Lynne Castle’s favorite line was, “I’m too old for this.” Lately, though, she had felt like adding an expletive onto the end of that; now she wanted to say, “I’m too old for this shit.” But Lynne wasn’t one to swear. She was solid, she was responsible, she was the voice of reason, she was a model citizen, she was a loving wife, she was a good mother.
But was she, really?
Welcome to the summer of self-doubt. Lynne and Al had everything a couple could want. Al had the car dealership and local politics. Lynne had a permitting business that kept her as busy as she wanted to be. They had a lovely home, the Castle castle. They had two boys away at college who were poised to take the world by storm. And they had Demeter.
On the outside, their lives looked good. Life had always looked good for the Castles. Al was in charge of everything on this island, and what he wasn’t in charge of, Lynne was in charge of. But lately something deep inside their life seemed to be emitting a foul smell.
Lynne wasn’t stupid, she wasn’t an idiot, she knew that the problem was Demeter. Her youngest child, her only daughter. Lynne had been thrilled when she gave birth to a girl after the two boys. It was a dream come true: all that pink, the baby dolls, dance lessons, tea parties. Demeter had been a precocious little girl, cute and tiny, with a high-pitched candy voice.
What had gone wrong? Could Lynne just look back and be honest with herself for once?
By the time Demeter was ten or eleven, she was overweight. Lynne wasn’t quite sure how this had happened. It was true that Lynne and Al were not small people, and there never seemed to be enough time in the day for regular exercise, but neither one of them was what you’d call fat, either. And both the boys were trim and athletic.
Lynne had enrolled Demeter in spring soccer; first she sat on the bench—because she was no good at the sport, because she was too heavy to run more than a few yards downfield without getting winded—and then she quit. Al bought her a mountain bike for her birthday, but by that point Demeter had few friends, and so no one to bike with, no one to go and see on her bike. She was ostracized at school because of her weight, but at home Lynne was afraid to address her size because she didn’t want to make it an issue, she didn’t want Demeter to think that her own mother believed she was fat. Instead she strove to promote a positive body image by telling her daughter she was beautiful, and of course she could have another piece of cake.
Demeter got bigger. She refused to ski during their weekends in Stowe. She refused to put on a bathing suit when they went to the beach on Sundays.
Fat camp? Lynne wondered. A summer away might help, but the idea seemed cruel. And outdated. Lynne had had a friend in high school who’d gone to fat camp and returned with an eating disorder.
Al was little help. Lynne crawled into bed at night and said, “What are we going to do about her? She’s so lonely. I could cry thinking about it.” And Al said, “I’ll do whatever you want to do, honey.”
This sounded like support, but really it was Al passing the buck. He was too busy with the dealership and his civic duties to do anything about Demeter. Demeter was a girl, Lynne was her mother. Certainly Lynne would know the best course of action. Al had put in his intense parenting time with the boys. Little League coach for eight years, science projects, college visits—he’d done it all. Lynne could hardly fault him for taking a pass here.
But she did fault him. And she faulted herself. What she thought was, I’m too old for this shit.
Adolescence, Lynne had tried to tell Demeter, was like a bad ride on the ferry. You got tossed about in the waves, you crested to the top, you sank into the troughs, and the motion between the highs and the lows made you sick to your stomach. You thought with every passing minute that you were surely going to drown. The good news was, the ride eventually came to an end. You docked in Hyannis Harbor and disembarked from the boat. Demeter would graduate from high school, she would reach adulthood, and things would get better.
Demeter had looked upon her mother with a jaundiced eye. “A bad ride on the ferry”? That was what her mother had to offer?
A little before 1:30 a.m. on June 17, Ed Kapenash had called the house and told Al that there had been an accident. Demeter was at the hospital, but she was unhurt.
Al relayed this message to Lynne, who was by that point sitting bolt upright in bed. “There was an accident, Demeter’s at the hospital, but she’s unhurt.”
Lynne said, “She’s not at the hospital. She’s in her bedroom.”
And Al, trusting every word that came out of his wife’s mouth, said to Police Chief Ed Kapenash, “Demeter is in her bedroom.”
To which Ed responded, “I’m looking right at her, Al. Can you come down here, please?”
Even then, Lynne didn’t believe it. She threw on the skirt and blouse by her bed, the same outfit she had worn only hours before to four graduation parties, and she marched down the hallway to Demeter’s bedroom. Knocked on the door. There was no answer, but that was hardly unusual. Lynne tried the knob. Locked. Again, not unusual. What teenage girl didn’t lock her bedroom door? She knocked again, and Al came up behind her with a metal pin.
“Jesus Christ, Lynne, step aside, please.”
Lynne half turned to him, shocked. He never spoke to her like that. He popped the lock and reached for the light and then they were both standing in Demeter’s empty bedroom, where the window was hanging wide open. In a daze Lynne walked to the window and looked down.
“She… what?” Lynne said.
“Climbed out the window,” Al said in a snarky tone of voice.
“And then what?” Lynne said. The screen for the window lay on the shingles of the roof, but from the roof line it was probably eight or nine feet to the lawn below. “She jumped?”
“She must have,” Al said. “I’m going to the hospital. Are you coming with me?”
“Of course I’m coming with you,” Lynne said. Her daughter had been in an accident, her daughter was at the hospital, her daughter had climbed out her bedroom window and jumped to the lawn below. Her daughter had fooled them. Lynne was so tired, it was the middle of the night, she had gotten only a couple hours of sleep. She was too old for this.
But once she reached the hospital, she couldn’t have been more awake. Ed Kapenash met them out in the parking lot, and Lynne thought, This can hardly be standard protocol. Maybe he had lied about Demeter’s being unhurt so they wouldn’t drive off the road while trying to get here. Why else would Ed be waiting for them outside?
Ed spoke in a low voice. Lynne had never heard him sound so serious. Jake Randolph’s Jeep, Penny driving, Penny D.O.A., Hobby alive but unresponsive. The helicopter was on its way. Demeter unhurt, Jake Randolph unhurt.
Lynne couldn’t quite keep up. “Wait a minute,” she said. “What did you say about Penny?”
Ed pressed his lips together.
Al said, “Honey, she’s dead. She was dead on arrival.”
Lynne felt herself falling. But no, she was upright. But she had dropped something. Keys. Her keys had fallen from her hand onto the asphalt. She bent down to pick them up. She hiccupped, then started crying.
“I met you out here because I thought you should know,” Ed said. “So you’ll be prepared. Jordan’s on his way. Zoe’s on her way.”
“Do they know?” Lynne asked. “Does Zoe know?”
“Not yet.”
Jesus, this was awful. Lynne’s life wasn’t set up to accommodate this kind of awful.
“I also need to inform you that we found a bottle of Jim Beam in your daughter’s bag,” Ed said. “It had an inch or two of whiskey left in it. She probably wasn’t the only one drinking it, but the paramedics said she was inebriated when she arrived. I’m going in to talk with her now. I just wanted to tell you that myself. Because we’re friends.”
