It was barely dawn when Jake walked into the garden. Ava was startled, thinking maybe it was an intruder, maybe it was a drunk from the corner pub who had stumbled home to the wrong house. Then she realized that the figure sneaking into the yard was her own child, and he was carrying his duffel bag. They locked eyes for a second, and Ava saw the desperation and defeat on his face. She felt a colossal relief that he was walking toward the shed and not away from it.
“Jake?” she said.
“Mom,” he said. “I need my bed.”
Ava took a drag of her cigarette—a nasty habit, one she would have preferred to keep secret from him. She exhaled, then nodded. She let him go.
For four years she had been adrift. She had lost a baby. Her son Ernie. She had carried him for nine months, pushed him out of her body without any drugs, she had nursed him and cared for him for eight weeks. These weeks had been blissful. Ernie was constantly in her arms, his hungry mouth tugged on her breast, his tiny hands grabbed at her hair. How smitten she had been, how helplessly in love. Jordan got tired and occasionally grumbled when he had to get up for a feeding, but she never complained. She wasn’t tired; she was bursting with purpose, dizzy with joy.
And then the inverse of that. The horror.
He had been perfectly healthy. Ava had just taken him for his two-month checkup, and Ted Field had declared him thriving. There was no discernible reason for the fact that he stopped breathing. And since there was no reason, it was impossible to comprehend. There must have been some mistake, he would wake up and be returned to her, squirming and flashing his toothless smile. For days afterward Ava had awoken each morning believing that she would find Ernie alive.
But no.
Jordan had been at the newspaper. He walked in a few steps behind the paramedics, holding his briefcase. Ava was confused by this at first. The head paramedic lifted Ernie out of her arms and laid him on a mat and tried to revive him, doing CPR with two fingers. Ava dissolved into Jordan, and he held her, both of them shaking, as they watched the fruitless efforts to save their son.
Jordan whispered, “I am so sorry, Ava. I am so, so sorry.”
The apology made sense only later, once she’d pieced together the fact that Jordan hadn’t been in the house that night. He had been at work.
Ava fancied herself a reasonable woman. She had grown up in a family of six children, she had lived on two continents, she had a reservoir of understanding about human beings and the things that motivated them and the ways they sometimes acted.
But Jordan’s being at work, on the night Ernie stopped breathing? That was something she could not reconcile. She knew that Jordan’s absence hadn’t caused Ernie’s death, and yet the two facts were linked in her mind. Ernie’s death was a mystery. There was no one to blame. Jordan At Work was a reason Ava could cling to. It was a shard of obsidian that she polished over and over.
“He was in distress. You might have heard him if you’d been home! You might have been able to save him!”
In the grip of Ava’s mind, Jordan was at fault. He hadn’t caused Ernie’s death, but he had made the circumstances of Ernie’s death unbearable.
Ava knew about Jordan and Zoe. She had first suspected they were having an affair in May of the previous year. Since Jake and Penny started dating, Jordan and Zoe had shared the responsibility of transporting the young lovers back and forth. One day Ava looked out the window of Ernie’s nursery and saw Jordan and Zoe sitting on the hood of Zoe’s orange car, talking. Jordan seemed happy and animated, and Ava thought, He never looks that way when he talks to me. Then she thought, He never talks to me.
And then, a month or two later, she climbed into the Land Rover to drive to the cemetery with a bouquet of while lilies for Ernie’s grave, and her senses were assaulted by a foul smell. It was a hot day, the car had been closed up overnight, and Jordan had left a crumpled brown lunch bag on the passenger seat. The bag had a dark stain spread across the bottom, and it was leaking some kind of milky liquid all over the leather. Ava carefully picked up the dripping bag and carried it to the trash can in the garage. Before she threw the bag away, she looked inside. There was a small Tupperware container—not quite closed—of spoiled, reeking coleslaw. That was the culprit. Also in the bag were some sandwich crusts and a fudge brownie, wrapped in wax paper. Ava studied the brownie. This particular kind of brownie… in wax paper.
Ava thought, Zoe.
Huh?
Then she saw that there was a recipe card in the bag, folded in half.
