Elin Hilderbrand - Summerland

“Sure you can,” Al said. “It’s your paper.” And with that he hung up.

Half an hour until deadline, and Marnie and Jojo kept knocking to see if Jordan had made a decision yet about the front page. He’d told them he was on the fence about the layout. He hadn’t said anything about the content, or about killing the piece altogether.

He didn’t know what to do. Believe Al Castle? Al Castle wouldn’t have lied about Zoe’s words or made them up. He could be a pompous ass at times, but he didn’t lie. So Zoe really must have asked him to tell Jordan not to print a word. Not one word. She was the mother of the victims. She was his lover. He had to separate the two. If she were any other woman, would he concede?

He was a newspaperman like his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. Zoe was basically asking him to wage war on his genetic makeup. She was asking him to change the code in his chromosomes.

He deleted the file. He called Lorna in and told her he was killing the story. She nodded calmly. Jordan opened his mouth to explain, but Lorna pivoted and left his office. He didn’t know if she was angry or if she was merely saving him the indignity of trying to explain. He then told Marnie and Jojo he was killing the lead story and replacing it with a general graduation piece. They both stared at him baldly for a moment, and then Marnie excused herself, which meant she was going out back to have a cigarette. Maybe all three of them would quit. Marnie and Jojo didn’t have children, but Lorna had two boys-did it matter either way? Jordan decided not to issue an explanation. He owned the paper, as Al had pointed out; he made the decisions, and this was his decision.

Back in his office with the door closed, he quieted his revolting instincts by saying to himself, This is the one thing I can do for her now.

Fifteen days after the accident, a week after Hobby regained consciousness, Zoe held a funeral service for Penny. Zoe wasn’t a religious person, she didn’t belong to any church, but she had asked Al Castle to arrange for the service to be held at St. Mary’s. She asked Jake to be a pallbearer, along with Patrick Loom, Colin Farrow, Anders Peashway, and some of Hobby’s other teammates. Eight strapping, handsome, and very young men carried Penny’s coffin out of the hearse and lifted it onto the carriage that rolled down the aisle. Hobby attended the funeral on a hospital gurney that orderlies placed between the front pew and the altar. Hobby was half boy, half mummy, but he had his mind back, and he cried openly in a ruined voice. Jordan had heard a rumor that Hobby had asked to speak but Zoe had said no. She couldn’t handle it. Jake had also asked to speak, as had Annabel Wright and Mrs. Yurick the music teacher, but Zoe had said no to them all. The priest said a few words about Christ and forgiveness and the glory of the hereafter, but Jordan-who was sitting with Ava, halfway back on the left-felt that it was all wrong. It was too stiff, too formal, too religious and scripted. It had nothing to do with Penny. Couldn’t Zoe see that? Zoe was sitting in the front pew alone, wearing a black suit that Jordan had never seen before, a suit befitting a corporate boardroom, and that was wrong too, he felt. It was a disguise; this funeral was a masquerade. Zoe was hiding. Where was she, really? Because that woman up there wasn’t anyone he recognized.

Well, yes, of course, he thought. Losing a child changed a person. Look at what it had done to Ava.

The church was packed. There was an apron of mourners gathered around the outside of the building, spilling across the street and down the block.

Why not let Jake speak? He had spent days writing something. Jordan asked to read it, but Jake wanted him to wait and hear it at the service along with everyone else. Then when Zoe said no, Jake was crushed. Jordan had almost intervened on his son’s behalf and spoken to Zoe directly for the first time since the accident-but then he thought, She’s punishing Jake because he survived. But why not let Hobby speak? Jordan realized that if this service contained too much of Penny, Zoe wouldn’t be able to bear it.

At the end of the service, nine girls gathered before the altar: the madrigal group from the high school. The girls wore the same black skirts and white blouses that they performed in. They lined up, leaving a gap in the left front, where Penny usually stood. Jordan had never seen anything so powerful. The girls launched into “Ave Maria,” and everyone in the church stood, but Jordan’s eyes never strayed from Zoe. Her hands were clasped to her chest, her eyes were closed, her lips were moving.

Jordan thought, You did it, Zoe. He thought, Bravo.

