Elin Hilderbrand - Summerland

He started the car and headed back into town, toward home, thinking that he would drop by the hospital to peek in on Hobby, or stop at the cemetery and gaze at Penny’s grave or the grave of tiny Ernie Randolph, who had died at eight weeks old. He suddenly saw the appeal of a wide-open foreign land where every building and curve in the road was benign and bland, where nothing had memories attached, where nothing could pierce him.

At the turnoff for Bartlett’s Farm, Jordan’s engine began to sputter. He made it a few yards farther and pulled the car over to the side of the road. He had run out of gas.

“There is no us,” Zoe had said.

“For so many reasons,” Zoe had said.

Jordan climbed out of the car, tucked his keys in his pocket, and began walking toward home.

It was big news: the Randolphs were moving to Australia for at least a year, maybe longer. Jordan Randolph was taking a leave of absence from the newspaper, and Marnie Fellowes would run it in his stead. People questioned the logic of pulling Jake Randolph out of school in his senior year. Was it kind or cruel? Was it wise from a college-admissions perspective? Some people said Jake didn’t want to go. Others said he couldn’t wait to get away from Nantucket. Even people who knew next to nothing about the Randolphs’ marriage knew that Ava Randolph was dying to move back to her homeland. If it hadn’t been for the accident, people would have seen this move as a valiant attempt to fix the marriage. But everyone knew the Randolphs were leaving because of the accident.

The accident was still lurking around the edges of our minds, but it was no longer front and center. It had been, after all, an accident: there was no one to blame. Penelope Alistair had been driving too fast, plain and simple. Dr. Ted Field released the tox report, but it turned up nothing. Penny hadn’t been drinking or on drugs. She had been upset. People hazarded guesses about the reason for that, but most of those guesses were so absurd that we disregarded them immediately. That the other kids had been drinking was whispered about, of course. If it had been during the school year, some of the parents might have rallied for an alcohol and drug awareness forum, but it was high summer. The mild June weeks turned into scorching July weeks. The summer people arrived in their Suburbans and Hummers, taking all the available parking spots, clogging up the aisles at the Stop & Shop, bringing vacation frivolity and a river of money to the island. Whole days passed during which we didn’t think about Penelope Alistair at all. Don’t think us callous; life was just moving on. It was summer. We had our own lives to live.

There were reminders, of course. The seven-foot white cross at Cisco Beach was the most visible of these. A few of the girls from the madrigal group started gathering at the cross every evening at sunset to sing. They sang the classical tunes they had practiced so hard, but as their audience grew (one night there were fifteen people, the next night twenty-three), they branched out to cover the Beatles and Elton John. As with anything else, there were detractors. It was in poor taste, someone said, singing each night at the spot where their friend had died. Others felt it was a fitting tribute. The cross itself put some people off. Cisco had been a popular surfing beach, but now a stretch of sand on either side of the cross remained unoccupied during the day.

One summer resident, the mother of two girls, said, “The cross scares my children. I wish they would take it down.”

Her parents assumed she was a lost cause, and Demeter took great joy in surprising them. She told her father she intended to go to work for Frog and Toad Landscaping, just as she had said she would. Monday, July 2, was the day of Penny’s funeral-Demeter attended with her parents and left immediately after the service, surrounded by the mysterious aura of one who was intimately affected, though how profoundly, people could only guess-and so Demeter started work the next day, July 3.

Her parents had tried to talk her out of it.

“Are you sure?” her mother said. “I don’t think you’re ready.”

Her father had actually had the temerity to enter Demeter’s room, sit in her papasan chair with his hands tented like a preacher’s, and tell her that she was very courageous to want to move forward like this. Then he went on, “But your mother fears, as do I, that your starting a new job tomorrow might be taking on a little too much a little too soon. If you’re worried about money…”

Here Demeter giggled. She was drunk when her father came in. She had taken four bottles of wine and a full icy bottle of vodka-its contents no less precious to Demeter than liquid gold-from Zoe’s house. But now there was only half a bottle of wine left, and two fingers of vodka. Demeter knew one thing: there was no alcohol in this house. She had considered calling Mrs. Kingsley to let her know that she was available to babysit, but she was afraid that Mrs. Kingsley might have heard rumors about the bottle of Jim Beam found in her possession and connected it with the bottle of Jim Beam missing from the Kingsleys’ liquor cabinet. The Kingsleys were no longer an option. Demeter had to get out into the world, pronto.

