Elin Hilderbrand - Summerland

Now she and Jordan struggled up the hill toward the Vlamingh Lookout. At the crest Ava stopped, a little winded, and pointed across the island toward the Basin and Little Parakeet Bay. The day was clear enough that she could just pick out the coastline of the mainland, five miles away.

Jordan followed Ava’s finger with dull eyes. He swigged from his water bottle. “What are we doing here, Ava?” he said.

“You don’t like it?” she said. “In the summer you can swim at these beaches. You can snorkel. We used to collect these purple sea urchins, and my brothers used to fish for skippies with nets.”

“What are we doing here?” he asked again.

She had hoped to make it to lunchtime, to a booth in the pub of the hotel, where they could relax and have a pint. Ava closed her eyes. The pub used to have a jukebox. Ava and her siblings would play Bruce Springsteen and the Who, but her mother would always choose “Waltzing Matilda,” and then her mother and father and a few of the drunk strangers sitting at surrounding tables would belt out the lyrics together.

“I’m going to adopt a baby,” she said. “A little girl, from China.”

This was met with silence, which Ava had predicted. She couldn’t look at Jordan’s face. She desperately wanted a cigarette.

“No,” he said. “I am not adopting a baby. I am not raising another child. I am not.”

“You weren’t listening to me,” Ava said. “I said I am going to adopt a baby.”

“So what does that mean?” He drank from his water bottle, then spit the water into the grass on the side of the road. “What does that mean, Ava?”

“It means… I want to stay here, for good, and I want to adopt a baby. And I think you and Jake should go home.”

“What?” Jordan said. “What is this? This is you… what? Leaving me? You brought me here to godforfuckingsaken Rottnest Island so that you can tell me you’re leaving me and you’re going to adopt a baby?” He got off his bike and threw it onto the road, where it jumped and clattered. “This is bullshit, Ava!”

“Jordan.”

“This is bullshit! I gave up my life for you, I left my entire life back on Nantucket and brought you here because that was all you ever wanted. You never wanted to live on Nantucket with me, that was perfectly clear twenty fucking years ago when I showed up here the first time and you laughed in my face and showed me the door. But you came back to me, you came back to me, Ava-and yet I’ve spent most of this marriage feeling as if I were the one who was making you miserable. I was the reason we couldn’t get pregnant again, I was the reason Ernie died, I was the one who was too absorbed with work, everything was always my fault. And so now I do the selfless thing, I act in the name of our marriage, in the name of our family, and you tell me that you’re adopting a baby and that Jake and I should go home?”

Cigarette, she thought. Or a cold pint. Anything to make this easier. But she would be glad later, she supposed, that she had had no crutches. Nothing to do with her hands but let them hold her bike steady, nowhere to put her eyes but on her husband.

“I know about Zoe, Jordan,” Ava said. “I’ve known for a while now.”

This was the real ambush; Jordan was caught completely off guard. She watched half a dozen emotions cross his face, and because they had been married for so long, she recognized every single one: denial, incredulity, contrition, anger, sadness, resignation.

“Jesus, Ava,” he said.

“It’s okay,” she said. “It wasn’t okay, I don’t think, for a long time, but it’s okay now.” She thought back to their recent awkward encounter in bed. She had known then that things were over. She had allowed her marriage to rust, like a bicycle-built-for-two left out in the rain. And then, when she finally decided she wanted to climb back on it, she’d been surprised when it didn’t work. When she reached out for Jordan, he was ten thousand miles away. At first Ava had felt angry and rejected, until she realized that the passion she felt that night wasn’t for Jordan, it was for something else: Australia, her mother and brothers and sisters, the nascent idea of a new family.

“I can’t believe this is happening,” Jordan said. He screamed at the open sky: “I CANNOT BELIEVE THIS IS HAPPENING!”

She couldn’t believe it either. She took a deep breath of the bracing Rottnest air. She had come to this island as a child; she could never have foreseen the circumstances that she found herself in now. For years, no matter how wretched she had felt, splitting from Jordan had been unthinkable. But why? Why?

“Go back to Nantucket, Jordan,” Ava said. “That’s where you belong.”

Jordan opened his mouth to speak.

“You can protest,” Ava said. “You can deny it all you want. But I know the truth. You want this over too.”

“And what about our son?” Jordan asked.

“Jake is a sorry mess,” Ava said. “A couple of weeks ago he tried to run away. He met some kids down at South Beach who had a van. He gave them some money because they said they would drive him to Sydney, where he was going to hop on a plane, or a container ship, back to the States. But they drugged him or something, I guess, and then they robbed him, and so he came back to the house. I caught him coming in the side gate at five-thirty in the morning with his duffel bag.”

“Jesus,” Jordan said. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t he tell me?”

“And ever since he told me what happened, all I’ve been thinking about is what I would have done if I’d lost him. Really lost him, the way we lost Ernie, the way Zoe lost Penny.” Ava blinked. The wind whipped her hair, and she tried to collect it into an elastic at the base of her neck. “What would I have done?”

“I don’t have an answer for that,” Jordan said. “I don’t seem to have an answer for anything anymore.”

“I asked Jake what he wanted more than anything in the world. And you know what he said? He wants Nantucket.”

“Ava. We’re not going to decide this today. You can’t dissolve a twenty-year marriage in one day.”

“Just think about it, Jordan, please. Take Jake home and keep him safe. Get him into college somewhere. Put him on a plane to see me every once in a while. Run the newspaper, serve the island, do what you were born and raised to do.” She swallowed. “And get Zoe back.”