“Thank you, Ed,” Al said.
“Jim Beam?” Lynne said. “Where on Earth, really, where would Demeter have gotten a bottle of Jim Beam? We don’t drink. You know we don’t drink, Ed.”
“I’m just telling you what we found.”
“Someone must have put it in her bag,” Lynne said. “One of the boys.” But not Penny. Penny didn’t drink at all; Lynne knew this from both Demeter and Zoe. Although it was graduation, so maybe she’d been drinking tonight. Maybe that was what had caused the accident. Maybe Penny had put the bottle in Demeter’s purse. Demeter would have let her do that—anything to be accepted by those kids. “Was Penny drinking?”
“We know almost nothing else,” Ed said.
Al said, “Honey, let the man do his job. He came out here to warn us as a courtesy.”
Was Al expecting her to thank him, then? Say something like “Thank you, Ed, for telling us that our daughter was the one with the near-empty bottle of booze in her purse”? Lynne didn’t like being the mother who insisted on her child’s innocence—those mothers were nearly always delusional about their own children—but in this case she had no choice. There was no way the Jim Beam or whatever it was they’d found in Demeter’s purse actually belonged to her.
Lynne couldn’t believe she was even worrying about this. Penny Alistair was dead. And Hobby—what had the Chief said about Hobby, again?
“What did he say about Hobby?” Lynne asked Al, as the Chief’s back receded toward the bright glass doors of the Emergency Room. She was shivering as if it were January instead of June.
“Let’s go inside,” Al said.
Now, two months later, Lynne had a hard time piecing together what had happened after that. Her memory was shattered like a broken mirror. She remembered seeing Zoe walk in; the two of them exchanged a look, and Lynne feared for the expression on her own face. She hated that she knew that Penny was dead while Zoe didn’t; she despised Ed Kapenash for telling them first.
She remembered Zoe’s slapping Jordan. Oh yes, that she remembered. She would remember that for the rest of her life. Zoe nearly knocked the glasses off of Jordan’s face. And why? What had Jordan done wrong? That wasn’t clear.
Al was the one who helped Zoe get to Boston, though at first she refused his help. But Al held firm: “I’m taking you, goddammit, Zoe. You can’t do this alone.” He got her to Mass General; he stood by her side while the doctors delivered the ghastly news. Hobby was still unresponsive. In a coma. There was nothing they could do but wait.
Meanwhile, Lynne and Jordan had sat side by side in the waiting room of Nantucket Cottage Hospital until Ed Kapenash finished interrogating their children. Had the two of them talked? Lynne couldn’t remember. She did remember Demeter’s coming out to the waiting room, pale, shaking, and smelling like vomit. Lynne touched her all over in a way that she hadn’t touched her in years, checking to make sure she was in one piece.
“Let’s go, Mom, please,” Demeter whispered.
“Yes,” Lynne said. She remembered that Jordan was still sitting, waiting for Jake to emerge. She remembered that his blue eyes tracked her and Demeter, and his mouth opened to say something. But did he speak? And did Lynne say good-bye?
She couldn’t remember. But she must have. She would never have left without saying good-bye.
Another mother might have addressed the issue of the Jim Beam right away. Another mother might have acknowledged—even if only to herself—that the vomit fumes coming off her daughter in the passenger seat did, in fact, reek of whiskey. Another mother might have asked her daughter the simple question, “What happened?” So that at least she would have a baseline to work from.
But Lynne Castle addressed, acknowledged, and asked nothing. Things might have been different if Al had still been with them, but Al had gone with Zoe, so Lynne was left to deal with Demeter by herself, and she was at a loss. Demeter had carried a pillow, sheathed in an aqua pillowcase, out of the hospital. Every so often she would lean over, bury her face in the pillow, and emit a soundless scream. And Lynne thought, She’s in shock. That was what Dr. Field had said. He’d pressed a prescription for a sedative into Lynne’s hand, but it was too late, or too early, to get that filled at the pharmacy now.
At home Lynne said, “Daddy’s gone to Boston. Do you want to sleep in my bed with me?”
Demeter said, “God, no.”
Lynne tried not to take offense at this, but she was tired, and for some reason these words, or perhaps the disgust with which Demeter uttered them, hurt her feelings. She reminded herself that Demeter had never been a snuggler, and that the two of them didn’t have a touchy-feely relationship. Zoe and Penny have that kind of relationship, Lynne thought—or at least they did (God, the first use of the past tense, it was hideous!). She knew that Penny used to climb into bed with Zoe when she was scared or there was a lightning storm, and they always cuddled together on the couch during Patriots games on football Sundays, and they lay next to each other on towels at the beach. Demeter and Lynne just weren’t like that, fair enough, but was it too much to ask for a little physical closeness between them tonight, on the very night when Penny Alistair had been killed and Demeter might have been killed herself?
Lynne and Demeter stood at the open door of Demeter’s bedroom. The light was on, the window wide open. Was Lynne going to confront her daughter about her locked door, her exodus, her blatant deceit?
No, not tonight. Outside, the birds were starting to chirp. June on Nantucket: the sun rose at 4:30 a.m.
“Are you going to be okay?” Lynne asked.
Demeter eyed her mother.
Right, Lynne thought: stupid, vague question, too big a question to answer. She narrowed it down a little. “Do you want a sleeping pill?” she asked. “I can give you one of mine.”
“Okay,” Demeter said.
It was something concrete Lynne could do. Something she had to offer. One of her Lunestas. She had asked Ted Field for them back in April, when Al was running for selectman for the fourth time. The stress of local politics, of negative campaigning aimed at Al, of insinuations that he had Ed Kapenash, among other people, in his back pocket—all of this had kept Lynne up at night. Ha! She had worried then, when nothing was wrong. Al had won in a landslide.
Lynne placed the tiny pill in Demeter’s palm, and Demeter dry-mouthed it down. Lynne grimaced. Probably not a bad idea to suggest that she take a shower and brush her teeth: she stank to high heaven. But as Lynne was searching for the words to gently convey this thought to her daughter, Demeter stepped into her bedroom and slammed the door shut, leaving her mother alone in the hallway.
“Good night, darling,” Lynne said.
Now it was August, and the worst was behind them. Hobby had woken up from his coma, Penny had been properly buried, the Randolph family had moved halfway around the world. Demeter had defied all odds and honored her commitment to work at Frog and Toad Landscaping. She got up and went to work five mornings a week. She was never late. She was the color of toast and she had, most definitely, lost some weight.
But something still wasn’t right. Demeter was less forthcoming than ever. She rarely spoke unless spoken to, and half the time, when Al or Lynne asked her a question, she gave a nonsensical answer and broke into giggles. And yet Lynne was afraid to dissect this behavior because Demeter did, in fact, seem happier than she had seemed in a long, long time. She was working and bringing home a weekly paycheck, she looked good. She had made some friends, she said, on her crew. A girl named Nell. A boy named Coop. A man named Zeus.
