself, was how grateful she was. She didn’t deserve this.

He said, “So as you probably figured out, I tried to run away.”

She decided to sit. Her throat felt as if it were going to close. Run away. She said, “Where did you go?”

He said, “I went to South Beach. I hung out around this bonfire with a bunch of people I didn’t know. Ferals.”

Ava winced. The term was awful. Ferals. And yet such people had been hanging around Perth and Freo since she was a young girl, and that was what they’d always been called: feral. Ava had seen them at South Beach herself thirty years ago-the dreadlocks, the tattoos and piercings, the dirty mattresses that they dragged out to the park and lounged across as they smoked marijuana and played their guitars and sketched in journals and read Orwell or Proust. They cooked on camp stoves and slept with their dirty feet hanging out of the windows of their vans.

“One of them, this guy named Hawk, said I could ride with him across the Nullarbor, to Adelaide first and then across to Sydney.” Jake paused. “I gave him some money.”

“Oh,” Ava said. She tried not to sound alarmed. “How much?”

“Two hundred and sixty dollars,” Jake said. He stared into his coffee cup. “It seemed like kind of a bargain at the time.”

“So then what happened?” Ava asked.

“Well, then I had some beers, and I… smoked some marijuana, or what I thought was marijuana, and then I blacked out in the sand. And when I woke up, they had taken the rest of my money and my credit card and my shoes and my camera, and they’d left.”

“Ah,” Ava said. She had heard from Jordan that Jake had lost the credit card, and that after giving him a lecture about fiscal responsibility, Jordan had called to cancel it. “I see.”

“So then I came back here,” Jake said.

“And that’s when I saw you sneaking in the side door with your bag,” Ava said.

“You didn’t tell Dad?”

“No.”

“I knew you didn’t tell Dad,” Jake said. “He would have wanted to have a heart-to-heart about it right away.”

“No doubt.”

“In a way I’m kind of glad it didn’t work out,” Jake said. He took a deep breath. “Because I couldn’t stand to think about you being worried, not knowing where I was, not knowing where I was sleeping or what I was eating or who I was with.”

“Thank you,” Ava said.

“I know you love me, Mom.”

Ava felt tears burning her eyes. “You know I love you, but you’ll never understand how much.”

“You seem really happy here.”

“I never thought I would feel like myself again,” Ava said. “But now I do.”

“Dad’s not happy,” Jake said.

“No,” Ava said. “He’s not. I know he’s not.”

Jake said, “I wish there was a way that we could all be happy at the same time, in the same place.”

Ava had been stunned when Jordan came to her and said he thought they should move to Australia.

“We’ll go to Perth, we’ll rent a house, we’ll try it for a year,” he said. “I can take a leave of absence; Marnie can run the paper, she’s more than capable.”

Ava said, “Jake? School?”

“He can go to school in Australia.”

“His senior year?” she said.

“Ava, we need to get him out of here.”

She had flared up with anger. She had been asking Jordan to move to Perth for how many years, and they were leaving now because Jake had to get off the island?

She said, “So this is all for Jake, then?”

“And you,” Jordan said. “Mostly for you. If I just wanted to get Jake off the island, if that was my only motivation, I could think of places we could go that are a hell of a lot closer than Perth, Australia.”

Yes, Ava thought. Anywhere was closer.

“But you want to move home, and I am taking you home,” he said.

Yes, Ava did want to move home. She was an idiot for playing devil’s advocate, but something wasn’t computing.

“And you’re going to leave the paper? And Marnie’s going to run it?” she asked.

“For a year, yes.”

It was inconceivable. Ava was missing something. She saw conviction in Jordan’s eyes. He meant it. He was going to leave the paper, leave the island; she saw that he wanted to. But why now, when before he had regarded even a two-week trip to Australia as a fate worse than death? Her mind raced. She thought back to the Fourth of July. Jordan had said he was driving on Hummock Pond Road when the car ran out of gas. That had seemed odd to her. Jordan wasn’t the type of man who ever let his car run out of gas. Ava had asked him, “What were you doing on Hummock Pond Road?”

“Driving around,” he said.

Ava had mulled it over for hours, willing her brain to make sense of it. They were moving to Australia for an entire year. Jordan wanted to go-for Jake, but also for her, he said. But no-she would offer her apologies here-she didn’t think Jordan Randolph was that selfless. Why would he want to go? Why would he want to get away?

And then she understood that it had to do with Zoe.

Zoe had turned him away.

Zoe didn’t want him anymore.

Since they had moved to Fremantle, Ava had been happier than she could have imagined. In the early-morning hours she drank her tea and worked her crossword puzzles. Then she made breakfast-eggs and rashers, grilled tomatoes, beans. She went to Woolies during the week for groceries, and on the weekends she shopped at the Fremantle Markets. She came home with mangoes and fresh Turkish bread and baby cos for Caesar salad. She spent time with her brothers and sisters and her mother; she saw friends from secondary school and girls she’d once waitressed with at Cicarella’s. She had been out with her old boyfriend, Roger Polly, on two occasions, and both times she had laughed as she hadn’t done in years. Was this how Jordan had felt when he was with Zoe-energized and young again, like a new person?

“I wish there was a way that we could all be happy at the same time, in the same place,” Jake had just said.

Ava tried to imagine what would have happened if Jake had journeyed across the country in some stranger’s van. What if she and Jordan had woken up that morning, and Jake’s bed had been empty, his things missing? Jordan, with his reporter’s instincts, would probably have headed into town first, and then maybe to South Beach, to grill everyone he saw about his son’s whereabouts. He might have found someone who remembered Jake-Jake would have stuck out, as an American kid, clean, in expensive clothes, reading Hemingway. But what if they hadn’t found him in time? What if those people had kicked him out of the van on the scorching hot, deserted stretch of the Nullarbor, without any food or water?

Ava checked the clock. It was still only quarter after six. Outside the kookaburras were hooting. It had been quite a morning already.

“What is it you want?” she asked Jake. “More than anything else, what do you want?”

“I want to go home,” he said.

A pink glow of possibility had been growing inside of Ava for weeks, an idea, a life change, but she had been afraid to tell anyone about it. She finally confided in her sister May over dinner at the Subiaco Hotel. They ordered glasses of the Leeuwin chardonnay and a bowl of chili mussels to share, and Ava nearly had to pinch herself. She was in Subiaco, having dinner with her favorite sister, exactly as she had fantasized about doing on so many bitter Nantucket nights. Ava’s prevailing thought was that now that she had this life again, she couldn’t let anyone take it away.

She said to May, “I’ve made a decision.”

May said, “Boob job?”

“No,” Ava said. “I’m going to adopt a baby.”

May clapped her hand over her mouth to keep from screaming. Her eyes bulged. Ava laughed.

“People are staring,” Ava said.

“Oh my God,” May said. “So much better than a boob job. I think that’s a bloody brilliant idea. I don’t know why you didn’t decide this sooner.”

“Well…,” Ava said. She wasn’t sure how much her family knew about her emotional state of the past four years. Probably they would have said she was “going through a bit of a rough patch,” or perhaps acting “not quite herself.” That would have been an example of typical Australian understatement, or else a consequence of the fact that she lived ten thousand miles away. “I wasn’t ready before. But I’ve made up my mind, and I’m ready now. I’m thinking I want a little girl. From China.”

“Oh, Ava!” May said. She came around the table to give her sister a hug. Of all the Price children, May was the most like their mother, Dearie. She had the pillowy bosom and the pragmatic attitude. She had learned to knit and could make dinner for ten even if there was nothing in the fridge. She had gray hair already, but she didn’t care. With six kids of her own, an average week for her entailed four cricket matches, three trips to the dentist, and ten bloody noses. Who wouldn’t have gray hair? “Oh, I am so happy for you! This is a wonderful thing.” She sat back down, sipped her wine, leaned forward across the table. “And Jordan, is he excited?”

“Jordan doesn’t know,” Ava said. “This is my decision. It’s a decision I’m making for me.”

“So does that mean you’re leaving him?” May asked. Ava had expected her sister to be scandalized. There hadn’t been a divorce in the Price family in three generations. But May merely seemed matter-of-fact about it.

Ava had debated exactly when and where to talk to Jordan. One afternoon as she was walking home from the Fremantle Markets, she spied him drinking alone at the bar at the Norfolk Hotel, and she nearly walked in and tapped him on the shoulder, but she didn’t want the conversation to be an ambush. She needed a block of time and a safe, wide-open space-and so she arranged for May to take Jake overnight, and she booked the two of them a day trip to Rottnest Island.

She said to Jordan, “You and I are going to Rottnest Island tomorrow morning. The ferry’s at a quarter to nine.”

Jordan’s head whipped around so quickly that his glasses slid to the end of his nose. “No,” he said.

“No?”

“I don’t feel like an excursion,” he said. “I’m not up for it. And certainly Jake doesn’t want to go?”

“Jake’s not invited,” Ava said. “Jake is going over to May and Doug’s. This is for you and me.”

Jordan looked even more alarmed. “We’re not spending the night?”

“No,” Ava said. “Just a day trip. We’ll rent bikes. See the island. See the quokkas.”

“Oh,” Jordan said. His lips twisted in that disapproving way of his. “I don’t know. I had some things I wanted to do tomorrow.”

Ava studied her husband. She could have said, “What things are those? Drinking at the Norfolk? Watching the cricket on TV? Wallowing in your misery?” But instead she smiled. “Cancel them,” she said. “Because we’re going to Rottnest.”

She was jangling with nerves. The drive from their house to the ferry was perhaps the tensest eight minutes she had ever spent with her husband. He sulked like a recalcitrant child. He didn’t want to go on a day trip alone with Ava. The only saving grace was that she understood. If their roles had been reversed and it had been Jordan dragging her out-say, for a day trip to Tuckernuck Island-she would have been just as miserable. As she drove, Jordan pressed his forehead against the car window, like a dog being driven to the pound.

Once they were on the ferry, Ava stood out on the bow while Jordan sat in the cabin with a short black, rereading the very same newspaper that he’d read earlier that morning at home. It was chilly on the bow; the wind sliced through Ava’s sweater. Really, Rottnest was better appreciated in the summer, but what she needed to do had to be done now. She looked out at the blue water frosted with whitecaps. She couldn’t believe they had stayed together so long. They had wasted so much time.

When they disembarked on Rottnest, Ava was so overcome with nostalgia that she nearly forgot the purpose of her mission. The Price children had stayed here for a week every year over the school holidays in January. They had always rented pushbikes, and after a certain age they had been allowed to explore the island on their own. It wasn’t a lush tropical paradise by any means. The landscape was stark and barren, an expanse of parched brown acres with scattered eucalyptus trees and low-lying scrub brush. Ava’s father used to award a dollar coin to the first child who spotted a quokka, the strange-looking marsupial indigenous to the island. The Price family would camp in a tent just off Geordie Bay, and the best night of the trip was always the night they ate sandwiches and played billiards in the pub at the Hotel Rottnest. That was thirty years ago. Now Rottnest was posher. There was a Dome, and a Subway, and a waterfront café. People came from Perth on their sailboats or motor yachts and anchored off the beach and snorkeled.

Ava stepped onto the dock and inhaled the scent of salt water and eucalyptus. “My God,” she said, “I love it here. I’ve always loved it here. And I never thought I’d see it again.”

Jordan made a snorting noise.

They rented mountain bikes with twenty-one gears, a far cry from the bikes of Ava’s youth, which hadn’t even had hand brakes. Ava took a map from the young man behind the rental counter and said to Jordan, “We have to do the whole circuit, all the way down to Fish Hook Bay, and we have to go and see the lighthouse. We’ll have lunch at the hotel. That’s where we used to go with Mum and Dad.”

Jordan shook his head. He didn’t want to be here.

They climbed onto their bikes and started riding. How long since Ava had been on a bike? Her first summer on Nantucket, she had ridden a used ten-speed all over the island, sometimes in her bare, sandy feet. One time Jordan had pulled his Jeep up alongside her and tried to convince her to accept a ride, but she had turned him down. She would pedal herself.

Now she and Jordan struggled up the hill toward the Vlamingh Lookout. At the crest Ava stopped, a little winded, and pointed across the island toward the Basin and Little Parakeet Bay. The day was clear enough that she could just pick out the coastline of the mainland, five miles away.

Jordan followed Ava’s finger with dull eyes. He swigged from his water bottle. “What are we doing here, Ava?” he said.

“You don’t like it?” she said. “In the summer you can swim at these beaches. You can snorkel. We used to collect these purple sea urchins, and my brothers used to fish for skippies with nets.”

“What are we doing here?” he asked again.

She had hoped to make it to lunchtime, to a booth in the pub of the hotel, where they could relax and have a pint. Ava closed her eyes. The pub used to have a jukebox. Ava and her siblings would play Bruce Springsteen and the Who, but her mother would always choose “Waltzing Matilda,” and then her mother and father and a few of the drunk strangers sitting at surrounding tables would belt out the lyrics together.

“I’m going to adopt a baby,” she said. “A little girl, from China.”

This was met with silence, which Ava had predicted. She couldn’t look at Jordan’s face. She desperately wanted a cigarette.

“No,” he said. “I am not adopting a baby. I am not raising another child. I am not.”

“You weren’t listening to me,” Ava said. “I said I am going to adopt a baby.”

“So what does that mean?” He drank from his water bottle, then spit the water into the grass on the side of the road. “What does that mean, Ava?”

“It means… I want to stay here, for good, and I want to adopt a baby. And I think you and Jake should go home.”

“What?” Jordan said. “What is this? This is you… what? Leaving me? You brought me here to godforfuckingsaken Rottnest Island so that you can tell me you’re leaving me and you’re going to adopt a baby?” He got off his bike and threw it onto the road, where it jumped and clattered. “This is bullshit, Ava!”

“Jordan.”

“This is bullshit! I gave up my life for you, I left my entire life back on Nantucket and brought you here because that was all you ever wanted. You never wanted to live on Nantucket with me, that was perfectly clear twenty fucking years ago when I showed up here the first time and you laughed in my face and showed me the door. But you came back to me, you came back to me, Ava-and yet I’ve spent most of this marriage feeling as if I were the one who was making you miserable. I was the reason we couldn’t get pregnant again, I was the reason Ernie died, I was the one who was too absorbed with work, everything was always my fault. And so now I do the selfless thing, I act in the name of our marriage, in the name of our family, and you tell me that you’re adopting a baby and that Jake and I should go home?”

Cigarette, she thought. Or a cold pint. Anything to make this easier. But she would be glad later, she supposed, that she had had no crutches. Nothing to do with her hands but let them hold her bike steady, nowhere to put her eyes but on her husband.

“I know about Zoe, Jordan,” Ava said. “I’ve known for a while now.”

This was the real ambush; Jordan was caught completely off guard. She watched half a dozen emotions cross his face, and because they had been married for so long, she recognized every single one: denial, incredulity, contrition, anger, sadness, resignation.

“Jesus, Ava,” he said.

“It’s okay,” she said. “It wasn’t okay, I don’t think, for a long time, but it’s okay now.” She thought back to their recent awkward encounter in bed. She had known then that things were over. She had allowed her marriage to rust, like a bicycle-built-for-two left out in the rain. And then, when she finally decided she wanted to climb back on it, she’d been surprised when it didn’t work. When she reached out for Jordan, he was ten thousand miles away. At first Ava had felt angry and rejected, until she realized that the passion she felt that night wasn’t for Jordan, it was for something else: Australia, her mother and brothers and sisters, the nascent idea of a new family.

“I can’t believe this is happening,” Jordan said. He screamed at the open sky: “I CANNOT BELIEVE THIS IS HAPPENING!”

She couldn’t believe it either. She took a deep breath of the bracing Rottnest air. She had come to this island as a child; she could never have foreseen the circumstances that she found herself in now. For years, no matter how wretched she had felt, splitting from Jordan had been unthinkable. But why? Why?

