Elin Hilderbrand - Summerland

Once they were on the ferry, Ava stood out on the bow while Jordan sat in the cabin with a short black, rereading the very same newspaper that he’d read earlier that morning at home. It was chilly on the bow; the wind sliced through Ava’s sweater. Really, Rottnest was better appreciated in the summer, but what she needed to do had to be done now. She looked out at the blue water frosted with whitecaps. She couldn’t believe they had stayed together so long. They had wasted so much time.

When they disembarked on Rottnest, Ava was so overcome with nostalgia that she nearly forgot the purpose of her mission. The Price children had stayed here for a week every year over the school holidays in January. They had always rented pushbikes, and after a certain age they had been allowed to explore the island on their own. It wasn’t a lush tropical paradise by any means. The landscape was stark and barren, an expanse of parched brown acres with scattered eucalyptus trees and low-lying scrub brush. Ava’s father used to award a dollar coin to the first child who spotted a quokka, the strange-looking marsupial indigenous to the island. The Price family would camp in a tent just off Geordie Bay, and the best night of the trip was always the night they ate sandwiches and played billiards in the pub at the Hotel Rottnest. That was thirty years ago. Now Rottnest was posher. There was a Dome, and a Subway, and a waterfront café. People came from Perth on their sailboats or motor yachts and anchored off the beach and snorkeled.

Ava stepped onto the dock and inhaled the scent of salt water and eucalyptus. “My God,” she said, “I love it here. I’ve always loved it here. And I never thought I’d see it again.”

Jordan made a snorting noise.

They rented mountain bikes with twenty-one gears, a far cry from the bikes of Ava’s youth, which hadn’t even had hand brakes. Ava took a map from the young man behind the rental counter and said to Jordan, “We have to do the whole circuit, all the way down to Fish Hook Bay, and we have to go and see the lighthouse. We’ll have lunch at the hotel. That’s where we used to go with Mum and Dad.”

Jordan shook his head. He didn’t want to be here.

They climbed onto their bikes and started riding. How long since Ava had been on a bike? Her first summer on Nantucket, she had ridden a used ten-speed all over the island, sometimes in her bare, sandy feet. One time Jordan had pulled his Jeep up alongside her and tried to convince her to accept a ride, but she had turned him down. She would pedal herself.

Now she and Jordan struggled up the hill toward the Vlamingh Lookout. At the crest Ava stopped, a little winded, and pointed across the island toward the Basin and Little Parakeet Bay. The day was clear enough that she could just pick out the coastline of the mainland, five miles away.

Jordan followed Ava’s finger with dull eyes. He swigged from his water bottle. “What are we doing here, Ava?” he said.

“You don’t like it?” she said. “In the summer you can swim at these beaches. You can snorkel. We used to collect these purple sea urchins, and my brothers used to fish for skippies with nets.”

“What are we doing here?” he asked again.

She had hoped to make it to lunchtime, to a booth in the pub of the hotel, where they could relax and have a pint. Ava closed her eyes. The pub used to have a jukebox. Ava and her siblings would play Bruce Springsteen and the Who, but her mother would always choose “Waltzing Matilda,” and then her mother and father and a few of the drunk strangers sitting at surrounding tables would belt out the lyrics together.

“I’m going to adopt a baby,” she said. “A little girl, from China.”

This was met with silence, which Ava had predicted. She couldn’t look at Jordan’s face. She desperately wanted a cigarette.

“No,” he said. “I am not adopting a baby. I am not raising another child. I am not.”

“You weren’t listening to me,” Ava said. “I said I am going to adopt a baby.”

“So what does that mean?” He drank from his water bottle, then spit the water into the grass on the side of the road. “What does that mean, Ava?”

“It means… I want to stay here, for good, and I want to adopt a baby. And I think you and Jake should go home.”

“What?” Jordan said. “What is this? This is you… what? Leaving me? You brought me here to godforfuckingsaken Rottnest Island so that you can tell me you’re leaving me and you’re going to adopt a baby?” He got off his bike and threw it onto the road, where it jumped and clattered. “This is bullshit, Ava!”

“Jordan.”

