They took her to the hospital even though there was nothing wrong with her. Nothing wrong with her except that she couldn’t stop shivering. Penny was dead. The car had gone up over the embankment at Cisco Beach, where the drop was… eight feet? ten feet? The car had seemed to fly at first, they had been going wicked fast, but Demeter was loving it, it was a carnival ride, scary and thrilling, right up until the very end, right up until she realized that Penny wasn’t slowing down, Penny was on some kind of rampage, and they were going to crash.
There were police at the hospital. Demeter was confused. Doctors, nurses, police—but where were her parents? Maybe they hadn’t come, though surely someone had called them. Demeter’s fake Louis Vuitton bag had been in the car, and her license was in her wallet, and—sickening thought—there was a nearly empty fifth of Jim Beam in the bag, too. Demeter had drunk some of it in her bedroom alone while the rest of those guys went to the graduation party at Patrick Loom’s house. Demeter hadn’t been invited to Patrick Loom’s party—or rather, she had been invited, but only through her parents, who got asked to everything because her father was a selectman. She hadn’t been invited in earnest, on her own merit. She never was.
So she had drunk some of the Jim Beam in her bedroom, and then she’d locked the door and climbed out her window. She’d scooted on her butt down the sloping roof to just above the garage, where she was able to leap to soft grass. Her parents would never have believed Demeter capable of doing this, because she was overweight and the least coordinated human being alive. She would never be able to execute her escape in reverse, because how would she climb the drainpipe to the roof? Someone could—Hobby could, Jake could, possibly even Penny could—but not Demeter. She was too heavy. She would rip the drainpipe right off the side of the house. She would wait until her parents were home from their evening out—they had no less than four graduation parties to attend—and when she was sure they were asleep, she would walk right back in the house, and pop the lock on her bedroom door with a pin.
Demeter was being largely ignored at the hospital. There was a flurry of urgent-sounding business swirling around her like a tornado. She heard the letters D.O.A., and she knew that that must be Penny. Penny had been dead on arrival. Demeter knew this, and she knew she was supposed to feel something, but she didn’t feel anything. The room was warm, but Demeter couldn’t stop shivering.
She heard the incoming helicopter. Medflight. Someone was being flown off-island. Someone was really hurt. Was it Penny? Penny was D.O.A. Did they fly dead people to Boston? Certainly not. So it must be someone else: Jake or Hobby. The Castles’ house was on the flight path of the air ambulance, and every time Demeter’s mother, Lynne, heard it incoming, she would genuflect and say, “God bless the patient. God bless the mother of the patient.” In this way, Demeter had learned that it was even worse to be the mother of the hurt person that it was to be the hurt person herself.
A nurse approached Demeter and lifted up her chin. Demeter was convulsing into the pillow she held against her chest.
“I think she’s in shock,” the nurse said aloud to herself.
Shock? Probably certainly correct. When the Jeep smashed into the sand, there had been an impact like the apocalypse, a world-ending smash. A horrible shattering noise, an acrid smell. And then the Jeep had tipped over, and Demeter had gotten that roller coaster feeling in her stomach. She had tucked her head to her chest. One hand had gripped the door handle, one hand had pressed against the seat in front of her, the seat where Jake was sitting. The Jeep tilted to the left, and Demeter might have crushed Hobby with her oppressive weight, but she was literally dangling from the harness that was her seat belt.
At that moment she had seen the unnatural angle of Penny’s head.
All of a sudden, everything that had happened in those seconds became unthinkable. Demeter’s mind shut off. Dark screen. Was this shock?
To the nurse, Demeter whispered, “Are my parents here?”
The nurse wasn’t familiar to Demeter. She said, “Yes. But I can’t let them see you just yet. We have to examine you. And you have to talk to the police.”
They had the bottle of Jim Beam, for sure.
She said, “Did someone get flown to Boston? Someone from the car?”
The nurse was taking her pulse. She looked levelly at Demeter. “Yes.”
“Who was it?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Is it bad?” Demeter asked.
“Yes,” the nurse said. “It’s bad.”
The nurse took her blood pressure, checked her eyes, her ears, her nose, her throat. Asked her to stand up, asked her to move her limbs, her digits. Asked her to say the alphabet backward, asked her her home address, her date of birth, and the date of Valentine’s Day.
“February fourteenth,” Demeter said. “Not a favorite.”
The nurse gave a dry laugh. “Does anything hurt?”
“Not really,” Demeter said, though there was something in her mind like a coin at the bottom of a well. Something shiny that she wanted to pick up but couldn’t quite grasp. She closed her eyes and tried to concentrate. Then she realized that the shiny thing was Penny, but Penny was D.O.A. Dead. Demeter leaned forward and vomited all over the floor.
