Elin Hilderbrand - Summerland

It was during one such chance meeting-Sara Boule and Annika DeWan were both waiting for prescriptions from Dan’s Pharmacy, Sara for her Ativan, Annika for Augmentin to cure her son’s tenth ear infection of the summer-that the topic of Claire Buckley arose. Annika asked Sara, who was a great good friend of Rasha Buckley’s, if Claire was “okay.”

“Because I’ve called her to babysit no less than four mornings this summer, and all four times-maybe five, come to think of it-she turned me down. And then last week, when I took the kids to the Juice Bar for frappes, I saw that she wasn’t working there, either. Doesn’t that seem strange?”

Sara met this question with what struck Annika as a loaded silence. “Yes,” she finally said. “That does seem strange. I think perhaps there is something going on with Claire.”

And in this way, as only something as insidious as gossip could manage, the following was discovered:

Claire Buckley had been fired from her job at the Juice Bar, not because she had called in sick three times in a row with the stomach flu, but because when she finally did come in to work a shift, she left her post briefly to vomit in the back alley.

“This is ice cream,” the manager purportedly said upon finding Claire a retching, weepy mess. “There’s a line out the door, and every third one of those people is going to walk out of here with your germs because you weren’t considerate enough to think of our customers and call in sick.”

“I didn’t want to get fired,” Claire supposedly said.

“You’re fired,” said the manager.

Claire wasn’t going to field hockey camp at Amherst College this year, as she had done for the past two summers. In fact, she wasn’t planning on playing field hockey in the fall at all, even though she was slated to be the team captain. Kate Horner, the coach, was on a biking vacation in France and couldn’t be called upon to verify these claims, but surely she must have been crying into her Cabernet. To lose her best senior! We couldn’t believe it. We could hardly remember a time when we had seen Claire without her mouthguard.

Claire Buckley had been seen twice out in public over the summer. Once was on the fast ferry with her mother, Rasha. The girl, usually so peppy and outgoing, had on this occasion seemed pale and quiet and reserved. She was reading The Secret Life of Bees and barely looked up when Elizabeth Kingsley came over to say hello. It was Elizabeth Kingsley who made allowances for the fact that perhaps Claire wasn’t herself because of all that had happened with the accident. After all, hadn’t she been the one to sit at Hobby Alistair’s bedside when he was in his coma? “I think that accident affected our teenagers”-Elizabeth used the royal “our” here; her own kids were only eight, five, and three-“more deeply than we realize,” she said. “My babysitter, Demeter Castle, is totally changed. I can’t really say how; she’s just… different now.”

The other place where Claire Buckley was spotted was in the waiting room of Dr. Field’s office, again in the company of her mother, Rasha. More precisely, Claire and Rasha were holding hands, and Claire was visibly upset. This was reported by Mindy Marr, who conceded that the girl might still be shaken up by the accident-but while Ted Field was many things, he was not a shrink.

“No,” Mindy said. “I think Claire was there for another reason.”

“What reason?” we asked, as though Mindy Marr held the answer, as though she were something more than just a random person who happened to walk through the waiting room at the right time.

“She looked heavy,” Mindy said. “Heavier.”

Could be depression, we thought. But Mindy’s voice was coy; it contained unspoken possibilities. Something else? Another reason?

And then, instead of being disproved, as we were certain it would be, the suspicion was confirmed: Rasha Buckley confided in Sara Boule, and Sara Boule, constitutionally unable to keep a secret, told one of the rest of us: Claire Buckley was ten weeks pregnant.

“Pregnant!” We gasped. “Ten weeks pregnant!”

We were unable to say another word. But in this shared silence, it became clear that we were all thinking the same thing.

He had watched her go. They had been connected since before birth, so it seemed only right that he should be the one she’d choose. They were squeezed together in an unfamiliar place-not life, not death, but somewhere in between. It was as dark and moist as a womb, and he and Penny were face to face, and Penny was saying to him, clear as a bell, “Listen, I’m going.”

Casually, as though she were telling him she was walking home from the library:

“Listen, I’m going.”

