He never printed a word about the accident. People criticized him for this. A few advertisers pulled ads, but his paper was the only game in town, so in trying to hurt him, they hurt only themselves. He asked his assistant, Emily, what was being said around town. Emily was candid, Emily was no-bullshit, Emily knew everyone on the island. She was the right person to ask.
She said, “They say you’re covering it up because the brakes on the Jeep were faulty. They say you’re sweeping it under the rug because your son was involved. They say you’re trying to protect Al Castle’s daughter, who had a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in her bag and pressured Penny into drinking with her in the dunes. They say Ted Field is withholding the tox report.” Emily swallowed. “They say it was the mother’s fault, for never making those kids buckle their seat belts. They say her car, the orange one, doesn’t even have seat belts. They say the girl was mentally unstable. They say it was a suicide. They say it was a two-way suicide pact between Penny and your son, only your son fastened his seat belt at the last minute. They say it was a four-way suicide pact. They say the four kids were on acid, and that’s why Ted Field is withholding the tox report. They say the Castle girl practices witchcraft. They say Penny was smoking Oxycontin that she got from your wife, and that’s why Ted Field is withholding the tox report.”
“Jesus,” Jordan said. They said all of this, but not…? Was Emily holding out on him to spare his feelings? Would Emily do that? Certainly not. “Do they say anything else?”
“Anything else?” Emily asked.
People would say what they said, and what they said was that Jordan Randolph decided to take a leave of absence from the newspaper and move his wife and son to Perth, Australia, because he wanted to escape the scandal and the shame brought on his family and his family’s newspaper by the death of Penelope Alistair.
And that would be partially right.
He hadn’t reported the story, and this mere fact had changed the way he felt about the newspaper. All his life he’d believed the newspaper to be an absolute. It was his job as editor to print all the facts and only the facts—except for the editorials. A newspaper was pure; it was holy. And by not printing a word about the accident, Jordan had, in a way, disproved this. What was pure and holy in this case was honoring the wishes of a woman who had lost one child and was in danger of losing another. That woman was his lover. But that didn’t matter. Jordan convinced himself that he would have done the same for anyone.
Not printing the story made him realize that the newspaper wasn’t the most important thing in his life. It could be left behind. Someone else could run it for a year, or indefinitely, and he wouldn’t have to worry about its integrity’s being compromised, because he’d already accomplished that.
Ava had been asking him to go back to Australia for nearly twenty years. Jordan had never indulged her in this request after his first disastrous trip. It was her nation and her family, not his nation and his family. Ava had traveled back herself a handful of times, both alone and with Jake. But she hadn’t been back in four years now. Not since Ernie died.
Jake didn’t want to live in Australia. But if they left the island, Jordan knew, things would be better for him.
Ultimately, though, Jordan’s decision had nothing to do with Jake or Ava or the newspaper or public opinion about how he’d handled coverage of the accident.
It had to do with Zoe.
For the nine days that Hobby lay in a coma in Mass General, Jordan did not hear from her. This was nine days of lying on razor blades, of picking up his phone and checking for text messages or missed calls—there were dozens of each but none from her—of debating should he or shouldn’t he hop on a plane and go up there and see her. But Al Castle was in Boston, acting as a watchdog over the situation, and what would Al think if Jordan just showed up? Al might have his suspicions already. But then again, what did Al Castle matter in comparison to Zoe, who had lost her daughter? Zoe had slapped Jordan across the face at the hospital and nearly sent his glasses flying. Jordan had never been struck like that by anyone in his life, and the curious thing was that the slap had excited him. It had been filled with passion as well as a lot of other deep and complicated feelings, none of which she’d been able to voice, something that had been a problem for as long as they’d been together. When she left messages on his cell phone in the middle of the night, she always said, “I have no one to talk to about you other than you.”
Jordan had composed text messages and then deleted them, he had sat up nights thinking, Should I call? There had been times in their relationship when Zoe said she wanted “space,” but what she really meant was that she wanted Jordan closer. It was her own confusing calculus. Jordan convinced himself that the slap and the silence meant that she wanted him there to take care of her. He called her at ten o’clock on the night of the candlelight vigil—he hadn’t attended because Jake didn’t want to go—but when his call went to voicemail, he hung up. Then at midnight he called back, and the call went to voicemail again, and this time he managed to croak out one word—Zoe—but nothing else. He tried a third time because three was a magic number, three wishes, the third time a charm, so at three in the morning he called—imagining the dim, hushed corridors of the hospital, Zoe asleep across four molded plastic chairs as Al had so vividly described, with the pancake-flat pillow and the pilled blanket that some benevolent nurse had brought her—and he thought, Goddammit, Zoe, pick up. I have no one to talk to about you other than you. But once again his call went to voicemail, and he hung up.