The nurse jumped out of the way, but she wasn’t quite fast enough; she got splattered. Her turquoise scrubs, her nice white sneakers. Demeter vomited again. All that Jim Beam and the bag of cheese puffs that she’d eaten by big, guilty handfuls in her room, but not too guilty because cheese puffs were mostly air.
The nurse made a noise of disgust, which she then tried to cover up with gestures of concern and practical care. She reached for a shallow dish and called for someone to clean up Demeter’s mess.
The nurse asked, “Have you been drinking tonight?”
Demeter gagged and spit in the shallow bowl. Should she lie and say no, or should she tell the truth? The truth didn’t always help. This was a lesson Demeter had learned that very night: some truths should never see the light of day.
“Yes,” Demeter whispered.
The nurse patted her on the back. She said, “The Chief is coming in to talk to you. Okay?”
Oh God, no, Demeter thought. Not okay. The Chief and her father were friends; they were in Rotary together. They passed the basket in church together. Demeter had known the Chief since she was little. She didn’t want to talk to the Chief.
She thought they would move her to another room, a square white room with a simple wooden table, like an interrogation room on TV. She thought they would transport her in a cruiser to the beautiful, brand-new, bajillion-dollar police facility on Fairgrounds Road. Demeter’s father had, thanks to his political clout, made it possible for that police station to get funded and built. Would the Chief take that into account when he was questioning her?
Oh God, the Jim Beam.
Oh God, the walk with Penny into the dunes at Steps Beach. What had Demeter done? It was true that Demeter had hated Penny a little, but she had loved her, too. A lot of love and a little hate, and maybe the hate was inexcusable, but Demeter dared the world to find a girl more worthy of hateful envy than Penelope Alistair—for her singing alone, her beauty alone, her relationship with Jake Randolph alone. They had all been friends since Montessori: Demeter, Penelope, Hobby, and Jake, sitting in a circle singing songs about magic pennies and grandfather clocks. They had painted in the art room, they had learned the names of the continents, they had sliced their own cucumbers at snack time. Penny and Demeter had sat together at lunch each day and talked about the things that four-year-olds talked about. Who remembered what those things were? They had played chase on the playground. Keep-away with the boys.
Penny was D.O.A.
The Chief walked into the ward. Demeter almost didn’t recognize him; he was in street clothes. A pair of jeans, a gray hooded sweatshirt that said NANTUCKET WHALERS across the front in navy letters. He pulled a chair to the side of the bed where Demeter was sitting.
“Demeter,” he said.
She nodded.
He put his face in his hands, and when he looked up, Demeter could see that he was close to tears.
He said, “Penelope Alistair is dead.”
Demeter pursed her lips and nodded. She wanted to tell the Chief that she knew this already and explain that her brain wasn’t allowing her an emotional response. Because she was probably certainly in shock.
“Hobson Alistair is in a coma. And he has sixteen broken bones. He’s been flown to Boston.”
Demeter gagged and spit in the bowl. Her body was in rejection mode. She made some ungodly retching noises. The Chief cast his eyes down.
“I have you, and I have the Randolph kid. It was Jake Randolph’s Jeep, but he wasn’t driving?”
“No, sir.”
“Penelope was driving?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Had she been drinking? You can tell me the truth. We’re going to do a tox report.”
“No,” Demeter said. “Penny wasn’t drinking. She doesn’t…” Demeter blinked. “She doesn’t drink at all, ever. Didn’t, I mean.”
“But the rest of you were drinking,” the Chief said. Somehow he made Demeter’s fake Louis Vuitton bag materialize, and he pulled out the nearly empty fifth of Jim Beam. “This. Where did you get this?”
Oh God. Lodged in Demeter’s mind was a boulder she couldn’t budge. The truth was that she had stolen the bottle from the Kingsley house, on a night when she had been babysitting for Barrett, Lyle, and Charlie Kingsley. Demeter had been the Kingsleys’ babysitter for five years. The Kingsley parents went out a lot, and they paid Demeter well, and Mrs. Kingsley was always amazed and relieved to find that she was available. (“Because I have no life,” Demeter wanted to confess.) Mrs. Kingsley kept her pantry stocked with potato chips and Doritos and Triscuits and white cheddar popcorn and cheese-filled pretzels and Italian rosemary crackers; Mr. Kingsley called it the 7-Eleven. The fridge was always packed with dips and smoked sausages and hunks of cheese and leftover containers of potato salad or fettuccine Alfredo. The bottom drawer was filled with Cokes and ginger ale, grape soda, root beer. And every single time that Demeter had babysat for her over the past five years, Mrs. Kingsley had opened her arms as wide as they would go and said, “Help yourself to whatever you want.”