“Go back to Nantucket, Jordan,” Ava said. “That’s where you belong.”

Jordan opened his mouth to speak.

“You can protest,” Ava said. “You can deny it all you want. But I know the truth. You want this over too.”

“And what about our son?” Jordan asked.

“Jake is a sorry mess,” Ava said. “A couple of weeks ago he tried to run away. He met some kids down at South Beach who had a van. He gave them some money because they said they would drive him to Sydney, where he was going to hop on a plane, or a container ship, back to the States. But they drugged him or something, I guess, and then they robbed him, and so he came back to the house. I caught him coming in the side gate at five-thirty in the morning with his duffel bag.”

“Jesus,” Jordan said. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t he tell me?”

“And ever since he told me what happened, all I’ve been thinking about is what I would have done if I’d lost him. Really lost him, the way we lost Ernie, the way Zoe lost Penny.” Ava blinked. The wind whipped her hair, and she tried to collect it into an elastic at the base of her neck. “What would I have done?”

“I don’t have an answer for that,” Jordan said. “I don’t seem to have an answer for anything anymore.”

“I asked Jake what he wanted more than anything in the world. And you know what he said? He wants Nantucket.”

“Ava. We’re not going to decide this today. You can’t dissolve a twenty-year marriage in one day.”

“Just think about it, Jordan, please. Take Jake home and keep him safe. Get him into college somewhere. Put him on a plane to see me every once in a while. Run the newspaper, serve the island, do what you were born and raised to do.” She swallowed. “And get Zoe back.”

“Ava.”

“I am serious,” she said. “And I am sincere. Go after what you want.”

Jordan poked his glasses up his nose. This gesture always used to bother her, but now she saw it as his way of expressing bewilderment. “And what about you?” he asked.

“I’ve got what I want right here.” Ava mounted her bike and coasted down the backside of the hill. A quokka bounced across the road in front of her, and she thought, I win the dollar coin!

She was home.

LYNNE

Lynne Castle’s favorite line was, “I’m too old for this.” Lately, though, she had felt like adding an expletive onto the end of that; now she wanted to say, “I’m too old for this shit.” But Lynne wasn’t one to swear. She was solid, she was responsible, she was the voice of reason, she was a model citizen, she was a loving wife, she was a good mother.

But was she, really?

Welcome to the summer of self-doubt. Lynne and Al had everything a couple could want. Al had the car dealership and local politics. Lynne had a permitting business that kept her as busy as she wanted to be. They had a lovely home, the Castle castle. They had two boys away at college who were poised to take the world by storm. And they had Demeter.

On the outside, their lives looked good. Life had always looked good for the Castles. Al was in charge of everything on this island, and what he wasn’t in charge of, Lynne was in charge of. But lately something deep inside their life seemed to be emitting a foul smell.

Lynne wasn’t stupid, she wasn’t an idiot, she knew that the problem was Demeter. Her youngest child, her only daughter. Lynne had been thrilled when she gave birth to a girl after the two boys. It was a dream come true: all that pink, the baby dolls, dance lessons, tea parties. Demeter had been a precocious little girl, cute and tiny, with a high-pitched candy voice.

What had gone wrong? Could Lynne just look back and be honest with herself for once?

By the time Demeter was ten or eleven, she was overweight. Lynne wasn’t quite sure how this had happened. It was true that Lynne and Al were not small people, and there never seemed to be enough time in the day for regular exercise, but neither one of them was what you’d call fat, either. And both the boys were trim and athletic.

Lynne had enrolled Demeter in spring soccer; first she sat on the bench-because she was no good at the sport, because she was too heavy to run more than a few yards downfield without getting winded-and then she quit. Al bought her a mountain bike for her birthday, but by that point Demeter had few friends, and so no one to bike with, no one to go and see on her bike. She was ostracized at school because of her weight, but at home Lynne was afraid to address her size because she didn’t want to make it an issue, she didn’t want Demeter to think that her own mother believed she was fat. Instead she strove to promote a positive body image by telling her daughter she was beautiful, and of course she could have another piece of cake.

Demeter got bigger. She refused to ski during their weekends in Stowe. She refused to put on a bathing suit when they went to the beach on Sundays.

Fat camp? Lynne wondered. A summer away might help, but the idea seemed cruel. And outdated. Lynne had had a friend in high school who’d gone to fat camp and returned with an eating disorder.

Al was little help. Lynne crawled into bed at night and said, “What are we going to do about her? She’s so lonely. I could cry thinking about it.” And Al said, “I’ll do whatever you want to do, honey.”

This sounded like support, but really it was Al passing the buck. He was too busy with the dealership and his civic duties to do anything about Demeter. Demeter was a girl, Lynne was her mother. Certainly Lynne would know the best course of action. Al had put in his intense parenting time with the boys. Little League coach for eight years, science projects, college visits-he’d done it all. Lynne could hardly fault him for taking a pass here.

But she did fault him. And she faulted herself. What she thought was, I’m too old for this shit.

Adolescence, Lynne had tried to tell Demeter, was like a bad ride on the ferry. You got tossed about in the waves, you crested to the top, you sank into the troughs, and the motion between the highs and the lows made you sick to your stomach. You thought with every passing minute that you were surely going to drown. The good news was, the ride eventually came to an end. You docked in Hyannis Harbor and disembarked from the boat. Demeter would graduate from high school, she would reach adulthood, and things would get better.

Demeter had looked upon her mother with a jaundiced eye. “A bad ride on the ferry”? That was what her mother had to offer?

A little before 1:30 a.m. on June 17, Ed Kapenash had called the house and told Al that there had been an accident. Demeter was at the hospital, but she was unhurt.

Al relayed this message to Lynne, who was by that point sitting bolt upright in bed. “There was an accident, Demeter’s at the hospital, but she’s unhurt.”

Lynne said, “She’s not at the hospital. She’s in her bedroom.”

And Al, trusting every word that came out of his wife’s mouth, said to Police Chief Ed Kapenash, “Demeter is in her bedroom.”

To which Ed responded, “I’m looking right at her, Al. Can you come down here, please?”

Even then, Lynne didn’t believe it. She threw on the skirt and blouse by her bed, the same outfit she had worn only hours before to four graduation parties, and she marched down the hallway to Demeter’s bedroom. Knocked on the door. There was no answer, but that was hardly unusual. Lynne tried the knob. Locked. Again, not unusual. What teenage girl didn’t lock her bedroom door? She knocked again, and Al came up behind her with a metal pin.

“Jesus Christ, Lynne, step aside, please.”

Lynne half turned to him, shocked. He never spoke to her like that. He popped the lock and reached for the light and then they were both standing in Demeter’s empty bedroom, where the window was hanging wide open. In a daze Lynne walked to the window and looked down.

“She… what?” Lynne said.

“Climbed out the window,” Al said in a snarky tone of voice.

“And then what?” Lynne said. The screen for the window lay on the shingles of the roof, but from the roof line it was probably eight or nine feet to the lawn below. “She jumped?”

“She must have,” Al said. “I’m going to the hospital. Are you coming with me?”

“Of course I’m coming with you,” Lynne said. Her daughter had been in an accident, her daughter was at the hospital, her daughter had climbed out her bedroom window and jumped to the lawn below. Her daughter had fooled them. Lynne was so tired, it was the middle of the night, she had gotten only a couple hours of sleep. She was too old for this.

But once she reached the hospital, she couldn’t have been more awake. Ed Kapenash met them out in the parking lot, and Lynne thought, This can hardly be standard protocol. Maybe he had lied about Demeter’s being unhurt so they wouldn’t drive off the road while trying to get here. Why else would Ed be waiting for them outside?

Ed spoke in a low voice. Lynne had never heard him sound so serious. Jake Randolph’s Jeep, Penny driving, Penny D.O.A., Hobby alive but unresponsive. The helicopter was on its way. Demeter unhurt, Jake Randolph unhurt.

Lynne couldn’t quite keep up. “Wait a minute,” she said. “What did you say about Penny?”

Ed pressed his lips together.

Al said, “Honey, she’s dead. She was dead on arrival.”

Lynne felt herself falling. But no, she was upright. But she had dropped something. Keys. Her keys had fallen from her hand onto the asphalt. She bent down to pick them up. She hiccupped, then started crying.

“I met you out here because I thought you should know,” Ed said. “So you’ll be prepared. Jordan’s on his way. Zoe’s on her way.”

“Do they know?” Lynne asked. “Does Zoe know?”

“Not yet.”

Jesus, this was awful. Lynne’s life wasn’t set up to accommodate this kind of awful.

“I also need to inform you that we found a bottle of Jim Beam in your daughter’s bag,” Ed said. “It had an inch or two of whiskey left in it. She probably wasn’t the only one drinking it, but the paramedics said she was inebriated when she arrived. I’m going in to talk with her now. I just wanted to tell you that myself. Because we’re friends.”

“Thank you, Ed,” Al said.

“Jim Beam?” Lynne said. “Where on Earth, really, where would Demeter have gotten a bottle of Jim Beam? We don’t drink. You know we don’t drink, Ed.”

“I’m just telling you what we found.”

“Someone must have put it in her bag,” Lynne said. “One of the boys.” But not Penny. Penny didn’t drink at all; Lynne knew this from both Demeter and Zoe. Although it was graduation, so maybe she’d been drinking tonight. Maybe that was what had caused the accident. Maybe Penny had put the bottle in Demeter’s purse. Demeter would have let her do that-anything to be accepted by those kids. “Was Penny drinking?”

“We know almost nothing else,” Ed said.

Al said, “Honey, let the man do his job. He came out here to warn us as a courtesy.”

Was Al expecting her to thank him, then? Say something like “Thank you, Ed, for telling us that our daughter was the one with the near-empty bottle of booze in her purse”? Lynne didn’t like being the mother who insisted on her child’s innocence-those mothers were nearly always delusional about their own children-but in this case she had no choice. There was no way the Jim Beam or whatever it was they’d found in Demeter’s purse actually belonged to her.

Lynne couldn’t believe she was even worrying about this. Penny Alistair was dead. And Hobby-what had the Chief said about Hobby, again?

“What did he say about Hobby?” Lynne asked Al, as the Chief’s back receded toward the bright glass doors of the Emergency Room. She was shivering as if it were January instead of June.

“Let’s go inside,” Al said.

Now, two months later, Lynne had a hard time piecing together what had happened after that. Her memory was shattered like a broken mirror. She remembered seeing Zoe walk in; the two of them exchanged a look, and Lynne feared for the expression on her own face. She hated that she knew that Penny was dead while Zoe didn’t; she despised Ed Kapenash for telling them first.

She remembered Zoe’s slapping Jordan. Oh yes, that she remembered. She would remember that for the rest of her life. Zoe nearly knocked the glasses off of Jordan’s face. And why? What had Jordan done wrong? That wasn’t clear.

Al was the one who helped Zoe get to Boston, though at first she refused his help. But Al held firm: “I’m taking you, goddammit, Zoe. You can’t do this alone.” He got her to Mass General; he stood by her side while the doctors delivered the ghastly news. Hobby was still unresponsive. In a coma. There was nothing they could do but wait.

Meanwhile, Lynne and Jordan had sat side by side in the waiting room of Nantucket Cottage Hospital until Ed Kapenash finished interrogating their children. Had the two of them talked? Lynne couldn’t remember. She did remember Demeter’s coming out to the waiting room, pale, shaking, and smelling like vomit. Lynne touched her all over in a way that she hadn’t touched her in years, checking to make sure she was in one piece.

“Let’s go, Mom, please,” Demeter whispered.

“Yes,” Lynne said. She remembered that Jordan was still sitting, waiting for Jake to emerge. She remembered that his blue eyes tracked her and Demeter, and his mouth opened to say something. But did he speak? And did Lynne say good-bye?

She couldn’t remember. But she must have. She would never have left without saying good-bye.

Another mother might have addressed the issue of the Jim Beam right away. Another mother might have acknowledged-even if only to herself-that the vomit fumes coming off her daughter in the passenger seat did, in fact, reek of whiskey. Another mother might have asked her daughter the simple question, “What happened?” So that at least she would have a baseline to work from.

But Lynne Castle addressed, acknowledged, and asked nothing. Things might have been different if Al had still been with them, but Al had gone with Zoe, so Lynne was left to deal with Demeter by herself, and she was at a loss. Demeter had carried a pillow, sheathed in an aqua pillowcase, out of the hospital. Every so often she would lean over, bury her face in the pillow, and emit a soundless scream. And Lynne thought, She’s in shock. That was what Dr. Field had said. He’d pressed a prescription for a sedative into Lynne’s hand, but it was too late, or too early, to get that filled at the pharmacy now.

At home Lynne said, “Daddy’s gone to Boston. Do you want to sleep in my bed with me?”

Demeter said, “God, no.”

Lynne tried not to take offense at this, but she was tired, and for some reason these words, or perhaps the disgust with which Demeter uttered them, hurt her feelings. She reminded herself that Demeter had never been a snuggler, and that the two of them didn’t have a touchy-feely relationship. Zoe and Penny have that kind of relationship, Lynne thought-or at least they did (God, the first use of the past tense, it was hideous!). She knew that Penny used to climb into bed with Zoe when she was scared or there was a lightning storm, and they always cuddled together on the couch during Patriots games on football Sundays, and they lay next to each other on towels at the beach. Demeter and Lynne just weren’t like that, fair enough, but was it too much to ask for a little physical closeness between them tonight, on the very night when Penny Alistair had been killed and Demeter might have been killed herself?

Lynne and Demeter stood at the open door of Demeter’s bedroom. The light was on, the window wide open. Was Lynne going to confront her daughter about her locked door, her exodus, her blatant deceit?

No, not tonight. Outside, the birds were starting to chirp. June on Nantucket: the sun rose at 4:30 a.m.

“Are you going to be okay?” Lynne asked.

Demeter eyed her mother.

Right, Lynne thought: stupid, vague question, too big a question to answer. She narrowed it down a little. “Do you want a sleeping pill?” she asked. “I can give you one of mine.”

“Okay,” Demeter said.

It was something concrete Lynne could do. Something she had to offer. One of her Lunestas. She had asked Ted Field for them back in April, when Al was running for selectman for the fourth time. The stress of local politics, of negative campaigning aimed at Al, of insinuations that he had Ed Kapenash, among other people, in his back pocket-all of this had kept Lynne up at night. Ha! She had worried then, when nothing was wrong. Al had won in a landslide.

Lynne placed the tiny pill in Demeter’s palm, and Demeter dry-mouthed it down. Lynne grimaced. Probably not a bad idea to suggest that she take a shower and brush her teeth: she stank to high heaven. But as Lynne was searching for the words to gently convey this thought to her daughter, Demeter stepped into her bedroom and slammed the door shut, leaving her mother alone in the hallway.

“Good night, darling,” Lynne said.

Now it was August, and the worst was behind them. Hobby had woken up from his coma, Penny had been properly buried, the Randolph family had moved halfway around the world. Demeter had defied all odds and honored her commitment to work at Frog and Toad Landscaping. She got up and went to work five mornings a week. She was never late. She was the color of toast and she had, most definitely, lost some weight.

But something still wasn’t right. Demeter was less forthcoming than ever. She rarely spoke unless spoken to, and half the time, when Al or Lynne asked her a question, she gave a nonsensical answer and broke into giggles. And yet Lynne was afraid to dissect this behavior because Demeter did, in fact, seem happier than she had seemed in a long, long time. She was working and bringing home a weekly paycheck, she looked good. She had made some friends, she said, on her crew. A girl named Nell. A boy named Coop. A man named Zeus.

“Zeus?” Lynne said. “That’s an interesting name.”

“ ‘Gods and goddesses in the front,’ ” Demeter said, and then she giggled.