It was a note. It said: It’s ridiculous how much I love you.
Ava didn’t say anything to Jake about their encounter in the backyard of the bungalow in Fremantle, and eventually her silence was rewarded: on August 14, the coldest day of the winter—the temperature was a brisk 52 degrees Fahrenheit—Jake entered the kitchen at five-thirty in the morning. Ava was at the table, drinking Lady Grey tea and doing the crossword puzzle from the previous day’s newspaper. Jake was wearing a pair of jeans that Penny had scribbled on and his navy blue Nantucket Whalers sweatshirt. He entered the kitchen with an air of intent, as though he and his mother had an appointment, and Ava thought that while some warning would have been nice, she had no reason to be surprised. She had caught him at something, and Jake was the kind of kid who would want to explain himself.
Ava said, “Would you like some tea?”
“Actually, I’ve started drinking short blacks,” he said.
“Short blacks?” Ava said. She had to suppress a smile. She didn’t want him to know how much it delighted her to hear him use the Australian term. “Have you really?”
He gave a serious nod, and she brought out the French press and the espresso powder and started the kettle. This bought her some time. All she hoped was that Jordan would stay asleep. On Nantucket he was always up at the crack of dawn, but here he woke when he wanted to, sometimes as late as eight-thirty.
When the coffee was ready, Ava poured a cup for Jake and brought it to the table.
“Thanks,” he said, and he took a sip as she watched him.
“As good as at the Dome?” she asked.
“Better.”
He was lying, but it was sweet.
“So,” she said.
He took a big, heaving breath. Then he stared at her, mute.
She was afraid to prompt him. She was afraid of scaring him away.
Finally he said, “I want to ask you about Penny.”
“Penny?” she said.
“When the two of you… when she was with you in Ernie’s nursery, what kind of stuff did you talk about? I know you were close. I know she told you things, Mom.”
Ava had not confronted Jordan about Zoe. She had thought she might, especially in the first days after finding the note. It’s ridiculous how much I love you. Ava felt betrayed. Of course she felt betrayed! Ava and Zoe had been good friends before Ernie died. The five of them—she and Jordan and Zoe and Al and Lynne—had been a group, a merry band. All those weekends together, so many shared hours with the kids. Ava thought back to how Jordan and Zoe had acted together over the years. They had been close, they had been aligned, they had had that American camaraderie, they had the same political views, they liked the same music, that kind of thing. Ava had never cared about that. And the fact of the matter was, she didn’t care what Jordan and Zoe were doing behind her back now. Let them carry on like Penny and Jake, like a couple of horny teenagers! Let them leave little love notes for each other! Jordan had proved himself to be no better than his father, a common philanderer! Jordan could seek comfort in another woman’s arms, even if that woman was Ava’s friend. Ava didn’t care. They could both go to hell. She had bigger things on her mind. She had lost her child.
Their affair alleviated her guilt. She had abandoned her marriage, and also her friendship with Zoe. Now the two of them didn’t need her anymore. They had each other. Ava wanted to be left alone. They would leave her alone.
In her more generous moments she thought, Jordan tried to love me through the worst of it, he tried to pull me out of the hole. She thought, Zoe tried too. She made and delivered all that food, and I never once thanked her, I never once reached out. She sent that beautiful letter, and I threw it away. I couldn’t talk to either of them, I couldn’t talk to anybody. So they turned to each other. Was that really such a surprise?
When had Penny first approached Ava? When had she first knocked on the door of Ernie’s nursery? When had she asked Ava what she was watching (the umpteenth rerun of Home and Away), when had she asked her what she was reading (Melville)? Ava didn’t remember exactly. One day when Jake wasn’t home, Penny had just appeared, and in that lovely, innocent way of hers, she had started talking—about Jake and school, and then about her voice, the impossible burden of it, and then about the leaden weight in her heart that she couldn’t account for, which she said she couldn’t tell anyone else about.
“You’re the only one who gets it,” Penny had said. “I can’t tell Jake, and I can’t tell my mother.”
For months Ava had borne witness to the girl’s sadness, to the lows of Penny’s psyche—unfathomable, probably, to anyone but her. Ava had stroked her pretty head and said, “Yes, I know how you feel, darling girl.”