“Zeus?” Lynne said. “That’s an interesting name.”
“ ‘Gods and goddesses in the front,’ ” Demeter said, and then she giggled.
Lynne wondered if Demeter had started a relationship with one of the men on her crew. Maybe this Coop, or this Zeus. Zeus was more likely, Lynne thought. An older Hispanic man with a wife all the way down in Central America—to him, Demeter would seem young and ripe and lush. Too young, though. Lynne couldn’t stand to think about it.
It crossed Lynne’s mind that Demeter might be doing drugs either before or after work. Because, to be honest, her whole demeanor was altered. She was a different kid. All of her angry, bitter, resentful, woe-is-me attitude seemed to have disappeared, and in its place was this vacant insipidness. Demeter used to be an avid reader. Her marks in school weren’t great, they were just-getting-by, but she always read very good books, both classic and contemporary. But had she read a single book this whole summer? Lynne didn’t think so. Lynne wasn’t naive, she knew that landscapers were famous for smoking marijuana, and she also knew that Demeter might not have the resolve to say no. She was a perfect target for peer pressure, wanting so badly to be accepted and to fit in. Lynne had gone so far as to sniff her daughter’s clothes before she stuffed them into the washing machine. They smelled like sour sweat but not smoke. Later she extended her olfactory investigation to the inside of Demeter’s Escape, where her nose was overpowered by the smell of breath mints and piney air-freshener and something else that was sickly sweet but unidentifiable—until she pulled a black, rotten banana out from under the passenger seat.
Lynne didn’t find any signs of marijuana. But there was something—something—going on.
Demeter had been through one hell of an ordeal this summer. She had lost Penny, who was as much of a friend as she had had, and she had lost Jake too. Hobby was still alive, thank God. Lynne kept tabs on him through the grapevine; it seemed she was always talking to someone who had just seen him in town or out for a quiet dinner at 56 Union with his mother. Lynne learned that he was out of the wheelchair and onto crutches and making excellent progress, but that Coach Jaxon had finally come to terms with the fact that he would never play football again. It was just too dangerous. Hobby was apparently spending lots of time with Claire Buckley, which was good, Lynne thought. Claire was a nice girl.
Lynne wished she had gotten all this news about Hobby from Zoe herself, but Zoe was incommunicado. Lynne had arranged dropoff meals at the Alistair house for six weeks after Penny’s funeral but Zoe had never called or written to say thank you. Not that a thank-you was necessary; Lynne certainly hadn’t scheduled the meals because she wanted gratitude. She had done it because it was one stupid, paltry thing that she and the other women in the community could do—offer food so that something healthy and delicious would be on hand whenever Zoe got her appetite back. Lynne had also left several messages on Zoe’s voicemail, she had lost count of how many, four or five, but these had gone unreturned. She had tried to tread lightly, saying, “Hey, Zoe, it’s me, just checking in, no need to call me back, just wanted to see how you’re doing, thinking of you.” So Zoe had managed to make it out to 56 Union for dinner with Hobby, but she hadn’t been able to call Lynne back? Lynne was—or had been—her best friend. Lynne had to assume that status had been altered in Zoe’s mind. Perhaps Zoe couldn’t bring herself to talk to her for the same reason that she’d slapped Jordan in the hospital waiting room: a firewall of anger. She had lost a child, and they hadn’t.
She had lost a child. Lynne couldn’t pretend to know what that felt like.
They had all been through one hell of an ordeal this summer.
So whatever was going on with Demeter, Lynne told herself, would pass. There was no describing how badly she wanted to ignore it. If Demeter could just make it through the summer… things might change once she was back in school… her senior year… things were always great in senior year, so for Demeter they should at least be tolerable. She would be accepted to college somewhere, probably not a top-tier school like her brothers, but maybe Michigan State, where Al had gone. He donated money to MSU, he should be able to pull those strings if needed, and then Demeter would be away at school, and Al and Lynne would be empty-nesters. There was a way in which the two of them had been born to be empty-nesters. They both had more than enough interests and involvements to keep them busy for the next three centuries. (Although their interest in each other, at this stage of the game, was limited: they had sex only two or three times a year, on prescribed dates—their anniversary, Al’s birthday, and Valentine’s Day—and frankly, even that much was more than enough for Lynne.) Maybe, Lynne thought, her eager anticipation of an empty nest meant that they should never have had children at all.
Demeter’s strange behavior continued. On the night she returned from babysitting for the Kingsleys, Lynne happened to be awake, standing next to the open freezer door, shoveling Chunky Monkey into her mouth. She had been indulging in this kind of late-night stress eating more and more lately, but when Demeter walked in, she hastened to fit the top back onto the carton and shove the ice cream back into the freezer, because what kind of example was she setting?
“Hey, honey,” Lynne said. She positioned her body to block’s Demeter’s view of the sticky spoon on the countertop.
Demeter didn’t respond to her greeting, didn’t acknowledge her mother’s presence at all. She clutched her backpack to her chest and proceeded up the stairs.
“Demeter!” Lynne snapped. Her voice was louder than it ought to have been in the middle of the night—Al was sleeping—but Jesus Christ, she was sick of being ignored.
“What?” Demeter said.
“How was babysitting? How were the Kingsleys?”
Demeter let out a shrill, high-pitched laugh that was unlike anything Lynne had ever heard come out of her daughter’s mouth. It made Lynne worry that maybe Demeter’s problem was that she was possessed by the spawn of Lucifer. “Babysitting?” Demeter said. “At the Kingsleys’? It was awful. It was goddamned fucking awful, if you must know, Mother.” Then Demeter laughed again, and it gave Lynne the shivers.
Two days later Lynne stood in front of Demeter’s bedroom door with the metal pin. Demeter was still at work, and Lynne had been trying to work in her home office as well, but Demeter’s words kept playing through her mind: “It was goddamned fucking awful, if you must know, Mother.” And that demonic laugh. Something was going on, and Lynne intended to find out what it was.
She popped the lock on Demeter’s door as she’d seen Al do the night of the accident. She entered her daughter’s bedroom. She was one of those mothers now, she thought. One of those mothers who nosed around her child’s personal space, one of those mothers who couldn’t be trusted. She had never had to do this with the boys. The boys had been easy to raise; the boys had been a breeze.
Demeter’s room smelled funny. It had been a hot couple of weeks, and Lynne had kept the central air on, so Demeter’s window was shut tight. Sunlight streamed in, and dust motes hung in the air. The bed was unmade. Demeter used only a fitted sheet and a duvet, anyway. Lynne sniffed the duvet. Abominable—body odor, along with whatever cheap teenage scent her daughter used to mask body odor. Lynne rarely cleaned in this room anymore; she had basically been denied access for the past three years, though she did make a point of asking for Demeter’s sheets and towels occasionally. But she hadn’t asked once this summer, and now the whole room smelled of dirty linen. Lynne started stripping the bed right then and there. Something was under the pillow and fell to the floor, and Lynne scrambled to pick it up. It was a paperback copy of The Beautiful and Damned, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Lynne sat on the bare mattress and flipped through the book. Demeter was reading Fitzgerald. Was Lynne worrying herself sick over nothing?
