Zoe looked up at him. She was shaking, and this awful noise was escaping from her. Fix this! she thought. She had once carried Penny into the Emergency Room at two in the morning. Penny had been four years old, and she had vomited in her bed. When Zoe touched her forehead, she felt as if it nearly scorched her hand. She hunted around awhile in the bathroom for a functioning thermometer-this was the kind of object she never seemed to have at the ready-then she gave up. The child was on fire; she needed a doctor. It had been hard as a single mother. She’d had to carry Penny out to the car, then go back inside and wake up Hobby and take him, too. (She had considered calling Lynne Castle and asking her to come over and watch Hobby, but back then, Zoe was determined to handle everything herself.) Penny’s cheeks had been bright pink, her hair damp around her face, but when Zoe had carried her into this very room so many years earlier, Ted Field had met them at the door and taken Penny into his arms. He had taken her temperature-104.5-and gotten some Tylenol into her. He’d discovered the problem: a raging double ear infection.

But he couldn’t fix this. Penny was dead.

“Do you want to see her?” he asked.

Zoe wailed. The mere question was hideous. Did she want to see her dead daughter? It was a decision from a nightmare. This would be followed by other unholy decisions, such as whether to bury her daughter or cremate her.

“No,” Zoe said. No: seeing Penelope dead would only do her further damage. Maybe that was the wrong decision; maybe another mother, a better mother, someone like Lynne Castle, would’ve been strong enough to look upon the body of her dead child, but Zoe couldn’t do it. I love you twice as much as any other mother loves her child, she thought. And therefore I cannot stand to see you dead.

Penny. Her dark hair and rosy cheeks and the spray of freckles across her nose. Zoe wasn’t religious, but every year the Catholics asked Penny to sing “Ave Maria” at their Christmas Eve service, and every year Zoe went to listen. Hearing her daughter sing that beautiful song made Zoe feel as close as she ever had to God.

The Castles had come over to her. They had been her friends for fifteen years, but Zoe could see that they didn’t know how to proceed in this situation. They stood in front of her.

Lynne said, “Oh, Zoe.”

Zoe nodded.

“It’s too much,” Lynne said.

Too much what? Zoe wondered.

Al said, “Can we take you to Boston? There’s a flight leaving at five-thirty. I’ll have a car waiting in Hyannis. We’ll go with you.”

Zoe stared. Al was as bland-looking as a person could get, which was why people liked him so much. He had brown hair and a bit of a paunch; he wore slacks and tie clips. He embodied some kind of American ideal: the local businessman, the selectman, the affable, reliable type. Nothing hidden or surprising. He seemed a little milquetoast, but he had a way of getting things done. He would put Zoe on the flight, he would have a car waiting for her at the airport, he would be Zoe’s substitute husband now, on the worst night of her life, just as he’d been her substitute husband a hundred times before: scheduling her oil changes and her car inspections, checking her tire pressure before she drove out onto the beach, sending someone over to seal up her ocean-facing windows in the winter, calling the people at Yates Gas when they neglected to fill her tanks and her heat went off, giving her free tickets to the Boys & Girls Club clambake because he bought twenty-five for his employees and always had extras.

Al and Lynne Castle were her closest friends. But how to explain it? A chasm was opening between her and them now, expanding with every passing minute. Their daughter was alive, and Zoe’s daughter was dead. She couldn’t bear to be in their presence.

“I need to go alone,” Zoe whispered.

“You can’t go alone, Zoe. Don’t be ridiculous.” This came from Jordan. Jordan was looming above her now, but where had he been five minutes ago when Dr. Field delivered the blow? He should have been holding her, steeling her. Jordan Randolph was her substitute husband in all the ways that Al Castle was not. Jordan sent her flowers, he put suntan lotion on her back, he made love to her every Tuesday and Thursday morning while the kids were at school. He washed her hair in the outdoor shower afterward. He kissed her fingertips, he ate the food she made for him. They’d spent exactly six nights together: two nights in New York City, two nights in Boston, one night on Martha’s Vineyard, and one night at the crummy Radisson in Hyannis. Those had been the six best nights of Zoe’s life.

She loved him so much. He was that man for her. The one who made everything matter.

His dark, curly hair was matted. The lenses of his glasses were smudged. How many times had she lifted Jordan’s glasses from his face, breathed on them, and wiped them off on her own shirttail?

He said to the Castles, “I’ll take Zoe to Boston.”

