Elin Hilderbrand - Summerland

What? What was she going to say? What did she have to tell him?

His leg itched in its cast.

Lynne Castle sighed, then turned and left, closing the door firmly behind her.

He looked supremely uncomfortable, dangling from his crutches like a scarecrow propped up in a cornfield.

“Do you want to sit?” she said.

“No,” he said. Then he changed his mind: “Actually, yes.” He moved to the chair and sat down, his left leg straight out in front of him in its cast.

She didn’t know how to start. She sort of felt like she should thank him for coming.

He said, “Jesus Christ, Meter, what is it? Just tell me!”

She had rehearsed it in her head. “I told Penny something in the dunes.”

“About Jake?” Hobby said.

About Jake? she thought.

“What about Jake?” she said.

“About me, then?” Hobby said. His eyes were rolling, and his forehead was sweating. “Did you tell her something about me?”

“No,” Demeter said. “I told her something about your mom and Jordan Randolph.”

Hobby narrowed his eyes, and his nose twitched. He leaned forward in the chair, and Demeter noticed the toes on his cast-foot wiggling. “What?” he said. “What did you tell her?”

“That I saw them together.”

“What the fuck does that mean?” Hobby said. “You saw them together, so what? They used to be together all the time. They were friends. You know that.”

“I saw them together together,” Demeter said.

“What? You mean, like, kissing?”

“I mean like more than kissing.”

“For God’s sake, Meter, what?”

“I saw them… well, I saw them having sex. On the deck of your house. A couple of days before graduation.”

Hobby stared at her. His expression was inscrutable. This, Demeter decided, was the most frustrating thing about life: it was impossible to tell what other people were thinking.

“What do you mean, you saw them having sex?” Hobby said. “I don’t get that.”

Demeter’s hands were shaking. She needed a drink. But she was never going to drink again. Never again, for the rest of her life. That was impossible of course, but that was what Dr. Field and her parents had been trying to convince her of. In less than an hour she would be picked up and transported to Vendever, where counselors and doctors and addiction experts were going to teach her how to live without drinking.

“I saw them having sex,” she said. “I cut school. That Thursday.”

It had been a glorious day with a scrubbed-clean feel to the air and a pure June-blue sky. That morning Demeter had drunk the dregs of a bottle of Dewar’s, the last of her parents’ stash, and she had also taken a few swigs off the bottle of Jim Beam that she’d swiped from the Kingsleys’. But she needed more alcohol, another bottle at least, and the idea of stealing from someone she knew had lodged in her brain. It had been so easy to lift the bottle from the Kingsleys’ house. Demeter ran through a list of all the people she knew, or whom her parents knew, who drank, and Zoe was the most promising candidate. Zoe always drank wine, though Demeter also had memories of margarita parties at the Alistairs’, and cosmopolitans and martinis, and hot rum toddies in winter. She knew Zoe’s kitchen practically as well as her own, she knew that Zoe would be at work, and she knew that the sliding door facing the ocean would be unlocked.

So Demeter drove to the end of Miacomet Pond and parked her Escape. She told herself she was just going for a walk on the beach, no crime there. She trudged the two or three hundred yards to the Alistairs’ steps. She left her sandals on the beach and was unusually light and quick up the steps in her bare feet. She was dreaming of having a cold glass of white wine, and maybe a short nap in the sun on the chaise longue, before returning to school after lunch, just in time for English, which was the only class she could stand.

Demeter was just four or five steps from the top of the stairs when she heard the breathing and whispering and moaning. She didn’t quite know what to make of it; she never heard such noises in her own house. She listened. She thought, Turn around and leave, right now. Zoe had a man up there. Demeter had no reason to be surprised by this; Zoe was single and she was young, barely forty. But instead of turning around, Demeter crept upward. She had a feeling that she couldn’t identify. This was obviously something private that she was about to witness, something secret. She had never been privy to any kind of secret before, other than her own hideous secret about her drinking. She knew that other kids kept secrets and told secrets, among them Annabel Wright and Winnie Potts and Anders Peashway, kids who had a lot more going on in their lives than she did.

She kept going, up one step then the next until she could see clearly: Zoe and… Jordan. Zoe naked, straddling Jordan on the very same chaise that Demeter had been planning to use for her nap.