Lynne set the book down on Demeter’s bedside table, next to her water glass, which had a wedge of lime floating in it. Lime in her water glass? That was Zoe’s influence right there. Zoe kept a pitcher of chilled water in her fridge, and it always had lemon or lime slices and sometimes fresh mint and sometimes cucumber slices floating in it, and it always tasted fresh and delicious.
God, Lynne missed Zoe. She wondered what would happen if she just turned up at Zoe’s house unannounced. That was what a real friend would do—go over there and check on her. Lynne would bring her something, maybe a hanging begonia from Bartlett’s Farm or a topiary from Flowers on Chestnut.
Lynne picked up the water glass and emptied it into Demeter’s bathroom sink. She threw the lime wedge in the trash and carried the liner down to the kitchen trash. The bathroom trash seemed to be mostly crumpled tissues and dental floss and a bunch of wrappers from sugarless gum and breath mints. So maybe Demeter was having a relationship with someone at work—or, more likely, she’d developed a crush. Which could either end well or end badly.
Lynne went back up to Demeter’s bathroom and collected all the towels and the bathmat. She gathered the sheets as well and carried everything down to the laundry. Demeter would be angry when she found out that her mother had been in her room, but she’d appreciate having clean sheets and towels.
Lynne had work to do—three clients needed titles cleared—but she hated to leave a job half done. She lugged the Dyson up to Demeter’s room and found a yellow dust rag and fetched her bucket of cleaning supplies and the mop. The cleaners came once a week, so this kind of time-consuming effort on Lynne’s part had been rendered unnecessary in the rest of the house. But the cleaners weren’t allowed to go in Demeter’s room, and it badly needed cleaning.
That smell, Lynne thought. How did Demeter stand it?
Lynne dusted and vacuumed. This gave her a legitimate excuse to peek under the bed—nothing there but a dusty suitcase, which made her wonder if what they really needed was a vacation, which made her think of the Randolphs in Australia. They’d gone because, Jordan said, he needed to get Jake and Ava off the island for a while. Ava had been asking to move back to Australia for years, Lynne knew, but the accident was what had prompted their departure. So it seemed—to Lynne, and probably to the rest of Nantucket—as if they had left in shame. Lynne had heard people castigating Jordan for not printing anything about the accident in the paper, and she had done her best to correct this misperception by telling anyone who brought it up within her earshot that Zoe had asked him not to print a single word. His actions had been noble, she believed.
Lynne wondered if Jake had somehow been to blame for the accident. The police report had been so vague.
Lynne was glad that she hadn’t found any strange or unidentifiable objects in Demeter’s room. No weird altars or vials of tiger blood or voodoo dolls. Of course, she hadn’t looked through the drawers. She would look through the drawers—maybe—once she was done with the bathroom.
No one in the world enjoyed cleaning a bathroom, and this one smelled especially bad. Lynne was generous with the Windex; she tried not to gaze into the toilet bowl as she scoured it with the brush. She checked in the cabinet under the sink and saw that Demeter was down to her last roll of toilet paper and her final two tampons. Lynne replenished the supplies from the stockpile in her own bathroom. The girl was suffering from neglect.
Lynne struggled with the bathtub. She pulled Demeter’s hair out of the drain, then she took down the shower curtain. That could use a run through the washing machine as well.
She checked the medicine cabinet. There was a large bottle of ibuprofen that Lynne knew she herself hadn’t bought. Strange, she thought. She checked the bottle’s contents to make sure it really was ibuprofen, and it was.
Okay, she was feeling paranoid now. Why would Demeter have spent her own money on ibuprofen? Why not just write it down on Lynne’s shopping list?
Lynne went back into Demeter’s bedroom and thought, I have to check her drawers. She didn’t want to check the drawers, but to be thorough, she had to. Then there was the dark screen of Demeter’s computer. Should she check the computer? Would she know what she was looking for? Demeter didn’t have a Facebook page, or she hadn’t the last time Lynne checked, which was some time before the accident. Even Lynne had a Facebook page, complete with 274 friends. Penny had been Lynne’s friend on Facebook, that was the kind of dear child she was, but Lynne hadn’t had the heart to go in and see if Penny’s page had been taken down yet. Lynne collapsed in Demeter’s desk chair and stared at the computer. There were so many places for kids to hide things. How were parents supposed to win at this game?
She would check the dresser drawers, she decided, but would leave the computer alone for now. She would ask Al about the computer, maybe. He had to pull his weight in this.
Lynne slid open Demeter’s drawers. She was holding her breath as though she expected to see a nest of snakes in there. But all she found was a mess of very large clothes—overalls, jeans, T-shirts, and the hooded sweatshirts that made Demeter look like a hoodlum from Jamaica Plain instead of a nice girl from Nantucket. This was Lynne’s chance to surreptitiously remove them, but she was so glad not to have found anything worrisome in the drawers that she let the sweatshirts remain, and even resisted her urge to fold and straighten them. She closed the drawers.
Her search had turned up nothing. Nothing except the Fitzgerald.
Lynne was about to leave the room when she caught sight of the closet door. It was slightly ajar, which seemed like an invitation for her to open it and check inside. Lynne noticed how blank the door was, how blank the whole room was, really. There were no pictures of friends, no pictures of her or Al, or Mark or Billy, no trophies or awards or ribbons or framed certificates of achievement, no maps of places they’d visited, no posters of actors or rock stars. (Even Lynne, yes, straight Lynne Comstock, had had a poster of Lynyrd Skynyrd taped to her wall.)
Suddenly Demeter’s room seemed like the saddest place on earth.
Lynne took a step toward the closet.
“Mom?”
Lynne gasped.
“Jesus Christ,” she said to Demeter. “You scared the shit out of me.”
Demeter stared at her mother. Lynne wondered when the last time was that she had taken the Lord’s name in vain and sworn in the same sentence. College? She hadn’t always been such a straight arrow; she hadn’t always been such an upstanding citizen. She had listened to Lynyrd Skynyrd in the front seat of Beck Paulsen’s Mazda RX4. She had smoked Newports with Beck and drunk Miller beer from cans.
“What are you doing in here?” Demeter asked.
“Cleaning,” Lynne answered honestly. “It smelled awful. I took your sheets….” Lynne nodded at the naked bed.
“Yes, I see that.”
“I cleaned your bathroom, you’re welcome. I’ll return your linens to you by dinnertime, freshly laundered, you’re welcome.”
“Wasn’t this room locked?” Demeter asked.
“Yes, but…”
“How did you get in?”
“I popped the lock.”
