You would have to be a mother to understand. But how many mothers really could? There were some, Zoe knew this. There were mothers in the world who had sick children, sometimes more than one. There were mothers in the world with sons or daughters in Afghanistan or other war zones, sometimes more than one child. One killed in action, one still fighting.
That was Zoe.
Penny was dead, but Zoe had done some mental yoga and put that information aside for now so that she could focus on Hobby. Ever since the day the twins were born, this had been her modus operandi. Set one down, pick the other one up and nurse her. Give one a bath, put the other one on the soft bathroom rug and let him cry. Help one with her homework, let the other one sit and complain. Watch one play basketball, ask the other to sit in the stands and cheer. Zoe was one woman facing two sets of needs. Splitting her attention had never worked. The kids knew this: either they had her or they didn’t.
For nine days she had given Hobby all of herself. A gatekeeper wielding a long, sharp machete lived in her mind: no other thoughts but of Hobby.
Zoe talked to the doctors. She talked, tersely, to Al Castle: “No change,” she said. “No change.” “Penny will be buried, not cremated.” “No change.” “Tell Jordan not to run a story—nothing, not one word.” “No change.”
Only a mother could be so single-minded. She went back over every second of his life. Everything! Holding him for the first time—just him alone, while the doctors were still pulling out Penny. His eyes squeezed shut, his tiny fist jammed in his mouth. They were twins, but he was technically her firstborn. He had made her a mother. In the first moment of holding him she had felt that magnificent rush of love, powerful and terrifying.
Hobby smiling for the first time, Hobby eating peaches from a jar, roly-poly Hobby, too chubby to pull himself up. His sister was already cruising around the room by holding on to the furniture. He would watch her and start to cry. Zoe had captured it on film. There had been one rare night a few months earlier when both Hobby and Penny were both home for dinner, and Zoe made shrimp and grits, their favorite, and after dinner she pulled out the old videos from when they were babies: Hobby sitting on the floor like a potted plant, bawling his eyes out, and Penny toddling circles around him.
Zoe had tousled Hobby’s hair—sandy like his father’s, not dark like hers and Penny’s—and said, “Oh, but did you catch up to her later!”
Hobby had mastered the art of skipping stones by the time he was four years old. He was always running and jumping, climbing things—trees, cars, bookshelves. Zoe signed him up for swimming lessons at the community pool. Other mothers gossiped or read books while their kids swam, but she rested her chin on the aluminum railing of the balcony and watched Hobby. Zoe could go on forever about the games. His first year playing football at the Boys & Girls Club, the coach had put him in at quarterback. He had quick hands, one of the fathers said, and quick feet. He was a head taller than everyone else on the team. On the basketball court, he shot 75 percent from the free-throw line. He hit his first home run at age ten. Zoe remembered jumping up and down in her chef’s clogs, making a racket against the metal bleachers. Hobby later retrieved the ball out of right field and gave it to her. When Hobby was ten, his mother was his only girl.
There were private things about Hobby, too. For a stretch of months, he’d been afraid of the dark. This was Zoe’s fault. She’d had the Castles and the Randolphs over for dinner one night, and they’d gotten onto the topic of the Columbine shootings. Hobby was still lingering around the dinner table, hoping that one of the adults would pass him an unfinished dessert. And, too, he liked adult conversation more than other kids did. He observed the adult world, then tried to process it so that it made sense to him. Zoe should have banished him from the table that night or put an abrupt end to the discussion, but she had had three or four glasses of Cabernet, and she liked to prove to other people that her kids could thrive in a house where they weren’t constantly sheltered from the harsh realities of the world. And so she had let the conversation go on around him. About the two gunmen—boys hooked on violent video games—who had killed twelve of their classmates and a teacher and then themselves.
That night, Hobby had climbed into bed with her. He was crying. He couldn’t stop thinking about those kids shooting other kids. Killing them.
“I’m sorry,” Zoe had said. Here was her liberal parenting coming back to bite her in the ass. “I shouldn’t have let you hear that.”
