Elin Hilderbrand - Summerland

These questions nagged, but eventually we let them go. We saved the article, folded it carefully, and tucked it away in a drawer or scrapbook where we would find it years or decades later, only to be struck yet again by the sad mystery of it all.

July was winter: he had to keep reminding himself of that. But winter weather in Fremantle was humid and balmy, much like a really good day in late May at home. It was 73 degrees Fahrenheit, without a cloud in the sky; it had been raining every night, and everyone’s garden was going gangbusters. The grass was so green it hurt Jordan’s eyes to look at it.

On the last Sunday in July, Ava took Jake to Heathcote Park for a family barbecue. Ava had brought her son back to Australia with her four times, but not since grade school, and neither Jake nor Jordan had seen anyone from Ava’s family since they’d been here this time. This had been at Jordan’s specific request. He wanted to give Jake a chance to settle in. And the last thing Jordan wanted was for their rental house to be inundated by Ava’s relatives. Things were bad enough as it was.

The person Jordan dreaded seeing most was Ava’s mother, Dearie. Dearie had been a perfect bitch toward him when he journeyed halfway across the globe to ask for her daughter’s hand in marriage, but she’d been even worse on the one occasion when she’d come to the States. On that visit, she had told Jordan that he was no better than a criminal in her eyes. He had abducted her daughter; he had broken up the freakishly close-knit Price clan. “As if losing Father wasn’t bad enough!” Dearie screamed at Jordan on the penultimate evening of her visit, when she had drunk an entire bottle of Riesling by herself.

Jordan tried to point out that he hadn’t stolen Ava. He had asked her to marry him, she had said no, and he had retreated to the States with his tail tucked, a perfect gentleman. Ava’s return to Nantucket the following summer had come as a complete surprise to him; he’d had nothing to do with it. “She came back to me of her own volition,” he told Dearie. The reason for Ava’s return had never been clear to him-just one of many mysteries about the woman. But he refused to take the blame.

Because of his abhorrence of Dearie, Jordan had flat-out refused to go to the barbecue with his wife and son. This was very bad behavior on his part, and it led to a near-rebellion by Jake.

“I don’t get it,” Jake said. “Why do I have to go, but you don’t?”

“They want to see you, not me,” Jordan said. He thought back to the family dinner he’d suffered through on the evening he’d arrived in Perth so many years ago. All he’d wanted was five minutes alone with Ava so he could properly kiss her, but the house was so crammed with people that it verged on the comical. It was like dozens of clowns’ climbing out of a Volkswagen: just when Jordan thought there couldn’t possibly be any more relatives, another one would descend the stairs or pop out of the bathroom. Dearie had cooked three legs of lamb to feed everybody, and all Jordan remembered was that he was served the burnt ends. Ava, for some reason, had been seated at the opposite end of a very long table, and Jordan got the impression that though he had traveled ten million miles to see her, he hadn’t gotten any closer. “You’re their blood,” he told Jake now. “But I’m not.”

“God,” Jake said.

Jordan felt sorry for his son. Jordan had met the Price family twenty years ago, and since then everyone had married and reproduced. Ava’s siblings had a passel of kids among them. Ava’s oldest sister, Greta, had a daughter named Amanda who was pregnant at eighteen. She was only a year older than Jake, and she was having a baby. Greta was going to be a grandmother at forty-seven. And the worst part was, nobody in the Price family saw the shame in this. Ava reported that Dearie was positively over the moon about it; she glowed as though she were the one who was pregnant. She was sixty-seven years old and about to be a great-grandmother.

The population of Western Australia was 2.3 million, and half of those people had to be Prices. In that family, progeny was more important than career or religion or net worth. This explained why Ava, when they first got married, had said she wanted “at least five” children. Jordan had laughed. Five children? Who, in this day and age, wanted five children? It was irresponsible. When Ava had trouble conceiving again after Jake was born, Jordan was inwardly relieved. Unfortunately, he’d made the grave error of letting his relief show. He’d said, “I was an only child, and I turned out just fine,” to which Ava had angrily responded, “I am not having an ONLY CHILD!” She was a Price, after all. Her sister Greta had six; her brother Noah had three boys already, and his wife was pregnant again with twin boys, which meant they would undoubtedly try for a sixth.

