Elin Hilderbrand - Summerland

Now here she was, stroking him. She was making a purring noise. If he made love to her now, it would be like having sex with a total stranger. But it was a moot point, because his body wasn’t responding anyway. He was headachy and hung over from his afternoon at the pub, and Ava smelled like a dirty ashtray. She’d been smoking again-probably with her sister May and her brother Marco, but maybe with her ex-flame Roger Polly; maybe Roger Polly had showed up at Heathcote Park to play surrogate husband. Jordan couldn’t summon the energy to care. He was exhausted. But those were just excuses. He was a different man now than he had been then. Ava had come back to him, but it was too late.

“Ava,” he whispered.

She shushed him. Her hand, insistent, slid under his boxers. She wanted this to work. And didn’t he want it to work too? Wasn’t that why he’d brought her here? So she would be happy again? So they could try to reconcile?

She gave up after a few minutes and rolled over.

“You don’t want me,” she said.

He closed his eyes and tried to remember the woman he had fallen in love with: the volleyball player in the string bikini with the ruthless serve and the bright smile. He tried to remember the young woman at the far end of her mother’s table, safely surrounded by her tribe. All he had wanted back then was to be able to touch her leg under the table, but she was too far away. Unattainable. It had driven him mad.

But that Ava was gone. And that Jordan was gone. Now they were just two older, sadder people who had done years and years’ worth of damage to each other.

Jordan opened his mouth to speak. But what to say? She would recognize an excuse. This was a big moment. It was, Jordan realized, the moment the whole trip had been about. He wished he were better prepared. All he was armed with was the stark truth.

“I can’t,” he said.

She kicked him, hard, under the covers. His shin hurt, but he didn’t make a sound. He could hear Ava next to him, breathing.

“They all asked about you, you know.”

“I know,” Jordan said. “Jake told me.”

“And what was I supposed to say? ‘Jordan didn’t come because he hates you. He fucking hates your guts, Mum, because you threw away his beachplum jam.’ ” Ava’s voice was nasty, but curiously, Jordan relaxed. The Ava who had tried to arouse him was a stranger, but this Ava he recognized.

He sat up. He could barely see anything of her in the dark, but he sensed her sliding out of bed. He saw the ghostly white of her tank top, the shadow of her legs. “I don’t hate anyone’s guts,” he said calmly.

“You didn’t come because you never come. You’re never around. You never once came back with me here to visit. Never once in twenty years, Jordan. You were always working. Always at the newspaper. God, how I despise that newspaper!” Ava said. “You know I never read a single page of it after Ernie died. Not a word.”

Jordan felt stunned by this. He hadn’t realized that Ava refused to read the newspaper. His newspaper.

“I offered to come back here with you after Ernie died,” Jordan said. “Remember, I mentioned it to you…”

“I didn’t want to come after Ernie died, Jordan,” Ava said. “How would that have felt? All of my sisters and brothers with their broods of beautiful, perfect children, and me showing up just after burying the baby I had waited twelve years for.”

“Okay, Ava, yes. Fine, I get it.”

“The only reason you offered to bring me back here,” Ava said, “was that you felt guilty.”

There was that word. Jordan had chewed on it all afternoon at the pub.

“Yes,” he said. “You’re right. I felt guilty.”

“Because you weren’t home!” she screamed. “Because at the one moment in my life when I needed you most-the very most, Jordan, a life- and-death situation-you weren’t there!”

“Ava,” he said. She was pacing the room now, shaking her hands. Probably she wanted a cigarette. “Ava, it would have made no difference if I’d been home. Ernie still would have died, Ava.”

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

“No,” Jordan said. He couldn’t accept that he might have had the power to save Ernie and had failed. “No, Ava, things wouldn’t have been different.”

“But they might have,” she said. She was crying now. “We’ll never know.”

“No!” Jordan roared.

“We’ll never know!” Ava said. “But I will always wonder. I! Will! Always! Wonder!”

“I’m sorry!” Jordan said. “Is that what you want? I am sorry, Ava. I’ve never been sorrier about anything in my life! I was at work! Trying to do my job, to run the paper that has provided my family with a livelihood for eight generations! I didn’t know anything was going to happen to Ernie! I loved him too! I’ve been hurting too! But since then, you have been so focused on your own pain and your own grief that nothing else has mattered to you. You let your whole life fall away! You let me fall away! Because deep down, you blame me!”

“There is no one else to blame!” Ava shrieked.

Jordan sank his head back into his pillow. She was right about that, he thought. There was no one else to blame.

In his shed, even with the door closed and a feather pillow over his head, he could still hear them: “You’re never around… Always at the newspaper. God, how I despise that newspaper!”

“I’m sorry! Is that what you want?… You let me fall away!”

Jake sat up in bed. There was a momentary quiet; he could hear the gurgle of the fountain. He felt a little dizzy, which was probably due to the fact that he’d drunk three beers at the barbecue, grabbed from the eskie by his cousin Xavier, who had been nicer and cooler than the bratty kid Jake remembered. Somewhere in the middle of the third beer, sitting at the foot of an enormous Norfolk pine, overlooking the Swan River and the Perth city skyline across the river, Jake had confided to Xavier that he hated Australia.

As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he worried that Xavier would be offended. Xavier had lived in Western Australia his whole life. All of the Price family had.

“It’s not the place, exactly,” Jake said. “It’s my parents. They fight all the time. And I miss home.”

Xavier bobbed his head. “Man,” he said. “You should just head back to the States, then. You should just bolt.”