His head and heart were scrambled. He had never imagined this kind of emotional duress—his son heartbroken, his lover destroyed, his wife strangely neutralized, the whole island breathing down his neck, either blaming him or looking for an explanation. Penelope—a girl Jordan had adored—dead. He had to grieve too. He had to worry about Hobby and pray too. Zoe’s children were, in so many ways, like his own children, but they weren’t his own children—under these terrible circumstances, that fact had become resoundingly clear. His child was fine.
Go to Boston, he thought. If she turns you away, she turns you away.
The last time he had been with Zoe was the Thursday before graduation. Tuesday and Thursday mornings were their times—Jordan drove to Zoe’s house after the kids had left for school. In the summer they sat on the deck and in the winter they settled in front of the woodstove. Occasionally they walked on the beach. They talked about everything, though their favorite topic was their three kids. They also did a fair amount of talking about Ava, and lately Jordan had sensed that Zoe was growing restless and impatient with his decision to stay married to her. Zoe pretended that she wanted Jordan to leave Ava for his own good. How could he continue to live with her mood swings? Since Ernie died Ava had had only two settings: she was either angry and combative or morose and withdrawn. She held Jordan responsible for Ernie’s death, and Jordan had carried this impossible burden without a word of complaint. But why? Zoe wanted to know. Why not reclaim his own life?
Here was the spot for a big, huge sigh. It was far more complicated than Zoe knew. Zoe had never had to share her kids with anyone else; she had always been their only parent. She had been married for only six months, and that was a long time ago. Hence, Jordan suspected, there were things about marriage that Zoe had either forgotten or never learned in the first place. Such as the fact that even the worst marriages were stronger than anyone might expect. Jordan couldn’t just get up and walk out the door. He and Ava had two children, one living and one dead; they had a home and a way of life. Over the past four years that way of life had deteriorated, but it couldn’t be discounted. If Jordan moved out, Jake would choose to move out with him, he knew, and without their son Ava would perish. The best thing would be for Ava to go back to Australia and regain her happiness, but she wouldn’t go for any length of time without Jake. Surely Zoe could see how impossible the situation was. And what did Zoe want, anyway, that she didn’t already have? Sometimes she made it sound as if she wanted Jordan to move in with her, live with her, marry her. But this was ridiculous. Zoe, more than anyone Jordan had ever met, relished her freedom. She had been married, for those six months, to the man who was Penny’s and Hobby’s father, but Jordan had a hard time even imagining that. Zoe wearing a ring on her left hand, Zoe plunking down breakfast, lunch, and dinner for someone, Zoe relinquishing authority over the remote control or the temperature of the water in the shower, Zoe sharing her bed? She answered to no one except her kids.
On the Thursday morning when Jordan had last seen Zoe, they had lain together on the chaise on her deck. Zoe was feeling melancholy about graduation. In the fall the kids would be seniors, and this time next year they would be graduating. And then they’d be going away to college. And Jordan thought, She’s afraid of being alone. But on that morning Zoe was excited, too, about Penny’s singing the National Anthem, and about Jake’s and Hobby’s becoming the leaders they were born to be. Zoe and Jordan were both going to Patrick Loom’s graduation party. They liked seeing each other in public; it still held a secret deliciousness for both of them. Zoe always wore something sexy and gorgeous, she put on a perfume that drove Jordan crazy, and she applied sheer lip gloss that made her mouth shine like glass.
They had made love on the chaise outside in the sun and then showered together outdoors, and then Jordan had sat at the kitchen table, his lower half wrapped in a white Turkish cotton towel, while Zoe made him a cheddar and tomato omelet with bacon, fried shredded potatoes, wheat toast with butter and homemade jam, fresh-squeezed orange juice, and hot coffee. He ate gratefully. Zoe was the only person who cooked for him, and it felt like love. He wanted her to join him, but she never did; instead she worked in the kitchen, packing him a lunch: turkey and Swiss and baby mache and honey mustard on whole grain bread, watermelon chunks, pasta salad with asparagus and toasted pine nuts, and a slice of chocolate and peanut-butter tart wrapped in wax paper. She packed all of this in a brown paper bag. Sometimes she slipped notes in with his lunch, but not often enough that he expected it. The notes were a treat.
