Elin Hilderbrand - Summerland

Lynne slipped out of bed. Calm down, she thought. She was tempted just to take a Lunesta and drift back to sleep. Beck Paulsen: where was he now? Was he anyplace worse than where she currently found herself?

She had sworn she would never use the pin to open Demeter’s door again, and yet she had put the pin right there on her nightstand. She crept down the hall to Demeter’s room. She should wake up Al. If this was going to be done, it should be done by both of them together. But something about this felt personal: Lynne to Demeter, mother to daughter. Was Lynne thinking of Zoe and Penny? Of course she was.

It looked as though Demeter’s bedroom light was off. Lynne put her ear to the door. Silence. She half expected to walk in and find the window open again, and Demeter’s bed empty.

She popped the lock. The sound was loud to Lynne’s ears, and she held her breath. Waited, waited… and then eased the door open.

Demeter was asleep on her back, snoring. Lynne tiptoed over to the bed. She was assaulted by the obvious memories of Demeter as a baby in her crib, the soft spot on her head palpitating as she worked her pacifier. There had never been a sweeter, softer baby. Then as a little girl in footy pajamas, in smocked nightgowns. A chunky early adolescent in long nightshirts, her toenails painted blue, a smear of chocolate around her mouth, swearing that yes, she had brushed her teeth, when she most certainly had not.

Childhood ended here.

Lynne lifted the water glass from Demeter’s nightstand and tasted it. The liquid burned her tongue and she spit it out, and the glass shook in her hand. She tasted it again, however, just to make sure. Ugh, awful! It was straight vodka or gin; she couldn’t tell which. Her eyes filled with tears. She held on to the glass and switched on the light, but Demeter didn’t wake up. That was fine, though. That was preferable.

Lynne opened the closet door.

There on the floor, where another girl would have lined up her shoes, were bottles and bottles of alcohol: Mount Gay rum, Patron tequila, Kahlua, Dewar’s, Finlandia vodka, and wine, sauvignon blanc and two bottles of Chateau Margaux, which even Lynne, as a teetotaler, knew was outrageously expensive. Lynne set down the glass on Demeter’s desk and stumbled back into the nether regions of the closet, where she found a black Hefty bag cinched at the top. Lynne dragged it out into the room. The clinking gave the contents away: dozens of empty bottles.

Fruit flies swarmed. The smell. Lynne gagged.

Demeter rolled over. “Mom?” she said.

Ted Field suggested a facility outside of Boston called Vendever.

“For how long?” Lynne asked.

“As long as it takes,” he said.

Lynne packed a bag for Demeter and dropped it off at the hospital. She reminded herself that her daughter was lucky. Many of the people who ended up at Vendever had only the clothes on their backs. Many of the people who ended up at Vendever didn’t have two loving parents who would take any steps necessary to help them get better.

An alcoholic at seventeen? Lynne knew that this happened. But for it to happen to them, the Castles?

Demeter had fought her fate at first. She had jumped out of bed, grabbed the Hefty bag from Lynne’s hands, and started swinging it at her. Lynne had a bruise on her ribs to prove it. Al had woken up and restrained Demeter. Then he’d called Ted Field, who had met them at the hospital.

Now, just a few hours before her departure, Demeter seemed accepting. Four weeks. She would go through detox and counseling. She would meet other kids who were dealing with dependency issues, and professionals who were trained to help such kids. Demeter lay in the white hospital bed looking so hopeless and despondent that Lynne couldn’t help herself.

She said, “Is there anything I can do for you before you go?”

There was such a long silence that Lynne figured her daughter was ignoring her. Then Demeter took a breath. “Yes,” she said. “I’d like to talk to Hobby.”

He was hanging out with Claire on his mother’s back deck, and it was almost like regular summertime. His mother brought them cold ginger ales and a bowl of nacho chips with her homemade salsa that she’d made from the first of the Bartlett’s Farm field tomatoes. The ocean unfolded before them. Hobby was dying to jump in and let the cool waves cradle him, but he still had a cast on-just the one, on his left leg-and so there would be no ocean for him for a while. His leg itched as if the Devil himself were inside the cast. Hobby swore that as soon as the thing was off, he was going to climb down those stairs and jump in the water; he didn’t care if it was Christmas Day.