Ava had believed that Penny was suffering from the malaise common to all teenage girls: “No one understands me. My mom and I used to be close, but now she doesn’t get it. She thinks I’m the luckiest girl alive. If I told her I felt like this, she would ship me straight off to a psychiatrist. She’s done that to me before.”
Ava had thought, Every girl needs a woman to talk to who is not her mother; every girl needs a place to vent her feelings where she won’t be judged. Ava was pleased that Penny had sought her out, she was gratified. She had won over Zoe’s daughter. She thought, I’m taking good care of her.
Now, with Jake, Ava faced a monstrous guilt. Ava had seen the warning signs, she had seen that Penny was capable of putting herself or others in danger, and she had done nothing to prevent that possibility. She should have told Jordan, or Lynne Castle. Or Zoe. Of course, she should have told Zoe.
Ava said, “She used to talk about what was on her mind, Jake. Her concerns, her worries, her sadness. She felt safe talking to me about those things, I think, because I was so sad too, about Ernie.”
Jake nodded. He sipped his coffee.
Ava said, “If I had it to do over, I would go to her mother. I would tell Zoe some of the things that Penny told me. I would try to get her some help.”
“It wasn’t your fault, Mom,” Jake said. “It was my fault. It was something I did.” He looked at her, and his eyes filled with tears, and then he was sobbing, and Ava went around the table and knelt in front of him and gathered him into her arms.
“Oh, honey, no,” she said. “You were wonderful to Penny.”
“No, I wasn’t,” he said. “I mean, most of the time I was pretty good, but not always.”
Ava shushed him and smoothed his hair. She had spent so long mourning the child she’d lost, she thought, that she had missed out on caring for the child she had. She said, “It’s impossible to do right by someone all the time, Jake. I am very much living proof of that. We hurt the people we care about, intentionally and unintentionally. But if there is one thing I’m confident about, it’s that Penelope Alistair knew that you loved her.”
Jake sniffed and wiped at his nose with his sweatshirt, and Ava rose to grab a box of tissues. She eyed the door to the master bedroom: still closed.
Jake sighed and seemed to collect himself. He took another sip of coffee. “This is good.”
Ava refilled his mug. She wasn’t sure whether to stand up or sit down. He was talking to her and she was listening, but what Jake didn’t know, what he wouldn’t know until he was a parent himself, was how grateful she was. She didn’t deserve this.
He said, “So as you probably figured out, I tried to run away.”
She decided to sit. Her throat felt as if it were going to close. Run away. She said, “Where did you go?”
He said, “I went to South Beach. I hung out around this bonfire with a bunch of people I didn’t know. Ferals.”
Ava winced. The term was awful. Ferals. And yet such people had been hanging around Perth and Freo since she was a young girl, and that was what they’d always been called: feral. Ava had seen them at South Beach herself thirty years ago—the dreadlocks, the tattoos and piercings, the dirty mattresses that they dragged out to the park and lounged across as they smoked marijuana and played their guitars and sketched in journals and read Orwell or Proust. They cooked on camp stoves and slept with their dirty feet hanging out of the windows of their vans.
“One of them, this guy named Hawk, said I could ride with him across the Nullarboor, to Adelaide first and then across to Sydney.” Jake paused. “I gave him some money.”
“Oh,” Ava said. She tried not to sound alarmed. “How much?”
“Two hundred and sixty dollars,” Jake said. He stared into his coffee cup. “It seemed like kind of a bargain at the time.”
“So then what happened?” Ava asked.
“Well, then I had some beers, and I… smoked some marijuana, or what I thought was marijuana, and then I blacked out in the sand. And when I woke up, they had taken the rest of my money and my credit card and my shoes and my camera, and they’d left.”
“Ah,” Ava said. She had heard from Jordan that Jake had lost the credit card, and that after giving him a lecture about fiscal responsibility, Jordan had called to cancel it. “I see.”
“So then I came back here,” Jake said.
“And that’s when I saw you sneaking in the side door with your bag,” Ava said.
“You didn’t tell Dad?”
“No.”
