Oh Jesus, his femur. His eyes fluttered closed, and he felt his mother’s icy fingertips on his forehead, brushing back his hair. She said, “Do you remember what happened, Hob?”

“Accident.”

There was a long pause. He opened his eyes to see if he was correct about the accident, though of course he was correct, he hadn’t broken all those bones in his sleep. His mother’s face was blurry. She was crying, that was the problem. She had her lips pressed together, and tears were streaming down her face.

She said, “I have something to tell you.”

He didn’t want her to say it. He wanted to stay in this not-knowing-for-sure state for a little while longer. He wanted to stay in the jubilant condition of newly-arrived-back-on-Planet-Earth-from-who-knew-where-the-fuck-he’d-been. But Zoe had shored herself up to say it, so she was going to say it: “Penny is dead.”

He nodded. It hurt to nod. His head hurt. It felt like a cracked egg. “I know,” he said.

“You know?” Zoe said. “How could you possibly know?”

“I saw her,” Hobby said.

“You saw her?” Zoe said. She was looming over him, the cup of ice chips rattling in her hand like dice. “You saw… what? Her neck snap? She broke her neck.”

Hobby shook his head, but gingerly, gingerly. How the hell could he explain this to his mother? “I saw her. She said, ‘Listen, I’m going.’ ”

“Going where? Leaving the party, you mean?”

Hobby shook his head again. He’d have to tell her later. But her mention of “the party” had brought something else to mind. “Claire,” he said.

“Claire,” Zoe said. “Sweet Jesus, I nearly forgot! Claire is here! She’s here at the hospital! I can send her in. Do you want me to send her in? Are you up for it?”

“Yes,” he said.


When he saw Claire, he knew she hadn’t done it. He knew this not from how her body looked-it was still too soon for that-but from the expression on her face. The unadulterated joy. And something else: a collusion. They had a secret, they still had it, thank God, thank God! If Hobby had had the energy, he would have burst into his own Hallelujah chorus.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” he said back.

He reached for her with his right hand, and without saying a word, she pressed it to her belly.

Life, he thought. Thank God.


The hospital, his return, his homecoming to Nantucket, so many well-wishers, enough to fill a stadium-all of those were fine. But there were many other things that followed that were not fine.

Penny’s funeral. Hobby went off his pain medication for a few hours because it was the funeral of his twin sister, and he wanted to be cogent for it; he wanted to remember every detail so he could tell her about it later. Hobby wasn’t a particularly spiritual person-his mother had never been big on church, and he certainly wasn’t mystical-but he felt very strongly that he would see Penny again, in the whatever-came-after. Their conversation wasn’t over. It couldn’t be over. She was his sister. She was his twin. When he died, and he hoped that would not be until seventy or eighty years in the future, she would be on the other side waiting for him. And he would tell her about everything. All that she had missed.

The funeral was sad, and Hobby was in pain, and he cried along with the rest of the people in the packed and stifling church. He cried for his mother. He had done the right thing, absolutely, in staying alive, because his mother couldn’t have sustained the loss of both of them. She was strong for the funeral, or sort of strong, but she was weird. She wouldn’t let Hobby speak, she wouldn’t let Jake speak. She couldn’t bear it, she said. Hobby protested, and she said, “Maybe I’m not being clear, Hobson. If I have to listen to you speak about your sister, I will break. The same goes for Jake Randolph. I’m keeping this service simple.”

Hobby saw his coaches at the funeral, and his teammates and the fathers of his teammates. They had all come for his sake, he knew, and not because they felt any deep connection to Penny. (Although she had diligently kept the stats on his basketball games at the Boys & Girls Club-had he ever thanked her for that? Probably not, dammit. He would have to do that later too.) Hobby accepted rushed, manly hugs from these men, but he saw the look in their eyes. His body was broken: he had sixteen fractures in all. His future career as a quarterback or a shooting guard or a pitcher was over. He would walk again, he would run, he would throw, but the 24-karat-gold caliber of his playing was gone forever.

Hobby listened to the madrigal group-all those pretty girls-sing “Ave Maria,” and he was filled with gratitude. It was music, and he could hear it. He cried just for that reason: he was alive. And elsewhere in this church, a tiny knot of a being the size of his thumb was alive inside of Claire. Penny was dead, but he would see her again, and he would tell her how beautiful her funeral had been. He would tell her about the music.