Ava had pursued a second pregnancy the same way she used to play volleyball on the beach: ruthlessly. She did all the things that the desperate-to-conceive do: she bought a kit that tracked her ovulation, she took her basal temperature, she hunted down Jordan night after night so they could try out new positions that she’d heard might help: her on top, him behind her, her hanging upside down. For a while he’d loved it-what man wouldn’t? But as the years passed, she grew frantic. It was bad enough that Ava was the only member of her family who had married an American, now she was also the only one who was having problems conceiving! (Dearie, it was well known, had gotten pregnant with Ava’s youngest brother, Damon, at the age of forty-two while she had an IUD in place!) Ava began to suspect that she was unable to conceive precisely because Jordan was American. And an only child. She accused him of having lazy sperm; she suggested one night that perhaps he’d secretly had a vasectomy. Jordan was then subjected to a hospital visit during which he had to jerk off into a plastic cup just so the lab technician-Charlotte Volmer, whom he’d gone to high school with-could reassure him that all was well. He had millions of healthy swimmers.

The chase for baby number two grew tiresome. Ava used to appear at the newspaper on the night of a deadline and demand that Jordan lock the door to his office and have sex with her right then. The first time it happened, their subsequent emergence garnered a round of enthusiastic applause from his staff. The tenth time, hardly anyone looked up.

In ways too numerous to count, the Prices’ obsession with progeny had ruined Jordan’s life.

When it began to seem clear that a second baby was never going to happen, when Jordan had given up hope and he believed Ava had as well, Ava returned to Australia alone. She had planned to stay for two weeks, but she ended up staying for six. During their phone calls, Jordan gently inquired as to when she might be coming home. He missed her. He missed her as his wife, and he missed her as Jake’s mother; she had left him as a single parent, and he also had a newspaper to run. Jake was only twelve years old at the time, and Jordan had to feed him, help him with his homework, and chauffeur him all over the island. Jordan was careful not to press too hard, however: Ava’s trips to Australia were a touchy subject because for all the times that she had gone back, Jordan had never accompanied her. He told her it was because he couldn’t leave the newspaper, which was true enough, but more than that, it was because he didn’t want to go. In this particular instance, Jordan understood that her extended trip to Australia was something of a consolation prize: it was what he was giving Ava because he hadn’t given her a baby.

When Ava had been gone for four weeks and three days-a detail that Jordan couldn’t forget-she mentioned in a phone call that she had been spending time with Roger Polly, the man fifteen years her senior with whom she had once been in love. The man who had broken her heart.

“ ‘Spending time’?” Jordan said. He was incensed by this news, and completely panicked. “What does that mean, ‘spending time’?”

“We’ve been out,” Ava said. She then let it slip that Roger’s wife had drowned the year before at Kuta Beach in Bali while on vacation with some friends, adding that when she heard this news, she had called him to offer her condolences. This had led to a second phone conversation, then a meet-up for coffee, then dinner at Fraser’s in Kings Park. When Jordan looked up Fraser’s on line, he learned that it was one of the nicest restaurants in Perth.

He thought, She’s not coming home.

He decided that though he’d refused every chance to go with Ava to Australia in the past, he would go after her right that second. He didn’t care if he had to walk and swim.

As it turned out, though, Ava returned of her own volition ten days later. Jordan arranged for Jake to sleep over at the Alistair house that night. Then he brought Ava home and made love to her in a way that he hoped would exorcise all traces of old, distraught widower Roger Polly, as well as establish the national superiority of the United States.

And six weeks later, they discovered that Ava was pregnant.

Now Ava was livid that Jordan wouldn’t come to the barbecue. “I suppose they’ll think we’re divorced, then,” she fumed.