“I knew you didn’t tell Dad,” Jake said. “He would have wanted to have a heart-to-heart about it right away.”
“No doubt.”
“In a way I’m kind of glad it didn’t work out,” Jake said. He took a deep breath. “Because I couldn’t stand to think about you being worried, not knowing where I was, not knowing where I was sleeping or what I was eating or who I was with.”
“Thank you,” Ava said.
“I know you love me, Mom.”
Ava felt tears burning her eyes. “You know I love you, but you’ll never understand how much.”
“You seem really happy here.”
“I never thought I would feel like myself again,” Ava said. “But now I do.”
“Dad’s not happy,” Jake said.
“No,” Ava said. “He’s not. I know he’s not.”
Jake said, “I wish there was a way that we could all be happy at the same time, in the same place.”
Ava had been stunned when Jordan came to her and said he thought they should move to Australia.
“We’ll go to Perth, we’ll rent a house, we’ll try it for a year,” he said. “I can take a leave of absence; Marnie can run the paper, she’s more than capable.”
Ava said, “Jake? School?”
“He can go to school in Australia.”
“His senior year?” she said.
“Ava, we need to get him out of here.”
She had flared up with anger. She had been asking Jordan to move to Perth for how many years, and they were leaving now because Jake had to get off the island?
She said, “So this is all for Jake, then?”
“And you,” Jordan said. “Mostly for you. If I just wanted to get Jake off the island, if that was my only motivation, I could think of places we could go that are a hell of a lot closer than Perth, Australia.”
Yes, Ava thought. Anywhere was closer.
“But you want to move home, and I am taking you home,” he said.
Yes, Ava did want to move home. She was an idiot for playing devil’s advocate, but something wasn’t computing.
“And you’re going to leave the paper? And Marnie’s going to run it?” she asked.
“For a year, yes.”
It was inconceivable. Ava was missing something. She saw conviction in Jordan’s eyes. He meant it. He was going to leave the paper, leave the island; she saw that he wanted to. But why now, when before he had regarded even a two-week trip to Australia as a fate worse than death? Her mind raced. She thought back to the Fourth of July. Jordan had said he was driving on Hummock Pond Road when the car ran out of gas. That had seemed odd to her. Jordan wasn’t the type of man who ever let his car run out of gas. Ava had asked him, “What were you doing on Hummock Pond Road?”
Ava had mulled it over for hours, willing her brain to make sense of it. They were moving to Australia for an entire year. Jordan wanted to go—for Jake, but also for her, he said. But no—she would offer her apologies here—she didn’t think Jordan Randolph was that selfless. Why would he want to go? Why would he want to get away?
And then she understood that it had to do with Zoe.
Zoe had turned him away.
Zoe didn’t want him anymore.
Since they had moved to Fremantle, Ava had been happier than she could have imagined. In the early-morning hours she drank her tea and worked her crossword puzzles. Then she made breakfast—eggs and rashers, grilled tomatoes, beans. She went to Woolies during the week for groceries, and on the weekends she shopped at the Fremantle Markets. She came home with mangoes and fresh Turkish bread and baby cos for Caesar salad. She spent time with her brothers and sisters and her mother; she saw friends from secondary school and girls she’d once waitressed with at Cicarella’s. She had been out with her old boyfriend, Roger Polly, on two occasions, and both times she had laughed as she hadn’t done in years. Was this how Jordan had felt when he was with Zoe—energized and young again, like a new person?
“I wish there was a way that we could all be happy at the same time, in the same place,” Jake had just said.
Ava tried to imagine what would have happened if Jake had journeyed across the country in some stranger’s van. What if she and Jordan had woken up that morning, and Jake’s bed had been empty, his things missing? Jordan, with his reporter’s instincts, would probably have headed into town first, and then maybe to South Beach, to grill everyone he saw about his son’s whereabouts. He might have found someone who remembered Jake—Jake would have stuck out, as an American kid, clean, in expensive clothes, reading Hemingway. But what if they hadn’t found him in time? What if those people had kicked him out of the van on the scorching hot, deserted stretch of the Nullarboor, without any food or water?
