Zoe had tousled Hobby’s hair-sandy like his father’s, not dark like hers and Penny’s-and said, “Oh, but did you catch up to her later!”

Hobby had mastered the art of skipping stones by the time he was four years old. He was always running and jumping, climbing things-trees, cars, bookshelves. Zoe signed him up for swimming lessons at the community pool. Other mothers gossiped or read books while their kids swam, but she rested her chin on the aluminum railing of the balcony and watched Hobby. Zoe could go on forever about the games. His first year playing football at the Boys & Girls Club, the coach had put him in at quarterback. He had quick hands, one of the fathers said, and quick feet. He was a head taller than everyone else on the team. On the basketball court, he shot 75 percent from the free-throw line. He hit his first home run at age ten. Zoe remembered jumping up and down in her chef’s clogs, making a racket against the metal bleachers. Hobby later retrieved the ball out of right field and gave it to her. When Hobby was ten, his mother was his only girl.

There were private things about Hobby, too. For a stretch of months, he’d been afraid of the dark. This was Zoe’s fault. She’d had the Castles and the Randolphs over for dinner one night, and they’d gotten onto the topic of the Columbine shootings. Hobby was still lingering around the dinner table, hoping that one of the adults would pass him an unfinished dessert. And, too, he liked adult conversation more than other kids did. He observed the adult world, then tried to process it so that it made sense to him. Zoe should have banished him from the table that night or put an abrupt end to the discussion, but she had had three or four glasses of Cabernet, and she liked to prove to other people that her kids could thrive in a house where they weren’t constantly sheltered from the harsh realities of the world. And so she had let the conversation go on around him. About the two gunmen-boys hooked on violent video games-who had killed twelve of their classmates and a teacher and then themselves.

That night, Hobby had climbed into bed with her. He was crying. He couldn’t stop thinking about those kids shooting other kids. Killing them.

“I’m sorry,” Zoe had said. Here was her liberal parenting coming back to bite her in the ass. “I shouldn’t have let you hear that.”

He came in night after night for months, for a year.

“What happens when we die?” he asked her once.

Zoe could remember wanting to say something encouraging about Heaven, a place up above where you could sit on a puffy white cloud and watch what was happening on Earth. Where certain angels, maybe, even had the power to make the Red Sox win. But instead, she gave him the only truth she had: “I don’t know. No one knows.”

“Well, where is our father?” he asked.

“Honey,” she said, “I don’t know.”


Hobby pouring milk on his cereal, Hobby lacing up his cleats, Hobby smiling at the girls lined up on the other side of the backstop as he approached the batter’s box and did his own version of genuflecting-touching the end of his bat to each corner of the plate, Father, Son, Holy Spirit.

She should have taken them to church, Zoe thought. She should have given them something to believe in.


She refused to think about Jordan. This was difficult because Jordan had infiltrated all their lives and for two years had been as important to Zoe as oxygen. Jordan had talked to Hobby about colleges. Hobby could go anywhere he liked on a full scholarship, he said. Jordan kept telling Zoe, “You’ve got to stay on top of this. You want him to go to a great school.”

“I want him to be happy,” Zoe said. “He could be happy at UMass.” “One of thousands,” Jordan said.

“Maybe after this island, he’d like that.”

Jordan counseled Hobby about it. Jordan researched various architecture departments-their faculties, their degree requirements. Hobby liked the idea of going to a good college. Stanford, Georgetown, Harvard.

Jordan and Hobby talked about other things as well, including politics and music. Jordan downloaded songs that Hobby suggested-by Eminem, Arcade Fire, Spoon-and Hobby downloaded songs that Jordan suggested, by Neil Young and Joe Cocker, the Who, the Pretenders.

Jordan said to Zoe, “I want to ask him about girls, but I’m afraid.”

“Why girls?” Zoe said.

“I’d like to talk to him about love.”

Zoe could remember thinking, And what, Jordan Randolph, would you tell my son about love? There were times when Jordan’s surrogate fathering bugged the shit out of her.