He came in night after night for months, for a year.
“What happens when we die?” he asked her once.
Zoe could remember wanting to say something encouraging about Heaven, a place up above where you could sit on a puffy white cloud and watch what was happening on Earth. Where certain angels, maybe, even had the power to make the Red Sox win. But instead, she gave him the only truth she had: “I don’t know. No one knows.”
“Well, where is our father?” he asked.
“Honey,” she said, “I don’t know.”
Hobby pouring milk on his cereal, Hobby lacing up his cleats, Hobby smiling at the girls lined up on the other side of the backstop as he approached the batter’s box and did his own version of genuflecting—touching the end of his bat to each corner of the plate, Father, Son, Holy Spirit.
She should have taken them to church, Zoe thought. She should have given them something to believe in.
She refused to think about Jordan. This was difficult because Jordan had infiltrated all their lives and for two years had been as important to Zoe as oxygen. Jordan had talked to Hobby about colleges. Hobby could go anywhere he liked on a full scholarship, he said. Jordan kept telling Zoe, “You’ve got to stay on top of this. You want him to go to a great school.”
“I want him to be happy,” Zoe said. “He could be happy at UMass.”
“One of thousands,” Jordan said.
“Maybe after this island, he’d like that.”
Jordan counseled Hobby about it. Jordan researched various architecture departments—their faculties, their degree requirements. Hobby liked the idea of going to a good college. Stanford, Georgetown, Harvard.
Jordan and Hobby talked about other things as well, including politics and music. Jordan downloaded songs that Hobby suggested—by Eminem, Arcade Fire, Spoon—and Hobby downloaded songs that Jordan suggested, by Neil Young and Joe Cocker, the Who, the Pretenders.
Jordan said to Zoe, “I want to ask him about girls, but I’m afraid.”
“Why girls?” Zoe said.
“I’d like to talk to him about love.”
Zoe could remember thinking, And what, Jordan Randolph, would you tell my son about love? There were times when Jordan’s surrogate fathering bugged the shit out of her.
She said, “I’ll be the one to talk to him about love, thank you very much.”
She’d had a chance to do just that one day when she was driving him home from baseball practice. Penny had gotten her driver’s license, but Hobby had been in the middle of basketball season and had been too busy. He seemed content to let Zoe or Penny chauffeur him around.
Hobby was in the passenger seat of Zoe’s bright-orange Karmann Ghia in his usual slumped repose, his head back against the headrest, his long legs stretched out as far as they could go, which wasn’t very far. He was wearing a sweaty T-shirt; his glove was in his lap.
Zoe asked, “Have you ever been in love, Hob?”
He’d breathed out a laugh and looked out the window. “Mom.”
“Just curious.” It wasn’t a ridiculous question, was it? Hobby had girls calling and texting him day and night; even girls who had graduated from Nantucket High and were now in college texted him. Did any one in particular affect him, or were they all the same? He had asked Claire Buckley to the prom. Claire was bright and vivacious, a go-getter, an athlete in her own right, field hockey and basketball. She was pretty enough, though every time Zoe saw her she was ponytailed and perspiring, biting down on her mouthguard as if getting ready to kill somebody. “What about Claire?”
“Claire’s cool,” Hobby said.
Zoe nodded. That was correct: Claire was cool, and for Hobby, cool would trump beautiful or sexy. For now.
“But you don’t love her?” she prodded.
“Love her?” he said. “You mean, like the way Penny loves Jake? No. No, I don’t.”
Zoe had shrunk away from the topic at that point. In their house, the standard by which all other love should be measured was Penny’s love for Jake. Which was completely separate from Zoe’s love for Jordan, but which mirrored it nonetheless.
What Zoe did not want Hobby to ask was, “Have you ever been in love, Mom?”