He hadn’t had an answer ready; he had been unable to speak. He had a vague understanding that they’d been in an accident, and he figured he must be much worse off than Penny because she told him she was leaving while he couldn’t seem to get a message from his brain to his tongue. What would he have said? “I’m coming with you” was his first instinct. But then he realized that if he went with Penny his mother would be left alone, and he understood that he could not leave his mother alone. He wanted to say, “Don’t go. Stay. Please don’t leave.” But Penny was willful, stubborn, she did what she wanted, she would never listen to him, he couldn’t make her stay.

He remembered seeing her blue eyes get bigger and bigger until they were like oceans he could swim in. Then she evaporated before his eyes. She was gone, and he knew she wasn’t coming back.

His mother asked him if he remembered anything about being in the coma. Had he had any dreams? Had he felt any pain? The answer to both of those questions was no. He’d been in a coma for nine days, they told him, but to him it had felt like only a few seconds. He remembered being in the car and Penny’s flooring it. Hobby had watched the speedometer out of sheer awe and stupid drunkenness. How fast could the car go? His thoughts were those of a child. He’d never believed they’d get hurt. Even when they approached the end of Hummock Pond Road and Penny sped up instead of slowing down, Hobby had thought only, Oh, shit, we’re going to crash. But he didn’t think of getting hurt, and he certainly didn’t think of dying. They were all seventeen years old, and seventeen-year-olds didn’t die. Their bodies were made out of things that bounced back: rubber and fishing line.

Then there were the moments with Penny, the two of them suspended like water vapor in some strange atmosphere. Then Penny said, “Listen, I’m going,” and Hobby decided to stay, and everything went black.

As he was regaining consciousness, he’d had some thoughts. He’d been aware that the world he was returning to didn’t have Penny in it. And he was aware of another shadowy presence that he wanted to grasp, hold on to.

Claire’s baby. His baby.

The nine days in a coma scared Hobby only now, in retrospect. He’d asked a couple of the doctors at Mass General if a person in a coma was technically dead or technically alive.

“Neither, really,” the doctor said. “You’re in a third state. The state that we call a coma.”

Another doctor said, “A coma is when your body is alive, but your brain is unresponsive.”

“So your brain is dead,” Hobby said.

“I didn’t say ‘dead,’ ” the second doctor corrected him. “I said ‘unresponsive.’ ”

What Hobby believed was that he had been partially dead for nine days. And then magically, miraculously, blessedly, he had returned to life. His mother had been sitting there. He remembered her face upon seeing him open his eyes-man, her face alone had made coming back to life worthwhile. He saw that he had made the right decision in letting Penny go by herself. His mother needed him more.

Claire had been at the hospital that day too, though it had taken a while for anyone to tell Hobby that. When he first returned (this was Hobby’s term; his mother preferred to say “woke up”), he saw his mother first, and then a whole slew of doctors and nurses came in to grin and gawk at him and announce that they had seen a miracle that day and praise the Lord, the boy was okay, they were just going to do some tests and did he know his name and did he know who this woman was and could he name the President of the United States?

When he croaked out “Barack Obama,” the whole room practically burst into the Hallelujah chorus.

They took his temperature and his blood pressure, and it was only then that Hobby realized he was in a shitload of pain. Pretty much all over his body. It felt like he’d been sacked forty times by that monster lineman from Blue Hills. He said, “Mom? I hurt.”

There was talk of upping his morphine, and seconds later the pain subsided, that was fine, his mother was still crying, that was fine, but Hobby sensed that he had a lot of other business to deal with, he felt jammed up, like he had a paper to write and a chemistry test to study for and nine innings of baseball to pitch before nightfall.

He said, “Mom?”

Suddenly the room cleared of nurses and doctors. Only his mother was left, and she was laying ice chips on his lips. The cold wet was like heaven. He was so thirsty.

His mother said, “You have some broken bones.”

He wanted to ask if he was paralyzed, but he couldn’t form the word; it had too many syllables. He tried moving his right hand, his throwing hand, and his right foot, and both of those worked, so he figured he wasn’t paralyzed. Nothing on his left side moved, but people didn’t get paralyzed that way, did they? Side-to-side?

His mother said, “Your clavicle, three ribs, your left radius, your left femur…”