“This is bullshit! I gave up my life for you, I left my entire life back on Nantucket and brought you here because that was all you ever wanted. You never wanted to live on Nantucket with me, that was perfectly clear twenty fucking years ago when I showed up here the first time and you laughed in my face and showed me the door. But you came back to me, you came back to me, Ava-and yet I’ve spent most of this marriage feeling as if I were the one who was making you miserable. I was the reason we couldn’t get pregnant again, I was the reason Ernie died, I was the one who was too absorbed with work, everything was always my fault. And so now I do the selfless thing, I act in the name of our marriage, in the name of our family, and you tell me that you’re adopting a baby and that Jake and I should go home?”

Cigarette, she thought. Or a cold pint. Anything to make this easier. But she would be glad later, she supposed, that she had had no crutches. Nothing to do with her hands but let them hold her bike steady, nowhere to put her eyes but on her husband.

“I know about Zoe, Jordan,” Ava said. “I’ve known for a while now.”

This was the real ambush; Jordan was caught completely off guard. She watched half a dozen emotions cross his face, and because they had been married for so long, she recognized every single one: denial, incredulity, contrition, anger, sadness, resignation.

“Jesus, Ava,” he said.

“It’s okay,” she said. “It wasn’t okay, I don’t think, for a long time, but it’s okay now.” She thought back to their recent awkward encounter in bed. She had known then that things were over. She had allowed her marriage to rust, like a bicycle-built-for-two left out in the rain. And then, when she finally decided she wanted to climb back on it, she’d been surprised when it didn’t work. When she reached out for Jordan, he was ten thousand miles away. At first Ava had felt angry and rejected, until she realized that the passion she felt that night wasn’t for Jordan, it was for something else: Australia, her mother and brothers and sisters, the nascent idea of a new family.

“I can’t believe this is happening,” Jordan said. He screamed at the open sky: “I CANNOT BELIEVE THIS IS HAPPENING!”

She couldn’t believe it either. She took a deep breath of the bracing Rottnest air. She had come to this island as a child; she could never have foreseen the circumstances that she found herself in now. For years, no matter how wretched she had felt, splitting from Jordan had been unthinkable. But why? Why?

“Go back to Nantucket, Jordan,” Ava said. “That’s where you belong.”

Jordan opened his mouth to speak.

“You can protest,” Ava said. “You can deny it all you want. But I know the truth. You want this over too.”

“And what about our son?” Jordan asked.

“Jake is a sorry mess,” Ava said. “A couple of weeks ago he tried to run away. He met some kids down at South Beach who had a van. He gave them some money because they said they would drive him to Sydney, where he was going to hop on a plane, or a container ship, back to the States. But they drugged him or something, I guess, and then they robbed him, and so he came back to the house. I caught him coming in the side gate at five-thirty in the morning with his duffel bag.”

“Jesus,” Jordan said. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t he tell me?”

“And ever since he told me what happened, all I’ve been thinking about is what I would have done if I’d lost him. Really lost him, the way we lost Ernie, the way Zoe lost Penny.” Ava blinked. The wind whipped her hair, and she tried to collect it into an elastic at the base of her neck. “What would I have done?”

“I don’t have an answer for that,” Jordan said. “I don’t seem to have an answer for anything anymore.”

“I asked Jake what he wanted more than anything in the world. And you know what he said? He wants Nantucket.”

“Ava. We’re not going to decide this today. You can’t dissolve a twenty-year marriage in one day.”

“Just think about it, Jordan, please. Take Jake home and keep him safe. Get him into college somewhere. Put him on a plane to see me every once in a while. Run the newspaper, serve the island, do what you were born and raised to do.” She swallowed. “And get Zoe back.”

“Ava.”

“I am serious,” she said. “And I am sincere. Go after what you want.”

Jordan poked his glasses up his nose. This gesture always used to bother her, but now she saw it as his way of expressing bewilderment. “And what about you?” he asked.

“I’ve got what I want right here.” Ava mounted her bike and coasted down the backside of the hill. A quokka bounced across the road in front of her, and she thought, I win the dollar coin!

She was home.

Lynne Castle’s favorite line was, “I’m too old for this.” Lately, though, she had felt like adding an expletive onto the end of that; now she wanted to say, “I’m too old for this shit.” But Lynne wasn’t one to swear. She was solid, she was responsible, she was the voice of reason, she was a model citizen, she was a loving wife, she was a good mother.