“Ava.”

“I am serious,” she said. “And I am sincere. Go after what you want.”

Jordan poked his glasses up his nose. This gesture always used to bother her, but now she saw it as his way of expressing bewilderment. “And what about you?” he asked.

“I’ve got what I want right here.” Ava mounted her bike and coasted down the backside of the hill. A quokka bounced across the road in front of her, and she thought, I win the dollar coin!

She was home.

Lynne Castle’s favorite line was, “I’m too old for this.” Lately, though, she had felt like adding an expletive onto the end of that; now she wanted to say, “I’m too old for this shit.” But Lynne wasn’t one to swear. She was solid, she was responsible, she was the voice of reason, she was a model citizen, she was a loving wife, she was a good mother.

But was she, really?

Welcome to the summer of self-doubt. Lynne and Al had everything a couple could want. Al had the car dealership and local politics. Lynne had a permitting business that kept her as busy as she wanted to be. They had a lovely home, the Castle castle. They had two boys away at college who were poised to take the world by storm. And they had Demeter.

On the outside, their lives looked good. Life had always looked good for the Castles. Al was in charge of everything on this island, and what he wasn’t in charge of, Lynne was in charge of. But lately something deep inside their life seemed to be emitting a foul smell.

Lynne wasn’t stupid, she wasn’t an idiot, she knew that the problem was Demeter. Her youngest child, her only daughter. Lynne had been thrilled when she gave birth to a girl after the two boys. It was a dream come true: all that pink, the baby dolls, dance lessons, tea parties. Demeter had been a precocious little girl, cute and tiny, with a high-pitched candy voice.

What had gone wrong? Could Lynne just look back and be honest with herself for once?

By the time Demeter was ten or eleven, she was overweight. Lynne wasn’t quite sure how this had happened. It was true that Lynne and Al were not small people, and there never seemed to be enough time in the day for regular exercise, but neither one of them was what you’d call fat, either. And both the boys were trim and athletic.

Lynne had enrolled Demeter in spring soccer; first she sat on the bench-because she was no good at the sport, because she was too heavy to run more than a few yards downfield without getting winded-and then she quit. Al bought her a mountain bike for her birthday, but by that point Demeter had few friends, and so no one to bike with, no one to go and see on her bike. She was ostracized at school because of her weight, but at home Lynne was afraid to address her size because she didn’t want to make it an issue, she didn’t want Demeter to think that her own mother believed she was fat. Instead she strove to promote a positive body image by telling her daughter she was beautiful, and of course she could have another piece of cake.

Demeter got bigger. She refused to ski during their weekends in Stowe. She refused to put on a bathing suit when they went to the beach on Sundays.

Fat camp? Lynne wondered. A summer away might help, but the idea seemed cruel. And outdated. Lynne had had a friend in high school who’d gone to fat camp and returned with an eating disorder.

Al was little help. Lynne crawled into bed at night and said, “What are we going to do about her? She’s so lonely. I could cry thinking about it.” And Al said, “I’ll do whatever you want to do, honey.”

This sounded like support, but really it was Al passing the buck. He was too busy with the dealership and his civic duties to do anything about Demeter. Demeter was a girl, Lynne was her mother. Certainly Lynne would know the best course of action. Al had put in his intense parenting time with the boys. Little League coach for eight years, science projects, college visits-he’d done it all. Lynne could hardly fault him for taking a pass here.

But she did fault him. And she faulted herself. What she thought was, I’m too old for this shit.

Adolescence, Lynne had tried to tell Demeter, was like a bad ride on the ferry. You got tossed about in the waves, you crested to the top, you sank into the troughs, and the motion between the highs and the lows made you sick to your stomach. You thought with every passing minute that you were surely going to drown. The good news was, the ride eventually came to an end. You docked in Hyannis Harbor and disembarked from the boat. Demeter would graduate from high school, she would reach adulthood, and things would get better.

Demeter had looked upon her mother with a jaundiced eye. “A bad ride on the ferry”? That was what her mother had to offer?

A little before 1:30 a.m. on June 17, Ed Kapenash had called the house and told Al that there had been an accident. Demeter was at the hospital, but she was unhurt.

Al relayed this message to Lynne, who was by that point sitting bolt upright in bed. “There was an accident, Demeter’s at the hospital, but she’s unhurt.”

Lynne said, “She’s not at the hospital. She’s in her bedroom.”

And Al, trusting every word that came out of his wife’s mouth, said to Police Chief Ed Kapenash, “Demeter is in her bedroom.”

To which Ed responded, “I’m looking right at her, Al. Can you come down here, please?”

Even then, Lynne didn’t believe it. She threw on the skirt and blouse by her bed, the same outfit she had worn only hours before to four graduation parties, and she marched down the hallway to Demeter’s bedroom. Knocked on the door. There was no answer, but that was hardly unusual. Lynne tried the knob. Locked. Again, not unusual. What teenage girl didn’t lock her bedroom door? She knocked again, and Al came up behind her with a metal pin.

“Jesus Christ, Lynne, step aside, please.”

Lynne half turned to him, shocked. He never spoke to her like that. He popped the lock and reached for the light and then they were both standing in Demeter’s empty bedroom, where the window was hanging wide open. In a daze Lynne walked to the window and looked down.

“She… what?” Lynne said.

“Climbed out the window,” Al said in a snarky tone of voice.