“Something funny?” Al Castle asked.

Funny? Well, only if by “funny” he meant sad and pathetic. Demeter’s parents were experts in the field of doing her a disservice. They coddled her, they spoiled her, and they refused to hold her accountable for her actions. Every time Lynne Castle knocked on the bedroom door, Demeter was sure the beatings were about to begin-but it was only ever Lynne “checking in” to see if Demeter “needed anything.” Lynne Castle delivered snacks and meals on a tray, she carried away the dirty dishes and collected armfuls of Demeter’s laundry. She smoothed her daughter’s hair and let her know that she was loved and appreciated. Lynne said she thanked God every day that Demeter was safe.

What was wrong with her parents? Didn’t they see that they needed to stop bringing her food and make her exercise instead? Didn’t they see that she had to get out of her foul-smelling hole of a room and into the sunshine? Didn’t they see that she needed to earn money rather than have it handed to her? Didn’t they see that the make-believe world they lived in was so paralyzing that their daughter couldn’t bear to live in it sober?

I’m fat, she thought. I’m unpopular. I’m a drunk. I said something inexcusable to Penny, which ended up being worse than I ever could have imagined, because now Penny is dead.

Demeter composed her face. Her father was a bit more worldly than her mother; if anyone was going to catch on that she was inebriated, it was Al.

“I want to work, Dad. We told Kerry that I’d work for him, and I plan to stand by that. It has nothing to do with money. It has to do with proving my character.”

“It’s just so soon,” Al Castle said. “Kerry understands what you’ve been through.”

That was doubtful. Demeter suspected that what was really happening here was that Al and Lynne thought it would look bad if she started working too soon. They subconsciously wanted her to stay in her room all summer, growing fatter and stinkier and more bored and slothful and useless-because that way Lynne could continue to tell the women she bumped into at the grocery store that her daughter “wasn’t doing too well.” This would be preferable, according to the fucked-up social politics of year-round Nantucket, to admitting that just weeks after the tragic accident that had claimed her friend’s life, Demeter was productive and happy and loving her new job.

She won, as she knew she would. Her parents couldn’t keep her from doing anything. On her first day of work Demeter wore cargo shorts, a gray T-shirt, a flannel shirt, socks and sneakers, a bandanna in her hair, and a pair of Ray-Ban Aviators. She looked in the mirror. The outfit wasn’t too awful. The flannel shirt was long enough to cover her backside; the shorts came to her knees. She liked the way she looked in her sunglasses, and the bandanna was cool, she thought.

She took a backpack, empty except for two bottles of water and a banana.

“You’ll starve,” her mother said.

“I’ll be fine,” Demeter said.

She hadn’t driven since the accident, but she drove now; the thought of Al Castle’s dropping her off was mortifying. She had a two-year-old Ford Escape, one benefit of her father’s owning the car dealership. She drove to the headquarters of Frog and Toad Landscaping, which was out near the airport. She’d polished off the last two fingers of vodka that morning, then brushed her teeth. The vodka so early in the morning on an empty stomach gave her a little sparkle, a secret glow; it took the edge off things and even made her mother seem bearable.

Frog and Toad was the largest landscaping concern on the island. Kerry Trevor employed sixty-five people and ran seventeen teams a day. When Demeter pulled down the dirt driveway, she saw people gathered in the gravel yard in front of the greenhouses. Hispanic men, college kids-everyone was older than Demeter. There was no one from Nantucket High School. It was possible that no one here knew what had happened, other than Kerry himself.

One of the Hispanic men-Demeter was unfortunately reminded of the man who had mopped up her 80-proof puke at the hospital-directed her into a parking spot. She grabbed her backpack and stepped out of the car. The other workers turned and stared at her. She knew what they were thinking: Fat girl. They wouldn’t be thinking this meanly; they would be thinking it only as a matter of course. There wasn’t enough vodka in the world to take away the daily sting of Demeter’s reality.