Elin Hilderbrand - Summerland

All of these things about his mother’s room were as familiar to Hobby as the parts of his own body, and yet somehow he’d forgotten about them.

Why were they talking in her room? Wasn’t the kitchen private enough? Or the hallway? This was very bad. This was what he’d been dreading, or worse.

Zoe closed the door.

Hobby collapsed on the bed. At that moment he yearned for his old body back. He wanted to run away as fast as he could. He wanted to jump fences and swim ponds. Anything to get away.

Penny, help me!

Zoe said, “Lynne Castle just called.”

Hobby thought, Oh, Jesus.

Zoe said, “Demeter is in bad shape. She’s going away to a hospital called Vendever to be treated for alcohol abuse.”

“What?” Hobby said.

“They’re holding her right now at the hospital,” Zoe said. “And she’s asked for one thing before she goes.”

“What’s that?” Hobby said.

“She wants to talk to you.”

Hobby brushed his teeth and splashed cold water on his face. He thought, Demeter wants to talk to me.

In the living room he found Claire lying on the sofa with a wet washcloth over her eyes.

“She doesn’t feel well,” Zoe said. “Maybe she got too much sun. Or maybe the two of you caught a bug.”

“Not a bug,” Hobby said. He looked at Claire, his princess in repose. Her left hand was resting across her abdomen in a way that he felt stated the obvious. Should they tell Zoe now, before he went off on this heinous mission of talking to Demeter at the hospital?

“Mom…,” he said.

“I told Claire that we needed to run an errand,” Zoe said. “And that we’ll be back in an hour or so. That will give her a chance to rest.”

Claire nodded, and Hobby thought, All right, get this over with, then tell Mom. Tell her over dinner, like we planned.

“We’ll be back in an hour,” he said. “Maybe sooner.”

They used the Emergency Room entrance and found Lynne Castle waiting for them. Lynne reached out for Zoe, and the two women hugged for a long time. Zoe was crying and Lynne Castle was crying and there seemed to be a lot of apologizing going on: “I’m sorry…” “No, I’m sorry…” Lynne was so sorry for everything, Zoe was sorry for not calling Lynne back sooner, Lynne was sorry for her daughter’s behavior, Zoe was sorry that she’d had to be the one to blow the whistle. Hobby hung from his crutches and thought, Can we please get this over with? I have my own drama waiting for me at home. But Zoe and Lynne kept speaking in whispers, wiping away tears, squeezing each other’s hands. “I was so blind,” Lynne said. “I was a blind, stupid cow.”

“The important thing,” Zoe said, “is that now she can get the help she needs.”

Hobby let out an audible breath, a cue that his mother-being immune to his childish cries for attention-ignored but Lynne Castle picked up on.

She said, “Hobby. Thank you for agreeing to do this.”

“No prob,” he said. He crutched toward her, hoping to expedite the forward motion that would get this done and get him back home to Claire, then get them to the dinner table where he would tell his mother that he had fathered a child.

Lynne said, “I’ll take you up. Follow me.”

“I’ll wait here,” Zoe said. She eyed the chairs of the waiting room. The place was completely deserted; Dr. Phil was on TV. She put her hand to her mouth, and Hobby thought, This was the place where she learned that Penny was dead.

“Actually,” Zoe said. “I’ll wait in the car.”

Hobby and Lynne walked down the corridor in silence. They waited for the elevator.

Lynne asked, “How are you feeling?”

“Better,” he said. “Everything else works, just not the leg.”

“How much longer with the cast?” Lynne asked.

“They’re not sure,” Hobby said. “Three more weeks, maybe? I’m hoping to get it off before school starts.”

“That would be nice,” Lynne said.

Hobby nodded in agreement.

The elevator doors opened, they filed in, Lynne pressed the button for the third floor, the elevator doors closed. Hobby worried that he smelled like puked-up jalapeños and onions.

Lynne said, “Your mother told you what happened?”