Lynne wondered if Demeter had started a relationship with one of the men on her crew. Maybe this Coop, or this Zeus. Zeus was more likely, Lynne thought. An older Hispanic man with a wife all the way down in Central America-to him, Demeter would seem young and ripe and lush. Too young, though. Lynne couldn’t stand to think about it.

It crossed Lynne’s mind that Demeter might be doing drugs either before or after work. Because, to be honest, her whole demeanor was altered. She was a different kid. All of her angry, bitter, resentful, woe-is-me attitude seemed to have disappeared, and in its place was this vacant insipidness. Demeter used to be an avid reader. Her marks in school weren’t great, they were just-getting-by, but she always read very good books, both classic and contemporary. But had she read a single book this whole summer? Lynne didn’t think so. Lynne wasn’t naive, she knew that landscapers were famous for smoking marijuana, and she also knew that Demeter might not have the resolve to say no. She was a perfect target for peer pressure, wanting so badly to be accepted and to fit in. Lynne had gone so far as to sniff her daughter’s clothes before she stuffed them into the washing machine. They smelled like sour sweat but not smoke. Later she extended her olfactory investigation to the inside of Demeter’s Escape, where her nose was overpowered by the smell of breath mints and piney air-freshener and something else that was sickly sweet but unidentifiable-until she pulled a black, rotten banana out from under the passenger seat.

Lynne didn’t find any signs of marijuana. But there was something-something-going on.

Demeter had been through one hell of an ordeal this summer. She had lost Penny, who was as much of a friend as she had had, and she had lost Jake too. Hobby was still alive, thank God. Lynne kept tabs on him through the grapevine; it seemed she was always talking to someone who had just seen him in town or out for a quiet dinner at 56 Union with his mother. Lynne learned that he was out of the wheelchair and onto crutches and making excellent progress, but that Coach Jaxon had finally come to terms with the fact that he would never play football again. It was just too dangerous. Hobby was apparently spending lots of time with Claire Buckley, which was good, Lynne thought. Claire was a nice girl.

Lynne wished she had gotten all this news about Hobby from Zoe herself, but Zoe was incommunicado. Lynne had arranged dropoff meals at the Alistair house for six weeks after Penny’s funeral but Zoe had never called or written to say thank you. Not that a thank-you was necessary; Lynne certainly hadn’t scheduled the meals because she wanted gratitude. She had done it because it was one stupid, paltry thing that she and the other women in the community could do-offer food so that something healthy and delicious would be on hand whenever Zoe got her appetite back. Lynne had also left several messages on Zoe’s voicemail, she had lost count of how many, four or five, but these had gone unreturned. She had tried to tread lightly, saying, “Hey, Zoe, it’s me, just checking in, no need to call me back, just wanted to see how you’re doing, thinking of you.” So Zoe had managed to make it out to 56 Union for dinner with Hobby, but she hadn’t been able to call Lynne back? Lynne was-or had been-her best friend. Lynne had to assume that status had been altered in Zoe’s mind. Perhaps Zoe couldn’t bring herself to talk to her for the same reason that she’d slapped Jordan in the hospital waiting room: a firewall of anger. She had lost a child, and they hadn’t.

She had lost a child. Lynne couldn’t pretend to know what that felt like.

They had all been through one hell of an ordeal this summer.

So whatever was going on with Demeter, Lynne told herself, would pass. There was no describing how badly she wanted to ignore it. If Demeter could just make it through the summer… things might change once she was back in school… her senior year… things were always great in senior year, so for Demeter they should at least be tolerable. She would be accepted to college somewhere, probably not a top-tier school like her brothers, but maybe Michigan State, where Al had gone. He donated money to MSU, he should be able to pull those strings if needed, and then Demeter would be away at school, and Al and Lynne would be empty-nesters. There was a way in which the two of them had been born to be empty-nesters. They both had more than enough interests and involvements to keep them busy for the next three centuries. (Although their interest in each other, at this stage of the game, was limited: they had sex only two or three times a year, on prescribed dates-their anniversary, Al’s birthday, and Valentine’s Day-and frankly, even that much was more than enough for Lynne.) Maybe, Lynne thought, her eager anticipation of an empty nest meant that they should never have had children at all.

Demeter’s strange behavior continued. On the night she returned from babysitting for the Kingsleys, Lynne happened to be awake, standing next to the open freezer door, shoveling Chunky Monkey into her mouth. She had been indulging in this kind of late-night stress eating more and more lately, but when Demeter walked in, she hastened to fit the top back onto the carton and shove the ice cream back into the freezer, because what kind of example was she setting?

“Hey, honey,” Lynne said. She positioned her body to block’s Demeter’s view of the sticky spoon on the countertop.

Demeter didn’t respond to her greeting, didn’t acknowledge her mother’s presence at all. She clutched her backpack to her chest and proceeded up the stairs.

“Demeter!” Lynne snapped. Her voice was louder than it ought to have been in the middle of the night-Al was sleeping-but Jesus Christ, she was sick of being ignored.

“What?” Demeter said.

“How was babysitting? How were the Kingsleys?”

Demeter let out a shrill, high-pitched laugh that was unlike anything Lynne had ever heard come out of her daughter’s mouth. It made Lynne worry that maybe Demeter’s problem was that she was possessed by the spawn of Lucifer. “Babysitting?” Demeter said. “At the Kingsleys’? It was awful. It was goddamned fucking awful, if you must know, Mother.” Then Demeter laughed again, and it gave Lynne the shivers.

Two days later Lynne stood in front of Demeter’s bedroom door with the metal pin. Demeter was still at work, and Lynne had been trying to work in her home office as well, but Demeter’s words kept playing through her mind: “It was goddamned fucking awful, if you must know, Mother.” And that demonic laugh. Something was going on, and Lynne intended to find out what it was.

She popped the lock on Demeter’s door as she’d seen Al do the night of the accident. She entered her daughter’s bedroom. She was one of those mothers now, she thought. One of those mothers who nosed around her child’s personal space, one of those mothers who couldn’t be trusted. She had never had to do this with the boys. The boys had been easy to raise; the boys had been a breeze.

Demeter’s room smelled funny. It had been a hot couple of weeks, and Lynne had kept the central air on, so Demeter’s window was shut tight. Sunlight streamed in, and dust motes hung in the air. The bed was unmade. Demeter used only a fitted sheet and a duvet, anyway. Lynne sniffed the duvet. Abominable-body odor, along with whatever cheap teenage scent her daughter used to mask body odor. Lynne rarely cleaned in this room anymore; she had basically been denied access for the past three years, though she did make a point of asking for Demeter’s sheets and towels occasionally. But she hadn’t asked once this summer, and now the whole room smelled of dirty linen. Lynne started stripping the bed right then and there. Something was under the pillow and fell to the floor, and Lynne scrambled to pick it up. It was a paperback copy of The Beautiful and Damned, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Lynne sat on the bare mattress and flipped through the book. Demeter was reading Fitzgerald. Was Lynne worrying herself sick over nothing?

Lynne set the book down on Demeter’s bedside table, next to her water glass, which had a wedge of lime floating in it. Lime in her water glass? That was Zoe’s influence right there. Zoe kept a pitcher of chilled water in her fridge, and it always had lemon or lime slices and sometimes fresh mint and sometimes cucumber slices floating in it, and it always tasted fresh and delicious.

God, Lynne missed Zoe. She wondered what would happen if she just turned up at Zoe’s house unannounced. That was what a real friend would do-go over there and check on her. Lynne would bring her something, maybe a hanging begonia from Bartlett’s Farm or a topiary from Flowers on Chestnut.

Lynne picked up the water glass and emptied it into Demeter’s bathroom sink. She threw the lime wedge in the trash and carried the liner down to the kitchen trash. The bathroom trash seemed to be mostly crumpled tissues and dental floss and a bunch of wrappers from sugarless gum and breath mints. So maybe Demeter was having a relationship with someone at work-or, more likely, she’d developed a crush. Which could either end well or end badly.

Lynne went back up to Demeter’s bathroom and collected all the towels and the bathmat. She gathered the sheets as well and carried everything down to the laundry. Demeter would be angry when she found out that her mother had been in her room, but she’d appreciate having clean sheets and towels.

Lynne had work to do-three clients needed titles cleared-but she hated to leave a job half done. She lugged the Dyson up to Demeter’s room and found a yellow dust rag and fetched her bucket of cleaning supplies and the mop. The cleaners came once a week, so this kind of time-consuming effort on Lynne’s part had been rendered unnecessary in the rest of the house. But the cleaners weren’t allowed to go in Demeter’s room, and it badly needed cleaning.

That smell, Lynne thought. How did Demeter stand it?

Lynne dusted and vacuumed. This gave her a legitimate excuse to peek under the bed-nothing there but a dusty suitcase, which made her wonder if what they really needed was a vacation, which made her think of the Randolphs in Australia. They’d gone because, Jordan said, he needed to get Jake and Ava off the island for a while. Ava had been asking to move back to Australia for years, Lynne knew, but the accident was what had prompted their departure. So it seemed-to Lynne, and probably to the rest of Nantucket-as if they had left in shame. Lynne had heard people castigating Jordan for not printing anything about the accident in the paper, and she had done her best to correct this misperception by telling anyone who brought it up within her earshot that Zoe had asked him not to print a single word. His actions had been noble, she believed.

Lynne wondered if Jake had somehow been to blame for the accident. The police report had been so vague.

Lynne was glad that she hadn’t found any strange or unidentifiable objects in Demeter’s room. No weird altars or vials of tiger blood or voodoo dolls. Of course, she hadn’t looked through the drawers. She would look through the drawers-maybe-once she was done with the bathroom.

No one in the world enjoyed cleaning a bathroom, and this one smelled especially bad. Lynne was generous with the Windex; she tried not to gaze into the toilet bowl as she scoured it with the brush. She checked in the cabinet under the sink and saw that Demeter was down to her last roll of toilet paper and her final two tampons. Lynne replenished the supplies from the stockpile in her own bathroom. The girl was suffering from neglect.

Lynne struggled with the bathtub. She pulled Demeter’s hair out of the drain, then she took down the shower curtain. That could use a run through the washing machine as well.

She checked the medicine cabinet. There was a large bottle of ibuprofen that Lynne knew she herself hadn’t bought. Strange, she thought. She checked the bottle’s contents to make sure it really was ibuprofen, and it was.

Okay, she was feeling paranoid now. Why would Demeter have spent her own money on ibuprofen? Why not just write it down on Lynne’s shopping list?

Lynne went back into Demeter’s bedroom and thought, I have to check her drawers. She didn’t want to check the drawers, but to be thorough, she had to. Then there was the dark screen of Demeter’s computer. Should she check the computer? Would she know what she was looking for? Demeter didn’t have a Facebook page, or she hadn’t the last time Lynne checked, which was some time before the accident. Even Lynne had a Facebook page, complete with 274 friends. Penny had been Lynne’s friend on Facebook, that was the kind of dear child she was, but Lynne hadn’t had the heart to go in and see if Penny’s page had been taken down yet. Lynne collapsed in Demeter’s desk chair and stared at the computer. There were so many places for kids to hide things. How were parents supposed to win at this game?

She would check the dresser drawers, she decided, but would leave the computer alone for now. She would ask Al about the computer, maybe. He had to pull his weight in this.

Lynne slid open Demeter’s drawers. She was holding her breath as though she expected to see a nest of snakes in there. But all she found was a mess of very large clothes-overalls, jeans, T-shirts, and the hooded sweatshirts that made Demeter look like a hoodlum from Jamaica Plain instead of a nice girl from Nantucket. This was Lynne’s chance to surreptitiously remove them, but she was so glad not to have found anything worrisome in the drawers that she let the sweatshirts remain, and even resisted her urge to fold and straighten them. She closed the drawers.

Her search had turned up nothing. Nothing except the Fitzgerald.

Lynne was about to leave the room when she caught sight of the closet door. It was slightly ajar, which seemed like an invitation for her to open it and check inside. Lynne noticed how blank the door was, how blank the whole room was, really. There were no pictures of friends, no pictures of her or Al, or Mark or Billy, no trophies or awards or ribbons or framed certificates of achievement, no maps of places they’d visited, no posters of actors or rock stars. (Even Lynne, yes, straight Lynne Comstock, had had a poster of Lynyrd Skynyrd taped to her wall.)

Suddenly Demeter’s room seemed like the saddest place on earth.

Lynne took a step toward the closet.

“Mom?”

Lynne gasped.

“Jesus Christ,” she said to Demeter. “You scared the shit out of me.”

Demeter stared at her mother. Lynne wondered when the last time was that she had taken the Lord’s name in vain and sworn in the same sentence. College? She hadn’t always been such a straight arrow; she hadn’t always been such an upstanding citizen. She had listened to Lynyrd Skynyrd in the front seat of Beck Paulsen’s Mazda RX4. She had smoked Newports with Beck and drunk Miller beer from cans.

“What are you doing in here?” Demeter asked.

“Cleaning,” Lynne answered honestly. “It smelled awful. I took your sheets…” Lynne nodded at the naked bed.

“Yes, I see that.”

“I cleaned your bathroom, you’re welcome. I’ll return your linens to you by dinnertime, freshly laundered, you’re welcome.”

“Wasn’t this room locked?” Demeter asked.

“Yes, but…”

“How did you get in?”

“I popped the lock.”

“You popped the lock?”

“With a pin,” Lynne said. Apropos of nothing, she laughed. She had broken into her teenage daughter’s bedroom, and she had nothing to say in her own defense. She had put so much effort into cleaning that she had lost track of time. Now she was busted, as though she were the teenager and Demeter the parent.

“Get out,” Demeter said.

“Honey, really, I just needed to get in here to clean-”

“If you really need to get in here, you ask me,” Demeter said. “You don’t pop the lock with a pin while I’m at work. You’re like a common thief.”

“Thief?” Lynne said. “I didn’t take anything.”

“A spy, then,” Demeter said.

“Honey, I wasn’t spying. I told you, the smell-”

“I like the smell.”

“Your sheets needed to be changed.”

“What happened to my water glass?” Demeter asked.

“I emptied it. It’s in the dishwasher.”

“I don’t know what you’re doing in here!” Demeter’s voice took on the shrill edge of hysteria. She was still in her work boots-which were, naturally, tracking dirt and sand into the newly vacuumed room. She was clutching her backpack to her chest like a shield, just as she had done the other night when she got home from babysitting.

Clutching her backpack. Okay, Lynne wasn’t naive, she wasn’t in the wrong here, this was her house, she was the mother and Demeter was the child and something was going on with Demeter and Lynne wanted to know what it was.

“Do you have a Facebook page?” Lynne asked.

“What?” Demeter said. “No, I don’t.”

“I can check, you know.”

Demeter said, “Fine, check. I don’t have one.” Her tone of voice was both calm and bored. Facebook wasn’t the culprit.

“Let me see your phone.”

“What?”

“Your phone. Let me see it.”

“My phone?”

“Your phone.” Demeter had an iPhone 4S that Lynne had bought for her in the spring. Lynne had noticed that she kept a passcode lock on the phone. Now she wondered, Why would she keep a passcode lock unless there’s something she’s trying to hide?

Demeter pulled her phone out of the pocket of her cargo shorts and handed it to Lynne.

“Unlock it, please,” Lynne said.

Demeter unlocked it. “You’re acting like a psycho.”

“No,” Lynne said. “I’m acting like a parent. Finally.” She looked at the face of the phone. Apps-she knew that those colorful squares were apps, but she didn’t know what to do with them. She was acting like a clueless parent. She had a cell phone herself, but she kept it in her car and used it only when she was on the road or away from home. She didn’t know how to text. Zoe knew how to text, and Jordan knew how to text-the two of them had been texting buddies for years, that was how they communicated. But not Lynne. She was a clueless parent and a fuddy-duddy who didn’t text and couldn’t navigate her way around an iPhone. She handed the phone back to Demeter.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” Demeter asked.

