“And then what?” Lynne said. The screen for the window lay on the shingles of the roof, but from the roof line it was probably eight or nine feet to the lawn below. “She jumped?”

“She must have,” Al said. “I’m going to the hospital. Are you coming with me?”

“Of course I’m coming with you,” Lynne said. Her daughter had been in an accident, her daughter was at the hospital, her daughter had climbed out her bedroom window and jumped to the lawn below. Her daughter had fooled them. Lynne was so tired, it was the middle of the night, she had gotten only a couple hours of sleep. She was too old for this.

But once she reached the hospital, she couldn’t have been more awake. Ed Kapenash met them out in the parking lot, and Lynne thought, This can hardly be standard protocol. Maybe he had lied about Demeter’s being unhurt so they wouldn’t drive off the road while trying to get here. Why else would Ed be waiting for them outside?

Ed spoke in a low voice. Lynne had never heard him sound so serious. Jake Randolph’s Jeep, Penny driving, Penny D.O.A., Hobby alive but unresponsive. The helicopter was on its way. Demeter unhurt, Jake Randolph unhurt.

Lynne couldn’t quite keep up. “Wait a minute,” she said. “What did you say about Penny?”

Ed pressed his lips together.

Al said, “Honey, she’s dead. She was dead on arrival.”

Lynne felt herself falling. But no, she was upright. But she had dropped something. Keys. Her keys had fallen from her hand onto the asphalt. She bent down to pick them up. She hiccupped, then started crying.

“I met you out here because I thought you should know,” Ed said. “So you’ll be prepared. Jordan’s on his way. Zoe’s on her way.”

“Do they know?” Lynne asked. “Does Zoe know?”

“Not yet.”

Jesus, this was awful. Lynne’s life wasn’t set up to accommodate this kind of awful.

“I also need to inform you that we found a bottle of Jim Beam in your daughter’s bag,” Ed said. “It had an inch or two of whiskey left in it. She probably wasn’t the only one drinking it, but the paramedics said she was inebriated when she arrived. I’m going in to talk with her now. I just wanted to tell you that myself. Because we’re friends.”

“Thank you, Ed,” Al said.

“Jim Beam?” Lynne said. “Where on Earth, really, where would Demeter have gotten a bottle of Jim Beam? We don’t drink. You know we don’t drink, Ed.”

“I’m just telling you what we found.”

“Someone must have put it in her bag,” Lynne said. “One of the boys.” But not Penny. Penny didn’t drink at all; Lynne knew this from both Demeter and Zoe. Although it was graduation, so maybe she’d been drinking tonight. Maybe that was what had caused the accident. Maybe Penny had put the bottle in Demeter’s purse. Demeter would have let her do that-anything to be accepted by those kids. “Was Penny drinking?”

“We know almost nothing else,” Ed said.

Al said, “Honey, let the man do his job. He came out here to warn us as a courtesy.”

Was Al expecting her to thank him, then? Say something like “Thank you, Ed, for telling us that our daughter was the one with the near-empty bottle of booze in her purse”? Lynne didn’t like being the mother who insisted on her child’s innocence-those mothers were nearly always delusional about their own children-but in this case she had no choice. There was no way the Jim Beam or whatever it was they’d found in Demeter’s purse actually belonged to her.

Lynne couldn’t believe she was even worrying about this. Penny Alistair was dead. And Hobby-what had the Chief said about Hobby, again?

“What did he say about Hobby?” Lynne asked Al, as the Chief’s back receded toward the bright glass doors of the Emergency Room. She was shivering as if it were January instead of June.

“Let’s go inside,” Al said.


Now, two months later, Lynne had a hard time piecing together what had happened after that. Her memory was shattered like a broken mirror. She remembered seeing Zoe walk in; the two of them exchanged a look, and Lynne feared for the expression on her own face. She hated that she knew that Penny was dead while Zoe didn’t; she despised Ed Kapenash for telling them first.

She remembered Zoe’s slapping Jordan. Oh yes, that she remembered. She would remember that for the rest of her life. Zoe nearly knocked the glasses off of Jordan’s face. And why? What had Jordan done wrong? That wasn’t clear.