There had been a note that Thursday, on one of the index cards that she used for recipes, folded in half. It said I heart you.
That was Thursday. On Friday Jordan called her on his way home from work, but she was busy prepping platters for Garrick Murray’s graduation party and could talk for only a second. On Saturday Jordan saw her at graduation; they sat three seats away from each other, and his gaze meandered to her firm calf muscles—amazing, as she avoided exercise at all costs—and her toenails, filed square and painted dark purple, framed by the vamp of her kitten heels. They chatted privately for a second at the Looms’ party and then, right after the kids left, Jordan offered to walk her to her car—he was heading home—but Zoe said she was going to stay a little longer. She flashed him a wicked grin. Zoe had, or pretended to have, a crush on Patrick’s father, Stuart Loom, which Jordan in turn pretended made him jealous, only Jordan wasn’t pretending. It did make him jealous, but Stuart Loom was married, and Zoe and Alicia Loom were friends, and so there was really nothing for Jordan to worry about. He left Zoe at the Looms’ party. Everything was fine.
The next time he saw her, they were in the hospital waiting room, and she slapped him. And now she wouldn’t talk to him. Was Lynne Castle’s theory true? Was she unable to speak to them because Jake and Demeter were unhurt? Jordan had obeyed Zoe’s one wish—he had kept the accident out of the newspaper—and so she couldn’t fault him. He had done nothing wrong.
But before Jordan could decide how to approach Zoe, news arrived: Hobby had regained consciousness. He was cogent; there was no brain damage.
Jordan was at home when the call came. It was around ten-thirty at night; Ava was asleep, and Jake was upstairs with his door closed. The caller was Lynne Castle, who had heard from Rasha Buckley, who was at Mass General with Zoe. Jordan felt himself tearing up. He said, “Thank the Lord, Lynne.”
And she said, “Oh, yes.”
He wanted to call Zoe right that instant, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. She wouldn’t be answering her phone anyway. She would be with Hobby; she would want to talk only to Hobby. Not another soul would matter—not for weeks, maybe not ever.
A week later Zoe called Jake’s cell phone to ask him to be a pallbearer at Penny’s funeral and to tell him that she didn’t want him to speak during the service.
Jordan took this news silently. He wanted to say, “Did she ask about me?”
Ava piped up and said, “She’s the mother, Jake. You have to respect her wishes.”
Jordan rarely found himself in the same place with both Ava and Zoe. The last time had been at the final performance of Grease. And now at the funeral. Ava and Zoe had been good friends once upon a time. After Ernie died, Zoe had brought over food every day for a month. She had taken Jake to the beach; she had let him sleep over whenever he liked.
Ava had let all her friendships fade away—including her friendship with Zoe—and then the romance had developed between Jordan and Zoe, and from that point on Zoe was the one who was keen to avoid seeing Ava. When the two women saw each other, they were civil, saying hello, how are you, good-bye. Jordan wasn’t at all sure Zoe would want Ava at the funeral, but how could Jordan get her to stay at home? Ava was kinder than she had been in months. Before the service she walked up to Zoe and took both her hands and kissed her as Jordan watched, waiting for Zoe’s inevitable questioning gaze. But Zoe didn’t look his way once, not before, during, or after the funeral.
He went to see her three days later. Hobby had been moved to Nantucket Cottage Hospital, where he would have to stay until his bones healed a little more—which might take as long as three weeks. Every day Zoe went to sit with him for two hours in the early morning, then again after lunch, then again from six to eight in the evening. Jordan had ascertained this schedule from Lynne Castle, and armed with this timetable, he waited down the dirt road from her cottage until she pulled in at 8:15 p.m. He gave her a few minutes inside by herself—enough time, he figured, for her to light some citronella candles, pour herself a glass of wine, take off her sandals, and settle into the chaise.
Then he wondered, did she do the same things now that Penny was dead, or did she sink into a pile on the floor and cry?
He pulled in behind her Karmann Ghia in the driveway so she couldn’t just get into it and drive off. He approached the house quietly, like a criminal. It wasn’t safe for her to live alone out here at the beach, in a house that didn’t lock up properly. He’d been telling her that for years, but she never listened to him. She wasn’t afraid of anything, she said. Or anyone.