“You popped the lock?”
“With a pin,” Lynne said. Apropos of nothing, she laughed. She had broken into her teenage daughter’s bedroom, and she had nothing to say in her own defense. She had put so much effort into cleaning that she had lost track of time. Now she was busted, as though she were the teenager and Demeter the parent.
“Get out,” Demeter said.
“Honey, really, I just needed to get in here to clean—”
“If you really need to get in here, you ask me,” Demeter said. “You don’t pop the lock with a pin while I’m at work. You’re like a common thief.”
“Thief?” Lynne said. “I didn’t take anything.”
“A spy, then,” Demeter said.
“Honey, I wasn’t spying. I told you, the smell—”
“I like the smell.”
“Your sheets needed to be changed.”
“What happened to my water glass?” Demeter asked.
“I emptied it. It’s in the dishwasher.”
“I don’t know what you’re doing in here!” Demeter’s voice took on the shrill edge of hysteria. She was still in her work boots—which were, naturally, tracking dirt and sand into the newly vacuumed room. She was clutching her backpack to her chest like a shield, just as she had done the other night when she got home from babysitting.
Clutching her backpack. Okay, Lynne wasn’t naive, she wasn’t in the wrong here, this was her house, she was the mother and Demeter was the child and something was going on with Demeter and Lynne wanted to know what it was.
“Do you have a Facebook page?” Lynne asked.
“What?” Demeter said. “No, I don’t.”
“I can check, you know.”
Demeter said, “Fine, check. I don’t have one.” Her tone of voice was both calm and bored. Facebook wasn’t the culprit.
“Let me see your phone.”
“Your phone. Let me see it.”
“My phone?”
“Your phone.” Demeter had an iPhone 4s that Lynne had bought for her in the spring. Lynne had noticed that she kept a passcode lock on the phone. Now she wondered, Why would she keep a passcode lock unless there’s something she’s trying to hide?
Demeter pulled her phone out of the pocket of her cargo shorts and handed it to Lynne.
“Unlock it, please,” Lynne said.
Demeter unlocked it. “You’re acting like a psycho.”
“No,” Lynne said. “I’m acting like a parent. Finally.” She looked at the face of the phone. Apps—she knew that those colorful squares were apps, but she didn’t know what to do with them. She was acting like a clueless parent. She had a cell phone herself, but she kept it in her car and used it only when she was on the road or away from home. She didn’t know how to text. Zoe knew how to text, and Jordan knew how to text—the two of them had been texting buddies for years, that was how they communicated. But not Lynne. She was a clueless parent and a fuddy-duddy who didn’t text and couldn’t navigate her way around an iPhone. She handed the phone back to Demeter.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” Demeter asked.
Lynne sighed. She wasn’t getting anywhere. “Demeter, what’s going on with you?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, what’s going on? Something is funny. Something is wrong.”
“I’m working,” Demeter said. “I spend all day on my knees weeding. If I’m very, very lucky, I get to water. Or deadhead.” She held up one hand and clutched at her backpack with the other. Her hand was blotched with purple stains. “Daylilies.”
She clutched the bag, clutched the bag. Lynne said, “I’d like you to open your bag, please.”
“What?” Demeter said. She tightened her grip on her bag, which only made Lynne more determined to see what was inside it. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Set the bag down and unzip it for me, please,” Lynne said.
“I suppose the cavity search is next,” Demeter said. “Do I need to call my lawyer?”
“Just do it,” Lynne said.
Demeter did not release her hold on the bag. “I can’t believe you’re doing this. What is wrong with you?”
“What is wrong with you?” Lynne said. Her voice sounded positively lethal; she felt herself losing her grip. She rarely got like this. If Al had been home, she would have ducked out of there already. She would have made herself a cup of chamomile tea and gotten into a cool bath, played some Mozart, read some poetry. “Put the bag down, please, and unzip it.”
Demeter did as she was told. The backpack gaped open. Lynne took a step forward and peered inside, as though she expected to find someone’s severed head in there. But all she saw was a flannel shirt. She rummaged a little deeper. Two bottles of water, one of them with a lime floating in it—more Zoe water—and another rotting banana. That was all.
Lynne extracted the banana. “Waste of a perfectly good banana,” she said.
“Call the fruit police,” Demeter said.
Lynne held the black, weeping banana. She was so relieved, she thought she might cry.
Demeter collapsed against the closet door; it closed with a sound like a gunshot.
“Mom,” she said.
“What?” Lynne said.
“Yes,” Lynne said. “Okay.”
Lynne was so embarrassed by the incident in Demeter’s bedroom that she said nothing about it to Al. She laundered Demeter’s sheets and towels and left them in a neat pile outside her daughter’s bedroom door. She swore to herself that she wouldn’t use the pin to force entry again. Demeter was a seventeen-year-old girl. She needed her privacy.
On August 14, Lynne was working in her home office. She was listening to a Bruce Springsteen CD, drinking freshly brewed iced tea with mint. She and Al had a date to meet at Ladies Beach at four o’clock. They did this every August, right when Al realized that summer was almost over and he hadn’t taken any late-afternoon swims. And this year, because of all that had happened, they hadn’t gone to the beach even once. Jordan was gone, and Lynne had been afraid to call and inflict herself on Zoe.
Lynne was looking forward to the swim. Afterward she would try to convince Al to go to Dune for dinner.
Downstairs, the phone rang. Lynne ignored it. God knew, if she picked up every phone call that came in to the house, she would never get any work done. Because of all that had happened this summer, she was running behind. The answering machine picked up. The Castles had to be the last family in America that even still had an answering machine. Everyone else used automated voicemail. Lynne tried not to listen to the voice on the machine—if she was so keen to know who was calling, she told herself, then she should have just picked up the phone in the first place. But she listened anyway, just long enough to discern that the voice belonged to Zoe.
Zoe. It was Zoe, finally calling her back. Lynne sprang from her desk and rushed down the stairs to get the phone, but by the time she picked it up, she was talking to a dial tone. She was just about to call Zoe back when the phone rang in her office, and Lynne thought, Of course, Zoe would call my office phone next since she couldn’t reach me on the home phone. Lynne hurried up the stairs, calling out pointlessly, “I’m coming, hold on, here I come!” When she picked up the phone, she was out of breath. She was too old for this. But it was Zoe. At last! She couldn’t wait to talk to her.
“Hello?” she said.
“Lynne,” Al said. “I need you to sit down.”
Twenty minutes later Lynne and Al were meeting in the hot, unvented offices of Frog and Toad Landscaping with Kerry Trevor and a hysterical Demeter. It was difficult for the adults to talk about what had happened with Demeter making so much noise.
“Honey,” Lynne said. “You have to calm down.”
But Demeter was a volcano intent on erupting. She hadn’t emoted nearly this much after the accident or after Penny’s funeral, which was probably why she was such a mess now. All of that difficult stuff was surfacing.