Ava checked the clock. It was still only quarter after six. Outside the kookaburras were hooting. It had been quite a morning already.
“What is it you want?” she asked Jake. “More than anything else, what do you want?”
“I want to go home,” he said.
A pink glow of possibility had been growing inside of Ava for weeks, an idea, a life change, but she had been afraid to tell anyone about it. She finally confided in her sister May over dinner at the Subiaco Hotel. They ordered glasses of the Leeuwin chardonnay and a bowl of chili mussels to share, and Ava nearly had to pinch herself. She was in Subiaco, having dinner with her favorite sister, exactly as she had fantasized about doing on so many bitter Nantucket nights. Ava’s prevailing thought was that now that she had this life again, she couldn’t let anyone take it away.
She said to May, “I’ve made a decision.”
May said, “Boob job?”
“No,” Ava said. “I’m going to adopt a baby.”
May clapped her hand over her mouth to keep from screaming. Her eyes bulged. Ava laughed.
“People are staring,” Ava said.
“Oh my God,” May said. “So much better than a boob job. I think that’s a bloody brilliant idea. I don’t know why you didn’t decide this sooner.”
“Well…,” Ava said. She wasn’t sure how much her family knew about her emotional state of the past four years. Probably they would have said she was “going through a bit of a rough patch,” or perhaps acting “not quite herself.” That would have been an example of typical Australian understatement, or else a consequence of the fact that she lived ten thousand miles away. “I wasn’t ready before. But I’ve made up my mind, and I’m ready now. I’m thinking I want a little girl. From China.”
“Oh, Ava!” May said. She came around the table to give her sister a hug. Of all the Price children, May was the most like their mother, Dearie. She had the pillowy bosom and the pragmatic attitude. She had learned to knit and could make dinner for ten even if there was nothing in the fridge. She had gray hair already, but she didn’t care. With six kids of her own, an average week for her entailed four cricket matches, three trips to the dentist, and ten bloody noses. Who wouldn’t have gray hair? “Oh, I am so happy for you! This is a wonderful thing.” She sat back down, sipped her wine, leaned forward across the table. “And Jordan, is he excited?”
“Jordan doesn’t know,” Ava said. “This is my decision. It’s a decision I’m making for me.”
“So does that mean you’re leaving him?” May asked. Ava had expected her sister to be scandalized. There hadn’t been a divorce in the Price family in three generations. But May merely seemed matter-of-fact about it.
Ava had debated exactly when and where to talk to Jordan. One afternoon as she was walking home from the Fremantle Markets, she spied him drinking alone at the bar at the Norfolk Hotel, and she nearly walked in and tapped him on the shoulder, but she didn’t want the conversation to be an ambush. She needed a block of time and a safe, wide-open space—and so she arranged for May to take Jake overnight, and she booked the two of them a day trip to Rottnest Island.
She said to Jordan, “You and I are going to Rottnest Island tomorrow morning. The ferry’s at a quarter to nine.”
Jordan’s head whipped around so quickly that his glasses slid to the end of his nose. “No,” he said.
“No?”
“I don’t feel like an excursion,” he said. “I’m not up for it. And certainly Jake doesn’t want to go?”
“Jake’s not invited,” Ava said. “Jake is going over to May and Doug’s. This is for you and me.”
Jordan looked even more alarmed. “We’re not spending the night?”
“No,” Ava said. “Just a day trip. We’ll rent bikes. See the island. See the quokkas.”
“Oh,” Jordan said. His lips twisted in that disapproving way of his. “I don’t know. I had some things I wanted to do tomorrow.”
Ava studied her husband. She could have said, “What things are those? Drinking at the Norfolk? Watching the cricket on TV? Wallowing in your misery?” But instead she smiled. “Cancel them,” she said. “Because we’re going to Rottnest.”
She was jangling with nerves. The drive from their house to the ferry was perhaps the tensest eight minutes she had ever spent with her husband. He sulked like a recalcitrant child. He didn’t want to go on a day trip alone with Ava. The only saving grace was that she understood. If their roles had been reversed and it had been Jordan dragging her out—say, for a day trip to Tuckernuck Island—she would have been just as miserable. As she drove, Jordan pressed his forehead against the car window, like a dog being driven to the pound.