This had been a rare form of torture, especially after the kids were in bed and Demeter was faced with empty hours of homework or independent reading or the two hundred channels of the Kingsleys’ satellite TV. Demeter’s cell phone lay charging on the Kingsleys’ granite countertop, but no one ever texted, and no one ever called. That wasn’t strictly true: at least once a night, Demeter’s mother, Lynne, would text her to ask how things were “coming along.” Demeter never responded to these messages; she found receiving texts from her mother humiliating. Now and then Demeter sent a text out to Penny, but that was a shot in the dark. Demeter would write something general and innocuous like, what u doin? And on occasion, Penny would text back, hanging with J. Or, sometimes, hanging with A, who was Ava, Jake’s mother. To Demeter, Ava Randolph was a tragic figure along the lines of Mr. Rochester’s crazy wife locked in the attic in Jane Eyre. But to Penny, she was more like Sylvia Plath or Virginia Woolf: brilliant, artistic, bipolar, possibly suicidal.
“Is Mrs. Randolph okay?” Demeter had asked her mother once.
“ ‘Okay’?” Lynne Castle said.
“I mean, I know she’s still really sad about the baby,” Demeter said. The baby had died when Demeter and Jake and Penny and Hobby were in seventh grade. “But what does she do? Like, with her life, what does she do?”
“That’s an interesting question,” Lynne Castle said. This was the kind of answer that made Demeter want to scream. Her parents were all about validation. What Demeter wanted was the truth.
“Tell me, Mom,” Demeter said.
“She’s just…” Lynne held her hands out, as if checking for rain. “Well, it seems to me that Ava is lost.”
Lost? Demeter was alarmed to learn that a person could make a career out of being lost. She worried that this might someday be her career.
“Did someone sell it to you?” the Chief asked. He held the bottle in two hands. “Someone on-island?”
Demeter was startled. Her thoughts had digressed so dramatically that she had forgotten she was under this line of questioning.
“No,” she said, honestly.
“Someone off-island?” the Chief asked. He sounded relieved, and she couldn’t blame him. He didn’t want to have to shut down a local business for selling liquor to minors. Demeter knew she should just tell him she had bought the Jim Beam off-island. “Off-island” was the whole rest of the world, an infinite bigness filled with people and places and things. It was impossible to police “off-island,” because where would you start?
Did Demeter want to lie? No, she did not. Her alternative was to admit that she’d stolen the Jim Beam from the Kingsleys, but to explain that it hadn’t felt like stealing because Mrs. Kingsley always said, “Help yourself to whatever you want.” And so last week, on a particularly fragrant spring night, the night of the Nantucket High School awards ceremony, which Demeter wasn’t attending because she hadn’t been selected to receive any awards, she had helped herself to the bottle of Jim Beam. And what she wouldn’t be able to tell Chief Kapenash was how happy and liberated taking the bottle had made her feel. It was secret and contraband; it was a bandage to have ready for a time in the future that might be even worse than that night. It was numbness in a bottle, oblivion in liquid form. Demeter knew this because she had already systematically run through every drop of alcohol in her parents’ house. Al and Lynne Castle weren’t drinkers—not a beer at a ball game, not a glass of wine at book club. At dinner Al had water and Lynne drank a glass of milk, like a child. That they even kept any alcohol in the house stunned Demeter. She had stumbled across the stash by accident one night when her parents were out and she was ransacking the kitchen looking for chocolate. In the never-opened cabinet above the refrigerator, she discovered a bottle of vodka, a bottle of gin, a bottle of dark rum, a bottle of scotch, a bottle of vermouth, and a bottle of Kahlua. All of the bottles were opened, with an inch or so missing from each. They had been bought for some party years earlier and hadn’t been touched or thought of since.
Demeter had drunk it all. The Kahlua with a little milk was her favorite. She drank the vodka with fresh-squeezed O.J. She mixed the gin with the vermouth—a martini! She replaced the missing vodka with water, the Dewar’s with iced tea. Would her parents ever discover her treachery? No, Demeter was certain they wouldn’t. Lynne Castle had forgotten that the bottles existed; even when company was over, they were never pulled out. By the time Al or Lynne happened upon these bottles, Demeter would be safely out of the house. At college, or beyond.
“Off-island,” Demeter said. She willed herself not to flash the Chief shifty eyes.
He was scribbling on a pad. “And you’re certain Penelope wasn’t drinking?”
“She was not drinking.”
“What about the boys?”
Demeter needed water. Her mouth was coated with a film of vomit. She asked the Chief if she could have some.