“Why would they think we’re divorced when I just uprooted my whole life and left the newspaper for an entire year so I could bring you here?” Jordan asked.

That hushed her up. He had made the ultimate sacrifice. He didn’t have to shake hands, drink beer, eat kangaroo sausages, or talk about footy with a bunch of Prices. But Jake did.

“Please kiss your grandmother,” Jordan told him, feeling like the ultimate hypocrite.

“I can barely remember what she looks like,” Jake said.

“She’ll be the one on the throne,” Jordan said. “Wearing the tiara and velvet robes.”

“Honestly, Dad,” Jake said. “Can’t you please come?”

“No,” Jordan said.

“I could refuse to go too, you know,” Jake said.

“It would break your mother’s heart,” Jordan said. “Showing you off to her family has always been her favorite thing. So be impressive, okay?” He clapped Jake’s shoulder, then lowered his voice and added, “Nobody knows about the accident, nobody knows about Penny. You won’t have to talk about it. You won’t have anyone feeling sorry for you. You can just be yourself.”

Jake looked at his father. “I don’t know who that is anymore.”

Jordan swallowed. What he couldn’t tell his son was that he felt the same way. He was a newspaperman without a newspaper. He was a citizen without a country. He was a man without the woman he loved.

“You’ll be fine,” Jordan said. “You’ll be great.”

Because he wasn’t working, Jordan had every day free, but today, with Ava and Jake off at Heathcote Park for an all-day affair, he was really free. He sat on the bench in the back garden and read the Sunday Australian while listening to the gurgling of the fountain. It was a pleasant hour in the sun; the Sunday Australian was a nice little newspaper. It featured a weekly column on wine whose author seemed very well informed-Jordan usually wrote down his suggestions-and it made him wonder if perhaps he should add a wine column to the Nantucket Standard. Maybe in summer. Maybe in winter. Whenever he thought about the newspaper, he got an itchy feeling. He was just biding time here in Australia; he was treading water for Ava’s sake, for Jake’s sake. Ava had undergone an immediate and complete metamorphosis upon their arrival in Fremantle. She was drinking, smoking, and partying like a teenager; she was sailing and going to the beach and once again singing along to Crowded House in the shower. She was living. Looking at the remarkable bloom of the flowers surrounding the fountain, Jordan thought that Ava was like a native plant that he’d uprooted and transplanted in a hostile climate. Now here she was, back on home soil. Flourishing again.

But he, most certainly, was not.

He went inside. He found himself tiptoeing like a burglar to his desk in the den. He hadn’t used his computer once in the three weeks they’d been here. He had been keen to set it up, eager to establish a connection with his home ten thousand miles away, but then as soon as he’d gotten it up and running, he’d felt afraid. He wasn’t sure he could handle news from home. After all, back on Nantucket, summer was in full swing. There would be things happening every day and every night: talks at the Atheneum, concerts, plays, benefits, dinner auctions, cocktail parties, golf tournaments, fishing tournaments, book signings, art openings. There would be bands playing at the Cisco Brewery in the afternoons and at the Chicken Box at night. Jordan had never been able to make it to every event in a typical summer week, but he liked to get to as many as he could. In recent years he and Zoe had attended functions separately but together. He loved nothing more than seeing her dressed up and chatting away, sipping her wine, throwing him meaningful looks, whispering funny things as they brushed past each other in the crowd. Sometimes Zoe would be catering one of these events, and Jordan would find her in the kitchen. She would be wearing her white chef’s jacket with the words Hot Mama stitched over the breast pocket, her hair held back by a turquoise bandanna. Her Jamaican waiters would all break out in knowing smiles when they saw him: “Coming to kiss the boss lady’s hand,” they’d tease. They thought he came back to the kitchen for the food-a special ramekin of the truffled mac and cheese, his own plate of mini lobster rolls. And while it was true that Zoe plied him with special treats, really he came just to lay his eyes on her, to hear the jingle of her long, dangly earrings, to listen to the sound of her voice.