He should just bolt. Jake had seventy Australian dollars, three hundred American dollars, and a Visa card that his father had given him in case of emergencies, but if he used the Visa card, it would take Jordan and Ava only about five minutes to figure out where he was. They would find him and come get him. He was still a minor.

Or at least those had been Jake’s thoughts earlier, at Heathcote Park. Now, having just heard his parents fighting again, he climbed out of bed and got dressed. He wasn’t going to stay here. He packed a duffel bag with clothes, his running shoes, the Hemingway novel, his camera, and one picture of Penny. He stuffed all of his money and his credit card into his jeans pocket. He jammed his earphones into his ears and walked out the door of the shed and through the garden, quietly, quietly, until he was out the side gate and on the street. It was 11:00 p.m.

He had nowhere to go. Most of Fremantle was closed up by this time of night, except the pubs, which he was too young to enter. He walked toward South Beach because that was the direction his feet seemed to want to take him. A crescent moon hung out over the Indian Ocean. Jake was chilly; he hunted through his duffel bag for his navy blue Nantucket Whalers sweatshirt.

His parents had been fighting about Ernie. If Ernie were alive, he would be four and a half years old now, a little kid who could ride a tricycle and ask Jake for piggyback rides.

Jake stuck to sidewalks and then moved over to the bike path that meandered through the park leading to the beach. He wondered if he should be worried about getting mugged. He wished he had another beer. He looked at his iPod, and despite the fact that he knew it would make him feel even worse than he already felt, he played the track of Penny singing “Lean on Me.” Lean on me, when you’re not strong: her voice sounded real, close, nearly three-dimensional. It was like a silken rope that he could climb up, maybe, until he reached her. Lean on me. When you’re not strong. He was not strong. He wanted to lean on her. More than anything, he wanted to hold her, tell her he was sorry, he would take the blame, it was his fault for what he’d done with Winnie, the kissing, the touching, the way his body had betrayed him. What he wanted to make clear was that he hadn’t stopped loving Penny, not at all, not for a second. He had run from the Pottses’ basement. He hadn’t followed his lustful seventeen-year-old desires; he had understood, even while he was captive to them, that they were wrong. He should have told Penny about it himself and not let Demeter, or possibly even Winnie, tell her in the dunes.

He should never have given her the keys to the car. He should have yanked the emergency brake. He had been worried about his transmission, for crying out loud. He’d never in a million years thought Penny would keep going, faster and faster.

He had thought she would hit the brake. Of course she would hit the brake.

At South Beach there was a group of people gathered around a bonfire. Jake stared at them from a distance. Another beach, another bonfire, the other side of the world. He didn’t recognize anyone there, of course; they were all strangers. Ferals. They were kids his age or a little older with dreadlocks and tattoos, they were drinking, and Jake smelled weed. This was most certainly not the place for him. But he was freezing now despite his sweatshirt, and the idea of being next to the fire was too tempting to resist. He would go check it out.

“Hey, man.”

One of the ferals stood. He was bare-chested, wore brown swim trunks, and had a bush of bronze-colored hair. He was so tan that the overall effect was of a continuous column of color-hair, skin, trunks. He stuck out his hand. “I’m Hawk,” he said. “Welcome.”

“Hey,” Jake said. This was a cult or something for sure. Regular people weren’t this friendly.

“What’s your name?” Hawk asked.

“Um, Jake,” he said.

“You American?” This was asked by a girl sitting a few people away from where Hawk had been sitting. She had long tangled hair and wore a white bikini top and a white eyelet skirt. How were these people not freezing their asses off?

“Yeah,” Jake said.

“Come sit,” Hawk said. “Join us. Warm yourself by the fire. You want a beer?”

Now would be a good time to excuse myself, Jake thought. Someone else, across the fire, asked, “You want a toke?” And everyone else laughed.

There was some tribal drumming music in the background, which gave the whole scene the feeling that someone was going to be sacrificed here tonight. Probably him, the newbie whose sweatshirt announced him as a punky American high school student.

“No, man, I gotta go,” Jake said.

“Go where, man?” Hawk asked.

“Sit,” the white-bikini girl said. “Have a beer. I’ll get it.” She ran through the sand to a big blue eskie. She pulled out an ice-cold Emu and handed it to him.

“Thanks,” Jake said. He had been craving a beer. He would stay for just this one. “Who do I pay?”

“ ‘Pay’?” Hawk said. “We all chipped in, man, you want to throw some in the pot, go right ahead.”

Jake pulled ten Australian dollars out of his jeans pocket and handed it to Hawk.

“Thank you!” Hawk said, holding the money out for everyone to see. “Have a seat, my friend. Have a seat.”

One hour, three beers, and two hits of marijuana later, Jake had handed over his remaining sixty Australian dollars, as well as two hundred of his three hundred American dollars, to Hawk, securing himself a place in Hawk’s van first thing in the morning. They were traveling across the Nullarbor Plain toward Adelaide, where some people would get out and some different people would get in, and then they were continuing east to Sydney. From Sydney Jake would use the credit card to book a flight back to the States, or he would jump on a container ship and cross the Pacific that way. His parents could chase after him, let them do that, or maybe they would realize how serious he was about returning home and they would do the wise thing and let him live with Zoe and Hobby for his senior year. Or he could live with the Castles. Once he reached Nantucket, it would be harder for his parents to make him return to Australia. Possession was nine tenths of ownership, after all, or something like that.