Al was the one who helped Zoe get to Boston, though at first she refused his help. But Al held firm: “I’m taking you, goddammit, Zoe. You can’t do this alone.” He got her to Mass General; he stood by her side while the doctors delivered the ghastly news. Hobby was still unresponsive. In a coma. There was nothing they could do but wait.

Meanwhile, Lynne and Jordan had sat side by side in the waiting room of Nantucket Cottage Hospital until Ed Kapenash finished interrogating their children. Had the two of them talked? Lynne couldn’t remember. She did remember Demeter’s coming out to the waiting room, pale, shaking, and smelling like vomit. Lynne touched her all over in a way that she hadn’t touched her in years, checking to make sure she was in one piece.

“Let’s go, Mom, please,” Demeter whispered.

“Yes,” Lynne said. She remembered that Jordan was still sitting, waiting for Jake to emerge. She remembered that his blue eyes tracked her and Demeter, and his mouth opened to say something. But did he speak? And did Lynne say good-bye?

She couldn’t remember. But she must have. She would never have left without saying good-bye.


Another mother might have addressed the issue of the Jim Beam right away. Another mother might have acknowledged-even if only to herself-that the vomit fumes coming off her daughter in the passenger seat did, in fact, reek of whiskey. Another mother might have asked her daughter the simple question, “What happened?” So that at least she would have a baseline to work from.

But Lynne Castle addressed, acknowledged, and asked nothing. Things might have been different if Al had still been with them, but Al had gone with Zoe, so Lynne was left to deal with Demeter by herself, and she was at a loss. Demeter had carried a pillow, sheathed in an aqua pillowcase, out of the hospital. Every so often she would lean over, bury her face in the pillow, and emit a soundless scream. And Lynne thought, She’s in shock. That was what Dr. Field had said. He’d pressed a prescription for a sedative into Lynne’s hand, but it was too late, or too early, to get that filled at the pharmacy now.

At home Lynne said, “Daddy’s gone to Boston. Do you want to sleep in my bed with me?”

Demeter said, “God, no.”

Lynne tried not to take offense at this, but she was tired, and for some reason these words, or perhaps the disgust with which Demeter uttered them, hurt her feelings. She reminded herself that Demeter had never been a snuggler, and that the two of them didn’t have a touchy-feely relationship. Zoe and Penny have that kind of relationship, Lynne thought-or at least they did (God, the first use of the past tense, it was hideous!). She knew that Penny used to climb into bed with Zoe when she was scared or there was a lightning storm, and they always cuddled together on the couch during Patriots games on football Sundays, and they lay next to each other on towels at the beach. Demeter and Lynne just weren’t like that, fair enough, but was it too much to ask for a little physical closeness between them tonight, on the very night when Penny Alistair had been killed and Demeter might have been killed herself?

Lynne and Demeter stood at the open door of Demeter’s bedroom. The light was on, the window wide open. Was Lynne going to confront her daughter about her locked door, her exodus, her blatant deceit?

No, not tonight. Outside, the birds were starting to chirp. June on Nantucket: the sun rose at 4:30 a.m.

“Are you going to be okay?” Lynne asked.

Demeter eyed her mother.

Right, Lynne thought: stupid, vague question, too big a question to answer. She narrowed it down a little. “Do you want a sleeping pill?” she asked. “I can give you one of mine.”

“Okay,” Demeter said.

It was something concrete Lynne could do. Something she had to offer. One of her Lunestas. She had asked Ted Field for them back in April, when Al was running for selectman for the fourth time. The stress of local politics, of negative campaigning aimed at Al, of insinuations that he had Ed Kapenash, among other people, in his back pocket-all of this had kept Lynne up at night. Ha! She had worried then, when nothing was wrong. Al had won in a landslide.

Lynne placed the tiny pill in Demeter’s palm, and Demeter dry-mouthed it down. Lynne grimaced. Probably not a bad idea to suggest that she take a shower and brush her teeth: she stank to high heaven. But as Lynne was searching for the words to gently convey this thought to her daughter, Demeter stepped into her bedroom and slammed the door shut, leaving her mother alone in the hallway.