“Actually, maybe Demeter should wait outside,” Kerry said.
Was that a good idea? Lynne wondered. At this point, she knew, Demeter was a flight risk. If she was left unsupervised, she might just get into her car and drive away. She might do something stupid.
“Jeanne will keep an eye on her,” Kerry said.
“Okay,” Lynne said. Jeanne, Kerry’s right-hand woman, had grown up in Brockton, where, she liked to tell people, she had earned her doctorate in badass.
As soon as Jeanne took Demeter by the arm and led her from the room, it was much quieter.
Lynne said, “Maybe you should start again at the beginning.”
“Demeter was caught trying to steal two bottles of vodka from a client’s house,” Kerry said. “She had a bottle in each hand; she was hurrying for the side door. The clients weren’t home, but a member of their staff caught her.”
“A member of the staff?” Lynne said.
“I have to tell you this in extreme confidence,” Kerry said. “The clients were the Allencasts.”
Lynne thought she might vomit in her lap.
“And the person who caught Demeter was their personal chef, Zoe Alistair.”
“We know Zoe,” Al said. “We’re close friends.”
“I realize that,” Kerry said. “And Zoe handled the situation sensitively. She called me right away. She said she had taken the bottles from Demeter and decided that she wasn’t going to tell the Allencasts. She said she would let the three of us handle it.”
Lynne thought about the phone call from Zoe. She had been calling to warn Lynne of what was coming. To let her know that her daughter—the girl who had survived—was a thief.
“Anybody else would probably have alerted the owners,” Kerry said. “And called the police.”
“Of course,” Al said.
“Now,” Kerry said, “I have more bad news.”
“Oh God,” Lynne said. The room was quiet for a second, and they could all hear Demeter sobbing on the other side of the door.
“I’ve had three separate complaints about missing bottles of alcohol from clients, which I dismissed because my crews never go inside the houses. However, when I spoke with Demeter’s crew members, they indicated that she enters clients’ homes all the time—most frequently to ‘use the facilities.’ My employee Nell, who worked closely with Demeter, told me that Demeter used the bathroom only when the clients weren’t home. I cross-checked the names of the clients who complained against the assignments of Demeter’s crew, and they all matched up.”
“So now you’re accusing my daughter of… what?” Lynne said.
“Honey,” Al said.
“I don’t think this stealing today was a onetime thing,” Kerry said. “I think it’s possible she’s been doing it all summer.”
“Stealing alcohol?” Lynne said. “But what for? I just don’t get it. What for? We don’t drink at home. Not a drop.”
“I think you’ll have to ask Demeter that,” Kerry said. “And I’m going to let you do that privately, because I know you’re good people and good parents. Demeter is finished working here, however, and I won’t be able to give her a reference.”
Kerry stood up and cleared his throat. He was wearing the standard-issue green Frog and Toad Landscaping T-shirt and a pair of khaki shorts. He was sunburned, and his hair was bleached-out blond. Lynne had always liked Kerry. She and Al sometimes saw him surfing at the South Shore after work. But what Lynne felt for Kerry now was anger and hatred, which was backward, she knew: she should be grateful that he wasn’t calling Ed Kapenash. Demeter had been stealing. She had been entering people’s homes as an employee of Frog and Toad and burgling them.
“I know Demeter has been through a lot,” Kerry said. “And you two as well.”
There was something that Lynne could agree with. “Yes,” she said. “Thank you.”
When they got home, all of them, at two o’clock that Tuesday afternoon, Lynne listened to the message from Zoe.
“Hi, Lynne, it’s Zoe. Listen, something happened at work just now, and I have to speak with you about it as soon as possible. Call me, please. On my cell.”
Lynne listened to the message again, then a third time. The first thing that struck her was that it was Zoe’s voice, and that she’d missed her. The second thing she noticed was that while the voice held urgency, it didn’t sound either angry or vindictive. This episode was not something Zoe had dreamed up to prove that Demeter was a bad person. To prove that the wrong girl had died.
Demeter was headed straight for her room, but Al stopped her. “Oh no, young lady,” he said. “You are going to sit right here”—he pointed to her usual seat at the dining room table—“and tell us what the hell this is all about.”
Lynne was glad for this. She needed Al’s help, even though she thought his tone sounded too harsh.
Demeter sat in the chair and dropped her face into her hands and bawled. Lynne fixed her a glass of ice water and, as a little treat, added a wheel of lime.
Lynne set the glass down on the table next to Demeter, and Al glowered at her. Demeter lifted her head and sucked the water down to the bottom, and Lynne realized that because of the lime, the drink looked like a cocktail. The roiling, nauseated feeling returned to Lynne’s stomach. She went over and turned up the air-conditioning a little, then sat down next to Demeter.
“Let’s start with the accident,” Al said. “Did you have a bottle of Jim Beam with you that night?”
“No,” Demeter said.
“Honey,” Lynne said. “We know the police found a nearly empty bottle of Jim Beam in your purse.”
“It was in my bag,” Demeter said, “but it wasn’t mine.”
“Whose was it?” Lynne asked.
“I don’t know,” Demeter said. “Some kid at the party gave it to me. I had a sip of it, and so did Jake and Hobby, but it wasn’t mine. I just ended up with it somehow. It was in my bag because I had a bag to put it in.”
“So you’re saying some kid at the party gave it to you,” Al said. “Some kid you didn’t know?”
“A kid from off-island,” Demeter said.
“So either you’re lying to us now or you lied that night to the police,” Al said. “Because you told Ed Kapenash that the bottle was yours and that you had bought it off-island.”
Really? Lynne thought. This was a detail that Al hadn’t shared with her. Bastard bastard bastard. Al and Ed and all those other bastards were part of this men’s club that discussed confidential matters and then decided how very little to pass along to their wives.
“I was lying to the police,” Demeter said. “I said I’d bought it so that I wouldn’t get anyone else in trouble.”
“This other kid from off-island, you mean?” Al said. “The one you didn’t even know? You lied to Ed Kapenash, Chief of the Nantucket Police, in order to protect some stranger from off-island?”
“I was in shock,” Demeter said.
“That is bullshit!” Al roared. It seemed to Lynne that the walls of the castle were quaking; she had never seen Al this angry. “You tell us the truth right now!” he demanded.
“I am telling you the truth,” Demeter said. She had shrunk, Lynne thought. She was losing weight; her face was getting back its beautiful contours. She was deeply tanned, and the blond streak in her hair was as light as Lynne had ever seen it. It seemed unfair that Demeter should appear so pretty, so genuinely pretty, on the very day that she was being revealed as a liar, and a thief, and possibly something even worse.
Al paced around the dining room table like a wild animal waiting to be fed. Who knew he could be like this?
“Why did you take two bottles of vodka from the Allencasts’ house?”
“I don’t know.”
“Tell me!”
“I don’t know!” Demeter cried. “I went in to use the bathroom, I saw the vodka in the bar and I just… took it. I guess I wanted to… I don’t know… act out.”