Hobby tying his necktie (Jordan had taught him how), Hobby sitting with Zoe up front at graduation, watching Penny sing the National Anthem. Hobby loosening his tie at Patrick Loom’s party (but not taking it off completely, good kid). Hobby stealthily pouring a Heineken into a blue plastic Solo cup. (So a good kid but not a perfect kid. Zoe had turned a blind eye because he didn’t drive, and baseball season was over.) Hobby kissing his mother good-bye before he left the party. He’d kissed her on the cheek, trying not to let her smell the beer on his breath, but she’d grabbed his face. He was a full foot taller than she was, but he was still her child. She said, “Where are you going?”
“Another party,” he said. “At the beach.”
“You’re going with…?”
“Pen and Jake.”
“Jake’s driving?”
“Be careful, please. Be smart.”
“Yes, dear,” Hobby said.
Zoe had enjoyed a sinful pride: everyone else at Patrick Loom’s party was watching them talk. “This gorgeous creature is my son!” she felt like shouting. “Eat your hearts out.”
She pushed him away. “Go,” she said. “Have fun.”
He pivoted away and yanked at his tie. She was about to remind him to thank the Looms for having him when he turned around.
“Hey, Mom?”
She raised her eyebrows.
“I talked to Patrick about Georgetown. He’s going to let me visit and stay with him in his dorm so I can see what it’s like.”
“Great,” Zoe said. As her son loped away, her mind turned to darker worries. Hobby would visit Patrick Loom in Washington, Hobby would possibly go to college in D.C., or Palo Alto, or Durham, North Carolina. She could barely stand the thought: she was going to lose him.
At the hospital, there were times when Zoe was allowed in the room with Hobby and times when she wasn’t. When she was in with him, she touched his face and squeezed his good hand and talked about the past—stories he’d heard, stories he hadn’t. He was still in a coma.
After who knows how many days, Al Castle left, and Claire Buckley and her mother, Rasha, showed up to take his place. Zoe saw them enter the hospital waiting room, and though she recognized them, she couldn’t come up with their names. All of the facts of her life had blended into a gray soup. The girl and her mother approached Zoe, and she thought, Hobby’s friend? Or Penny’s? The girl looked as bereft as Zoe felt, her hair lank and greasy and pulled into a limp ponytail. She had a spray of acne on her chin; her eyes were swollen, as though she’d been in a prize-fight. The mother looked slightly more pulled together, if sheepish, as though she had no idea what to say to Zoe. Of course she had no idea what to say. There was nothing to say.
“Zoe?” the woman said. “I’m Rasha Buckley? This is my daughter, Claire?”
Zoe stood up, mortified. It was Claire Buckley, Hobby’s prom date, the girl whom he was not in love with but who he thought was cool. Claire Buckley must be in love with Hobby, however, because, well, just look at her.
Zoe embraced Claire Buckley. and Claire dissolved into tears, and it felt strange to Zoe to be the one offering comfort.
Claire whispered, “He has to wake up. He just has to.”
Zoe held Claire tightly. There was something beatific in Claire at that moment, Zoe thought, something holy. Claire had an aura about her, a good energy. Zoe was glad Al Castle had gone home to Nantucket. She was glad Claire had come in his place.
Claire and her mother stayed at the hospital each day from 10:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m. Rasha brought Zoe food that looked so appetizing, Zoe couldn’t resist it. Rasha brought her a fluffier pillow and a softer fleece blanket but didn’t suggest that she leave the chairs. She didn’t suggest that Zoe change out of Hobby’s Whalers T-shirt, either. She understood that Zoe was keeping vigil and that being uncomfortable and unclean was part of it.
As grateful as Zoe was for the sensitive Buckley presence, she was relieved that in the evenings, when she went in to sit with Hobby, it was just the two of them alone.
On the ninth night, she decided to talk to Hobby about his father’s death. Zoe had always meant to tell the twins when they were old enough to handle it, but then when they were old enough to handle it, she’d thought, Why burden them?
She should have told Penny on one of those nights when her daughter had crawled into her bed. Because now she’d lost her chance.
She wouldn’t lose her chance with Hobby. He was unconscious, but the neurosurgeon was a spiritual man in addition to being a hyperintelligent wizard genius, and he had told her that he thought talking to coma patients helped them. It gave them a place to hook their consciousness. Something like 75 percent of coma patients who regained consciousness did so while being talked to, he said.