“Good night, darling,” Lynne said.


Now it was August, and the worst was behind them. Hobby had woken up from his coma, Penny had been properly buried, the Randolph family had moved halfway around the world. Demeter had defied all odds and honored her commitment to work at Frog and Toad Landscaping. She got up and went to work five mornings a week. She was never late. She was the color of toast and she had, most definitely, lost some weight.

But something still wasn’t right. Demeter was less forthcoming than ever. She rarely spoke unless spoken to, and half the time, when Al or Lynne asked her a question, she gave a nonsensical answer and broke into giggles. And yet Lynne was afraid to dissect this behavior because Demeter did, in fact, seem happier than she had seemed in a long, long time. She was working and bringing home a weekly paycheck, she looked good. She had made some friends, she said, on her crew. A girl named Nell. A boy named Coop. A man named Zeus.

“Zeus?” Lynne said. “That’s an interesting name.”

“ ‘Gods and goddesses in the front,’ ” Demeter said, and then she giggled.

Lynne wondered if Demeter had started a relationship with one of the men on her crew. Maybe this Coop, or this Zeus. Zeus was more likely, Lynne thought. An older Hispanic man with a wife all the way down in Central America-to him, Demeter would seem young and ripe and lush. Too young, though. Lynne couldn’t stand to think about it.

It crossed Lynne’s mind that Demeter might be doing drugs either before or after work. Because, to be honest, her whole demeanor was altered. She was a different kid. All of her angry, bitter, resentful, woe-is-me attitude seemed to have disappeared, and in its place was this vacant insipidness. Demeter used to be an avid reader. Her marks in school weren’t great, they were just-getting-by, but she always read very good books, both classic and contemporary. But had she read a single book this whole summer? Lynne didn’t think so. Lynne wasn’t naive, she knew that landscapers were famous for smoking marijuana, and she also knew that Demeter might not have the resolve to say no. She was a perfect target for peer pressure, wanting so badly to be accepted and to fit in. Lynne had gone so far as to sniff her daughter’s clothes before she stuffed them into the washing machine. They smelled like sour sweat but not smoke. Later she extended her olfactory investigation to the inside of Demeter’s Escape, where her nose was overpowered by the smell of breath mints and piney air-freshener and something else that was sickly sweet but unidentifiable-until she pulled a black, rotten banana out from under the passenger seat.

Lynne didn’t find any signs of marijuana. But there was something-something-going on.

Demeter had been through one hell of an ordeal this summer. She had lost Penny, who was as much of a friend as she had had, and she had lost Jake too. Hobby was still alive, thank God. Lynne kept tabs on him through the grapevine; it seemed she was always talking to someone who had just seen him in town or out for a quiet dinner at 56 Union with his mother. Lynne learned that he was out of the wheelchair and onto crutches and making excellent progress, but that Coach Jaxon had finally come to terms with the fact that he would never play football again. It was just too dangerous. Hobby was apparently spending lots of time with Claire Buckley, which was good, Lynne thought. Claire was a nice girl.

Lynne wished she had gotten all this news about Hobby from Zoe herself, but Zoe was incommunicado. Lynne had arranged dropoff meals at the Alistair house for six weeks after Penny’s funeral but Zoe had never called or written to say thank you. Not that a thank-you was necessary; Lynne certainly hadn’t scheduled the meals because she wanted gratitude. She had done it because it was one stupid, paltry thing that she and the other women in the community could do-offer food so that something healthy and delicious would be on hand whenever Zoe got her appetite back. Lynne had also left several messages on Zoe’s voicemail, she had lost count of how many, four or five, but these had gone unreturned. She had tried to tread lightly, saying, “Hey, Zoe, it’s me, just checking in, no need to call me back, just wanted to see how you’re doing, thinking of you.” So Zoe had managed to make it out to 56 Union for dinner with Hobby, but she hadn’t been able to call Lynne back? Lynne was-or had been-her best friend. Lynne had to assume that status had been altered in Zoe’s mind. Perhaps Zoe couldn’t bring herself to talk to her for the same reason that she’d slapped Jordan in the hospital waiting room: a firewall of anger. She had lost a child, and they hadn’t.