Elin Hilderbrand - Summerland

At the end of the service, nine girls gathered before the altar: the madrigal group from the high school. The girls wore the same black skirts and white blouses that they performed in. They lined up, leaving a gap in the left front, where Penny usually stood. Jordan had never seen anything so powerful. The girls launched into “Ave Maria,” and everyone in the church stood, but Jordan’s eyes never strayed from Zoe. Her hands were clasped to her chest, her eyes were closed, her lips were moving.

Jordan thought, You did it, Zoe. He thought, Bravo.

On the day that Jordan Randolph and his wife and son left for Perth, Australia, Zoe stood on her deck, which faced the mighty ocean, and she screamed at every plane that crossed the horizon, though she had no idea which one was theirs.

At some planes she screamed, “Fuck you, Jordan Randolph!”

At other planes she screamed, “I love you, Jordan Randolph!”

He never printed a word about the accident. People criticized him for this. A few advertisers pulled ads, but his paper was the only game in town, so in trying to hurt him, they hurt only themselves. He asked his assistant, Emily, what was being said around town. Emily was candid, Emily was no-bullshit, Emily knew everyone on the island. She was the right person to ask.

She said, “They say you’re covering it up because the brakes on the Jeep were faulty. They say you’re sweeping it under the rug because your son was involved. They say you’re trying to protect Al Castle’s daughter, who had a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in her bag and pressured Penny into drinking with her in the dunes. They say Ted Field is withholding the tox report.” Emily swallowed. “They say it was the mother’s fault, for never making those kids buckle their seat belts. They say her car, the orange one, doesn’t even have seat belts. They say the girl was mentally unstable. They say it was a suicide. They say it was a two-way suicide pact between Penny and your son, only your son fastened his seat belt at the last minute. They say it was a four-way suicide pact. They say the four kids were on acid, and that’s why Ted Field is withholding the tox report. They say the Castle girl practices witchcraft. They say Penny was smoking Oxycontin that she got from your wife, and that’s why Ted Field is withholding the tox report.”

“Jesus,” Jordan said. They said all of this, but not…? Was Emily holding out on him to spare his feelings? Would Emily do that? Certainly not. “Do they say anything else?”

“Anything else?” Emily asked.

People would say what they said, and what they said was that Jordan Randolph decided to take a leave of absence from the newspaper and move his wife and son to Perth, Australia, because he wanted to escape the scandal and the shame brought on his family and his family’s newspaper by the death of Penelope Alistair.

And that would be partially right.

He hadn’t reported the story, and this mere fact had changed the way he felt about the newspaper. All his life he’d believed the newspaper to be an absolute. It was his job as editor to print all the facts and only the facts-except for the editorials. A newspaper was pure; it was holy. And by not printing a word about the accident, Jordan had, in a way, disproved this. What was pure and holy in this case was honoring the wishes of a woman who had lost one child and was in danger of losing another. That woman was his lover. But that didn’t matter. Jordan convinced himself that he would have done the same for anyone.

Not printing the story made him realize that the newspaper wasn’t the most important thing in his life. It could be left behind. Someone else could run it for a year, or indefinitely, and he wouldn’t have to worry about its integrity’s being compromised, because he’d already accomplished that.

Ava had been asking him to go back to Australia for nearly twenty years. Jordan had never indulged her in this request after his first disastrous trip. It was her nation and her family, not his nation and his family. Ava had traveled back herself a handful of times, both alone and with Jake. But she hadn’t been back in four years now. Not since Ernie died.

Jake didn’t want to live in Australia. But if they left the island, Jordan knew, things would be better for him.

Ultimately, though, Jordan’s decision had nothing to do with Jake or Ava or the newspaper or public opinion about how he’d handled coverage of the accident.

It had to do with Zoe.

For the nine days that Hobby lay in a coma in Mass General, Jordan did not hear from her. This was nine days of lying on razor blades, of picking up his phone and checking for text messages or missed calls-there were dozens of each but none from her-of debating should he or shouldn’t he hop on a plane and go up there and see her. But Al Castle was in Boston, acting as a watchdog over the situation, and what would Al think if Jordan just showed up? Al might have his suspicions already. But then again, what did Al Castle matter in comparison to Zoe, who had lost her daughter? Zoe had slapped Jordan across the face at the hospital and nearly sent his glasses flying. Jordan had never been struck like that by anyone in his life, and the curious thing was that the slap had excited him. It had been filled with passion as well as a lot of other deep and complicated feelings, none of which she’d been able to voice, something that had been a problem for as long as they’d been together. When she left messages on his cell phone in the middle of the night, she always said, “I have no one to talk to about you other than you.”

Jordan had composed text messages and then deleted them, he had sat up nights thinking, Should I call? There had been times in their relationship when Zoe said she wanted “space,” but what she really meant was that she wanted Jordan closer. It was her own confusing calculus. Jordan convinced himself that the slap and the silence meant that she wanted him there to take care of her. He called her at ten o’clock on the night of the candlelight vigil-he hadn’t attended because Jake didn’t want to go-but when his call went to voicemail, he hung up. Then at midnight he called back, and the call went to voicemail again, and this time he managed to croak out one word-Zoe-but nothing else. He tried a third time because three was a magic number, three wishes, the third time a charm, so at three in the morning he called-imagining the dim, hushed corridors of the hospital, Zoe asleep across four molded plastic chairs as Al had so vividly described, with the pancake-flat pillow and the pilled blanket that some benevolent nurse had brought her-and he thought, Goddammit, Zoe, pick up. I have no one to talk to about you other than you. But once again his call went to voicemail, and he hung up.