“Uhhhh….” He glanced around and caught the attention of the short Hispanic man who’d had the good fortune to clean up Demeter’s Jim Beam–and-cheese-puff vomit. “Agua? Por favor?”
The man nodded. He reappeared a second later with a small blue cup of tepid water. Demeter was so grateful, she nearly cried. She sipped the water, though she wanted to gulp it.
“So, I was asking…”
Yes, Demeter knew what he was asking: he was asking her to rat out the boys. The truth was, both Jake and Hobby had taken swigs off the bottle. And then the four of them had gone to a bonfire on Steps Beach. It was just a general graduation party, there were lots of seniors there—refugees from earlier, legitimate parties—but there were juniors in attendance as well, and some sophomores. The party had livened up when Demeter arrived with Hobby and Jake and Penny. Everyone on earth loved those other three, and Demeter was lucky enough to be with them because she had texted Penny and said that she had a bottle, and not only that—she wasn’t sure that one bottle of Jim Beam would offer enough allure—but there was something BIG and IMPORTANT that she needed to tell Penny. Something ginormous.
There had been a keg at the bonfire, sitting in a trash can filled with ice. There was a line for the keg, but somehow Demeter found herself in charge of the tap. She was a good pour, someone said. Not too much foam. She filled a hundred plastic cups at least. How many of those had been Hobby’s or Jake’s? Two or three apiece, maybe? And Demeter herself had had three or four beers, though after all the hard stuff she’d drunk at home alone, beer had very little effect on her. For her, drinking it was like drinking juice.
“We were at a bonfire on Steps Beach,” Demeter said. “We were drinking beer.”
“Hobson and Jake were drinking beer?”
“Yes.”
“And then what happened?” the Chief asked.
Demeter drank her water down. She needed a hundred more cups just like that, but preferably colder.
“After that?” Demeter said. She wouldn’t talk about after that. She couldn’t. Besides, she was getting confused. Had the party she was talking about taken place that very night? Because it seemed like days ago. Last week. And was Penny really dead? She couldn’t be dead if only hours before she had been talking to Demeter in the dunes. And was Hobby really on a helicopter, in a coma? Sixteen broken bones? Demeter had been in love with Hobby when she was younger. She had berated herself for how unoriginal this was, for everyone on Nantucket was in love with Hobby Alistair—every girl, every mother, every father. Eventually Demeter had grown out of it and moved on to being in love with Patrick Loom, then Anders Peashway, then Jake Randolph, but Jake only because Penny loved him, and Demeter wanted to be like Penny.
Demeter let her face fall in fake disappointment-in-herself. “After that, I can’t remember.”
“You don’t remember getting into the car?” the Chief asked.
Demeter gnawed on her lower lip. She had tried out for Grease this past winter—she’d desperately wanted to play Rizzo—but she’d gotten only a part in the chorus, so she’d quit, much to her parents’ dismay. What Mr. Nelson and Mrs. Yurick hadn’t realized during the auditions was that Demeter was an excellent actress.
“I remember getting in the car,” she said. “I sat in the backseat, on the right. Hobby was in the backseat on the left. Jake was in the front passenger seat, and Penny was driving.”
“Penny was driving even though it was Jake’s car?”
“She was the only one who hadn’t been drinking,” Demeter said.
Even so, Jake had tried to take the keys. He’d held Penny’s wrist and tried to pry open her fingers, but she had swung her arms at his face as if to hit him, and he’d backed off. Penny had been in full freak-out mode. That was exactly what Demeter had thought at the time: She’s freaking out. Freaking freaking.
Hobby had said, with his unflappable calm, “Jeez, Pen, pull yourself together.”
“Please,” Jake had said. “Please let me drive.”
Penny had screamed. No words, just a scream.
Demeter had felt her stomach do funny things. She was certain Penny was going to spill the beans, even though Demeter had made her promise. Had made her swear.
“And Penny drove out to Cisco Beach,” Demeter said. “And she was going really fast.” Even while they were still on the road, the car was shuddering. Jake was pleading with Penny to slow down, while Hobby was leaning forward, trying to see the speedometer. He seemed most interested in finding out how fast the Jeep could go. Demeter was in a drunken daze, a dreamlike state in which she wasn’t sure if what seemed to be happening was really happening. She was, however, wearing her seat belt. And Jake was wearing his. That, she thought, was the result of good parenting. The twins were unbuckled because that was the kind of house they’d been raised in—an unbuckled household. Zoe laid down no rules. “Listen,” Zoe had said recently to Lynne Castle. “Raising them without hard-and-fast rules has worked. Look how wonderfully they’re turning out.”
D.O.A.
Coma.
“And then we crashed,” Demeter said.