Lynne sighed. She wasn’t getting anywhere. “Demeter, what’s going on with you?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what’s going on? Something is funny. Something is wrong.”

“I’m working,” Demeter said. “I spend all day on my knees weeding. If I’m very, very lucky, I get to water. Or deadhead.” She held up one hand and clutched at her backpack with the other. Her hand was blotched with purple stains. “Daylilies.”

She clutched the bag, clutched the bag. Lynne said, “I’d like you to open your bag, please.”

“What?” Demeter said. She tightened her grip on her bag, which only made Lynne more determined to see what was inside it. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Set the bag down and unzip it for me, please,” Lynne said.

“I suppose the cavity search is next,” Demeter said. “Do I need to call my lawyer?”

“Just do it,” Lynne said.

Demeter did not release her hold on the bag. “I can’t believe you’re doing this. What is wrong with you?”

“What is wrong with you?” Lynne said. Her voice sounded positively lethal; she felt herself losing her grip. She rarely got like this. If Al had been home, she would have ducked out of there already. She would have made herself a cup of chamomile tea and gotten into a cool bath, played some Mozart, read some poetry. “Put the bag down, please, and unzip it.”

Demeter did as she was told. The backpack gaped open. Lynne took a step forward and peered inside, as though she expected to find someone’s severed head in there. But all she saw was a flannel shirt. She rummaged a little deeper. Two bottles of water, one of them with a lime floating in it-more Zoe water-and another rotting banana. That was all.

Lynne extracted the banana. “Waste of a perfectly good banana,” she said.

“Call the fruit police,” Demeter said.

Lynne held the black, weeping banana. She was so relieved, she thought she might cry.

Demeter collapsed against the closet door; it closed with a sound like a gunshot.

“Mom,” she said.

“What?” Lynne said.

“Get out, please?”

“Yes,” Lynne said. “Okay.”

Lynne was so embarrassed by the incident in Demeter’s bedroom that she said nothing about it to Al. She laundered Demeter’s sheets and towels and left them in a neat pile outside her daughter’s bedroom door. She swore to herself that she wouldn’t use the pin to force entry again. Demeter was a seventeen-year-old girl. She needed her privacy.

On August 14, Lynne was working in her home office. She was listening to a Bruce Springsteen CD, drinking freshly brewed iced tea with mint. She and Al had a date to meet at Ladies Beach at four o’clock. They did this every August, right when Al realized that summer was almost over and he hadn’t taken any late-afternoon swims. And this year, because of all that had happened, they hadn’t gone to the beach even once. Jordan was gone, and Lynne had been afraid to call and inflict herself on Zoe.

Lynne was looking forward to the swim. Afterward she would try to convince Al to go to Dune for dinner.

Downstairs, the phone rang. Lynne ignored it. God knew, if she picked up every phone call that came in to the house, she would never get any work done. Because of all that had happened this summer, she was running behind. The answering machine picked up. The Castles had to be the last family in America that even still had an answering machine. Everyone else used automated voicemail. Lynne tried not to listen to the voice on the machine-if she was so keen to know who was calling, she told herself, then she should have just picked up the phone in the first place. But she listened anyway, just long enough to discern that the voice belonged to Zoe.

Zoe. It was Zoe, finally calling her back. Lynne sprang from her desk and rushed down the stairs to get the phone, but by the time she picked it up, she was talking to a dial tone. She was just about to call Zoe back when the phone rang in her office, and Lynne thought, Of course, Zoe would call my office phone next since she couldn’t reach me on the home phone. Lynne hurried up the stairs, calling out pointlessly, “I’m coming, hold on, here I come!” When she picked up the phone, she was out of breath. She was too old for this. But it was Zoe. At last! She couldn’t wait to talk to her.

“Hello?” she said.

“Lynne,” Al said. “I need you to sit down.”

Twenty minutes later Lynne and Al were meeting in the hot, unvented offices of Frog and Toad Landscaping with Kerry Trevor and a hysterical Demeter. It was difficult for the adults to talk about what had happened with Demeter making so much noise.

“Honey,” Lynne said. “You have to calm down.”

But Demeter was a volcano intent on erupting. She hadn’t emoted nearly this much after the accident or after Penny’s funeral, which was probably why she was such a mess now. All of that difficult stuff was surfacing.

“Actually, maybe Demeter should wait outside,” Kerry said.

Was that a good idea? Lynne wondered. At this point, she knew, Demeter was a flight risk. If she was left unsupervised, she might just get into her car and drive away. She might do something stupid.

“Jeanne will keep an eye on her,” Kerry said.

“Okay,” Lynne said. Jeanne, Kerry’s right-hand woman, had grown up in Brockton, where, she liked to tell people, she had earned her doctorate in badass.

As soon as Jeanne took Demeter by the arm and led her from the room, it was much quieter.

Lynne said, “Maybe you should start again at the beginning.”

“Demeter was caught trying to steal two bottles of vodka from a client’s house,” Kerry said. “She had a bottle in each hand; she was hurrying for the side door. The clients weren’t home, but a member of their staff caught her.”

“A member of the staff?” Lynne said.

“I have to tell you this in extreme confidence,” Kerry said. “The clients were the Allencasts.”

Lynne thought she might vomit in her lap.

“And the person who caught Demeter was their personal chef, Zoe Alistair.”

“We know Zoe,” Al said. “We’re close friends.”

“I realize that,” Kerry said. “And Zoe handled the situation sensitively. She called me right away. She said she had taken the bottles from Demeter and decided that she wasn’t going to tell the Allencasts. She said she would let the three of us handle it.”

Lynne thought about the phone call from Zoe. She had been calling to warn Lynne of what was coming. To let her know that her daughter-the girl who had survived-was a thief.

“Anybody else would probably have alerted the owners,” Kerry said. “And called the police.”

“Of course,” Al said.

“Now,” Kerry said, “I have more bad news.”

“Oh God,” Lynne said. The room was quiet for a second, and they could all hear Demeter sobbing on the other side of the door.

“I’ve had three separate complaints about missing bottles of alcohol from clients, which I dismissed because my crews never go inside the houses. However, when I spoke with Demeter’s crew members, they indicated that she enters clients’ homes all the time-most frequently to ‘use the facilities.’ My employee Nell, who worked closely with Demeter, told me that Demeter used the bathroom only when the clients weren’t home. I cross-checked the names of the clients who complained against the assignments of Demeter’s crew, and they all matched up.”

“So now you’re accusing my daughter of… what?” Lynne said.

“Honey,” Al said.

“I don’t think this stealing today was a onetime thing,” Kerry said. “I think it’s possible she’s been doing it all summer.”

“Stealing alcohol?” Lynne said. “But what for? I just don’t get it. What for? We don’t drink at home. Not a drop.”

“I think you’ll have to ask Demeter that,” Kerry said. “And I’m going to let you do that privately, because I know you’re good people and good parents. Demeter is finished working here, however, and I won’t be able to give her a reference.”

Kerry stood up and cleared his throat. He was wearing the standard-issue green Frog and Toad Landscaping T-shirt and a pair of khaki shorts. He was sunburned, and his hair was bleached-out blond. Lynne had always liked Kerry. She and Al sometimes saw him surfing at the South Shore after work. But what Lynne felt for Kerry now was anger and hatred, which was backward, she knew: she should be grateful that he wasn’t calling Ed Kapenash. Demeter had been stealing. She had been entering people’s homes as an employee of Frog and Toad and burgling them.

“I know Demeter has been through a lot,” Kerry said. “And you two as well.”

There was something that Lynne could agree with. “Yes,” she said. “Thank you.”

When they got home, all of them, at two o’clock that Tuesday afternoon, Lynne listened to the message from Zoe.

“Hi, Lynne, it’s Zoe. Listen, something happened at work just now, and I have to speak with you about it as soon as possible. Call me, please. On my cell.”

Lynne listened to the message again, then a third time. The first thing that struck her was that it was Zoe’s voice, and that she’d missed her. The second thing she noticed was that while the voice held urgency, it didn’t sound either angry or vindictive. This episode was not something Zoe had dreamed up to prove that Demeter was a bad person. To prove that the wrong girl had died.

Demeter was headed straight for her room, but Al stopped her. “Oh no, young lady,” he said. “You are going to sit right here”-he pointed to her usual seat at the dining room table-“and tell us what the hell this is all about.”

Lynne was glad for this. She needed Al’s help, even though she thought his tone sounded too harsh.

Demeter sat in the chair and dropped her face into her hands and bawled. Lynne fixed her a glass of ice water and, as a little treat, added a wheel of lime.

Lynne set the glass down on the table next to Demeter, and Al glowered at her. Demeter lifted her head and sucked the water down to the bottom, and Lynne realized that because of the lime, the drink looked like a cocktail. The roiling, nauseated feeling returned to Lynne’s stomach. She went over and turned up the air-conditioning a little, then sat down next to Demeter.

“Let’s start with the accident,” Al said. “Did you have a bottle of Jim Beam with you that night?”

“No,” Demeter said.

“Honey,” Lynne said. “We know the police found a nearly empty bottle of Jim Beam in your purse.”

“It was in my bag,” Demeter said, “but it wasn’t mine.”

“Whose was it?” Lynne asked.

“I don’t know,” Demeter said. “Some kid at the party gave it to me. I had a sip of it, and so did Jake and Hobby, but it wasn’t mine. I just ended up with it somehow. It was in my bag because I had a bag to put it in.”

“So you’re saying some kid at the party gave it to you,” Al said. “Some kid you didn’t know?”

“A kid from off-island,” Demeter said.

“So either you’re lying to us now or you lied that night to the police,” Al said. “Because you told Ed Kapenash that the bottle was yours and that you had bought it off-island.”

Really? Lynne thought. This was a detail that Al hadn’t shared with her. Bastard bastard bastard. Al and Ed and all those other bastards were part of this men’s club that discussed confidential matters and then decided how very little to pass along to their wives.

“I was lying to the police,” Demeter said. “I said I’d bought it so that I wouldn’t get anyone else in trouble.”

“This other kid from off-island, you mean?” Al said. “The one you didn’t even know? You lied to Ed Kapenash, Chief of the Nantucket Police, in order to protect some stranger from off-island?”

“I was in shock,” Demeter said.

“That is bullshit!” Al roared. It seemed to Lynne that the walls of the castle were quaking; she had never seen Al this angry. “You tell us the truth right now!” he demanded.

“I am telling you the truth,” Demeter said. She had shrunk, Lynne thought. She was losing weight; her face was getting back its beautiful contours. She was deeply tanned, and the blond streak in her hair was as light as Lynne had ever seen it. It seemed unfair that Demeter should appear so pretty, so genuinely pretty, on the very day that she was being revealed as a liar, and a thief, and possibly something even worse.

Al paced around the dining room table like a wild animal waiting to be fed. Who knew he could be like this?

“Why did you take two bottles of vodka from the Allencasts’ house?”

“I don’t know.”

“Tell me!”

“I don’t know!” Demeter cried. “I went in to use the bathroom, I saw the vodka in the bar and I just… took it. I guess I wanted to… I don’t know… act out.”

“ ‘Act out,’ ” Al said. “Act out? Did you know that Zoe was in the house? Did you think if she saw you, she’d let you get away with it?”

“No!” Demeter said. “I had no idea Zoe was there, obviously, or I never would have…”

“Say it.”

“Taken the vodka.”

“Stolen the vodka,” Al said. “You stole it, Demeter. You are a thief. A criminal.”

“Al,” Lynne said.

“Zoe Alistair is one of our oldest, dearest friends,” Al said. “Do you have any idea how mortifying it is for us that she was the one who caught you? She lost a child. Penny is dead. You, my dear, are alive. You got a second chance. And what have you done with it?”

“I didn’t know Zoe was there. I didn’t even know it was the Allencasts’ house. I’m sorry I embarrassed you.” She took a gulping breath. “I’m sorry I didn’t die in the accident instead of Penny.”

“Demeter!” Lynne said.

“No, it’s okay,” Demeter said, in a voice that was all of a sudden nearly serene. “I know that’s what people wish would have happened-that it was me instead of her.”

“No one wishes that, sweetheart,” Lynne said.

“Zoe does.”

“Not even Zoe.”

“Hobby and Jake do.”

“Demeter.”

“What were you going to do with the vodka once you took it?” Al asked. “Were you going to drink it?”

“No,” Demeter said.

“But you drank the night of the graduation party?”

“That night, yes, a little bit.”

“ ‘A little bit,’ ” Al repeated. “Your blood alcohol content was point one-four. That’s more than ‘a little bit,’ my dear.”

Really? Lynne thought. Another piece of secret information that Al and Ed Kapenash had kept from her!

“I drank that night because it was graduation,” Demeter said. “Everyone was drinking.”

“But not Penny?” Lynne said.

“No. Not Penny.”

“Kerry said he had complaints from three other clients about missing alcohol. He said he discounted them because his crews don’t go inside the homes. Then Nell, from your crew, informed him today that you, Demeter, do go inside, on a regular basis, when the clients aren’t at home, in order to ‘use the facilities.’ Is this true?”

“I’ve had problems with my stomach,” Demeter said. “What am I supposed to do? Take a shit on somebody’s beautifully manicured lawn?”

“Have you done this before?” Al asked. “Have you taken bottles of alcohol from houses before today?”

“No,” Demeter said. “This was the only time.” She started to cry. Lynne rose to fetch a box of tissues. “And I don’t know what came over me. It was like I was temporarily insane. I saw those two bottles, and I just… wanted them. I’ve been trying so hard to hold it together this summer. I mean, I could have spent all summer in my room, but I made a promise to Kerry, and I wanted to honor it. You guys have spent God knows how many thousands of dollars supporting me, and I wanted to earn some money on my own. I didn’t want to do the predictable thing and fall into a depression, but the fact of the matter is, I do think about the accident just about every second of every day, and I do think everyone would have been better off if I had died instead of Penny.” Demeter plucked a tissue out of the box and blotted her eyes. “I’m sorry about the vodka. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“So just to be clear, you’re telling me that you didn’t take bottles from any other homes?”

“No.”

“And you weren’t going to drink the vodka you stole? What the hell, Demeter? What were you going to do with it?”

“I don’t know,” Demeter said. “Give it away.”

“ ‘Give it away’?” Al said.

“Other kids drink, Dad,” Demeter said. “I guess I might have given it to Anders Peashway or Luke Browning or David Marcy. And then those guys would have been… I don’t know… grateful. They would have liked me a little better. Hung out with me, maybe.”

Lynne and Al were silent as Demeter sniffled. Lynne thought, She’s lonely. She’s so desperately lonely that she did this awful thing.

Al said, “Go to your room.”

Demeter rose.

Al said, “You’ve lost your job and your chance of ever procuring a reference from Kerry for another job. So starting tomorrow you’re coming to the dealership with me, and you’re going to do filing all day. You’ve lost your car, your phone, and your computer until the start of school. Is that understood?”

Demeter nodded. Lynne wondered if it was wise to cut her off socially when it was her loneliness that was the cause of this mess. But Lynne wasn’t brave enough to undermine Al’s authority.

Demeter said, “Can I still babysit for the Kingsleys if they call?”

Al pursed his lips. “Fine,” he said. “But your mother or I will drive you.”

“Okay,” Demeter said. Her eyes lit up with hope for a second, and Lynne thought, The Kingsleys? She would have guessed that Demeter would be finished with the Kingsleys after the last time. What was it she’d said? “It was goddamned fucking awful, if you must know.”

Demeter ascended the stairs to her room, and Al placed his two hands on Lynne’s shoulders, and Lynne felt grateful for that. The Castles were known for their solid marriage. For their united front, no matter the circumstances.

Al said, “I’m taking the rest of the day off. Let’s go for that swim.”