Hobson senior had been Zoe’s professor; this the kids knew. What they didn’t know, and might not appreciate, was how Zoe had fallen in love with him over the course of the semester, how she had anticipated Meats class with a thumping heart. She was mesmerized by the way he handled his knives and cleavers, she was smitten with his British accent, she was wowed by his physical size. She tried to figure out if he was married: he wore no ring, but many chefs chose not to wear rings. He seemed fond of Zoe, he lingered at her station, he occasionally touched her back. She played it cool, though she was hardly the only student hopelessly in love with him. Around campus he was known as either the Meatmeister, by the many fans of his bratwurst, or the Prime Minister of Meat, by the girls who swooned at his accent. There were female students who shamelessly flaunted their affections. A girl named Susannah brought him a hot latte before every class; another, named Kay, once sliced her thumb to the tendon—maybe an accident, maybe a cry for his attention.
Zoe saw Hobson out one night at Georgie O’s, drinking a pitcher of beer with some other men. It was the first time she’d seen him out of his whites; he was wearing jeans and a Clash T-shirt. Zoe waved, he beckoned her over, she stopped to talk. He was with two other professors, both older, one of them the hard-ass chef from Lyon, Jean-Marc Volange, who taught Basic Skills I. Zoe knew not to linger. She moved to the bar. A while later, the bartender put a glass of good white Burgundy in front of her and told her it was from the professors. Zoe was afraid to turn around. She savored the wine; she suspected it was the Montrachet, which famously went for thirty dollars a glass. Hobson came over and put his hand lightly on her back, the way he did in class. She felt her face heat up. She said, “Thank you for the wine. You shouldn’t have.”
He said, “You’re right, I shouldn’t have. It’s very bad form. But I couldn’t resist.”
“It’s the Montrachet?” she said.
“I thought you should taste the best.”
The night had ended with their passionately kissing against the side of his car.
He said, “In three weeks, the semester is over. We should wait.”
Zoe agreed: “We should wait.”
But he called her the next morning, and by the weekend they were inseparable.
Even to this day, Zoe could not believe how lucky she had been to be the one who won the heart of Hobson Alistair over other girls like Susannah and Kay. He was magnificent, a prince, a god, a rock star.
How many times had Zoe looked upon her children and thought, You will never know how kind and luminous and talented and dynamic your father was. I can tell you and tell you, but you’ll never know.
“When your father died,” Zoe said to Hobby now, “I was pregnant with you and Penny.”
The pregnancy had been an accident. Faulty diaphragm. At the same time that Zoe was graduating from the CIA, at the same time that she was trying to decide if she should accept the sous chef job at Alison’s on Dominick, the hottest restaurant in SoHo, she was also feeling dizzy and lightheaded and nauseated. Then she missed her period, and she thought, Oh God, no. She and Hobson were madly, stupidly in love. The love was so new, it hadn’t lost any of its sheen. But it was all about Sunday mornings in bed, playing Billie Holiday and drinking champagne. It was about making each other dinner, trying to outcook each other. It was about playing darts at Georgie O’s until two in the morning, then skinny-dipping in the Hudson, Zoe and Hobson floating on their backs naked, holding hands. It was about reading each other passages from M. F. K. Fisher. It was about planning trips to Berkeley to eat at Chez Panisse and Chicago to visit Charlie Trotter’s. Their relationship was only about the immediate future. It was not about a baby.
And yet when she told Hobson she was pregnant, he was dazzled. He picked her up and swung her around. He said, “I’m going to marry you.” Zoe opened her mouth to protest, and he said, “I’m going to marry you, woman.”
Zoe and Hobson got married. His very proper British parents came, Zoe’s very proper Connecticut parents came, a Justice of the Peace married them in their chefs’ whites, then Zoe changed into a sundress and Hobson changed into a double-breasted navy blazer and they all had lunch at the Boathouse in Central Park, and everyone got drunk except Zoe.