He thought maybe Claire would want to go down and have a swim, but she was nursing her ginger ale, holding the cold glass to her temple, and she hadn’t even tasted the salsa. She was either sick or nervous. They were planning on telling Zoe about the baby that night at dinner. Claire had been lying low, but in the past few days her phone had started blowing up: Annabel Wright, Winnie Potts, Joe, her boss from the Juice Bar. They’d all left messages urging her to call them back. Claire was convinced that everyone knew. She and her mother had had a huge fight because Rasha had told Sara Boule, and Sara Boule had most likely gossiped about it to every person who had been to Dr. Toomer’s office to get a cleaning over the past three weeks. Claire had wanted to wait to announce the news until after the ultrasound, once they knew the baby was healthy and whole. She had wanted to tell Zoe then, and Coach Horton of the field hockey team, who had just returned from France. Now, thanks to Rasha and Sara Boule, Zoe was in danger of finding out thirdhand, and what a terrible, cruel thing that would be. Hobby agreed that they couldn’t let that happen.

Penny, Hobby thought. Had Penny heard about Claire’s pregnancy from someone else? If she had, wouldn’t she have demanded an explanation from Hobby? Or would she have just flipped out and gone off the deep end?

They had to tell his mother, and pronto. He’d asked Zoe if Claire could stay for dinner, and Zoe had said yes, of course, and then she’d set about making an occasion out of it. They were having grilled lobster tails and French potato salad and corn on the cob with lime-cilantro butter, and crema calda with blackberries. Hobby knew that Zoe was excited about cooking for someone other than him and the Allencasts for a change. And she was relieved, perhaps, that Penny’s chair at the table wouldn’t sit empty tonight.

It was two o’clock now. Dinner was scheduled for seven. Hobby and Claire were left to marinate in their worry for five more hours. He had no idea what his mother’s reaction would be. She had always assured him that he could tell her anything. But he wasn’t sure; this was a pretty big “anything.” Zoe had gotten pregnant by accident eighteen years earlier, so by rights she should understand. But what if she didn’t? What if this news was the thing that finally broke her? Zoe had made no secret of the fact that despite Hobby’s injuries, she still expected great things from him. She expected him to get into an elite college and get a degree in architecture. He couldn’t forgo college so he could stay on Nantucket and work in construction and raise a child. He could not-could not-break his mother’s heart.

Would she be disappointed in him? Would she do the predictable thing and blame Claire? God, he hoped not. Claire was so nervous that she couldn’t eat at all, but Hobby reacted the opposite way. He guzzled down his ginger ale and shoveled in chip after chip loaded up with tangy salsa. His mother had added jalapeños to the salsa, which was something she used to do only when Penny was at a sleepover or away at camp. Penny didn’t eat spicy food; she worried it would damage her vocal cords. And so the fact that Zoe had added jalapeños to the salsa and presumably would be adding jalapeños to the salsa every time she made it from now on-since Penny was dead-further depressed Hobby and made him eat even faster. His manners, which were usually pretty decent, were appalling right now; he knew this, but he couldn’t help himself. Salsa dropped from his chip and stained his khaki shorts. He had crumbs down the front of his shirt. The speed with which he had polished off the ginger ale caused him to emit a loud and prolonged belch that smelled like onions. Claire shook her head at him. She was probably wondering why she had ever allowed herself to couple with such an artless boor. She was probably fearing for the way he would raise their unborn child.

“Excuse me,” he said.

Claire’s eyes looked weary. She was sick, or sick of him, or sick of their situation. They might have been married for forty years already.

“Let’s tell her now,” Claire said. “I can’t just sit here and wait.”

Hobby brushed the crumbs off the front of his shirt and sat up a little straighter. Yes! Tell her now and get it over with. Waiting was torture. He burped again, more quietly this time. He regretted having eaten so fast.

“Okay,” he said. “I think you’re right. You’re definitely right. We’ll tell her now.”