“Do you think it’s safe?” Lynne said. “Shouldn’t one of us stay here and keep an eye on her?” That, of course, was the problem with grounding your kids: you were essentially grounding yourself too.

“It’ll be fine,” Al said. “I have both sets of her car keys.”

“What about her phone? What about her computer?”

“I’ll collect them when we get back. Come on, I could really use it.”

Yes, Lynne could really use it as well. She would go change into her suit. She had the nagging feeling that there was something she had to do, something unpleasant. What was it? And then she remembered: she had to call Zoe. Call now to grovel and apologize and thank her. Lynne stood up, and her joints complained. She would call Zoe back tomorrow, she decided. When her head was clearer.

That night Lynne had a dream about Beck Paulsen. Very little happened in it; it was more a dream of ambience, set in 1976 in Moorestown, New Jersey, where Lynne grew up. Lynne’s father was a doctor; Lynne and her brothers and their parents lived in an enormous white center-entrance Colonial formally known as the George M. Haverstick House. The Comstocks were considered well off. The boys attended St. Joe’s Prep, but Lynne was sent to public school. She had had her bitter moments about this, but ultimately she would appreciate the diversity that public school offered. Beck Paulsen was from a different social stratum altogether. He was a bad kid, a druggie, he smoked marijuana, he wore shitkicker boots, he listened to Led Zeppelin, he worked at Arthur Treacher’s to make pocket money. Quite famously, he had bought a brown Mazda RX4 before he even had his license.

Lynne dated Beck the summer between her junior and senior years of high school, when she was the same age that Demeter was now. Lynne and her girlfriend Abby used to hang out at Arthur Treacher’s because it was halfway between their two houses and they could both bike there. They also both loved fish and chips, even what passed for fish and chips at Arthur Treacher’s. One night Beck invited them to stick around while he closed up the shop. Abby said no way and rode home; Lynne said no way but stayed. She and Beck made out that night in the Mazda, and that night led to other nights, all summer long. What could Lynne say? To her, Beck was an exotic. He wasn’t preppy and assholish like her brothers and their friends. He was mellow and kind. He was nearly always stoned, and that summer Lynne was nearly always stoned too. Beck drank Miller beer out of cans, most frequently when he was driving around with Lynne, to Maple Shade or the Cherry Hill Mall. Beck’s mother worked in Admitting at the same hospital where Lynne’s father was a thoracic surgeon.

In Lynne’s dream she and Beck were back in the Mazda again, summer air rushing through the open windows. They were driving up to Lake Nockamixon to go fishing. When Beck caught something, they were going to eat it. There was a Styrofoam cooler in the backseat that held a six-pack of Miller Genuine Draft, a package of hot-dog rolls, and a stick of butter.

Also in the back were two fishing poles. Beck had brought his father’s for Lynne to use. They were going to steal a canoe-or as Beck said, “borrow” one-and paddle to the good part of the lake. Lynne knew that all of this was wrong. She should be in Avalon for the weekend with Abby and her parents; she should be at home helping her mother prepare for her annual garden club cocktail party. But she was with Beck Paulsen, who had feathery dark hair like David Cassidy’s and was wearing a black Styx concert T-shirt with white sleeves and jeans and his shitkickers, even on this hot summer day. She was drinking and smoking dope and listening to Meat Loaf on WMMR. If her parents had seen her at that moment, they would have been appalled. But Lynne was happy doing what she was doing. She was happy.

Lynne snapped awake from her dream, and the good, hazy feeling evaporated, and she mourned its loss. She was back on Nantucket, lying in bed next to her husband of twenty-three years, Al Castle, and they would have to get up the next morning and deal with the debacle that had just landed in their lap. Please, couldn’t she go back to that dream? Then Lynne wondered if perhaps her seventeen-year-old self had materialized in her subconscious in order to offer her assistance.

Okay, seventeen-year-old Lynne Comstock-what should I do? she asked.

Seventeen-year-old Lynne smiled dopily. She was stoned. She had been stoned all summer, and her parents had never once suspected. It was a seventeen-year-old’s job to have secrets.

Demeter’s secrets had just been revealed to Al and Lynne in all their heinous splendor. Or had they?

Lynne looked at the clock next to her bed. It was ten past two. She thought back over all the things Demeter had said: “I saw the vodka in the bar and I just… took it.” “I was in shock.” “Other kids drink, Dad.” “I said I’d bought it so that I wouldn’t get anyone else in trouble.”

Lies, Lynne thought. All of it, lies.

Seventeen-year-old Lynne nodded. She agreed.

What did Lynne know? Demeter’s bedroom smelled, there were empty breath mint tins and sugarless gum wrappers in the bathroom trash, there had been a lime in the water next to her bed. She was reading F. Scott Fitzgerald. Maybe Lynne was reaching here, but had a more famous alcoholic ever lived? Her car smelled like breath mints. Ibuprofen that Demeter bought herself was in the medicine cabinet. Lynne had checked everywhere-in the trunk of her car, under the bed, in her dresser drawers, under the bathroom sink. But she hadn’t checked the closet. The smell. Demeter had leaned against the closet door, and the door had slammed shut. She had said that babysitting for the Kingsleys were awful, then she asked if she would be able to go back to the Kingsleys’. There had been a lime in the water next to her bed. When Lynne put a lime in Demeter’s water, it looked like a cocktail. There had been a lime in one of Demeter’s water bottles. Good God.

Lynne slipped out of bed. Calm down, she thought. She was tempted just to take a Lunesta and drift back to sleep. Beck Paulsen: where was he now? Was he anyplace worse than where she currently found herself?

She had sworn she would never use the pin to open Demeter’s door again, and yet she had put the pin right there on her nightstand. She crept down the hall to Demeter’s room. She should wake up Al. If this was going to be done, it should be done by both of them together. But something about this felt personal: Lynne to Demeter, mother to daughter. Was Lynne thinking of Zoe and Penny? Of course she was.

It looked as though Demeter’s bedroom light was off. Lynne put her ear to the door. Silence. She half expected to walk in and find the window open again, and Demeter’s bed empty.

She popped the lock. The sound was loud to Lynne’s ears, and she held her breath. Waited, waited… and then eased the door open.

Demeter was asleep on her back, snoring. Lynne tiptoed over to the bed. She was assaulted by the obvious memories of Demeter as a baby in her crib, the soft spot on her head palpitating as she worked her pacifier. There had never been a sweeter, softer baby. Then as a little girl in footy pajamas, in smocked nightgowns. A chunky early adolescent in long nightshirts, her toenails painted blue, a smear of chocolate around her mouth, swearing that yes, she had brushed her teeth, when she most certainly had not.

Childhood ended here.

Lynne lifted the water glass from Demeter’s nightstand and tasted it. The liquid burned her tongue and she spit it out, and the glass shook in her hand. She tasted it again, however, just to make sure. Ugh, awful! It was straight vodka or gin; she couldn’t tell which. Her eyes filled with tears. She held on to the glass and switched on the light, but Demeter didn’t wake up. That was fine, though. That was preferable.

Lynne opened the closet door.

There on the floor, where another girl would have lined up her shoes, were bottles and bottles of alcohol: Mount Gay rum, Patron tequila, Kahlua, Dewar’s, Finlandia vodka, and wine, sauvignon blanc and two bottles of Chateau Margaux, which even Lynne, as a teetotaler, knew was outrageously expensive. Lynne set down the glass on Demeter’s desk and stumbled back into the nether regions of the closet, where she found a black Hefty bag cinched at the top. Lynne dragged it out into the room. The clinking gave the contents away: dozens of empty bottles.

Fruit flies swarmed. The smell. Lynne gagged.

Demeter rolled over. “Mom?” she said.

Ted Field suggested a facility outside of Boston called Vendever.

“For how long?” Lynne asked.

“As long as it takes,” he said.

Lynne packed a bag for Demeter and dropped it off at the hospital. She reminded herself that her daughter was lucky. Many of the people who ended up at Vendever had only the clothes on their backs. Many of the people who ended up at Vendever didn’t have two loving parents who would take any steps necessary to help them get better.

An alcoholic at seventeen? Lynne knew that this happened. But for it to happen to them, the Castles?

Demeter had fought her fate at first. She had jumped out of bed, grabbed the Hefty bag from Lynne’s hands, and started swinging it at her. Lynne had a bruise on her ribs to prove it. Al had woken up and restrained Demeter. Then he’d called Ted Field, who had met them at the hospital.

Now, just a few hours before her departure, Demeter seemed accepting. Four weeks. She would go through detox and counseling. She would meet other kids who were dealing with dependency issues, and professionals who were trained to help such kids. Demeter lay in the white hospital bed looking so hopeless and despondent that Lynne couldn’t help herself.

She said, “Is there anything I can do for you before you go?”

There was such a long silence that Lynne figured her daughter was ignoring her. Then Demeter took a breath. “Yes,” she said. “I’d like to talk to Hobby.”

DEMETER AND HOBBY

He was hanging out with Claire on his mother’s back deck, and it was almost like regular summertime. His mother brought them cold ginger ales and a bowl of nacho chips with her homemade salsa that she’d made from the first of the Bartlett’s Farm field tomatoes. The ocean unfolded before them. Hobby was dying to jump in and let the cool waves cradle him, but he still had a cast on-just the one, on his left leg-and so there would be no ocean for him for a while. His leg itched as if the Devil himself were inside the cast. Hobby swore that as soon as the thing was off, he was going to climb down those stairs and jump in the water; he didn’t care if it was Christmas Day.

He thought maybe Claire would want to go down and have a swim, but she was nursing her ginger ale, holding the cold glass to her temple, and she hadn’t even tasted the salsa. She was either sick or nervous. They were planning on telling Zoe about the baby that night at dinner. Claire had been lying low, but in the past few days her phone had started blowing up: Annabel Wright, Winnie Potts, Joe, her boss from the Juice Bar. They’d all left messages urging her to call them back. Claire was convinced that everyone knew. She and her mother had had a huge fight because Rasha had told Sara Boule, and Sara Boule had most likely gossiped about it to every person who had been to Dr. Toomer’s office to get a cleaning over the past three weeks. Claire had wanted to wait to announce the news until after the ultrasound, once they knew the baby was healthy and whole. She had wanted to tell Zoe then, and Coach Horton of the field hockey team, who had just returned from France. Now, thanks to Rasha and Sara Boule, Zoe was in danger of finding out thirdhand, and what a terrible, cruel thing that would be. Hobby agreed that they couldn’t let that happen.

Penny, Hobby thought. Had Penny heard about Claire’s pregnancy from someone else? If she had, wouldn’t she have demanded an explanation from Hobby? Or would she have just flipped out and gone off the deep end?

They had to tell his mother, and pronto. He’d asked Zoe if Claire could stay for dinner, and Zoe had said yes, of course, and then she’d set about making an occasion out of it. They were having grilled lobster tails and French potato salad and corn on the cob with lime-cilantro butter, and crema calda with blackberries. Hobby knew that Zoe was excited about cooking for someone other than him and the Allencasts for a change. And she was relieved, perhaps, that Penny’s chair at the table wouldn’t sit empty tonight.

It was two o’clock now. Dinner was scheduled for seven. Hobby and Claire were left to marinate in their worry for five more hours. He had no idea what his mother’s reaction would be. She had always assured him that he could tell her anything. But he wasn’t sure; this was a pretty big “anything.” Zoe had gotten pregnant by accident eighteen years earlier, so by rights she should understand. But what if she didn’t? What if this news was the thing that finally broke her? Zoe had made no secret of the fact that despite Hobby’s injuries, she still expected great things from him. She expected him to get into an elite college and get a degree in architecture. He couldn’t forgo college so he could stay on Nantucket and work in construction and raise a child. He could not-could not-break his mother’s heart.

Would she be disappointed in him? Would she do the predictable thing and blame Claire? God, he hoped not. Claire was so nervous that she couldn’t eat at all, but Hobby reacted the opposite way. He guzzled down his ginger ale and shoveled in chip after chip loaded up with tangy salsa. His mother had added jalapeños to the salsa, which was something she used to do only when Penny was at a sleepover or away at camp. Penny didn’t eat spicy food; she worried it would damage her vocal cords. And so the fact that Zoe had added jalapeños to the salsa and presumably would be adding jalapeños to the salsa every time she made it from now on-since Penny was dead-further depressed Hobby and made him eat even faster. His manners, which were usually pretty decent, were appalling right now; he knew this, but he couldn’t help himself. Salsa dropped from his chip and stained his khaki shorts. He had crumbs down the front of his shirt. The speed with which he had polished off the ginger ale caused him to emit a loud and prolonged belch that smelled like onions. Claire shook her head at him. She was probably wondering why she had ever allowed herself to couple with such an artless boor. She was probably fearing for the way he would raise their unborn child.

“Excuse me,” he said.

Claire’s eyes looked weary. She was sick, or sick of him, or sick of their situation. They might have been married for forty years already.

“Let’s tell her now,” Claire said. “I can’t just sit here and wait.”

Hobby brushed the crumbs off the front of his shirt and sat up a little straighter. Yes! Tell her now and get it over with. Waiting was torture. He burped again, more quietly this time. He regretted having eaten so fast.

“Okay,” he said. “I think you’re right. You’re definitely right. We’ll tell her now.”

“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.

DEMETER

He 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?”

“That I saw them together.”

“What the fuck does that mean?” Hobby said. “You saw them together, so what? They used to be together all the time. They were friends. You know that.”

“I saw them together together,” Demeter said.

“What? You mean, like, kissing?”

“I mean like more than kissing.”

“For God’s sake, Meter, what?”

“I saw them… well, I saw them having sex. On the deck of your house. A couple of days before graduation.”

Hobby stared at her. His expression was inscrutable. This, Demeter decided, was the most frustrating thing about life: it was impossible to tell what other people were thinking.

“What do you mean, you saw them having sex?” Hobby said. “I don’t get that.”

Demeter’s hands were shaking. She needed a drink. But she was never going to drink again. Never again, for the rest of her life. That was impossible of course, but that was what Dr. Field and her parents had been trying to convince her of. In less than an hour she would be picked up and transported to Vendever, where counselors and doctors and addiction experts were going to teach her how to live without drinking.

“I saw them having sex,” she said. “I cut school. That Thursday.”

It had been a glorious day with a scrubbed-clean feel to the air and a pure June-blue sky. That morning Demeter had drunk the dregs of a bottle of Dewar’s, the last of her parents’ stash, and she had also taken a few swigs off the bottle of Jim Beam that she’d swiped from the Kingsleys’. But she needed more alcohol, another bottle at least, and the idea of stealing from someone she knew had lodged in her brain. It had been so easy to lift the bottle from the Kingsleys’ house. Demeter ran through a list of all the people she knew, or whom her parents knew, who drank, and Zoe was the most promising candidate. Zoe always drank wine, though Demeter also had memories of margarita parties at the Alistairs’, and cosmopolitans and martinis, and hot rum toddies in winter. She knew Zoe’s kitchen practically as well as her own, she knew that Zoe would be at work, and she knew that the sliding door facing the ocean would be unlocked.

So Demeter drove to the end of Miacomet Pond and parked her Escape. She told herself she was just going for a walk on the beach, no crime there. She trudged the two or three hundred yards to the Alistairs’ steps. She left her sandals on the beach and was unusually light and quick up the steps in her bare feet. She was dreaming of having a cold glass of white wine, and maybe a short nap in the sun on the chaise longue, before returning to school after lunch, just in time for English, which was the only class she could stand.

Demeter was just four or five steps from the top of the stairs when she heard the breathing and whispering and moaning. She didn’t quite know what to make of it; she never heard such noises in her own house. She listened. She thought, Turn around and leave, right now. Zoe had a man up there. Demeter had no reason to be surprised by this; Zoe was single and she was young, barely forty. But instead of turning around, Demeter crept upward. She had a feeling that she couldn’t identify. This was obviously something private that she was about to witness, something secret. She had never been privy to any kind of secret before, other than her own hideous secret about her drinking. She knew that other kids kept secrets and told secrets, among them Annabel Wright and Winnie Potts and Anders Peashway, kids who had a lot more going on in their lives than she did.