“ ‘Act out,’ ” Al said. “Act out? Did you know that Zoe was in the house? Did you think if she saw you, she’d let you get away with it?”
“No!” Demeter said. “I had no idea Zoe was there, obviously, or I never would have…”
“Say it.”
“Taken the vodka.”
“Stolen the vodka,” Al said. “You stole it, Demeter. You are a thief. A criminal.”
“Al,” Lynne said.
“Zoe Alistair is one of our oldest, dearest friends,” Al said. “Do you have any idea how mortifying it is for us that she was the one who caught you? She lost a child. Penny is dead. You, my dear, are alive. You got a second chance. And what have you done with it?”
“I didn’t know Zoe was there. I didn’t even know it was the Allencasts’ house. I’m sorry I embarrassed you.” She took a gulping breath. “I’m sorry I didn’t die in the accident instead of Penny.”
“Demeter!” Lynne said.
“No, it’s okay,” Demeter said, in a voice that was all of a sudden nearly serene. “I know that’s what people wish would have happened—that it was me instead of her.”
“No one wishes that, sweetheart,” Lynne said.
“Zoe does.”
“Not even Zoe.”
“Hobby and Jake do.”
“Demeter.”
“What were you going to do with the vodka once you took it?” Al asked. “Were you going to drink it?”
“No,” Demeter said.
“But you drank the night of the graduation party?”
“That night, yes, a little bit.”
“ ‘A little bit,’ ” Al repeated. “Your blood alcohol content was point one-four. That’s more than ‘a little bit,’ my dear.”
Really? Lynne thought. Another piece of secret information that Al and Ed Kapenash had kept from her!
“I drank that night because it was graduation,” Demeter said. “Everyone was drinking.”
“But not Penny?” Lynne said.
“No. Not Penny.”
“Kerry said he had complaints from three other clients about missing alcohol. He said he discounted them because his crews don’t go inside the homes. Then Nell, from your crew, informed him today that you, Demeter, do go inside, on a regular basis, when the clients aren’t at home, in order to ‘use the facilities.’ Is this true?”
“I’ve had problems with my stomach,” Demeter said. “What am I supposed to do? Take a shit on somebody’s beautifully manicured lawn?”
“Have you done this before?” Al asked. “Have you taken bottles of alcohol from houses before today?”
“No,” Demeter said. “This was the only time.” She started to cry. Lynne rose to fetch a box of tissues. “And I don’t know what came over me. It was like I was temporarily insane. I saw those two bottles, and I just… wanted them. I’ve been trying so hard to hold it together this summer. I mean, I could have spent all summer in my room, but I made a promise to Kerry, and I wanted to honor it. You guys have spent God knows how many thousands of dollars supporting me, and I wanted to earn some money on my own. I didn’t want to do the predictable thing and fall into a depression, but the fact of the matter is, I do think about the accident just about every second of every day, and I do think everyone would have been better off if I had died instead of Penny.” Demeter plucked a tissue out of the box and blotted her eyes. “I’m sorry about the vodka. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“So just to be clear, you’re telling me that you didn’t take bottles from any other homes?”
“No.”
“And you weren’t going to drink the vodka you stole? What the hell, Demeter? What were you going to do with it?”
“I don’t know,” Demeter said. “Give it away.”
“ ‘Give it away’?” Al said.
“Other kids drink, Dad,” Demeter said. “I guess I might have given it to Anders Peashway or Luke Browning or David Marcy. And then those guys would have been… I don’t know… grateful. They would have liked me a little better. Hung out with me, maybe.”
Lynne and Al were silent as Demeter sniffled. Lynne thought, She’s lonely. She’s so desperately lonely that she did this awful thing.
Al said, “Go to your room.”
Demeter rose.
Al said, “You’ve lost your job and your chance of ever procuring a reference from Kerry for another job. So starting tomorrow you’re coming to the dealership with me, and you’re going to do filing all day. You’ve lost your car, your phone, and your computer until the start of school. Is that understood?”
Demeter nodded. Lynne wondered if it was wise to cut her off socially when it was her loneliness that was the cause of this mess. But Lynne wasn’t brave enough to undermine Al’s authority.
Demeter said, “Can I still babysit for the Kingsleys if they call?”
Al pursed his lips. “Fine,” he said. “But your mother or I will drive you.”
“Okay,” Demeter said. Her eyes lit up with hope for a second, and Lynne thought, The Kingsleys? She would have guessed that Demeter would be finished with the Kingsleys after the last time. What was it she’d said? “It was goddamned fucking awful, if you must know.”
Demeter ascended the stairs to her room, and Al placed his two hands on Lynne’s shoulders, and Lynne felt grateful for that. The Castles were known for their solid marriage. For their united front, no matter the circumstances.
Al said, “I’m taking the rest of the day off. Let’s go for that swim.”
“Do you think it’s safe?” Lynne said. “Shouldn’t one of us stay here and keep an eye on her?” That, of course, was the problem with grounding your kids: you were essentially grounding yourself too.
“It’ll be fine,” Al said. “I have both sets of her car keys.”
“What about her phone? What about her computer?”
“I’ll collect them when we get back. Come on, I could really use it.”
Yes, Lynne could really use it as well. She would go change into her suit. She had the nagging feeling that there was something she had to do, something unpleasant. What was it? And then she remembered: she had to call Zoe. Call now to grovel and apologize and thank her. Lynne stood up, and her joints complained. She would call Zoe back tomorrow, she decided. When her head was clearer.
That night Lynne had a dream about Beck Paulsen. Very little happened in it; it was more a dream of ambience, set in 1976 in Moorestown, New Jersey, where Lynne grew up. Lynne’s father was a doctor; Lynne and her brothers and their parents lived in an enormous white center-entrance Colonial formally known as the George M. Haverstick House. The Comstocks were considered well off. The boys attended St. Joe’s Prep, but Lynne was sent to public school. She had had her bitter moments about this, but ultimately she would appreciate the diversity that public school offered. Beck Paulsen was from a different social stratum altogether. He was a bad kid, a druggie, he smoked marijuana, he wore shitkicker boots, he listened to Led Zeppelin, he worked at Arthur Treacher’s to make pocket money. Quite famously, he had bought a brown Mazda RX4 before he even had his license.
Lynne dated Beck the summer between her junior and senior years of high school, when she was the same age that Demeter was now. Lynne and her girlfriend Abby used to hang out at Arthur Treacher’s because it was halfway between their two houses and they could both bike there. They also both loved fish and chips, even what passed for fish and chips at Arthur Treacher’s. One night Beck invited them to stick around while he closed up the shop. Abby said no way and rode home; Lynne said no way but stayed. She and Beck made out that night in the Mazda, and that night led to other nights, all summer long. What could Lynne say? To her, Beck was an exotic. He wasn’t preppy and assholish like her brothers and their friends. He was mellow and kind. He was nearly always stoned, and that summer Lynne was nearly always stoned too. Beck drank Miller beer out of cans, most frequently when he was driving around with Lynne, to Maple Shade or the Cherry Hill Mall. Beck’s mother worked in Admitting at the same hospital where Lynne’s father was a thoracic surgeon.