“Just like we talked about,” Claire said. “You start.”

The phone in the house rang. Hobby’s heart seized. There were ringing phones and there were ringing phones, but this ringing phone was so ill timed that Hobby could imagine only that the person on the other end was someone who had chosen this precise moment to spoil their news. It must be Beatrice McKenzie, the librarian at the Atheneum, or Savannah Major, the principal’s wife, calling to congratulate Zoe after hearing “through the grapevine” that she was going to be a grandmother.

A grandmother. Zoe was forty years old. Hobby burped again.

Inside, Zoe answered the phone, a fact that Hobby found startling. He heard her murmuring, using her private voice. It was the same voice she used when she talked to Jordan on the phone. Hobby wondered if there was any way the phone call could be from him. God, that would be something! But it was the middle of the night in Australia now.

Zoe stepped out onto the deck. She said, “Hobby, can I speak to you for a minute, please?”

Hobby twisted in his chair. His mother’s face was inscrutable, but he was no dummy, it was something bad. She knew. He felt his insides start to roil; he burped again and tasted jalapeños. She knew. Someone else had told her. She wanted him… what? to come inside? She did realize that he had an eight-pound cast on his leg and that moving from one location to another was still an arduous task for him, right? He struggled to his feet. Even on his worst days he moved more gracefully than he was doing right now. Something about his mother’s face and Claire’s face-man, truthfully, Hobby couldn’t even look at Claire’s face, but he knew it was bad-and the hot sun and his aching, itching leg and the goddamned jalapeños in the salsa, and Penny dead, never to not eat jalapeños again or use her vocal cords again: all of these things conspired against him, and his stomach heaved, and he pivoted with the help of one crutch, and then he projectile-vomited off the deck, down into the dune grass below.

“Hobby!” his mother cried.

He vomited again. He hated to admit it, but it felt good, getting the poisonous stuff out. He could hear Claire making unpleasant noises behind him. She was probably going to sympathy-puke. This was like some godawful Monty Python movie. He closed his eyes and saw colors-swirling pink and orange-and he thought, Penny, can you help me here, please? She would probably refuse him. He could just hear her, wherever she was, saying that she was not some angel slave whom he could just summon whenever he got into a tight spot.

A glass of ice water appeared at his elbow. His mother. She said, “Are you okay?”

He wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand and accepted the water. “Yeah,” he said. “I ate too fast.”

She said, “I really need to talk to you inside. Privately.”

Hobby checked on Claire. She was sitting ramrod straight with her eyes closed and her legs folded in a way that reminded him of a yoga position. He said, “Claire? I’m going in for a minute.”

She nodded, though barely.

Hobby crutched his way inside and followed his mother into the nether regions of the house. Her bedroom. He looked around as though it were a room in a museum. It had been years and years since Hobby had done anything more than peek in here. Penny used to go into their mother’s room all the time, she would spend a string of nights sleeping in Zoe’s bed. Zoe and Penny had been ridiculously close, they’d had that best-friend thing going on, a girl thing, and Hobby had been more than happy to stand clear. Still, there were aspects of the room that Hobby had memorized long ago: the oval mirror with the gilt frame (true, not as big as Penny’s mirror, not even close), the dressing table with the engraved silver brush with the soft white bristles that, as a child, Hobby had liked to rub across his face, the photograph of Zoe and Hobson senior on the steps of the Culinary Institute, both of them in their chef’s whites and toques. A large pink conch shell that Zoe had gotten on a trip she’d taken, alone, to Cabo. The faded quilt on her spindle bed that she’d inherited from her mother’s sister, who had married an Amish man and lived somewhere in Iowa. Over the door, the enamel cross that Zoe had bought in Ravenna, Italy, where she had gone on vacation a million years ago with her parents. The one time Hobby had asked her about the cross, she’d said that she viewed it as a piece of art, not a religious symbol. The cut crystal candy dish filled with beach glass on her night table, next to a stack of books. The bottom book was The Collected Works of M. F. K. Fisher. This was Zoe’s favorite book of all time, and it had been Hobby’s father’s favorite book as well.