She said, “I’ll be the one to talk to him about love, thank you very much.”

She’d had a chance to do just that one day when she was driving him home from baseball practice. Penny had gotten her driver’s license, but Hobby had been in the middle of basketball season and had been too busy. He seemed content to let Zoe or Penny chauffeur him around.

Hobby was in the passenger seat of Zoe’s bright-orange Karmann Ghia in his usual slumped repose, his head back against the headrest, his long legs stretched out as far as they could go, which wasn’t very far. He was wearing a sweaty T-shirt; his glove was in his lap.

Zoe asked, “Have you ever been in love, Hob?”

He’d breathed out a laugh and looked out the window. “Mom.”

“Just curious.” It wasn’t a ridiculous question, was it? Hobby had girls calling and texting him day and night; even girls who had graduated from Nantucket High and were now in college texted him. Did any one in particular affect him, or were they all the same? He had asked Claire Buckley to the prom. Claire was bright and vivacious, a go-getter, an athlete in her own right, field hockey and basketball. She was pretty enough, though every time Zoe saw her she was ponytailed and perspiring, biting down on her mouthguard as if getting ready to kill somebody. “What about Claire?”

“Claire’s cool,” Hobby said.

Zoe nodded. That was correct: Claire was cool, and for Hobby, cool would trump beautiful or sexy. For now.

“But you don’t love her?” she prodded.

“Love her?” he said. “You mean, like the way Penny loves Jake? No. No, I don’t.”

Zoe had shrunk away from the topic at that point. In their house, the standard by which all other love should be measured was Penny’s love for Jake. Which was completely separate from Zoe’s love for Jordan, but which mirrored it nonetheless.

What Zoe did not want Hobby to ask was, “Have you ever been in love, Mom?”


Hobby tying his necktie (Jordan had taught him how), Hobby sitting with Zoe up front at graduation, watching Penny sing the National Anthem. Hobby loosening his tie at Patrick Loom’s party (but not taking it off completely, good kid). Hobby stealthily pouring a Heineken into a blue plastic Solo cup. (So a good kid but not a perfect kid. Zoe had turned a blind eye because he didn’t drive, and baseball season was over.) Hobby kissing his mother good-bye before he left the party. He’d kissed her on the cheek, trying not to let her smell the beer on his breath, but she’d grabbed his face. He was a full foot taller than she was, but he was still her child. She said, “Where are you going?”

“Another party,” he said. “At the beach.”

“You’re going with…?”

“Pen and Jake.”

“Jake’s driving?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Be careful, please. Be smart.”

“Yes, dear,” Hobby said.

Zoe had enjoyed a sinful pride: everyone else at Patrick Loom’s party was watching them talk. “This gorgeous creature is my son!” she felt like shouting. “Eat your hearts out.”

She pushed him away. “Go,” she said. “Have fun.”

He pivoted away and yanked at his tie. She was about to remind him to thank the Looms for having him when he turned around.

“Hey, Mom?”

She raised her eyebrows.

“I talked to Patrick about Georgetown. He’s going to let me visit and stay with him in his dorm so I can see what it’s like.”

“Great,” Zoe said. As her son loped away, her mind turned to darker worries. Hobby would visit Patrick Loom in Washington, Hobby would possibly go to college in D.C., or Palo Alto, or Durham, North Carolina. She could barely stand the thought: she was going to lose him.


At the hospital, there were times when Zoe was allowed in the room with Hobby and times when she wasn’t. When she was in with him, she touched his face and squeezed his good hand and talked about the past-stories he’d heard, stories he hadn’t. He was still in a coma.

