Elin Hilderbrand - Summerland

“Jordan,” Zoe said sharply.

Jordan sat bolt upright in bed, a glazed look in his eyes. He had no idea where he was, Zoe could tell. Oh God, this had been such a mistake. He reached for his glasses, and when he could see her, he smiled.

She said, “You have to get out of here.”

He frowned. “Okay.”

“And this can never, ever happen again.”

His frown grew deeper. “Okay,” he said.

She sat next to him, on the edge of the bed. She reached out and pushed his hair out of his face. She loved him, and she knew he loved her, but come on-if everyone slept with the person he or she had secretly fallen in love with, the world would be chaos.

“You have to promise me-” She stopped. She wouldn’t put the onus on him. She started again. “We have to promise each other that we won’t let this happen again, okay?”

“Okay,” Jordan said.

But of course, they didn’t keep that promise.

There had been good days with Jordan and there had been bad days. They developed a routine of keeping Tuesday and Thursday mornings just for themselves, and those mornings became anticipated and sacred. When they had to skip a day for one reason or another-Jordan had a meeting he couldn’t miss, or one of the kids was home sick from school-Zoe felt her world tip off kilter. They saw each other in public too, sometimes in the company of Al and Lynne Castle, and every once in a while Ava would emerge from the house to attend a school function or other event, and Zoe would be treated to the sight of the incredibly beautiful, broken woman she was betraying.

It was usually after seeing Ava and Jordan together that Zoe would try to end the relationship. She would call Jordan’s cell phone and say the predictable things to his recording: “I can’t do this anymore, it’s not fair to Ava, it’s not fair to me or to you or to the kids. If you’re going to stay married, then stay married. But you can’t have us both, Jordan.” She would pause dramatically, then shout, “You can’t have us both!”

She had broken up with him at least a dozen times in this way.

It was nearly nine o’clock in the morning in Perth. What would Jordan be doing now? She had no idea.

Their longest breakup had lasted eighteen hours. It happened on September 30, which was Jordan and Ava’s wedding anniversary. Zoe had respectfully kept her silence that day-no texts to Jordan, no phone calls. She was the one who had, in the preceding days, encouraged Jordan to mark the occasion with a card or flowers or dinner out at Le Languedoc, which had once been Ava’s favorite restaurant. Jordan had protested: Ava didn’t want to mark the occasion, he said. All she wanted was to be in Australia. All she wanted was Ernie back. Zoe acknowledged that this was probably true, but still she prodded him to do something special. She was talking out of guilt; she wanted him to celebrate the marriage in order to mask the fact that he was betraying it. But then, when the day itself arrived, Zoe experienced a gripping jealousy. Jordan would bring Ava breakfast in Ernie’s nursery, she imagined. They would make love. Zoe actually retched into the toilet at the thought, then wanted to slap herself for being so hypocritical. When, at four o’clock, Jordan texted and asked her to meet him at the now-closed snack shack at Dionis Beach, she couldn’t get there fast enough.

They made love in frantic haste, standing up against the side of the snack shack. Zoe felt like a desperate teenager. She wanted to ask Jordan what he had done to honor the day, but she was afraid to ask. She wanted him to offer it up on his own, but she knew he would never risk hurting her feelings. She was elated and relieved that he had wanted to meet her today, on this holiest of married days, but it sickened her as well.

She straightened her skirt. In front of them were the starkly beautiful sand dunes of Dionis. September 30: the wind held a chill. It would be fall soon. She and Jordan had been seeing each other for three months.

She said, “We have to stop.”

“Zoe.”

“It’s your wedding anniversary,” she said. “How long have you been married?”

He cleared his throat. “Eighteen years.”

“We have to stop.”

“Zoe, no.”

“If you don’t want to stop, then leave her.”

“ ‘Leave her’?”

“Leave Ava.”

“I can’t leave her, Zoe. You know what she’s like.”

Zoe stared at him. Blue eyes, glasses, shaggy dark hair. She knew him, she understood him; they were the same person. Yes, Zoe knew what Ava was like. Yes, Zoe knew that Jordan wouldn’t leave her. He would stay with her forever, and Zoe would always, always come second. She would remain in the shadows, hidden, concealed, lied about.

Zoe walked to her car, climbed in, slammed the door, started the engine. Was she going to drive away? Jordan was approaching with long strides, his hands out, his face beseeching.

Zoe backed out. Drove away.

She spent a sleepless night wondering how she had gotten herself into this mess. It had been years and years in the making, she knew; she had loved the man ever since he asked her if she wanted to do puzzles, on Fathers’ Night at the Children’s House. He poured her wine, he lit her woodstove, he washed her hair, he kissed the back of her neck. She loved him.

She felt ill when she woke up in the morning, then worse when there were no calls or texts from him. So he had gone home and taken Ava out to dinner and presented her with a bouquet of dahlias and a card. Goddamn him! Zoe wanted to scream. She wanted to throw something. But she had two kids to care for. Penny had madrigal rehearsal at ten, and Hobby had a football game at one, so Zoe found herself standing at the stove making her famous fried egg sandwiches on grilled English muffins with Swiss cheese and strawberry jam. Penny woke up in a Beatles mood, so they played “Good Day Sunshine” and “Drive My Car” and “Let It Be” as they ate, and Penny’s voice was so sweet, and Hobby’s shoulders were so broad and strong in his practice jersey, and the egg sandwiches were so delicious, that for one second Zoe thought, as she had for so many years before, Who cares about love? I have all the love I need right here in this room. Breaking up with Jordan had been the right thing to do. It had been the only thing to do. If the twins somehow found out what was going on in her head and her heart, if they knew how she spent her Tuesday and Thursday mornings while they were sitting in French class or American History, they would be destroyed. Zoe had always said they could tell her anything, but that didn’t go both ways. She had never been one to shelter her kids from the harsh realities of life, but this reality, yes. It was too private and awful to share. It would remain private, but it was no longer awful because it was over. She and Jordan had broken up. She was clean and righteous.

That feeling lasted until ten o’clock, when Zoe pulled in to the high school parking lot to drop Penny off. Penny kissed her and got out of the car and ran for the doors of the school-Mr. Nelson had told her if she was late one more time, she would lose her solo-and Zoe watched her daughter disappear into the building, and though she still had things to do (she had to go home, pick up Hobby, deliver him to pregame practice, and then help set up the concession stand), she felt an emptiness encroaching on her.

At that moment her cell phone rang.

Jordan.

“Hello?” she said.

“Will you stay with me?” he said. “Please?”

“Yes,” she said.

Now, in the car, at Cisco Beach, in the looming presence of the white cross, Zoe cried out, “I miss you!” Her voice was hoarse. “I love you!” She was a certifiable crazy person, yelling these things out to the dark interior of her car. But she had a freedom here that she lacked at home, where she had Hobby to think of.

“I love you!”

So there, she was admitting it to herself. Her anger at Jordan had been a carapace over her real feelings, but now it was cracking and falling off in pieces. It wasn’t Jordan’s fault that Penny was dead and Jake was alive, it wasn’t his fault that he couldn’t step inside her grief and discover just how unbearable it was. She had sent him away, and now he was gone and she missed him and she loved him and she missed Penny and she loved Penny.

She was alone, profoundly alone.

No, she was not doing all right. She would never be all right again.

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.