She kept going, up one step then the next until she could see clearly: Zoe and… Jordan. Zoe naked, straddling Jordan on the very same chaise that Demeter had been planning to use for her nap.

Demeter turned and flew down the stairs and, after grabbing her sandals, dashed across the sand toward her car. When she was safely out of view, she slowed down and tried to catch her breath and slow her galloping heart and her racing mind and her careening emotions.

Zoe and Jordan.

She was shocked, God, she felt as if she’d been electrocuted and was now vibrating and buzzing, but could she honestly say she was surprised? Zoe and Jordan. They were always together, always somehow aligned; they had seemed far more comfortable together than Jordan and Ava, even though Ava was Jordan’s wife and Jake’s mother. Everyone remarked about how Zoe and Jordan were such great friends. They were friends like Jerry and Elaine on Seinfeld, or like Beezus Quimby and Henry Huggins in the books Demeter had read growing up. Best friends: one boy and one girl. This kind of relationship was frequently portrayed in books and movies and on TV, but it never seemed to happen in real life-except in the case of Zoe and Jordan. But now that myth was dispelled. Their relationship was something else entirely.

“I was looking for booze,” Demeter explained to Hobby. “I knew I could get some at your house. So I walked down the beach and up the stairs, and I saw your mom and Jordan on the deck. And they were-”

Hobby held up a hand like a traffic cop. Demeter shut her mouth.

“Why?” he said.

Demeter wasn’t sure what he was asking. Why? Why was she looking for booze? Well, now he knew, now everyone knew: she was an alcoholic. Or did he mean, why were Zoe and Jordan together? That wasn’t something Demeter could answer.

“Why what?” she said.

“Why did you tell Penny?” he whispered.

Why did she tell Penny? She had asked herself this question half a million times: Why did I tell Penny? She must have known that Penny would be stunned; she must have known she would be hurt. Confused, sad, angry, disgusted. Yes, Demeter had known all of that. But the answer to why she had told Penny was that she had been unable not to tell Penny. The news was like a gold ingot in her hand, and for someone as emotionally impoverished as Demeter, it had been impossible not to squander it. The secret was valuable only if it could get her something she wanted, and what she had wanted, more than anything in the world, was Penny Alistair’s complete attention.

“I told her because I finally had something she didn’t. I had social currency.”

“ ‘Social currency,’ ” Hobby repeated.

“I knew she was going to be upset,” Demeter said. “But I thought I could help her work through it. That was what I wanted.” The words were so brutally honest that Demeter couldn’t believe she was actually uttering them. “My plan was to tell Penny the news and then be the one to help her deal with it. It was a secret that was going to bond us together.” She swallowed; her throat was dry and sore. “It was supposed to make us friends. Real friends.”

Hobby blew out a stream of air. He looked pale and sick. It occurred to Demeter that telling Hobby this news about his mother and Jordan might turn out to be a second disaster. Back in the dunes, with Penny, she had spoken with the self-righteous assurance that she was doing the correct and just thing by exposing the nefarious lies of the adults in their lives. Now, with Hobby, she was confessing only to her own transgressions. What had taken place between Zoe and Jordan was nobody’s business-not Penny’s, not Hobby’s, and certainly not Demeter’s.

“If I could take it back…,” she said.

“Well, yeah,” Hobby said. He was rubbing his forehead aggressively, as if willing his brain to work.

“Anyway, I wanted you to know that what happened with Penny was my fault. That was what I told her. She seemed cool with the news at first, like it was no big deal. But then, by the time we got back to the car, she was a mess.”

“ ‘A mess,’ ” Hobby said.

“I killed her,” Demeter said. “I might just as well have put a gun to her head and pulled the trigger.”

Hobby was quiet. Demeter thought he might try to say something to make her feel better, but he did nothing of the sort. So he was going to hold her responsible. He was very possibly going to report all of this back to Zoe, and then the whole world would hold her responsible for Penny Alistair’s death. But Demeter had concluded that telling Hobby was the only thing that would make her feel better. She could tell the story in group therapy at Vendever, but it wouldn’t have any meaning. Telling strangers would offer no relief from the insidious pressure that had been building inside her: I told Penny a horrible thing. I got in the middle of people’s personal affairs that had nothing to do with me. I am the reason Penny Alistair is dead. Me. If I had kept my mouth shut, Penny would still be alive.

Hobby struggled to his feet. Really? Demeter thought. He’s just going to leave? She wasn’t sure what she’d expected. Yelling, maybe. A scene. But there was a way-wasn’t there?-in which this was Zoe’s and Jordan’s fault. They, after all, were the ones who’d been lying and cheating. They were the ones who had crossed a line. They were adults-really good, cool, important, responsible adults, or so Demeter, and Hobby and Penny and Jake, had always been led to believe. And yet there they were on the deck, having sex, making those animal noises. Demeter hadn’t wandered into anyone’s bedroom. They were outside, practically in public. Demeter had wondered if perhaps she’d happened across a onetime thing. Maybe Jordan had stopped by to help Zoe change out her storm windows for screens, and they’d gotten to waxing nostalgic about graduation, and to talking about Penny and Jake and how much in love they were, and then one thing had led to another, and what Demeter had witnessed was like a shooting star that burned bright once, then faded away.

But Demeter didn’t think so. She’d glimpsed them only for a split second, just long enough to imprint in her mind Zoe’s bare back (with the white stripe of a tan line), and Jordan’s arms locked around her, and their movements and their sounds. It had seemed like they fit together perfectly in a way they might not have done if it were their first time. (Although what did Demeter know about sex? Really, what did she know?) And when she thought back on the way that Zoe and Jordan were together-their easy camaraderie, their inside jokes, the fact that they always sat next to each other, whether it be at a dinner table, at the beach, or in the ski lodge-she knew that this had been going on for a while, probably months, possibly even years. It was an industry of lies that they had produced. They had been lying not just to poor Ava Randolph but to everybody. Including their own children. Didn’t that make it Zoe and Jordan’s fault? Did Demeter have to take the blame just for repeating the awful truth?

Demeter wanted to initiate this debate with Hobby-and it would have to be here and now, while she was still around, while the topic was still hot and immediate-but she didn’t know how to broach it without making it seem like she was trying to pass the buck and deny the blame.

No, she thought. There would be no passing the buck or denying the blame. She was seventeen years old. That was old enough to accept responsibility for who she was and what she’d set in motion.

“I’m sorry,” she bleated.

Hobby shook his head violently, as if trying to dislodge something. “Yeah,” he said. “Me too.”

HOBBY

One thing at a time. Maybe before the accident he could have dealt with both Demeter’s shell-shocking news and telling Zoe about the baby, but he couldn’t do it now. His head was filled with white noise. Too much, too much.

His mother and Jordan. Whoa. He would have to think about that carefully.

If he’d had two good legs, he would have chosen to walk home, but the cast necessitated that he climb into the car with his mother, who was paging through an issue of Bon Appétit. She set the magazine down and looked at him.

“That go okay?” she asked.

“Not really.”

She regarded him for a second. He could feel her eyes, feel the questions hanging in the hot air of the car.

“Believe me,” he said, “you don’t want to know.”

Still she watched him. Hobby made a fist over and over again with his left hand. He wanted her to drive. He wanted the air-conditioning on full blast so he could cool down. He wanted to get back to Claire. But he couldn’t tell Claire about this; he couldn’t tell anyone. Demeter had just saddled him with a ridiculous burden. Did she feel better now? he wondered. He hoped so. He really fucking hoped so.

“Hobby?” Zoe said.

“Please drive,” Hobby said.

“I can handle it, you know,” Zoe said. “If you want to tell me something, if you want to talk this out with me, I can handle it.”

“You’ve handled enough,” Hobby said. He felt a surge of pure, vermilion anger at Demeter. She had used his mother’s secret as social currency, to bond with Penny, to try and make them real friends, but what had it cost her? Penny had lost her life, Zoe had lost her daughter, Hobby had lost his twin sister and the agility and quickness and coordination that had been his natural gifts. Demeter had lost nothing. Sure, she might feel as if she were losing something because she was being carted away to Vendever, but that was destruction by her own hand. Demeter had drunk and stolen and drunk some more because she couldn’t handle the truth: she had caused the accident.

But what was up with his mother and Jordan, anyway? Would his mother do that, sleep with Jordan while he was married to Ava, who was her friend too? Was his mother lonely and desperate enough to do that, and if she was, what did that say about her? Was she in love with Jordan? Of course she was in love with him. God, it seemed so obvious to Hobby right at that second that it was painful for him to think about. The phone calls and the texting and the way Zoe was always happier when Jordan was around, the way she made special food for him and he made such a big deal about how delicious everything was, and the way they liked the same music and had the same politics. If a certain Springsteen song came on over the car radio, Zoe would call Jordan’s cell phone and play a snippet into his voicemail, no words or explanation needed. When Barack Obama was elected President, the first person to call Zoe was Jordan: before midnight on November 4, 2008, they spent more than an hour talking on the phone together, as giddy as kids. “Do you miss Jordan?” Hobby had asked his mother a few weeks ago. “Yes,” she’d said. “Yes I do, actually. I miss him very much.” And then he’d heard her crying that night and thought she must be crying about Penny. He wondered now what it was like for his mother to have Jordan so far away; he would have liked to ask her, but at that moment he realized he didn’t want to know his mother’s innermost thoughts. He didn’t want to know about her sex life or her heart’s secrets. He wanted her to be his mother. Although of course he also wanted her to be happy. Jordan Randolph certainly made her happy. So did he want Zoe to be with Jordan? He wasn’t sure. His brain wasn’t working correctly, goddammit. He couldn’t make sense of any of this.

“Just drive,” he said to his mother again. “Please.”

Zoe started the car, and the air-conditioning kicked in. They backed out of the parking spot, and Hobby felt marginally better with the movement.

“Did you see Lynne on your way out?” Zoe asked.

“No,” he lied. He had seen Lynne standing over by the vending machines, talking to Percy Simons, who served on the Board of Selectmen with Al Castle, but he’d walked right past them.

“I wonder how Demeter is getting to Vendever,” Zoe said.

Hobby shrugged. He imagined just coming out with it: “Demeter told Penny that she saw you and Jordan having sex. And that was the thing that did it, I guess.”

That really might have been the thing that did it, too, he thought. Penny had been so close to their mother. Penny told Zoe everything, and it would have come as a devastating shock that the river didn’t flow both ways. Penny had always been happy that Zoe didn’t date; she wanted her all to herself, whereas Hobby had always worried that their mother was lonely. But she had never seemed lonely when Jordan was around.

Then Hobby remembered the journal. Penny had kept nothing private from Zoe except her close relationship with Ava Randolph. So it was a double whammy: not only had Zoe betrayed Penny, she had also betrayed Ava, who was Penny’s friend and confidante.

This might have been what drove Penny to do what she did. But it could just as easily have been the knowledge of Jake’s kissing and touching Winnie Potts in the Pottses’ basement after the cast party. Or it could have been the whispered news that Hobby had gotten Claire Buckley pregnant and they had scheduled an abortion.

The whole world had secrets, Hobby thought. Everyone was fallible. Everyone. Zoe Alistair, Jordan Randolph, Ava Randolph, Al and Lynne Castle-all fallible. Penny would have hated that answer. She’d been tethered to this world only by her belief in the people around her. If she’d somehow lost that belief, if the people she loved and trusted the most had turned out not to be who she thought they were-yes, Hobby could see how she could have just floated away.

Which was exactly what she’d done.

It had been her choice. Penny herself was to blame. She had caused the accident. She had killed herself.

“Listen,” she’d said to him. “I’m going now.”

Hobby felt tears running down his face. He wiped at them, and this immediately attracted his mother’s attention.

“Honey,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

“Claire’s pregnant,” he said.

PART THREE

September

ZOE

The day before school started, Zoe took Hobby to get his final cast off. They had spent an absurd amount of time at the hospital over the past three months, and now, with Claire having the baby, there would be even more hospital time in front of them. But that would be good, happy hospital time, just as getting the cast off was good. Hobby sat on the examining table, all six foot six of him, and Ted Field got out his Sawzall and cut the plaster into pieces. Hobby’s leg underneath was pale and shrunken, which only emphasized how brown and strong his other leg was. He looked like a doll that had been cobbled together out of mismatched parts.

Hobby dug at his newly exposed leg with his fingernails. “It doesn’t even itch,” he said, “but I’ve been dying to scratch it for months.”

Ted Field laughed. Zoe saw the humor too, but she felt tears rise. The final cast. She thought, Thank God you’re alive.

That afternoon, at home, Hobby slowly made his way down the steps to the beach and went for a swim in the ocean. Zoe watched him from the deck. He waved. She waved back.

Claire came for dinner. She did that so often these days that Zoe saw no point in getting rid of the third chair at the round outdoor table. It would always be Penny’s chair, but at least now there was someone else there to occupy it.

Claire was starting to show. There was a swell at her belly, and her breasts were full to bursting, and her skin was clear, and her hair had shine. Her fingernails were long for the first time in her life-playing field hockey and basketball and lacrosse, she’d always had to clip them-and Zoe took her to R. J. Miller for a manicure. Someone in the salon who didn’t know them asked if they were mother and daughter.

Zoe froze. Mother and daughter. She didn’t know how to answer that question.

Claire piped up, “I’m her son’s girlfriend.”

Both Zoe and Rasha Buckley went with Claire and Hobby to the ultrasound appointment. The four of them saw the shadowy, ghostlike image of the baby floating on the screen, and Zoe was overwhelmed with emotion, thinking back to her own ultrasound eighteen years earlier: the moment she had learned she was carrying twins. Hobson senior had whooped like a rodeo hand, as if he’d hit for a hundred grand on the penny slots. Stick a little something in, get back something priceless.

Claire and Hobby had decided not to ask the sex of the baby, but from the picture on the screen, there was no doubt.

“Oh,” Claire said. “It’s a boy.”

“Look at that equipment!” Hobby said.

Claire was due in February The plan was for her to keep up with her schoolwork at home until the baby was six or eight weeks old, and then go back to school for the end of her senior year. She and Hobby were both going to apply to colleges-and the next fall, when the baby was seven months old, Zoe and Rasha would take over. Zoe would have the baby for three days a week, and Rasha for four. Zoe would turn Penny’s room into a nursery. She would become a mother again. She couldn’t lie: she had been hoping and praying that the baby was a girl. She had been thinking it might be another Penny, a Penny reborn, reincarnated, returned to her in the form of this baby. But that was Zoe’s delusion, her false assumption, her pointless hope.

The baby was a boy.

“A boy,” Rasha said with equanimity.

Zoe wasn’t ready to speak yet, though she could feel the others waiting for her to chime in. She studied the image on the screen: a baby, a real, live, human baby. If the accident had never happened, if Penny were still alive and Hobby were still whole and he had told her that he’d gotten Claire pregnant, Zoe would have advised her to have an abortion. But now, looking at the screen, at the baby’s tiny toes and his thumb in his mouth, she marveled that her former self could have dismissed the wonder of life so hastily.

“A baby boy,” she said.

“We decided that if it was a boy, we’d name him Hobson,” Hobby said. “Hobson the third. It’s like the name of a king.”

Zoe let out a soft cry.

The day after Hobby got his cast removed, Zoe dropped him off at school. The first day of senior year, a scant three months after the last day of his junior year, and yet now his world was completely different.

“Thanks, Mom,” Hobby said. He wrestled with his backpack and the single crutch that he still needed for walking. “I promise I’ll get my license soon.”