Once they were on the ferry, Ava stood out on the bow while Jordan sat in the cabin with a short black, rereading the very same newspaper that he’d read earlier that morning at home. It was chilly on the bow; the wind sliced through Ava’s sweater. Really, Rottnest was better appreciated in the summer, but what she needed to do had to be done now. She looked out at the blue water frosted with whitecaps. She couldn’t believe they had stayed together so long. They had wasted so much time.
When they disembarked on Rottnest, Ava was so overcome with nostalgia that she nearly forgot the purpose of her mission. The Price children had stayed here for a week every year over the school holidays in January. They had always rented pushbikes, and after a certain age they had been allowed to explore the island on their own. It wasn’t a lush tropical paradise by any means. The landscape was stark and barren, an expanse of parched brown acres with scattered eucalyptus trees and low-lying scrub brush. Ava’s father used to award a dollar coin to the first child who spotted a quokka, the strange-looking marsupial indigenous to the island. The Price family would camp in a tent just off Geordie Bay, and the best night of the trip was always the night they ate sandwiches and played billiards in the pub at the Hotel Rottnest. That was thirty years ago. Now Rottnest was posher. There was a Dome, and a Subway, and a waterfront café. People came from Perth on their sailboats or motor yachts and anchored off the beach and snorkeled.
Ava stepped onto the dock and inhaled the scent of salt water and eucalyptus. “My God,” she said, “I love it here. I’ve always loved it here. And I never thought I’d see it again.”
Jordan made a snorting noise.
They rented mountain bikes with twenty-one gears, a far cry from the bikes of Ava’s youth, which hadn’t even had hand brakes. Ava took a map from the young man behind the rental counter and said to Jordan, “We have to do the whole circuit, all the way down to Fish Hook Bay, and we have to go and see the lighthouse. We’ll have lunch at the hotel. That’s where we used to go with Mum and Dad.”
Jordan shook his head. He didn’t want to be here.
They climbed onto their bikes and started riding. How long since Ava had been on a bike? Her first summer on Nantucket, she had ridden a used ten-speed all over the island, sometimes in her bare, sandy feet. One time Jordan had pulled his Jeep up alongside her and tried to convince her to accept a ride, but she had turned him down. She would pedal herself.
Now she and Jordan struggled up the hill toward the Vlamingh Lookout. At the crest Ava stopped, a little winded, and pointed across the island toward the Basin and Little Parakeet Bay. The day was clear enough that she could just pick out the coastline of the mainland, five miles away.
Jordan followed Ava’s finger with dull eyes. He swigged from his water bottle. “What are we doing here, Ava?” he said.
“You don’t like it?” she said. “In the summer you can swim at these beaches. You can snorkel. We used to collect these purple sea urchins, and my brothers used to fish for skippies with nets.”
“What are we doing here?” he asked again.
She had hoped to make it to lunchtime, to a booth in the pub of the hotel, where they could relax and have a pint. Ava closed her eyes. The pub used to have a jukebox. Ava and her siblings would play Bruce Springsteen and the Who, but her mother would always choose “Waltzing Matilda,” and then her mother and father and a few of the drunk strangers sitting at surrounding tables would belt out the lyrics together.
“I’m going to adopt a baby,” she said. “A little girl, from China.”
This was met with silence, which Ava had predicted. She couldn’t look at Jordan’s face. She desperately wanted a cigarette.
“No,” he said. “I am not adopting a baby. I am not raising another child. I am not.”
“You weren’t listening to me,” Ava said. “I said I am going to adopt a baby.”
“So what does that mean?” He drank from his water bottle, then spit the water into the grass on the side of the road. “What does that mean, Ava?”
“It means… I want to stay here, for good, and I want to adopt a baby. And I think you and Jake should go home.”
“What?” Jordan said. “What is this? This is you… what? Leaving me? You brought me here to godforfuckingsaken Rottnest Island so that you can tell me you’re leaving me and you’re going to adopt a baby?” He got off his bike and threw it onto the road, where it jumped and clattered. “This is bullshit, Ava!”