There were weeks of rehab at Nantucket Cottage Hospital. Time to allow his bones to heal. The start down the long road of physical therapy. That was all predictable. What wasn’t predictable was the stuff going on in Hobby’s mind. He became terrified of going to sleep, certain that if he did, he would never wake up again. He had a private room, thank God, and he asked for the lights to be left on at all times, along with the TV. The nurses reported this to Dr. Field; Dr. Field came in to see Hobby. It was like getting a visit from the school principal, except that the real principal, Dr. Major, was a lot less intimidating.

Dr. Field said, “They tell me you don’t want to sleep.”

Hobby said, “Can you blame me?”

Dr. Field laughed his dry laugh. Then his expression went back to being serious. “Your body needs sleep in order to heal, Hobson.”

“I take naps,” Hobby said. This was true. He was so exhausted during the day from not sleeping at night that he drifted off all the time, in brief catnaps where he was just beneath the surface of consciousness but always able to see some light. He had to be aware that life was continuing on around him.

“You need real sleep,” Dr. Field said. “I’ll have the nurses give you something.”

“I don’t want them to give me anything!” Hobby shouted. He never shouted except on the playing field, and certainly never at an adult. But he was scared. He was shouting now in the name of self-preservation. “What if they give me something and I don’t wake up?”

“Okay,” Dr. Field said. “Okay, fine. We’ll take it slow.”


Jake came to visit. Jake looked awful-of course he looked awful, he and Penny had been in love, really in love, not just saying they were. If Penny said her throat hurt, Jake would be up off the couch making her a mug of hot water with lemon before she finished her sentence. They read the same books, they practiced their lines for the musical together, they watched movies and laughed at the same things, they spoke to each other in French and Spanish and Latin. They drew pictures of the house they wanted to live in someday and made lists of names for their future children. When Penny sang, Jake closed his eyes to listen. He had taken good care of her.

Even in the relative isolation of the Cottage Hospital, Hobby had heard Jake’s name being bandied about in an unflattering way because Penny had died while driving his car. But that hadn’t mattered. Hobby wished he had the words to tell people what he knew: Penny was bound and determined to leave this world behind. If she hadn’t done it in Jake’s car, she would have found another way.

“Hey,” Jake said.

“Hey,” Hobby said.

They shook hands. Jake sat in the visitor’s chair that was most frequently occupied by Zoe, who was now back at work.

“How do you feel?” Jake asked.

“Like shit,” Hobby said.

“Good,” Jake said, and they both laughed. “Good that you can tell me the truth, I mean.”

“How do you feel?” Hobby asked.

“Like shit,” Jake said. He teared up, then wiped away the tears with the back of his hand, and Hobby felt like telling him not to bother. Hobby was sick of seeing people try to hide their feelings. What had happened was tragic, and there was no reason to pretend otherwise, no reason to stop the tears. Who cared about being a man? That had no meaning anymore. Being human was far more important than being a man, and human beings expressed their emotions. “My parents are making me move,” Jake told him.

“Move?” Hobby said. “Are they sending you away to school?”

“No,” Jake said. “We’re moving, all three of us, to Perth, Australia.”

“Perth, Australia?” Hobby said. He was something of a geography buff, and as such, he knew that Perth was on the western coast of Australia; it was the most isolated capital city in the world. “For how long?”

“A year.”

“Your dad too?” Hobby asked.

“Yeah, my dad too.”

“Your mom’s from Perth, right?”

“Yeah. I’m not sure why she can’t just go by herself.”

Hobby had no answer for this. Jake’s mother was a mystery. Hobby had seen her maybe once in the last four years. She was like a cicada or a lunar eclipse.

“My dad doesn’t even want to go,” Jake said. “But he tells me we have to.”

“Because of the accident?”

“Because of something.”

Hobby wondered if his mother knew about this. She came in to sit with him every morning and every evening, but she hadn’t mentioned anything about the Randolph family’s moving to Australia. And Jordan Randolph was his mother’s best friend.

“So I wanted to tell you that,” Jake said. “And there’s something else I wanted to ask you.”

Hobby sensed a heavier topic. “What’s that?”

Jake puffed a few times into his clenched fist and Hobby thought, Oh, shit, what is it?