Demeter turned and flew down the stairs and, after grabbing her sandals, dashed across the sand toward her car. When she was safely out of view, she slowed down and tried to catch her breath and slow her galloping heart and her racing mind and her careening emotions.

Zoe and Jordan.

She was shocked, God, she felt as if she’d been electrocuted and was now vibrating and buzzing, but could she honestly say she was surprised? Zoe and Jordan. They were always together, always somehow aligned; they had seemed far more comfortable together than Jordan and Ava, even though Ava was Jordan’s wife and Jake’s mother. Everyone remarked about how Zoe and Jordan were such great friends. They were friends like Jerry and Elaine on Seinfeld, or like Beezus Quimby and Henry Huggins in the books Demeter had read growing up. Best friends: one boy and one girl. This kind of relationship was frequently portrayed in books and movies and on TV, but it never seemed to happen in real life-except in the case of Zoe and Jordan. But now that myth was dispelled. Their relationship was something else entirely.

“I was looking for booze,” Demeter explained to Hobby. “I knew I could get some at your house. So I walked down the beach and up the stairs, and I saw your mom and Jordan on the deck. And they were-”

Hobby held up a hand like a traffic cop. Demeter shut her mouth.

“Why?” he said.

Demeter wasn’t sure what he was asking. Why? Why was she looking for booze? Well, now he knew, now everyone knew: she was an alcoholic. Or did he mean, why were Zoe and Jordan together? That wasn’t something Demeter could answer.

“Why what?” she said.

“Why did you tell Penny?” he whispered.

Why did she tell Penny? She had asked herself this question half a million times: Why did I tell Penny? She must have known that Penny would be stunned; she must have known she would be hurt. Confused, sad, angry, disgusted. Yes, Demeter had known all of that. But the answer to why she had told Penny was that she had been unable not to tell Penny. The news was like a gold ingot in her hand, and for someone as emotionally impoverished as Demeter, it had been impossible not to squander it. The secret was valuable only if it could get her something she wanted, and what she had wanted, more than anything in the world, was Penny Alistair’s complete attention.

“I told her because I finally had something she didn’t. I had social currency.”

“ ‘Social currency,’ ” Hobby repeated.

“I knew she was going to be upset,” Demeter said. “But I thought I could help her work through it. That was what I wanted.” The words were so brutally honest that Demeter couldn’t believe she was actually uttering them. “My plan was to tell Penny the news and then be the one to help her deal with it. It was a secret that was going to bond us together.” She swallowed; her throat was dry and sore. “It was supposed to make us friends. Real friends.”

Hobby blew out a stream of air. He looked pale and sick. It occurred to Demeter that telling Hobby this news about his mother and Jordan might turn out to be a second disaster. Back in the dunes, with Penny, she had spoken with the self-righteous assurance that she was doing the correct and just thing by exposing the nefarious lies of the adults in their lives. Now, with Hobby, she was confessing only to her own transgressions. What had taken place between Zoe and Jordan was nobody’s business-not Penny’s, not Hobby’s, and certainly not Demeter’s.

“If I could take it back…,” she said.

“Well, yeah,” Hobby said. He was rubbing his forehead aggressively, as if willing his brain to work.

“Anyway, I wanted you to know that what happened with Penny was my fault. That was what I told her. She seemed cool with the news at first, like it was no big deal. But then, by the time we got back to the car, she was a mess.”

“ ‘A mess,’ ” Hobby said.

“I killed her,” Demeter said. “I might just as well have put a gun to her head and pulled the trigger.”

Hobby was quiet. Demeter thought he might try to say something to make her feel better, but he did nothing of the sort. So he was going to hold her responsible. He was very possibly going to report all of this back to Zoe, and then the whole world would hold her responsible for Penny Alistair’s death. But Demeter had concluded that telling Hobby was the only thing that would make her feel better. She could tell the story in group therapy at Vendever, but it wouldn’t have any meaning. Telling strangers would offer no relief from the insidious pressure that had been building inside her: I told Penny a horrible thing. I got in the middle of people’s personal affairs that had nothing to do with me. I am the reason Penny Alistair is dead. Me. If I had kept my mouth shut, Penny would still be alive.