Normally he knocked—two long raps followed by two short ones, Morse code for the letter Z. But this time he slipped in the screen door without announcing himself. The sun was low, but it hadn’t set yet. Jordan could see her, as he’d expected, out on the deck—the citronella candles, the glass of wine. Her house, he noted, was a mess. The counter was lined with fruit baskets and decaying flower arrangements and little altars to Penny that her girlfriends from school must have made, complete with photographs and framed poems and stuffed animals. There were empty wine bottles spilling out of the recycling bin. The fridge was probably filled with covered dishes, and somehow this struck Jordan as funny—the idea of other people’s bringing Zoe food, inedible offerings that she would eventually toss down the stairs to the beach for the seagulls to eat.
He stepped out onto the deck. “Zoe?” he said.
She looked up, unsurprised. “Hey,” she said.
“Hey”? He didn’t know what to do with Hey. He’d been expecting a Get out! He’d been expecting a full glass of sauvignon blanc aimed at his head. But part of him had also held out hope that she’d jump into his arms.
He said, “I came to talk to you.”
She said, “Well, yeah, I expected that. Sooner or later.”
He didn’t dare sit on the chaise with her, though he could see the ghost of them making love there—both of them naked, Zoe riding him, her breasts swinging, him thrusting until she cried out. June 14. Twenty days earlier. A lifetime ago.
He pulled up one of the upright chairs that matched the chaise and rested his elbows on his knees. She was wearing white denim shorts and a navy halter top and the hideous blue rhinestone earrings that Hobby had bought for her the Christmas he was ten, which had become a family joke but which Jordan suspected were a joke no longer. Now she wore them in earnest; now they were likely her favorite earrings. Zoe’s hair was naturally dark, and she usually had it cut in an artful shag with the ends colored, but now the red had faded, and Jordan noticed some gray in her part. She looked pale and wore no makeup—she who liked always to be tan, even in the middle of January, and who favored electric-green eyeliner on a conservative day.
Jordan couldn’t take his eyes off her. This, he supposed, must be closer to what she’d looked like as a child. He could see Penny in her today, when he had never really seen her there before. Was that tragic or poetic, he wondered—the mother’s starting to look more like the daughter only now that the daughter was dead?
“I don’t know what to say,” he said. He had thought of things in the middle of the night, that was his job as a journalist, getting to the heart of the matter, but all that he’d so carefully scripted escaped him now.
“Nothing to say,” she said. “It’s not your fault. There was nothing wrong with the car. Penny was just driving too fast. She was upset about something, Hobby said.”
“Upset about what?” Jordan said. “Did something happen?”
“She was a seventeen-year-old girl,” Zoe said. “Things were happening with her every second of every day. I go back and forth between wanting to know exactly what it was and being afraid to know. Does it matter? I ask myself. She was driving recklessly, and she knew better. She could have killed all four of them, Jordan, and that would have made this conversation a very different one.” Zoe looked at the ocean. “Can you imagine?”
If Jake had died in the accident? No, he couldn’t imagine.
“What do you feel like?” he asked.
“I can’t explain it.”
“Try.”
“I don’t want to try.” She slugged back some wine.
“Have you seen the tox report?”
“I have. She was clean,” she said.
“She was?”
Zoe flashed her eyes at him. “You didn’t doubt that, did you?”
“I didn’t know. The other kids were drinking….”
“Well, Penny hadn’t had a drink since that horrible night at the Peashways’ house.”
“But she was the one driving because the other kids had been drinking. Do you feel angry about that?”
“Hobby said Jake offered to drive, but Penny insisted.” Zoe rubbed her knees. “You didn’t need to come here, Jordan. I don’t blame you, and I don’t blame your son.”
“I did need to come here,” Jordan said. “I needed to come here because I love you.”
She laughed, a tired bleat. “Ah,” she said. “That.”
“Yes,” he said. “That. Our relationship. My love for you. Do you know how hard it’s been not being able to talk to you, Zoe? Not being able to hold you and mourn with you? You shut me out.”
“Why is it always all about you?” Zoe asked.
“I’m not talking about me,” he said. “I’m talking about us.”
“There is no us,” Zoe said. “You want to know why I slapped you? Because for nearly two years I believed there was an us. But when they told me that Penny was dead and Hobby was in a coma, I realized there was only a me. A me who had lost one child and nearly lost another. And there you were across the room. You were going to go back to your house with your son and your wife. I slapped you because I was angry and hurting, but also because you allowed me to believe that there was an us when there was no us. There was never an us, and there’s never going to be an us.”