“I would be just as happy if you never learned to drive at all,” Zoe said.

“I know,” Hobby said. He patted her knee. “But it’d be a little weird, you driving me and my baby around.”

Zoe smiled and nodded. She was short on words. Today was one of those days that she had been dreading; she hadn’t slept at all the night before. Zoe watched the other kids filing into the school, the girls all brushed out and made up, dressed carefully in capri pants and cute tops. They congregated in groups, shrieked, giggled, talked a million miles an hour. There was that palpable energy in the air, the buzz that surrounded something’s starting. If things had been different, if Penny had been alive and Jake and Jordan had been here, this day would have been one to celebrate rather than one to survive. Penny had always loved the start of school, the fresh notebooks and sharpened pencils, the new pink erasers, the unopened books.

She was dead. In the ground.

Zoe watched Hobby make his way to the entrance. He was mobbed by people. Of course. Zoe didn’t even recognize some of the kids, but all of them wanted to high-five Hobby, the sports hero who was a sports hero no longer, who was something bigger and more important now. He had cheated death. He had survived.

Zoe waited until Hobby had disappeared through the front doors of the school, then she drove off. She wanted to do something: go home and make a soufflé, or take a spinning class, or rummage through her desk drawers for the unsmoked joint that her catering client Jonesy Vick, a graying, ponytailed record producer, had given her at the end of a particularly debauched dinner party. She hadn’t smoked dope in years, but something about the thought appealed to her today-get high, put on one of her bootleg Dead tapes, stare at the ocean.

But really, Zoe, she thought.

She decided she would drive to Cisco Beach to see the white cross. She had been doing this more and more often lately. She drove to the cross and thought about Penny, and sometimes she hummed “Ave Maria.” It made her feel better. It was, she supposed, a little like a prayer.

Zoe Alistair praying, she thought. And she laughed, because who would ever have believed it?

It was September 4, an absolutely perfect blue morning, warm but not hot and sticky, as the last half of August had been. Zoe drove with the car windows down, her left elbow poking out into the sun. Now that Hobby was back at school, she could start catering again, get her business up and running before the holidays. Football started next week. Zoe had notions of calling Al and Lynne and inviting them over, and she could ask Rasha and Claire, too, and she could make clam chowder. Maybe she would go up to Coatue one afternoon and harvest the clams herself.

She thought about dragging her ancient clam rake (bought at a yard sale during her first week on the island, because she had believed then that every real Nantucketer should own a clam rake) through the soft, marshy sand of the low-tide shallows on Monomoy Beach, coming up with a handful of cherrystones at a time. It never got old; it was always as exciting as panning for gold and finding nuggets in her sieve. She would take two or three dozen clams home and shuck them herself, then she’d sauté a diced Vidalia onion in half a stick of butter. She’d add the clams, some fresh Bartlett’s corn, fish stock, white wine, fresh thyme, and heavy cream, and an hour later she’d have a pot of chowder. She and Hobson senior had fantasized about just this kind of sustainable cooking, about owning cows and pigs, and growing herbs and carrots and baby lettuces, and running a farm-to-table restaurant. Making clam chowder, she realized, was probably as close as she was ever going to get to that dream, but that was okay.

As she approached the end of Hummock Pond Road, she experienced the particular floaty feeling that she’d been having recently whenever she came here, as though she were levitating. She wasn’t sure if it was a response to seeing the white arms of the cross or if it was her imagining what Penny had felt in the final seconds of her life. The speed, the lift, the flight.

Zoe saw the arms of the cross bisecting the brilliant blue of the sky. The visual effect was no less majestic than that inspired by the Cristo Redentor, overlooking Rio de Janeiro. But then something else caught Zoe’s eye: a familiar car, a Land Rover, and a man leaning against it.

Zoe hit her brakes. Her legs were liquid, threatening to dissolve. She felt panic, then euphoria, then panic again. She narrowed her eyes, certain she was mistaken. She wouldn’t let herself believe it.

She pulled up next to the car. The man turned.

Jordan.

Zoe had an urge to do what Penny had done on that terrible night in June: hit the gas and keep going. The car would crash, she would die, but so what? Anything was preferable to experiencing the overwhelming fact of Jordan, here. It was Jordan, right?

He walked toward her car. She bent her head forward and pressed her fingertips into her eyes.

She thought, My God, what do I do?

He reached in through her open window and circled his fingers around her wrist and gently pulled her hand away from her face.

“Hey,” he said. “I was wondering if you ever came here.”

His voice. She couldn’t stand it. She was going to collapse, she was going to crumble. She loved him. She had tried to forget the love. She had tried to shrink it with the power of her mind until it was small enough to tuck away. She had tried to focus on other things-Hobby, Claire, the baby, her cooking. She had tried to tell herself that life was long and she was young and she would find someone else. She tried to convince herself that by leaving, Jordan had done them both a favor.

“Zoe,” he said.

She turned her face and bravely took in the sight of him. The blue eyes that she had first noticed on Fathers’ Night at the Children’s House. Did she want to come do puzzles with him? The lips she had first kissed in the room at the Charlotte Inn on Martha’s Vineyard. What they had done was wrong, there were no excuses, but Zoe could at least say she had done the wrong thing for the right reason. She had done it for love.

“Are you real?” Zoe asked. So many strange things had happened already this summer that it was not impossible that she was now hallucinating. Her mind so desperately craved Jordan that she had conjured him. She thought, Why didn’t you call me or email me or text me? Why didn’t you tell me you were coming home? Why didn’t you warn me? But she knew Jordan, and therefore she knew that he had been too afraid to call. He would have wanted to see in her person, so he could tell her whatever he had to tell her face to face. He’d come back because there was a problem at the paper, or he’d come back because he missed her, or he’d come back because he and Ava had patched up the marriage and they were moving permanently to Australia.

“I’m real,” he said. He still held her by the wrist, and with his other hand he reached out to wipe away her tears.

JORDAN

He got the words out as quickly as he could. He was a journalist to his core. Report the facts.

“I came back. Jake came back. Ava stayed behind. We’re divorcing. She’s adopting a baby. I love you, Zoe. I love you.”

JAKE

He skipped the first week of school. This was surprising. All he’d wanted was to leave Australia and get home. Together his parents had jumped through all kinds of hoops to get him home in time, and yet when the morning of the first day arrived, he found himself unable to go. He worried that his father might have been right after all; maybe he should have stayed in Fremantle and finished up at the American School there. Because the thought of returning to the halls of Nantucket High School without Penny spooked him. He had been many things-an honors student, president of the Student Council, editor of the newspaper, star of the annual musical-but none of these things mattered or made sense without Penny. It was his senior year, he had to endure it, he didn’t have a choice, and yet what he kept thinking was, Why bother?

What he thought was that there would be memories of Penny everywhere. Every single kid at that school would know about his loss. He would have to face people like Winnie Potts and Annabel Wright and Anders Peashway. He would have to face Hobby.

Australia, he thought, would be better. Anonymity and loneliness would be better.

To his father, he punted. “I don’t know how to explain it,” he said. “I’m just not ready.”

“They’re expecting you,” Jordan said. “I brought you all the way home for this. You told your mother this was the only thing you wanted.”

“I know. I’m going to do it. Just not yet.”

“I’ll give you a week,” Jordan said. “One week. Then you go. Am I understood?”

“You are understood,” Jake said.

He went to the cemetery and sat by Penny’s grave. As he’d predicted, grass had grown in over the rich, dark soil. Her headstone had been erected: Penelope Caroline Alistair. March 8, 1995-June 17, 2012. Beloved daughter, sister, friend.

Headstones, Jake decided, were stupid and pointless. They told you nothing. When you looked at this headstone, you didn’t know that Penny had bluebell eyes or that she had perfect pitch or that her favorite word in French was parapluie. You didn’t know that her favorite color was lavender or that she wore flip-flops right up until Christmas because shoes made her feet feel trapped, or that she’d had her first orgasm on the catwalk of the auditorium their sophomore year, during a break in a rehearsal for Guys and Dolls.

Jake sat at Penny’s grave and thought about how, in many ways, Australia had been like a dream-Hawk and the ferals around the bonfire and the gurgling fountain in the backyard and his half-Aboriginal cousins and his mother’s happily dousing her fish and chips with vinegar and ogling the statue of Bon Scott. Had any of that been real? Real enough, he supposed, because his mother had stayed behind. She was keeping the Ute and the rental house on Charles Street, and she was adopting a baby girl from China. She and his father were getting divorced. It was weird to think about, his parents’ being divorced; they had been miserable together, but the thought of their splitting hadn’t seemed feasible. But his parents had been cool and unified in their decision; this would be better for everyone, and Jake would go back and visit Ava at Christmas.

Jake had learned something about love just from saying good-bye to Ava at the Perth airport. He’d learned that when you loved someone purely enough, all you wanted was for that person to be happy. Jake knew that his mother was making a tremendous sacrifice in letting him go home. She wanted him to be happy.

There were things about being back on Nantucket that Jake loved: the familiar streets of downtown, the Bean (where he got a cup of American coffee), the flag snapping at Caton Circle, the peppermint stick of the Sankaty lighthouse, the offices of the Nantucket Standard, which smelled familiarly of ink and dusty paper. The Jeep was totaled, and there wouldn’t be another car for Jake, so he’d been riding his bicycle. He’d biked past the Alistair house the day before. Zoe’s car was in the driveway and the front door was open and Jake could hear music playing and he remembered all the times he’d driven up to the house and heard Penny singing inside. Sometimes she sang scales or vocal exercises (“Red leather, yellow leather!”), but other times it was “Fee” by Phish (“In the cool shade of the banana tree…”), or Motown (“Stop! In the Name of Love”), or something folksy, like “If I Had a Hammer,” which was the song she was singing at age eight when Mrs. Yurick first discovered her voice. The thing Jake always thought when he heard Penny singing was that he could listen to her forever, and it would always feel like a privilege.

It had been a privilege. That was painfully obvious now.

The week went by, then the weekend. Jordan had gone back to work at the paper, and he came home with two pieces of startling news: first, he told Jake that Demeter Castle was spending thirty days in a facility off-island where she was being treated for alcoholism. Then, two days later, he came home to say that Hobby had gotten Claire Buckley pregnant, and the two of them were having a baby in March.

Jake accepted these bulletins with close-lipped, wide-eyed wonder. He’d been away for less than two months: was it really possible that things could have changed so dramatically in his absence?

On Monday Jake had to go to school. That was the deal.

“I’ll drop you off,” Jordan said.

“I’ll ride my bike,” Jake said.

“Jake.”

“I’m serious. I’ll ride my bike. I’ll be fine.”

“Hey,” Jordan said. He clapped Jake’s shoulder, and Jake thought, Oh no, not the shoulder thing again. “I know you’ll be fine,” Jordan told him.

He wore a pair of the jeans that Penny had written on, and he wore the sneakers that Penny had written on. His father regarded the jeans and the shoes with suspicion, and Jake saw his point and thought about changing into something else, but he couldn’t make himself do it. He wanted to wear Penny + Jake 4ever because his reality would, in some way known only to his heart, always be Penny + Jake 4ever, even when he was an old man, married to someone else for decades, with children and grandchildren. He decided it was better just to announce this, as if he were a walking billboard, than to hide it away.

He locked his bike at the rack in front of the school. Kids were clustered together, he could hear them talking, and as he swung his backpack over his shoulder and headed for the front door, he heard the conversations stall, then quiet down, then completely stop. He was wearing a pair of his father’s sunglasses, Ray-Ban Wayfarers, so he looked like Tom Cruise or some other old-time movie star, and he figured it probably took people a few minutes to realize it was him. He didn’t look at anyone directly. He just wanted to get inside, see Mrs. Hanson in the front office, get his locker assignment and his class schedule, and go to school.

He was about ten steps from the front door when he heard a shriek.

“Jake?”

He turned, despite the time he had put in at home rehearsing not reacting to this kind of thing. It was Winnie Potts. Of course. She’d straightened her brown curly hair, and it had blond highlights now. She was wearing a white top that pushed her boobs up and out. She looked older and sexier. It was her senior year, and Penny Alistair was no longer an obstacle to Winnie’s goal of being the Queen Bee of Nantucket High School. Jake thought about how high school was two things. It was school-he would learn calculus and read Macbeth and The Canterbury Tales-but it was also a social universe with its own rules and hierarchy. How he would have loved to get a hall pass from this second aspect, how he would have relished just being able to go inside and learn and then, at the end of the day, go home, eat pizza with his dad, talk about current events, read his assignments, and go to bed!

But this just wasn’t possible.

“Hey, Winnie,” he said.

“Oh. My. God!” she said. “I thought you were never coming back. I thought you’d moved away for good. I mean, you moved to Australia, right?”

“I did, sort of,” he said. “But we’re back now.”

She crushed him in a bear hug that she executed with her elbow and her bosom. “I. Am. So. Psyched. You’re. Back.” She pulled away and eyeballed him. “Are you doing okay?”

“Sort of, yeah,” he said, though already he felt his eyes burning, and he was grateful for the sunglasses.

“So you’re still pretty hung up, then?” Winnie said. She pulled away and sniffed. “I see you’re wearing the jeans.”

Still pretty hung up, Jake thought. Well, Penny hadn’t been dead for even three months yet. Maybe Winnie had forgotten about her, maybe she had come to terms with the accident, maybe Winnie, like so many other teenagers, had been cursed, or blessed, with a short attention span. She had been saddened by Penny’s death, but it was old news now, and she was moving on.

Jake pulled away from Winnie, but she didn’t seem to notice. She whipped out her phone and began madly texting. Probably broadcasting the news of his return. In ten seconds everyone would know.

There was a song that Zoe used to play on the cassette deck of her Karmann Ghia called “Uncle John’s Band,” and the first line went like this: Well the first days are the hardest days, don’t you worry any more. Jake sang this to himself as he moved through the halls, fielding amazed and inquisitive Hey man’s from his classmates. Some kids’ names he’d completely forgotten. He tried to focus on the school part of school-the Calc, the Physics, the A.P. European History. The teachers, at least, did their best to act professional and nonchalant-or possibly they really were professional and nonchalant. They, after all, were adults, with mortgages and children, and aging parents, and water heaters that needed replacing. They were nice people and good citizens; they all knew that Penny had died and that Penny had been Jake’s girlfriend, and maybe they even knew that Jake had spent the summer/winter in Australia, but they didn’t feel inclined to take Jake’s emotional temperature-they were too busy and consumed with their own worries to meddle much in others’ lives-and for that, Jake was grateful.

On his way from European History to his elective, Personal Narrative, which was a sort of creative writing class (and one he was greatly looking forward to), he felt a hand on his shoulder. He feared for an instant that his father had popped into school to check on him, but when he turned, he saw the principal, Dr. Major.

“Jake,” Dr. Major said. “Welcome back.”

“Thanks, Dr. Major,” Jake said.

Dr, Major smiled at Jake kindly. His blue eyes watered behind his glasses. Was he going to cry? Dr. Major was known around school as the ultimate good guy, sometimes too good a guy to do some of the more difficult tasks his job required. Kids who got suspended often got their sentences commuted by Dr. Major. He believed that kids, more than anything, needed adults to listen to them. This openhearted approach worked out for the most part; the students of Nantucket High School felt protective of Dr. Major and generally tried not to let him down.

“How was your trip?” Dr. Major asked.

“It was weird,” Jake said.

Dr. Major tilted his head. The head tilt was his signature gesture, a cue to let kids know he was listening. Jake didn’t want to be the recipient of Dr. Major’s head tilt. Kids were streaming past them like water around two rocks. This wasn’t the time or the place for Jake to detail the oddness of his time in Australia.

“I can’t explain it,” Jake said. “Not right now, anyway.”

“Fair enough,” Dr. Major said. “Well, I have to say, this school isn’t the same without Penelope.”