In Lynne’s dream she and Beck were back in the Mazda again, summer air rushing through the open windows. They were driving up to Lake Nockamixon to go fishing. When Beck caught something, they were going to eat it. There was a Styrofoam cooler in the backseat that held a six-pack of Miller Genuine Draft, a package of hot-dog rolls, and a stick of butter.
Also in the back were two fishing poles. Beck had brought his father’s for Lynne to use. They were going to steal a canoe—or as Beck said, “borrow” one—and paddle to the good part of the lake. Lynne knew that all of this was wrong. She should be in Avalon for the weekend with Abby and her parents; she should be at home helping her mother prepare for her annual garden club cocktail party. But she was with Beck Paulsen, who had feathery dark hair like David Cassidy’s and was wearing a black Styx concert T-shirt with white sleeves and jeans and his shitkickers, even on this hot summer day. She was drinking and smoking dope and listening to Meat Loaf on WMMR. If her parents had seen her at that moment, they would have been appalled. But Lynne was happy doing what she was doing. She was happy.
Lynne snapped awake from her dream, and the good, hazy feeling evaporated, and she mourned its loss. She was back on Nantucket, lying in bed next to her husband of twenty-three years, Al Castle, and they would have to get up the next morning and deal with the debacle that had just landed in their lap. Please, couldn’t she go back to that dream? Then Lynne wondered if perhaps her seventeen-year-old self had materialized in her subconscious in order to offer her assistance.
Okay, seventeen-year-old Lynne Comstock—what should I do? she asked.
Seventeen-year-old Lynne smiled dopily. She was stoned. She had been stoned all summer, and her parents had never once suspected. It was a seventeen-year-old’s job to have secrets.
Demeter’s secrets had just been revealed to Al and Lynne in all their heinous splendor. Or had they?
Lynne looked at the clock next to her bed. It was ten past two. She thought back over all the things Demeter had said: “I saw the vodka in the bar and I just… took it.” “I was in shock.” “Other kids drink, Dad.” “I said I’d bought it so that I wouldn’t get anyone else in trouble.”
Lies, Lynne thought. All of it, lies.
Seventeen-year-old Lynne nodded. She agreed.
What did Lynne know? Demeter’s bedroom smelled, there were empty breath mint tins and sugarless gum wrappers in the bathroom trash, there had been a lime in the water next to her bed. She was reading F. Scott Fitzgerald. Maybe Lynne was reaching here, but had a more famous alcoholic ever lived? Her car smelled like breath mints. Ibuprofen that Demeter bought herself was in the medicine cabinet. Lynne had checked everywhere—in the trunk of her car, under the bed, in her dresser drawers, under the bathroom sink. But she hadn’t checked the closet. The smell. Demeter had leaned against the closet door, and the door had slammed shut. She had said that babysitting for the Kingsleys were awful, then she asked if she would be able to go back to the Kingsleys’. There had been a lime in the water next to her bed. When Lynne put a lime in Demeter’s water, it looked like a cocktail. There had been a lime in one of Demeter’s water bottles. Good God.
Lynne slipped out of bed. Calm down, she thought. She was tempted just to take a Lunesta and drift back to sleep. Beck Paulsen: where was he now? Was he anyplace worse than where she currently found herself?
She had sworn she would never use the pin to open Demeter’s door again, and yet she had put the pin right there on her nightstand. She crept down the hall to Demeter’s room. She should wake up Al. If this was going to be done, it should be done by both of them together. But something about this felt personal: Lynne to Demeter, mother to daughter. Was Lynne thinking of Zoe and Penny? Of course she was.
It looked as though Demeter’s bedroom light was off. Lynne put her ear to the door. Silence. She half expected to walk in and find the window open again, and Demeter’s bed empty.
She popped the lock. The sound was loud to Lynne’s ears, and she held her breath. Waited, waited… and then eased the door open.
Demeter was asleep on her back, snoring. Lynne tiptoed over to the bed. She was assaulted by the obvious memories of Demeter as a baby in her crib, the soft spot on her head palpitating as she worked her pacifier. There had never been a sweeter, softer baby. Then as a little girl in footy pajamas, in smocked nightgowns. A chunky early adolescent in long nightshirts, her toenails painted blue, a smear of chocolate around her mouth, swearing that yes, she had brushed her teeth, when she most certainly had not.
Childhood ended here.
Lynne lifted the water glass from Demeter’s nightstand and tasted it. The liquid burned her tongue and she spit it out, and the glass shook in her hand. She tasted it again, however, just to make sure. Ugh, awful! It was straight vodka or gin; she couldn’t tell which. Her eyes filled with tears. She held on to the glass and switched on the light, but Demeter didn’t wake up. That was fine, though. That was preferable.
Lynne opened the closet door.
There on the floor, where another girl would have lined up her shoes, were bottles and bottles of alcohol: Mount Gay rum, Patron tequila, Kahlua, Dewar’s, Finlandia vodka, and wine, sauvignon blanc and two bottles of Chateau Margaux, which even Lynne, as a teetotaler, knew was outrageously expensive. Lynne set down the glass on Demeter’s desk and stumbled back into the nether regions of the closet, where she found a black Hefty bag cinched at the top. Lynne dragged it out into the room. The clinking gave the contents away: dozens of empty bottles.
Fruit flies swarmed. The smell. Lynne gagged.
Demeter rolled over. “Mom?” she said.
Ted Field suggested a facility outside of Boston called Vendever.
“For how long?” Lynne asked.
“As long as it takes,” he said.
Lynne packed a bag for Demeter and dropped it off at the hospital. She reminded herself that her daughter was lucky. Many of the people who ended up at Vendever had only the clothes on their backs. Many of the people who ended up at Vendever didn’t have two loving parents who would take any steps necessary to help them get better.
An alcoholic at seventeen? Lynne knew that this happened. But for it to happen to them, the Castles?
Demeter had fought her fate at first. She had jumped out of bed, grabbed the Hefty bag from Lynne’s hands, and started swinging it at her. Lynne had a bruise on her ribs to prove it. Al had woken up and restrained Demeter. Then he’d called Ted Field, who had met them at the hospital.
Now, just a few hours before her departure, Demeter seemed accepting. Four weeks. She would go through detox and counseling. She would meet other kids who were dealing with dependency issues, and professionals who were trained to help such kids. Demeter lay in the white hospital bed looking so hopeless and despondent that Lynne couldn’t help herself.
She said, “Is there anything I can do for you before you go?”
There was such a long silence that Lynne figured her daughter was ignoring her. Then Demeter took a breath. “Yes,” she said. “I’d like to talk to Hobby.”