A few pages later Hobby read this line: A told me to read Moby-Dick. Says I’ll like it.

Hobby thought, A? A is the reason Penny spent nine months plodding through Moby-Dick, only to finally get bogged down on page 236?

A appeared more and more. Hobby couldn’t read fast enough.

J at paper all afternoon. I skipped madrigals, I don’t care if I lose my solo. I spent two hours in the bedroom with A.

Hobby’s head snapped up. While Jake was working on the newspaper, Penny had spent two hours in a bedroom with someone whose name began with an A. Hobby racked his shell-shocked brain. The only A he could come up with was Anders Peashway. Had his sister been fooling around with Anders behind Jake’s back? Anders was good-looking, he was a very fine athlete, a forward on the basketball team, the catcher on the baseball team, one of Hobby’s top lieutenants. But really? Penny and Anders? Anders seemed too clueless for Penny, too provincial. Anders Peashway would go to college someplace where he could play baseball-Plymouth State or, if he was lucky, Northeastern-and then he would return to Nantucket and work for his father building houses. He would buy a boat and fish, he would have children and watch them play in the same gym and on the same fields where he played. Penny could never be interested in someone like Anders, could she?

A told me to read Moby-Dick. Says I’ll like it. There was absolutely no way Anders Peashway had told Penny to read anything, much less an eight-hundred-page classic that dealt with what Anders would have referred to as “old-fashioned shit.”

Hobby kept going. Lay down with A today. Talked. A understands me. A says that sometimes the heart pumps black blood. And that is exactly how I feel. I am poisoned with something, this evil sickness, this lethargy, the inability to care. I’m supposed to be joyous about my voice, my “natural gift.” Z says I have a “responsibility to myself” to develop my talent. God gave me this voice for a reason, Z says. Everyone and their “reasons.” It’s like the rest of the world doesn’t realize that everything that happens is random. A woman kills her two teenagers, she shoots them. She’d had it, she says. They were mouthy. Everyone sympathizes with the kids, and I sympathize with the kids. But sometimes I sympathize with the mother. Sometimes I feel like I’ve had it.


Hobby shut the journal. He shouldn’t have opened it. He was going to have to show his mother. Or maybe not. The heart pumps black blood. There was a black heart on the sketchpad. Penny had been sick, and none of them had known it. Well, one thing had changed: Hobby no longer felt guilty about invading Penny’s privacy. He felt as if she’d meant for him to find her journal.

J is mad that I’m spending so much time with A. Not healthy, he says. He doesn’t get that A is the only one who understands me.

So Jake knew about A, Hobby thought. The idea that A was Anders Peashway still nagged at him. Jake would certainly have said that Penny’s spending so much time with Anders was not healthy. But the Moby-Dick thing? No. Not Anders. No way.

I ask A about her marriage.

Hobby was so surprised to read this line that he nearly ripped the journal in two, and a shooting pain traveled up his bad arm and throbbed in the spot where he’d broken his clavicle. A was a woman, a woman who either was or had been married. So that meant what, exactly? That his sister had been a lesbian? That she was having a relationship with a grown woman? She had been “lying in bed” and sharing her most intimate thoughts with an adult woman, and Jake knew about it and didn’t think it was healthy.

Then Hobby got it. He was daft, yes he was; another person-his mother, for example-would have figured it out right away. A was Ava Randolph.


A says she’s felt alone ever since Ernie died; her loneliness is a shroud and a shield. She internalized the pain she felt over losing her son, and it ate up everything inside her. A is lucky. Ernie is her Reason. It’s something she can pinpoint. I feel like I’m being eaten away from the inside, but I don’t have a Reason. Then I wonder if my Reason is my father, the father who died before I was born. A touches my hair and says, “That’s possible.”


Jesus! Hobby thought. It sounded as if Ava Randolph had been mentoring Penny in the art of insanity and depression. How could Penny feel the loss of a person she’d never known? Hobby was in the same boat, he’d lost his father before he was born too, but he had hardly given it a moment’s thought. On Father’s Day he sometimes felt a twinge, or when he saw other kids throwing the baseball with their dads, but it wasn’t something he ever wanted to cry over. If anything, he was grateful to Hobson senior for giving him top-notch genes. He certainly hadn’t inherited his size or his athletic ability from Zoe.

The most notable thing for Hobby was that in the last fifteen or twenty pages of Penny’s journal, J was hardly mentioned at all. It was all about A.