Zoe got to her feet. She slapped Jordan across the face, as hard as she could. Lynne Castle gasped. Jordan’s glasses were askew. He set them straight again. He said nothing.

JORDAN

His father had cheated. Rory Randolph had conducted a classic martini- and-high-heels affair with the arts editor from the Boston Globe; for months he had kept a suite at the Eliot Hotel. There was a long-standing dalliance with a socialite from Philadelphia named Lulu Granville, who summered on Monomoy Road. Rory seduced one of his copyeditors; rumors flew that he had gotten her pregnant, then paid for her to have an abortion. Who knew if that was true? What was true was that the copyeditor had quit the newspaper after a tearful scene behind the closed door of Rory’s office, on the night of a deadline. And then there was the nineteen-year-old journalism student who worked on the classifieds desk. She later went to law school and filed a retroactive sexual harassment suit that Rory had to spend ten thousand dollars to make go away. Those were the women Jordan knew about.

In his day, Rory Randolph had been the most powerful man on Nantucket. He was handsome and charming, he drank good scotch, he smoked a pack of Newports a day, he had a Purple Heart from Korea, he’d gone to Yale on the G.I. Bill, and he didn’t care what people said. He was convinced of his own superiority. His family owned the newspaper and always had. He was the island’s voice.

Jordan had grown up despising his father. He hated the cheating and the lying, the stink of cigarette smoke, and the taste of whisky. He hated that his mother threw away the hotel receipts with a sigh. She and Jordan never talked about the other women, though she knew that he knew, and he knew that she knew that he knew.

She cooked the roasts, she poured the scotch. She said to her son once, apropos of seemingly nothing, “I take the bad with the good.”


Jordan took pleasure in doing things differently. He went to Tabor instead of Choate and Bennington instead of Yale, he smoked marijuana instead of cigarettes, he drank wine instead of whisky, he was a Democrat instead of a Republican, he was humble and self-effacing instead of pompous and self-congratulatory.

What was Jordan like with women? Well, like his father, he’d never had a problem there. He wore his hair over his collar, he wore rimless glasses, he wore faded jeans and flip-flops. He taught himself to play the guitar. There were always women. But Jordan wasn’t interested in a wife, wasn’t interested in a family-people he would inevitably let down. After watching his father for all those years, he decided it would be better for him to stay free and not owe anybody else a thing.


Then, one summer, there was Ava.

The best thing about Nantucket was that its allure drew people from all over the world. Jordan had grown up spending his summers with wealthy children from Manhattan, Boston, Washington, London, Paris, and Singapore. But he had never met anyone as bewitching as Ava Price.

She worked as a waitress at the Rope Walk. The first time Jordan saw her, she was wearing her uniform: Nantucket-red miniskirt, white T-shirt, white sneakers. She was bending over a table, clearing plates piled high with lobster carcasses. Her honey-blond hair was in one long braid down her back; she had a pencil tucked behind her ear. But what had gotten him was her accent. What American didn’t love a British accent? Which in Ava’s case was actually not British but Australian. Jordan didn’t learn this until later, though, when he saw her at the beach, playing volleyball in her string bikini. It was a Saturday, a day he took off from the paper, and he was at the beach with a bottle of wine and a book of Robert Bly poems. He placed himself advantageously. The volleyball landed on or near his towel no less than half a dozen times, and each time Ava came to fetch it with increasingly amused apologies.

She said, “Perhaps you should move your towel.”

He said, “Why would I want to do that?”

That was Ava Before: a twenty-three-year-old goddess from Perth, Australia, who had come to Nantucket for the summer because her father had read Moby-Dick out loud to her and her five siblings. It had taken them three years to finish it, she said. But as a result of that reading, Nantucket was the one place in the world she’d always wanted to visit.

Thank you, Herman Melville, Jordan thought when she told him that.

Ava Before was refreshing. She was intelligent and outspoken, she was a socialist in a good-natured Australian way, and she was an environmentalist before it was popular. She bought a secondhand ten-speed bike and rode everywhere with her straw bag tied to the back. She was a fierce volleyball player and a fearless swimmer-she had learned to swim when she was eighteen months old and happily took on waves Jordan wouldn’t even consider. She agreed to go on a date with Jordan, but she didn’t want anything serious, she said, because to her the idea of falling in love was about as attractive as the notion of having a piece of chewing gum stuck in her hair.