Labor Day weekend, they learned it was twins. Everyone was excited. Who didn’t love the news of twins? Zoe thought, My God, not one but two. At times in the middle of the night she felt as if she were being buried alive.
She managed to make it through the holidays. Hobson was teaching his Meats class, and he did the butchering not only for all of the Institute’s classes but also for the five CIA restaurants as well as a few restaurants in greater Poughkeepsie and Rhinebeck. This brought in extra money. Zoe and Hobson attended the twinkling holiday parties on campus and a few more down in the city. Zoe wore the only dress she could still fit into, a stretchy black number with tiny silver rhinestones all over it. People cooed over her; they asked to touch her prodigious midsection. “You look like you’re going to pop,” they said. “Any day now, I’ll bet,” they said.
Zoe said, “I still have ten more weeks to go. I’m having twins.” She sneaked glasses of wine and eggnog. The twins were encroaching on her internal organs, and Zoe found it impossible to eat a thing without suffering from debilitating heartburn.
Christmas passed, New Year’s passed, January set in. It snowed a foot. Hobson and Zoe were living in a faculty apartment. It was nothing special: the countertops in the kitchen were Formica, and the cabinets were plastic laminate, and the bathroom had a molded fiberglass shower stall instead of a tub. Neither Hobson nor Zoe, in her pregnant state, fit in the shower stall properly. Zoe had to shower with the glass door open, and water flooded the bathroom floor. Hobson came home from work splattered with blood. He smelled like pig intestine and head cheese and chicken feet. The mere thought of the flesh and organs that he’d come in contact with over the course of the day made Zoe vomit.
Zoe became convinced that Hobson was romancing someone else, a Susannah or a Kay. She confronted him, screaming and crying, one night when he’d been out late after work. He’d been at the gym, he said, and then stopped at Georgie O’s for a burger. That was it, he promised. That was all he was guilty of.
Zoe could not be consoled. She had been carrying two babies for seven months. Technically, she said, she’d been pregnant for fourteen months.
Hobson had the next day off from work. Sunday. He was taking Zoe down to the city, he said. They would ride the train in; they would do whatever they wanted, eat whatever they wanted, buy whatever they wanted. He gathered Zoe up into his arms and bent over to kiss the top of her head. The good thing about Hobson was that he was so big, he made Zoe feel small even when she was enormous.
“Let’s forget you’re pregnant,” he said. “Tomorrow it will be just you and me.”
“And that was what we did,” Zoe said to Hobby in the dark of his hospital room. “We caught the morning train, we got two cups of gourmet coffee, we bought the Sunday New York Times and read it on the way in.” They’d taken two double seats facing each other, seats for them and their coffee and the paper. “And then when we reached the city, we took a taxi to the Morgan Library.” It was less than ten blocks from the station, Zoe had wanted to walk—why waste the money?—but Hobson had insisted on a cab.
“I thought we were going to forget I was pregnant,” Zoe said.
Hobson said, “It’s not you, it’s me. I’m short of breath.”
Zoe said, “Too much coffee, Meatmeister.”
“The Morgan Library was a wonder,” Zoe told her son. Neither she nor Hobson had been there before. They went to see the Richard Avedon photos of famous chefs—Julia Child, Marco Pierre White, Jacques Pepin, Georges Perrier, Paul Bocuse. But they were amazed, too, by the Gutenberg Bible and the other treasures of the permanent collection. They wandered the hushed rooms, feeling smart and cultured the way one nearly always did in a museum in the city and almost never did in a chilly white test kitchen in Poughkeepsie. “We ate lunch at the café there, at a table overlooking the courtyard. It had just started to snow.”
Zoe looked at her broken, bandaged, comatose son, and she thought about the carrot-ginger soup and the toasted Gruyère sandwiches and Hobson’s big hand over hers and the fat snowflakes falling onto the boxwood hedge.