His head and heart were scrambled. He had never imagined this kind of emotional duress-his son heartbroken, his lover destroyed, his wife strangely neutralized, the whole island breathing down his neck, either blaming him or looking for an explanation. Penelope-a girl Jordan had adored-dead. He had to grieve too. He had to worry about Hobby and pray too. Zoe’s children were, in so many ways, like his own children, but they weren’t his own children-under these terrible circumstances, that fact had become resoundingly clear. His child was fine.

Zoe didn’t return his calls.

Go to Boston, he thought. If she turns you away, she turns you away.

The last time he had been with Zoe was the Thursday before graduation. Tuesday and Thursday mornings were their times-Jordan drove to Zoe’s house after the kids had left for school. In the summer they sat on the deck and in the winter they settled in front of the woodstove. Occasionally they walked on the beach. They talked about everything, though their favorite topic was their three kids. They also did a fair amount of talking about Ava, and lately Jordan had sensed that Zoe was growing restless and impatient with his decision to stay married to her. Zoe pretended that she wanted Jordan to leave Ava for his own good. How could he continue to live with her mood swings? Since Ernie died Ava had had only two settings: she was either angry and combative or morose and withdrawn. She held Jordan responsible for Ernie’s death, and Jordan had carried this impossible burden without a word of complaint. But why? Zoe wanted to know. Why not reclaim his own life?

Here was the spot for a big, huge sigh. It was far more complicated than Zoe knew. Zoe had never had to share her kids with anyone else; she had always been their only parent. She had been married for only six months, and that was a long time ago. Hence, Jordan suspected, there were things about marriage that Zoe had either forgotten or never learned in the first place. Such as the fact that even the worst marriages were stronger than anyone might expect. Jordan couldn’t just get up and walk out the door. He and Ava had two children, one living and one dead; they had a home and a way of life. Over the past four years that way of life had deteriorated, but it couldn’t be discounted. If Jordan moved out, Jake would choose to move out with him, he knew, and without their son Ava would perish. The best thing would be for Ava to go back to Australia and regain her happiness, but she wouldn’t go for any length of time without Jake. Surely Zoe could see how impossible the situation was. And what did Zoe want, anyway, that she didn’t already have? Sometimes she made it sound as if she wanted Jordan to move in with her, live with her, marry her. But this was ridiculous. Zoe, more than anyone Jordan had ever met, relished her freedom. She had been married, for those six months, to the man who was Penny’s and Hobby’s father, but Jordan had a hard time even imagining that. Zoe wearing a ring on her left hand, Zoe plunking down breakfast, lunch, and dinner for someone, Zoe relinquishing authority over the remote control or the temperature of the water in the shower, Zoe sharing her bed? She answered to no one except her kids.

On the Thursday morning when Jordan had last seen Zoe, they had lain together on the chaise on her deck. Zoe was feeling melancholy about graduation. In the fall the kids would be seniors, and this time next year they would be graduating. And then they’d be going away to college. And Jordan thought, She’s afraid of being alone. But on that morning Zoe was excited, too, about Penny’s singing the National Anthem, and about Jake’s and Hobby’s becoming the leaders they were born to be. Zoe and Jordan were both going to Patrick Loom’s graduation party. They liked seeing each other in public; it still held a secret deliciousness for both of them. Zoe always wore something sexy and gorgeous, she put on a perfume that drove Jordan crazy, and she applied sheer lip gloss that made her mouth shine like glass.

They had made love on the chaise outside in the sun and then showered together outdoors, and then Jordan had sat at the kitchen table, his lower half wrapped in a white Turkish cotton towel, while Zoe made him a cheddar and tomato omelet with bacon, fried shredded potatoes, wheat toast with butter and homemade jam, fresh-squeezed orange juice, and hot coffee. He ate gratefully. Zoe was the only person who cooked for him, and it felt like love. He wanted her to join him, but she never did; instead she worked in the kitchen, packing him a lunch: turkey and Swiss and baby mache and honey mustard on whole grain bread, watermelon chunks, pasta salad with asparagus and toasted pine nuts, and a slice of chocolate and peanut-butter tart wrapped in wax paper. She packed all of this in a brown paper bag. Sometimes she slipped notes in with his lunch, but not often enough that he expected it. The notes were a treat.

There had been a note that Thursday, on one of the index cards that she used for recipes, folded in half. It said I heart you.

That was Thursday. On Friday Jordan called her on his way home from work, but she was busy prepping platters for Garrick Murray’s graduation party and could talk for only a second. On Saturday Jordan saw her at graduation; they sat three seats away from each other, and his gaze meandered to her firm calf muscles-amazing, as she avoided exercise at all costs-and her toenails, filed square and painted dark purple, framed by the vamp of her kitten heels. They chatted privately for a second at the Looms’ party and then, right after the kids left, Jordan offered to walk her to her car-he was heading home-but Zoe said she was going to stay a little longer. She flashed him a wicked grin. Zoe had, or pretended to have, a crush on Patrick’s father, Stuart Loom, which Jordan in turn pretended made him jealous, only Jordan wasn’t pretending. It did make him jealous, but Stuart Loom was married, and Zoe and Alicia Loom were friends, and so there was really nothing for Jordan to worry about. He left Zoe at the Looms’ party. Everything was fine.