Jake nodded once, sharply. “Right. I know.”

Dr. Major clapped Jake’s shoulder again. “I just wanted to tell you…” Here he trailed off, and his eyes filled, and Jake had to look away rather than see the man cry. “… If you ever need a place to take a moment away from everyone, you’re welcome to sit in my office. As you know, I’m rarely there.”

Yes, Jake knew this; everyone knew this. Dr. Major roamed the school, no crevice or alcove was safe or private. Dr. Major was likely to appear out of nowhere. “Going about my rounds,” he called it. He stopped in to the junior Spanish class and learned how to conjugate irregular verbs, and he entered the art room and asked for a demonstration of the pottery wheel. He didn’t like to sit behind his desk, he said. Four or five times a day, Mrs. Hanson’s voice would come over the intercom, paging him for a phone call.

“Thank you,” Jake said. It was nice of Dr. Major to offer up his office for what amounted to Jake’s own personal crying room. “That’s very nice.”

Dr. Major smiled. His eyes were brimming, but no tears fell, thank God. “We’re all rooting for you,” he said. “And we’re glad to have you back.”

At lunchtime, Jake wasn’t sure what to do. Seniors were allowed to go off-property for lunch; it was one of the things he and Penny had been looking forward to. They had talked about how they would hit the burger shack at Surfside Beach in September while it was still warm, how they would go into town to the Brotherhood on Fridays in the winter, how they would sneak back to Penny’s house on days when Zoe was working. It was going to be forty-five minutes of daily bliss.

But what now?

There wouldn’t be a senior in sight in the cafeteria. That might be okay, Jake would be able to eat alone, none of the underclassmen would be brave enough to approach him. But the younger kids would talk about him, and the things they said would be half true and half false, and Jake didn’t feel like cutting the kind of tragic figure who sat alone and pretended to ignore the fact that everyone was discussing him. He needed to leave the building, but having only his bike left him few options. If he biked all the way home, he would have time only to drink a glass of water before he had to turn around and come right back. He could bike to the beach, he supposed, but he was fairly certain that Winnie Potts and Annabel Wright and company would all be there, and he sure as shit didn’t want to run into them. Or anyone. He needed forty-five minutes of quiet, of alone time, and it did occur to him that he could take Dr. Major up on the offer of his office, but even then, he worried that Mrs. Hanson or Mrs. Coffin or one of the other secretaries might fuss over him.

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.

NANTUCKET

The 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.

The game had yet to begin, so the crowd was still milling around: people greeted one another, found seats in the bleachers, and bought blocks of raffle tickets for the fifty-fifty, which supported the Nantucket Boosters. The Atheneum librarian, Beatrice McKenzie, and her husband, Paul, who had played for the Whalers in 1965, sat in the front row, just off the handicap ramp.

What many of us didn’t know was that Jordan Randolph and his son, Jake, were walking in the back entrance. Word had reached nearly all of us that Jordan Randolph had returned from Australia with Jake but without Ava. No one was surprised by this. We all understood that Ava came from and belonged to a city, a country, and a continent on the other side of the world. A few of us had heard that Ava was adopting a baby girl from China, which we agreed was a wonderful thing.

Jordan and Jake paid their five-dollar entrance fee and walked down the hill to the northwest corner of the playing field. We thought they might make their way over to the bleachers, but they decided to hang on the fence. We remembered that Jordan had always been a fence-hanger. He liked to watch every down of the game, reporter-at-heart that he was, but Jake used to sit in the bleachers with Penny. Penny, unlike her scantily clad counterparts in the stands tonight, always wore her brother’s navy blue away jersey with Alistair printed in white letters across the back, above Hobby’s number, which was 11. It was hard for us to think about Penny in that jersey, and it must have been even harder for Jake to think about it. We understood why he was keeping his distance.

Standing together, Jordan and Jake Randolph looked remarkably alike. We were glad to have Jordan back at the helm of our newspaper, not only because some of us felt that the standards of the newspaper had slipped (the content of lesser quality, perhaps, and the editing not as sharp, a few more corrections appearing in the following week’s editions than we were used to seeing) but also because, for as long as any of us could remember, a Randolph had headed the Standard. We hoped we were right in assuming that Jake Randolph-despite all he’d been through in the past few months-would resume his position as editor of Veritas, the student newspaper, then go on to major in journalism in college, and come back and work alongside his father, and eventually take over the legacy.

But we were all of us finished with trying to predict the future.

The front center bleacher had been roped off as “reserved,” and we had our suspicions about why. Sure enough, a few minutes before the team took to the field, a hush came over the crowd, and Hobby Alistair, Zoe Alistair, and a pregnant Claire Buckley walked in single file in front of the stands, up the stairs, and into those reserved seats. The three of them looked good. Hobby loped along, barely limping, Zoe held her head up; her hair was back to its artful shaggy style, the tips recently having been highlighted cherry-cola red. But it was Claire Buckley who stole the show. For the first time, possibly ever, her hair was down, flowing long over her shoulders, and the front of her sweater was filled out in a becoming way, and below her full breasts was a discreet swell.

We all wanted to comment on the three of them-how strong they looked, how luminous, and most of all, how unified. We wanted to comment on the mysterious aspects of life, those things almost beyond language, such as how it would feel to lose your seventeen-year-old daughter, or what it had been like for Hobby to spend nine days suspended in the netherworld of a coma, or how poetic and right it was that Claire had realized the sanctity inside herself and decided to keep Hobby’s baby. We wanted to explore these topics and more-What happened when we died? How were we to know that death wasn’t as profound an adventure as life was?-but just at that moment, the team stormed the field, and the crowd let out a great roar.

The names of the Nantucket Whalers were announced over the loudspeaker one by one, and while our eyes were on the field, they were also on Hobby. How would it feel for him to watch his former teammates being cheered, knowing that he could no longer play among them? How would it feel to hear Maxx Cunningham introduced as the team’s new quarterback?

Hobby handled it not only with grace but with exuberance. Despite his still-healing leg, he alone in the crowd stood for the announcement of each player. He clapped and whooped. When his lieutenants were announced-Anders Peashway, Colin Farrow-he whistled. And he cheered perhaps the loudest when his successor, Maxx Cunningham, rushed onto the field.

At the center of the field, Coach Jaxon took the microphone.

He said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to call Hobson Alistair onto the field.”

Hobby turned to his mother. The crowd quieted. We watched as Hobby scooted out past Claire and made his way down the stairs and through the gate that led onto the field. The players on the sideline parted to let him through. With what looked like painless ease, Hobby jogged out to the center of the fifty-yard line.

Coach Jaxon said, “Ladies and gentlemen, Hobson Alistair.”

Instinctively we all stood, and the applause was thunderous. Hobby looked shocked by the whole thing at first, but then he grinned and waved. We watched Zoe and Claire standing right along with everyone else, clapping. Claire gave a piercing whistle, loud enough to raise the dead.

Coach Jaxon held up the white home jersey, #11 Alistair, that Hobby used to wear and would have been wearing right then if things had been different. He said, “Tonight we retire number eleven.”

The crowd went wild.

Coach Jaxon handed Hobby a football, and with the perfect spiral we all remembered, Hobby threw the ball to Maxx Cunningham, who, though startled, managed to put out his hands and catch it.

We thought we were witnessing the resolution of the story right there on the Whalers’ field, but of course there were other, connected narrative lines unfolding simultaneously elsewhere.

At seven o’clock in the morning in springtime air that smelled of a peppermint grove, Ava Price Randolph was finishing her second cup of tea and the previous day’s crossword puzzle. Her hands shook a little as she washed her teacup in the sink. She was nervous. In a scant hour, her sister May was coming to drive her to her first appointment with the adoption agency. When Ava had talked to Meaghan, the adoption counselor, on the phone, she had said that the adoption process could take up to five months, and that it would require patience and fortitude.

“I’m committed,” Ava said.

“Good,” Meaghan said.

Meaghan already knew the salient facts about Ava’s situation. The applicant was the mother of one son, age seventeen, who was currently living with his father in America, and another son who had died of SIDS at eight weeks old. She was single, but supported by the husband from whom she was now amicably separated. She had a large family with many helping hands all within a twenty-kilometer radius. She was committed to being a mother again.

Ava missed both Jake and Jordan enormously. For nearly twenty years she had been married, and for more than seventeen years, a mother. Now she was alone. She missed the sound of Jordan’s snapping open the pages of a newspaper and Jake’s humming along to the music on his headphones-but in the sunny bungalow in Fremantle, in contrast to the dark days she’d spent living in Ernie’s nursery in the house in Nantucket, Ava didn’t feel lonely. She liked the quiet, and when she closed her eyes, she saw a bright light that she knew was her future.

If Ava could have seen the action unfolding on the football field on Nantucket just then, if she could have seen Jordan and Jake and Zoe and Claire all applauding as Hobby took a bow for the crowd, raised two fingers in a V for victory, and yelled out, “Retired at age seventeen!” she would have smiled. She would have thought, They are where they’re supposed to be. And so am I.

Ava’s cell phone chirped. She had a text message from Roger Polly that said, Good luck today! She smiled, thinking, Such a lovely man. Although God only knew what would happen there. She texted him back, Nervous!

Then she heard a car honking outside, and she checked out the front window to see her sister May idling at the curb in her minivan. God forbid any member of her family actually take thirty seconds to stop the car and come to the door.

Ava gathered her purse, her spring coat, and her documents, which were nestled in a manila folder, and she closed the door behind her. She hurried down the steps.

“Come on!” May called through her open window. “Let’s go get ourselves a baby!”

At seven o’clock in the evening on that September Friday, Al and Lynne Castle were driving to Vendever to pick up their daughter, Demeter, who had successfully completed thirty days of treatment for alcoholism. It still boggled Lynne’s mind that this had actually transpired, that Demeter had developed this disease while living under her parents’ roof, and that she and Al had had absolutely no idea. Lynne had run through the gamut of emotions herself, from denial to anger to grief. She had questioned the very core of her being. She had thought of herself as a good mother, and yet her youngest child, her only daughter, had essentially slipped through the cracks into a dark and sinister netherworld on her watch. Lynne had been too busy to notice, too smug, too self-absorbed, too self-congratulatory. On the night of the accident, where had she been? She had been at a series of graduation parties for Pumpkin Alexander, Patrick Loom, Garrick Murray, and Cole Lucas. She hadn’t considered the fact that while she and Al were “putting in appearances” at no less than four parties, Demeter was sitting home alone. Of course the girl was drinking. In merely imagining the isolation and loneliness that her daughter must have felt that night, Lynne wanted to reach for a glass of bourbon herself. Lynne wasn’t the wonderful mother she’d thought she was. She was hardly a mother at all. She was a silly woman who had put her business and her clean, orderly home and her charitable boards and her committees and her position in the community ahead of her own daughter.

As Al drove through the gathering dark, Lynne sighed.

In response, Al turned up the radio. He listened to the worst music ever made, what Lynne always thought of as A.M. Gold-Tony Orlando and Dawn, Ambrosia, Dr. Hook. Listening to the radio with Al made her feel a hundred years old. And the fact that he turned the music up when he heard her sigh instead of asking her what was on her mind simply infuriated her. She nearly asked Al to pull over right that second so she could get out. He would never do that, of course. She would have to demand that he get out, and then she would have the satisfaction of leaving him behind as she sped off with some decent music playing. Lynyrd Skynyrd or Bruce Springsteen, something she had listened to back in the Mazda RX4 with Beck Paulsen.

But she would never do that, either.

If Lynne Castle could have seen the scene unfurling at the football field-Jordan and Jake approaching the stands and, after an affirmative nod from Zoe, taking seats on the bleachers directly behind her and Hobby and Claire, and the five of them standing as the elementary school music teacher, Mrs. Yurick herself, sang the National Anthem in her warbling soprano, and Zoe reaching back and squeezing the heck out of Jordan’s hand because every atom of her at that moment yearned for her daughter-well, Lynne would have wished only that she were among them. She would have acknowledged the new, startling circumstances of their lives-that Penny was dead, that Hobby was permanently sidelined, that Jordan and Ava had split, that Jake was heartbroken, that Demeter was an alcoholic, that Claire Buckley was pregnant, that Zoe loved Jordan but didn’t know how to make that feel right, that Jordan was determined to find a way to make it feel right, that none of them were quite the people they seemed, or even the people they thought they were-and she would have said, “Okay, fine, I’ll take it all. As long as we’re together.”

Demeter stood waiting at the exit of the facility, which was a hundred and twenty feet and a world away from the entrance she’d walked through a month earlier. She was thirty-one pounds lighter and she was 80 percent clearer in the head, but the remaining 20 percent of her that struggled would, she realized, probably always struggle. She would struggle with her desire for a drink, the slow burn down the throat, the warm ball of honeyfire in her chest, the ensuing release. She would struggle with her weight. She would struggle with what she had said to Penny Alistair on the night of the accident. She would struggle with her relationship with her parents. She would struggle with unrequited love and sought-after friendships that would never come easily.

But, as her therapist here at Vendever, Sebastian, had said, only 20 percent of her was struggling, which was a lot better than most people. Sebastian had said, “You’re a good kid, Demeter. You’re going to be fine.” Sebastian was handsome and funny and immeasurably kind, and Demeter was half in love with him, as were all the other girls at Vendever, and so his words made an impact on her. If Sebastian thought she was a good kid, a kid worth rescuing, if he thought she was going to be fine, then maybe, just maybe, it was true.

Demeter’s mother had sent manila envelopes filled with Demeter’s schoolwork and assigned reading, and with each batch she had enclosed a simple note saying, I love you, Demeter. xo Mom. Demeter had kept these notes in a pile by her bed. She knew they were true, she knew her mother did, in fact, love her very much. Demeter had been a difficult child, and she meant to both change her ways and apologize. Along with her mother’s notes was a letter Demeter had received from Hobby that said a lot of things, and among them these most important lines: You aren’t responsible for Penny’s death any more than I am responsible or Jake is responsible or my mother or Jake’s mother and father or your mother and father are responsible. The only person who was responsible for Penny’s death was the person who was driving the car that night, and that was Penny herself. I don’t know why she did what she did, but when I see her again-oh, and I will see her again-I’m going to ask her why, and then pray for God’s help in understanding.

Demeter decided that she would keep this letter and her mother’s notes for the rest of her life so that when that 20 percent of her was struggling, she could pull them out and read them.

It was dark now, fully dark at seven-thirty, and whereas a part of Demeter knew that ninety miles away on the island where she had been born and raised there were lights burning brightly on a football field, the only lights Demeter cared about now were the headlights of her parents’ car. When, a few seconds later, they pulled up to the Vendever exit, which was also the entrance to the rest of her life, Demeter turned around and said to Sebastian, who was patiently manning the sign-out desk, “They’re here! They’re here! I’m going home.”

The Nantucket Whalers lost their first home game by a score of 35 to 7. It was a whipping the likes of which we hadn’t seen in over a decade, but no one, not a single one of us in the stands that night, cared about the score. We had learned some things over the past few months. We had learned that when we looked upon our children, the young heroes and goddesses of Nantucket Island, all we could do was hope. We knew they would struggle; we knew they would fall prey to the same temptations we did, they would have lonely and sad moments as we did, they would eat too much and drink too much and cheat at golf and slander their neighbors and fail to recycle assiduously and speed on the Milestone Road and do the wrong thing when the right thing was smack in front of their faces, just as we did. But what we could see as the team filed off the field-some of the kids smiling even in defeat, some of the kids hopping in their cleats because they were so eager to play again next week-was that they had survived with their spirits intact.

We saw Claire Buckley’s hand fly to her abdomen, her mouth pursed in an astonished O, and we knew that as she walked away from the field that night, she had felt her baby kick for the first time. Hobson Alistair III.

We would all of us persevere. We would keep going. We would move in the only direction we could move, and that was forward.