“In the afternoon, we took a cab to Greenwich Village. There was a doo-wop group on the corner, five black guys, they sounded professional, your father was quite taken with them. He gave them ten dollars. Your dad bought a funny hat with earflaps, lined with fur. Then he wanted to go and find this one particular cheese store. It took us a while, but it was worth the hunt, because this place was a cheese mecca. They had all the stinky, runny cheeses you couldn’t get anywhere else in the United States—the blues from England, the aged cheddars, the fresh goat cheeses and sheep’s-milk cheeses from these tiny farms in the Midwest. We tasted and tasted. They had salamis hanging from the ceiling in loops and these wonderful olive oils. God, we went crazy in there. Your dad loved it.”
They had spent a fortune, but they didn’t care. Later in the week, they decided, they would invite their friends Pat and Dmitri over to try the cheeses and drink some wine. The thought of this had cheered Zoe as she stepped out into the street. She would have a small glass of wine and eat with her friends.
They went to see a French movie at the Angelika Theater. They ate truffled popcorn and drank fizzy Italian water. The movie was all right; Hobson didn’t mind subtitles, but Zoe had taken six years of French and found herself distracted by the effort to translate. Then she became distracted by the fact that Hobson’s breathing sounded labored. He was sucking air in and forcing air out. He kept shaking out his left hand.
Zoe asked, “Are you okay?”
He said in his poshest British accent, “Yes, my darling, I’m fine.”
Zoe said to Hobby now, “I wish we’d left the movie and gone to the hospital. If we’d gone then, they might have saved him. But that would have required foresight that I didn’t have. I was concerned but not alarmed. If I had suggested the hospital, your father would have laughed at me. He would have said, ‘What the hell for?’ Your father was the healthiest person I knew.”
When the movie was over, they took a cab back to Grand Central, with Hobson’s new hat and their bag of excellent cheeses. They decided to have dinner at the Oyster Bar. Hobson ordered a glass of champagne, and Zoe took a few discreet sips, and between the two of them, they polished off three dozen oysters.
“It was divine,” Zoe said. “So few things in my life have tasted better than the cold champagne and those oysters—fresh, sweet, creamy, with the tangy mignonette.” Hobson had made jokes about how strong his libido would be once they got home, and Zoe had felt sexy and aroused for the first time in months. Sex would be good, it would be great, with her standing and him standing behind her.
Zoe sighed, and tears dropped down her cheeks. “As we were rushing to the platform to make our train, he collapsed. Now, your father was a big man. When he fell, a few other people around us nearly got knocked over. I screamed. Hobson was clawing at his chest. He was having a heart attack. The police were with us in seconds, and then the paramedics. They put Hobson on a stretcher, but it took three of them to carry him out to the ambulance. I followed the ambulance in the back of a police cruiser. There was a policewoman with me, trying to write down your dad’s information. I think she was worried that I was going to go into labor. I’m surprised I didn’t. I don’t know how to explain this, but I was very calm. It was as if I knew—somewhere deep inside me, I just knew.” Zoe stopped. Tears fell. She had never vocalized these thoughts to anyone, she realized, not even Jordan—but it seemed right that she should now be telling all of this to her unconscious son. “Your father and I had something so amazing and perfect that I had always feared it wouldn’t last. I had always thought he was too good for me, that his star was too bright. And I guess it was too bright, because it burned out. When I got to the hospital, they told me he was already gone.”
Zoe got up and went over to the side of Hobby’s bed. She touched his cheek. It was smooth; the nurses had taught Zoe how to shave him. It was one of the few things she could do for him. “But I kept you and your sister safe,” she said. “I did manage to do that.”
It was not at that exact moment but some minutes later—five minutes, ten minutes, twelve minutes—that Hobby opened his eyes. It looked as if he were squinting at first, and Zoe thought it was a figment of her imagination. She became alert without letting herself feel too hopeful.
And then, just like that, his eyes opened all the way—they were meadow-green—and he was looking at her. He saw her, he recognized her.
And just as Zoe had once known, deep down, that she was going to lose Hobson, so did she realize now that she had known all along that Hobby would come back to her.
“Hi,” she said.