A wants to move to Australia, but JR has work and J has school. A misses her family. I ask her why she doesn’t just move back alone, and she says she’s in a double bind.


Hobby knew there was no way he could show the journal to his mother. Zoe would hate the thought of Penny’s communing with Ava Randolph. Hobby tried to summon his own images of Ava Randolph, but as with so many of his memories, it was as if someone had broken into the bank and stolen them all. Then he had one: Ava Randolph at the funeral for her baby. She had set the tiny coffin in the hole in the ground, and then she alone had taken up the spade and filled in the hole. The rest of them, including Jordan Randolph, including Al Castle, including the cemetery attendant, had just stood there and watched her. Hobby had been only thirteen years old, but he remembered how the muscles in Ava Randolph’s forearms had tensed, he remembered the way she’d smoothed the dirt across the top, he remembered how, when she was finished, she had stabbed the earth with the blade of the spade, and then she had turned to the rest of them and started to wail.

“He’s gone,” she’d cried. “He’s gone!”

Hobby had never felt so helpless in all his life.

A is the only one who understands me, Penny wrote. I love A.

AVA

It was barely dawn when Jake walked into the garden. Ava was startled, thinking maybe it was an intruder, maybe it was a drunk from the corner pub who had stumbled home to the wrong house. Then she realized that the figure sneaking into the yard was her own child, and he was carrying his duffel bag. They locked eyes for a second, and Ava saw the desperation and defeat on his face. She felt a colossal relief that he was walking toward the shed and not away from it.

“Jake?” she said.

“Mom,” he said. “I need my bed.”

Ava took a drag of her cigarette-a nasty habit, one she would have preferred to keep secret from him. She exhaled, then nodded. She let him go.


For four years she had been adrift. She had lost a baby. Her son Ernie. She had carried him for nine months, pushed him out of her body without any drugs, she had nursed him and cared for him for eight weeks. These weeks had been blissful. Ernie was constantly in her arms, his hungry mouth tugged on her breast, his tiny hands grabbed at her hair. How smitten she had been, how helplessly in love. Jordan got tired and occasionally grumbled when he had to get up for a feeding, but she never complained. She wasn’t tired; she was bursting with purpose, dizzy with joy.

And then the inverse of that. The horror.

He had been perfectly healthy. Ava had just taken him for his two-month checkup, and Ted Field had declared him thriving. There was no discernible reason for the fact that he stopped breathing. And since there was no reason, it was impossible to comprehend. There must have been some mistake, he would wake up and be returned to her, squirming and flashing his toothless smile. For days afterward Ava had awoken each morning believing that she would find Ernie alive.

But no.

Jordan had been at the newspaper. He walked in a few steps behind the paramedics, holding his briefcase. Ava was confused by this at first. The head paramedic lifted Ernie out of her arms and laid him on a mat and tried to revive him, doing CPR with two fingers. Ava dissolved into Jordan, and he held her, both of them shaking, as they watched the fruitless efforts to save their son.

Jordan whispered, “I am so sorry, Ava. I am so, so sorry.”

The apology made sense only later, once she’d pieced together the fact that Jordan hadn’t been in the house that night. He had been at work.


Ava fancied herself a reasonable woman. She had grown up in a family of six children, she had lived on two continents, she had a reservoir of understanding about human beings and the things that motivated them and the ways they sometimes acted.

But Jordan’s being at work, on the night Ernie stopped breathing? That was something she could not reconcile. She knew that Jordan’s absence hadn’t caused Ernie’s death, and yet the two facts were linked in her mind. Ernie’s death was a mystery. There was no one to blame. Jordan At Work was a reason Ava could cling to. It was a shard of obsidian that she polished over and over.

“He was in distress. You might have heard him if you’d been home! You might have been able to save him!”

In the grip of Ava’s mind, Jordan was at fault. He hadn’t caused Ernie’s death, but he had made the circumstances of Ernie’s death unbearable.


Ava knew about Jordan and Zoe. She had first suspected they were having an affair in May of the previous year. Since Jake and Penny started dating, Jordan and Zoe had shared the responsibility of transporting the young lovers back and forth. One day Ava looked out the window of Ernie’s nursery and saw Jordan and Zoe sitting on the hood of Zoe’s orange car, talking. Jordan seemed happy and animated, and Ava thought, He never looks that way when he talks to me. Then she thought, He never talks to me.