“Not really,” Hobby said. “Just that Demeter is going to Vendever to be… treated.”

“She was caught stealing vodka from the Allencasts’ house while her landscaping crew was working there,” Lynne said. “You mom was the one who saw her do it, actually. And so Demeter got fired. When I asked Demeter, she said she wasn’t planning on drinking the vodka. She said she was going to give it away to friends. And I, like a fool, believed her.”

Yes, Hobby thought, that was foolish. Demeter drank all the time, she drank a lot. She was… well, other kids like Anders Peashway called her a lush. But maybe Mrs. Castle hadn’t realized that Demeter drank, or maybe she’d known that Demeter drank but not how much. Parents were funny that way, always wanting to believe the best about their kids. When Hobby was a father, he was going to be the ultimate realist. He wasn’t going to believe a word his child said. He was going to be a vigilante-especially if he had a girl.

Lynne went on: “Then I found, oh, maybe two dozen empty bottles in her closet and an additional eighteen bottles that were still full. Vodka, tequila, wine. I could hardly believe it.”

Hobby’s eyebrows jumped. Really? Man, that was something.

“All of the bottles were stolen,” Lynne said. “She took them from the houses where she was landscaping. Oh, and she stole from the Kingsleys, the family she babysits for. That was where she got the bottle of Jim Beam you were all drinking on the night of graduation.”

“Ah,” Hobby said. To say anything more seemed unwise.

“She stole the bottles because she had to have the alcohol and we don’t keep any around the house,” Lynne Castle said. “Not a drop. And she had to have it. Because she’s an alcoholic.”

Hobby clenched the grips of his crutches.

“An alcoholic at seventeen,” Lynne said.

The elevator doors opened-Thank you, God, thought Hobby-and he and Lynne Castle filed out. Hobby followed Lynne down the corridor. His hospital room had been on the second floor and not the third floor, that was a small blessing. As it turned out, the third floor was even bleaker and more hopeless-seeming than the second floor. Hobby broke out in a sweat despite the air-conditioning. It was hard to be back here.

Demeter was the only person in a double room. Hobby had pictured her lying in bed wearing a johnny, like a sick person, but she was in her regular clothes-cargo shorts and a T-shirt-sitting on the side of the bed, reading a book. When she saw her mother and Hobby, she set the book aside and gripped the edge of the bed as if it were a ledge she was about to leap from.

Lynne said, “Look who I found!” As though Hobby’s sudden presence in the room were a happy surprise and not 100 percent by design.

Demeter stared at him. Her eyes were vacant, and Hobby thought, They’ve drugged her.

“Hey, Meter,” Hobby said.

She gave a little smile, and Hobby had a flashback to sitting in the circle at the Children’s House next to her when they were little. He remembered her dimpled knees and pigtails. He remembered the cream cheese and jelly sandwiches in her lunchbox.

“Hey,” she said.

She didn’t look half bad. She was tan, and she was thinner. She had brushed her hair, and it hung down long and straight and shiny. The blond streak was so pretty that Hobby wanted to reach out and touch it.

Lynne Castle said, “Well, I guess I’ll leave you two alone.” As though they were on a date or something. Hobby looked down at the floor and counted this as one of the most awkward moments of his life, and to make matters worse, Lynne Castle, instead of leaving as she had just promised, lingered for a few strangled moments longer, looking from her daughter, Demeter, an alcoholic at seventeen, to Hobby, who had recently lost his twin sister and spent nine days in a coma. She was no doubt thinking about the children they had once been and wondering what had gone so horribly wrong, and whether it was her fault or just bad luck visited on them from above. Probably Lynne wanted to stay and hear what Demeter had to say, and could Hobby blame her? He was both dying of curiosity and waiting in dread.

What? What was she going to say? What did she have to tell him?

His leg itched in its cast.

Lynne Castle sighed, then turned and left, closing the door firmly behind her.