“So what are you saying?” Jordan asked. “You want me to leave Ava? Yes, Zoe, yes: I will leave Ava.”
“Now?” Zoe said. She finished her wine and poured herself some more. “Now that I’ve lost a child, now because you feel sorry for me….”
“That’s not why.”
“Why, then? Why now and not before?”
“Because I’ve learned about the power of my feelings. This thing, this crisis, has brought them into focus.”
“Do you know how ridiculous you sound?”
Yes, actually, he did know he sounded ridiculous. Yes, he did know he was a day late and a dollar short; he should have left Ava a long time ago. He had thought he was staying with Ava out of honor, but really he’d been staying out of cowardice.
“I want to be with you,” he said.
“I can’t be with you,” Zoe said. “It’s over.”
“Zoe…”
“For so many reasons,” she said.
“You’ve been through hell,” he said.
“Try not to explain my condition to me,” Zoe said. “Try to let me process this on my own terms. Let me make my own decisions.”
It was dark now. Jordan heard a popping noise, and he saw a flash of light in the sky. He stood up and moved to the edge of the deck. Down the beach, someone was setting off fireworks. He had either forgotten or simply not realized: it was the Fourth of July.
“And the decision you’re making is that our relationship is over?” he said.
“Over.”
“I don’t accept that.”
“You’re going to have to,” she said.
“I don’t.”
She stood up. She raised her hand, and he flinched, thinking she might slap him again. But instead she removed his glasses and wiped their lenses off on the hem of her blue cotton halter top, and the gesture was so familiar and so tender that Jordan nearly wept. When she placed the glasses back on his face, her hand grazed his cheek, and he feared this might be the last time she would ever touch him.
“Jordan,” she said. She paused. Down on the beach there was the keening of a bottle rocket, followed by a series of explosions. “Jordan, I’m sorry.”
That night Jordan drove around the island for hours. It was his home, he had lived here his whole life save for the four years he had spent in Bennington, Vermont, but on this night he drove on roads he hadn’t traveled in decades, and all the while fireworks were going off over his head, casting an eerie pink glow over the evening. He drove out the Polpis Road, taking an inland detour at Almanack Pond, winding back in among the acres of horse pasture and secret stands of trees. He drove around to the Sankaty lighthouse, then through Sconset with its ancient, rose-covered cottages, then down to Low Beach Road, where the houses were ten times the size of those cottages, and all built within the last decade. He wound around through Tom Nevers and Madequecham; he had never been quite clear on how the dirt roads connected in Madequecham, and he ended up lost in a scrub-pine forest. He battled through, the brush on either side of the road pin-striping his car. He popped out on a deserted dirt road that eventually led him back to Milestone.
“There is no us,” Zoe had said.
He drove all the way out to the farthest edge of the Madaket coast, a trip that took him thirty minutes from the rotary. He and Ava had gone to a party out here years earlier, but he hadn’t been back since. From there he traveled to Eel Point and Dionis and out the Cliff and back around until he reached the turn for the place he knew he’d been headed all along: the end of Hummock Pond Road.
Someone had pounded a white cross into the sand. Taller than Jordan, it was decorated with streaming pink ribbons and had bouquets of flowers—some of them fresh—leaning against its base. Jordan wondered if Zoe had seen it.
He couldn’t believe that Zoe wanted to face the months and years of pain that were to come without him. But she had made up her mind, and he knew that she meant what she said and not the opposite: she was done. It was over, for so many reasons. He hadn’t asked her to give him a single one of those reasons, because the reasons didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he loved her and now he was alone with his love. He would leave Nantucket because he was weak, and because staying on this island without her wasn’t possible. The journey he’d taken that night, the drive down unfamiliar roads, was Jordan’s way of saying good-bye.
He started the car and headed back into town, toward home, thinking that he would drop by the hospital to peek in on Hobby, or stop at the cemetery and gaze at Penny’s grave or the grave of tiny Ernie Randolph, who had died at eight weeks old. He suddenly saw the appeal of a wide-open foreign land where every building and curve in the road was benign and bland, where nothing had memories attached, where nothing could pierce him.
At the turnoff for Bartlett’s Farm, Jordan’s engine began to sputter. He made it a few yards farther and pulled the car over to the side of the road. He had run out of gas.
“There is no us,” Zoe had said.
“For so many reasons,” Zoe had said.
Jordan climbed out of the car, tucked his keys in his pocket, and began walking toward home.