After who knows how many days, Al Castle left, and Claire Buckley and her mother, Rasha, showed up to take his place. Zoe saw them enter the hospital waiting room, and though she recognized them, she couldn’t come up with their names. All of the facts of her life had blended into a gray soup. The girl and her mother approached Zoe, and she thought, Hobby’s friend? Or Penny’s? The girl looked as bereft as Zoe felt, her hair lank and greasy and pulled into a limp ponytail. She had a spray of acne on her chin; her eyes were swollen, as though she’d been in a prizefight. The mother looked slightly more pulled together, if sheepish, as though she had no idea what to say to Zoe. Of course she had no idea what to say. There was nothing to say.

“Zoe?” the woman said. “I’m Rasha Buckley? This is my daughter, Claire?”

Zoe stood up, mortified. It was Claire Buckley, Hobby’s prom date, the girl whom he was not in love with but who he thought was cool. Claire Buckley must be in love with Hobby, however, because, well, just look at her.

Zoe embraced Claire Buckley. and Claire dissolved into tears, and it felt strange to Zoe to be the one offering comfort.

Claire whispered, “He has to wake up. He just has to.”

Zoe held Claire tightly. There was something beatific in Claire at that moment, Zoe thought, something holy. Claire had an aura about her, a good energy. Zoe was glad Al Castle had gone home to Nantucket. She was glad Claire had come in his place.

Claire and her mother stayed at the hospital each day from 10:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m. Rasha brought Zoe food that looked so appetizing, Zoe couldn’t resist it. Rasha brought her a fluffier pillow and a softer fleece blanket but didn’t suggest that she leave the chairs. She didn’t suggest that Zoe change out of Hobby’s Whalers T-shirt, either. She understood that Zoe was keeping vigil and that being uncomfortable and unclean was part of it.

As grateful as Zoe was for the sensitive Buckley presence, she was relieved that in the evenings, when she went in to sit with Hobby, it was just the two of them alone.

On the ninth night, she decided to talk to Hobby about his father’s death. Zoe had always meant to tell the twins when they were old enough to handle it, but then when they were old enough to handle it, she’d thought, Why burden them?

She should have told Penny on one of those nights when her daughter had crawled into her bed. Because now she’d lost her chance.

She wouldn’t lose her chance with Hobby. He was unconscious, but the neurosurgeon was a spiritual man in addition to being a hyperintelligent wizard genius, and he had told her that he thought talking to coma patients helped them. It gave them a place to hook their consciousness. Something like 75 percent of coma patients who regained consciousness did so while being talked to, he said.

Hobson senior had been Zoe’s professor; this the kids knew. What they didn’t know, and might not appreciate, was how Zoe had fallen in love with him over the course of the semester, how she had anticipated Meats class with a thumping heart. She was mesmerized by the way he handled his knives and cleavers, she was smitten with his British accent, she was wowed by his physical size. She tried to figure out if he was married: he wore no ring, but many chefs chose not to wear rings. He seemed fond of Zoe, he lingered at her station, he occasionally touched her back. She played it cool, though she was hardly the only student hopelessly in love with him. Around campus he was known as either the Meatmeister, by the many fans of his bratwurst, or the Prime Minister of Meat, by the girls who swooned at his accent. There were female students who shamelessly flaunted their affections. A girl named Susannah brought him a hot latte before every class; another, named Kay, once sliced her thumb to the tendon-maybe an accident, maybe a cry for his attention.

Zoe saw Hobson out one night at Georgie O’s, drinking a pitcher of beer with some other men. It was the first time she’d seen him out of his whites; he was wearing jeans and a Clash T-shirt. Zoe waved, he beckoned her over, she stopped to talk. He was with two other professors, both older, one of them the hard-ass chef from Lyon, Jean-Marc Volange, who taught Basic Skills I. Zoe knew not to linger. She moved to the bar. A while later, the bartender put a glass of good white Burgundy in front of her and told her it was from the professors. Zoe was afraid to turn around. She savored the wine; she suspected it was the Montrachet, which famously went for thirty dollars a glass. Hobson came over and put his hand lightly on her back, the way he did in class. She felt her face heat up. She said, “Thank you for the wine. You shouldn’t have.”