“Jordan.”
“This is bullshit! I gave up my life for you, I left my entire life back on Nantucket and brought you here because that was all you ever wanted. You never wanted to live on Nantucket with me, that was perfectly clear twenty fucking years ago when I showed up here the first time and you laughed in my face and showed me the door. But you came back to me, you came back to me, Ava—and yet I’ve spent most of this marriage feeling as if I were the one who was making you miserable. I was the reason we couldn’t get pregnant again, I was the reason Ernie died, I was the one who was too absorbed with work, everything was always my fault. And so now I do the selfless thing, I act in the name of our marriage, in the name of our family, and you tell me that you’re adopting a baby and that Jake and I should go home?”
Cigarette, she thought. Or a cold pint. Anything to make this easier. But she would be glad later, she supposed, that she had had no crutches. Nothing to do with her hands but let them hold her bike steady, nowhere to put her eyes but on her husband.
“I know about Zoe, Jordan,” Ava said. “I’ve known for a while now.”
This was the real ambush; Jordan was caught completely off guard. She watched half a dozen emotions cross his face, and because they had been married for so long, she recognized every single one: denial, incredulity, contrition, anger, sadness, resignation.
“Jesus, Ava,” he said.
“It’s okay,” she said. “It wasn’t okay, I don’t think, for a long time, but it’s okay now.” She thought back to their recent awkward encounter in bed. She had known then that things were over. She had allowed her marriage to rust, like a bicycle-built-for-two left out in the rain. And then, when she finally decided she wanted to climb back on it, she’d been surprised when it didn’t work. When she reached out for Jordan, he was ten thousand miles away. At first Ava had felt angry and rejected, until she realized that the passion she felt that night wasn’t for Jordan, it was for something else: Australia, her mother and brothers and sisters, the nascent idea of a new family.
“I can’t believe this is happening,” Jordan said. He screamed at the open sky: “I CANNOT BELIEVE THIS IS HAPPENING!”
She couldn’t believe it either. She took a deep breath of the bracing Rottnest air. She had come to this island as a child; she could never have foreseen the circumstances that she found herself in now. For years, no matter how wretched she had felt, splitting from Jordan had been unthinkable. But why? Why?
“Go back to Nantucket, Jordan,” Ava said. “That’s where you belong.”
Jordan opened his mouth to speak.
“You can protest,” Ava said. “You can deny it all you want. But I know the truth. You want this over too.”
“And what about our son?” Jordan asked.
“Jake is a sorry mess,” Ava said. “A couple of weeks ago he tried to run away. He met some kids down at South Beach who had a van. He gave them some money because they said they would drive him to Sydney, where he was going to hop on a plane, or a container ship, back to the States. But they drugged him or something, I guess, and then they robbed him, and so he came back to the house. I caught him coming in the side gate at five-thirty in the morning with his duffel bag.”
“Jesus,” Jordan said. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t he tell me?”
“And ever since he told me what happened, all I’ve been thinking about is what I would have done if I’d lost him. Really lost him, the way we lost Ernie, the way Zoe lost Penny.” Ava blinked. The wind whipped her hair, and she tried to collect it into an elastic at the base of her neck. “What would I have done?”
“I don’t have an answer for that,” Jordan said. “I don’t seem to have an answer for anything anymore.”
“I asked Jake what he wanted more than anything in the world. And you know what he said? He wants Nantucket.”
“Ava. We’re not going to decide this today. You can’t dissolve a twenty-year marriage in one day.”
“Just think about it, Jordan, please. Take Jake home and keep him safe. Get him into college somewhere. Put him on a plane to see me every once in a while. Run the newspaper, serve the island, do what you were born and raised to do.” She swallowed. “And get Zoe back.”
“Ava.”
“I am serious,” she said. “And I am sincere. Go after what you want.”
Jordan poked his glasses up his nose. This gesture always used to bother her, but now she saw it as his way of expressing bewilderment. “And what about you?” he asked.
“I’ve got what I want right here.” Ava mounted her bike and coasted down the backside of the hill. A quokka bounced across the road in front of her, and she thought, I win the dollar coin!
She was home.