On the day that Jordan Randolph and his wife and son left for Perth, Australia, Zoe stood on her deck, which faced the mighty ocean, and she screamed at every plane that crossed the horizon, though she had no idea which one was theirs.

At some planes she screamed, “Fuck you, Jordan Randolph!”

At other planes she screamed, “I love you, Jordan Randolph!”

He never printed a word about the accident. People criticized him for this. A few advertisers pulled ads, but his paper was the only game in town, so in trying to hurt him, they hurt only themselves. He asked his assistant, Emily, what was being said around town. Emily was candid, Emily was no-bullshit, Emily knew everyone on the island. She was the right person to ask.

She said, “They say you’re covering it up because the brakes on the Jeep were faulty. They say you’re sweeping it under the rug because your son was involved. They say you’re trying to protect Al Castle’s daughter, who had a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in her bag and pressured Penny into drinking with her in the dunes. They say Ted Field is withholding the tox report.” Emily swallowed. “They say it was the mother’s fault, for never making those kids buckle their seat belts. They say her car, the orange one, doesn’t even have seat belts. They say the girl was mentally unstable. They say it was a suicide. They say it was a two-way suicide pact between Penny and your son, only your son fastened his seat belt at the last minute. They say it was a four-way suicide pact. They say the four kids were on acid, and that’s why Ted Field is withholding the tox report. They say the Castle girl practices witchcraft. They say Penny was smoking Oxycontin that she got from your wife, and that’s why Ted Field is withholding the tox report.”

“Jesus,” Jordan said. They said all of this, but not…? Was Emily holding out on him to spare his feelings? Would Emily do that? Certainly not. “Do they say anything else?”

“Anything else?” Emily asked.

People would say what they said, and what they said was that Jordan Randolph decided to take a leave of absence from the newspaper and move his wife and son to Perth, Australia, because he wanted to escape the scandal and the shame brought on his family and his family’s newspaper by the death of Penelope Alistair.

And that would be partially right.

He hadn’t reported the story, and this mere fact had changed the way he felt about the newspaper. All his life he’d believed the newspaper to be an absolute. It was his job as editor to print all the facts and only the facts-except for the editorials. A newspaper was pure; it was holy. And by not printing a word about the accident, Jordan had, in a way, disproved this. What was pure and holy in this case was honoring the wishes of a woman who had lost one child and was in danger of losing another. That woman was his lover. But that didn’t matter. Jordan convinced himself that he would have done the same for anyone.

Not printing the story made him realize that the newspaper wasn’t the most important thing in his life. It could be left behind. Someone else could run it for a year, or indefinitely, and he wouldn’t have to worry about its integrity’s being compromised, because he’d already accomplished that.

Ava had been asking him to go back to Australia for nearly twenty years. Jordan had never indulged her in this request after his first disastrous trip. It was her nation and her family, not his nation and his family. Ava had traveled back herself a handful of times, both alone and with Jake. But she hadn’t been back in four years now. Not since Ernie died.

Jake didn’t want to live in Australia. But if they left the island, Jordan knew, things would be better for him.

Ultimately, though, Jordan’s decision had nothing to do with Jake or Ava or the newspaper or public opinion about how he’d handled coverage of the accident.

It had to do with Zoe.

For the nine days that Hobby lay in a coma in Mass General, Jordan did not hear from her. This was nine days of lying on razor blades, of picking up his phone and checking for text messages or missed calls-there were dozens of each but none from her-of debating should he or shouldn’t he hop on a plane and go up there and see her. But Al Castle was in Boston, acting as a watchdog over the situation, and what would Al think if Jordan just showed up? Al might have his suspicions already. But then again, what did Al Castle matter in comparison to Zoe, who had lost her daughter? Zoe had slapped Jordan across the face at the hospital and nearly sent his glasses flying. Jordan had never been struck like that by anyone in his life, and the curious thing was that the slap had excited him. It had been filled with passion as well as a lot of other deep and complicated feelings, none of which she’d been able to voice, something that had been a problem for as long as they’d been together. When she left messages on his cell phone in the middle of the night, she always said, “I have no one to talk to about you other than you.”