He looked supremely uncomfortable, dangling from his crutches like a scarecrow propped up in a cornfield.

“Do you want to sit?” she said.

“No,” he said. Then he changed his mind: “Actually, yes.” He moved to the chair and sat down, his left leg straight out in front of him in its cast.

She didn’t know how to start. She sort of felt like she should thank him for coming.

He said, “Jesus Christ, Meter, what is it? Just tell me!”

She had rehearsed it in her head. “I told Penny something in the dunes.”

“About Jake?” Hobby said.

About Jake? she thought.

“What about Jake?” she said.

“About me, then?” Hobby said. His eyes were rolling, and his forehead was sweating. “Did you tell her something about me?”

“No,” Demeter said. “I told her something about your mom and Jordan Randolph.”

Hobby narrowed his eyes, and his nose twitched. He leaned forward in the chair, and Demeter noticed the toes on his cast-foot wiggling. “What?” he said. “What did you tell her?”

“That I saw them together.”

“What the fuck does that mean?” Hobby said. “You saw them together, so what? They used to be together all the time. They were friends. You know that.”

“I saw them together together,” Demeter said.

“What? You mean, like, kissing?”

“I mean like more than kissing.”

“For God’s sake, Meter, what?”

“I saw them… well, I saw them having sex. On the deck of your house. A couple of days before graduation.”

Hobby stared at her. His expression was inscrutable. This, Demeter decided, was the most frustrating thing about life: it was impossible to tell what other people were thinking.

“What do you mean, you saw them having sex?” Hobby said. “I don’t get that.”

Demeter’s hands were shaking. She needed a drink. But she was never going to drink again. Never again, for the rest of her life. That was impossible of course, but that was what Dr. Field and her parents had been trying to convince her of. In less than an hour she would be picked up and transported to Vendever, where counselors and doctors and addiction experts were going to teach her how to live without drinking.

“I saw them having sex,” she said. “I cut school. That Thursday.”

It had been a glorious day with a scrubbed-clean feel to the air and a pure June-blue sky. That morning Demeter had drunk the dregs of a bottle of Dewar’s, the last of her parents’ stash, and she had also taken a few swigs off the bottle of Jim Beam that she’d swiped from the Kingsleys’. But she needed more alcohol, another bottle at least, and the idea of stealing from someone she knew had lodged in her brain. It had been so easy to lift the bottle from the Kingsleys’ house. Demeter ran through a list of all the people she knew, or whom her parents knew, who drank, and Zoe was the most promising candidate. Zoe always drank wine, though Demeter also had memories of margarita parties at the Alistairs’, and cosmopolitans and martinis, and hot rum toddies in winter. She knew Zoe’s kitchen practically as well as her own, she knew that Zoe would be at work, and she knew that the sliding door facing the ocean would be unlocked.

So Demeter drove to the end of Miacomet Pond and parked her Escape. She told herself she was just going for a walk on the beach, no crime there. She trudged the two or three hundred yards to the Alistairs’ steps. She left her sandals on the beach and was unusually light and quick up the steps in her bare feet. She was dreaming of having a cold glass of white wine, and maybe a short nap in the sun on the chaise longue, before returning to school after lunch, just in time for English, which was the only class she could stand.

Demeter was just four or five steps from the top of the stairs when she heard the breathing and whispering and moaning. She didn’t quite know what to make of it; she never heard such noises in her own house. She listened. She thought, Turn around and leave, right now. Zoe had a man up there. Demeter had no reason to be surprised by this; Zoe was single and she was young, barely forty. But instead of turning around, Demeter crept upward. She had a feeling that she couldn’t identify. This was obviously something private that she was about to witness, something secret. She had never been privy to any kind of secret before, other than her own hideous secret about her drinking. She knew that other kids kept secrets and told secrets, among them Annabel Wright and Winnie Potts and Anders Peashway, kids who had a lot more going on in their lives than she did.