Elin Hilderbrand - Summerland

Zoe got up and went over to the side of Hobby’s bed. She touched his cheek. It was smooth; the nurses had taught Zoe how to shave him. It was one of the few things she could do for him. “But I kept you and your sister safe,” she said. “I did manage to do that.”

It was not at that exact moment but some minutes later-five minutes, ten minutes, twelve minutes-that Hobby opened his eyes. It looked as if he were squinting at first, and Zoe thought it was a figment of her imagination. She became alert without letting herself feel too hopeful.

And then, just like that, his eyes opened all the way-they were meadow-green-and he was looking at her. He saw her, he recognized her.

And just as Zoe had once known, deep down, that she was going to lose Hobson, so did she realize now that she had known all along that Hobby would come back to her.

“Hi,” she said.

In the days following the accident, there had been room for only one thought: she wished it had been her who died.

She was a criminal. A thief and a murderer.

Demeter vacillated between telling the hideous truth and keeping the truth sheltered and secret inside of her, the coin at the bottom of the well that no one could retrieve.

The latter, she thought. For as long as she could, she would be a sphinx. She had the answer, but nobody knew the question.

From behind the locked door of her bedroom, Demeter heard her mother on the telephone, every second practically, talking to Mrs. Loom or Mr. Potts or Rasha Buckley. Or talking to Demeter’s father, who was at Mass General, where Hobby lay in a coma.

How did Demeter feel about Hobby’s being in a coma? She felt sick about it, just sick. She had been in love with Hobby when she was younger, and those years had been exquisitely painful. Demeter was overweight, doughy, and cumbersome. The boys in her class had called her a dog, a cow, an elephant, and-in sixth grade, when they were studying prehistoric times-a mammoth. They told her she stank. To add insult to injury, she had braces on her teeth, and bits of food would get stuck in them, and her breath did stink. She was unwilling to get undressed to take a shower after gym class, and so on Tuesdays and Thursdays she reeked of body odor.

Demeter had looked upon Hobby, that classic Greek god of a human being, his muscles perfectly formed and tanned to gold, and wanted to be him. Her parents were such close friends with Zoe Alistair that Demeter had spent pretty much every weekend of her life in Hobby’s presence when they were growing up. In the spring they would picnic together at the Daffodil Festival in Sconset. Hobby and Jake Randolph would lob a lacrosse ball to each other on the lawn in front of the old water company, and Penny would inevitably have been asked to ride in someone’s antique car for the parade. How many times had Demeter stood on the side of the road, watching as Penny sat in the rumble seat of a Model A Ford, waving at the crowd like Miss America? Demeter had meanwhile stuffed her face with Zoe Alistair’s ribbon sandwiches and deviled eggs and curried chicken salad and double fudge brownies. That was all she was good at: eating.

In the summer the Castles, the Alistairs, and the Randolphs all went to the beach together. When they were younger, they would play flashlight tag, light a bonfire, and sing Beatles songs, with Mr. Randolph playing the guitar and Penny’s voice floating above everyone else’s. But at some point Demeter had stopped feeling comfortable in a bathing suit. She wore shorts and oversized T-shirts to the beach, and she wouldn’t go in the water, wouldn’t walk with Penny to look for shells, wouldn’t throw the Frisbee with Hobby and Jake. The other three kids always tried to include Demeter, which was more humiliating, somehow, than if they’d just ignored her. They were earnest in their pursuit of her attention, but Demeter suspected this was their parents’ doing. Mr. Randolph might have offered Jake a twenty-dollar bribe to be nice to Demeter because Al Castle was an old friend. Hobby and Penny were nice to her because they felt sorry for her. Or maybe Hobby and Penny and Jake all had a bet going about who would be the one to break through Demeter’s Teflon shield. She was a game to them.

In the fall there were football parties at the Alistairs’ house, during which the adults and Hobby and Jake watched the Patriots, Penny listened to music on her headphones, and Demeter dug into Zoe Alistair’s white chicken chili and topped it with a double spoonful of sour cream.

In the winter there were weekends at Stowe. Al and Lynne Castle owned a condo near the mountain, and Demeter had learned to ski as a child. According to her parents, she used to careen down the black-diamond trails without a moment’s hesitation. But by the time they went to Vermont with the Alistairs and the Randolphs, Demeter refused to get on skis at all. She sat in the lodge and drank hot chocolate until the rest of the gang came clomping in after their runs, rosy-cheeked and winded.

And then the ski weekends, at least, had stopped happening, because Hobby had basketball and Penny and Jake were in the school musical, which meant rehearsals night and day.

Demeter thought back to all those springs, summers, falls, and winters with Hobby and Penny and Jake, and she wondered how her parents could have put her through such exquisite torture. Hobby and Penny and Jake were all exceptional children, while Demeter was seventy pounds overweight, which sank her self-esteem, which led to her getting mediocre grades when she was smart enough for A’s and killed her chances of landing the part of Rizzo in Grease, even though she was a gifted actress.

Hobby was in a coma. Her mother was on the phone. She kept saying, “Zoe won’t talk to me. I don’t know why.”

Demeter wanted a drink, but there was no alcohol in the house. She thought her parents must know about the bottle of Jim Beam because on one of the rare occasions during the past week when she had left her room-to get a sleeve of Ritz crackers and a jar of peanut butter from the pantry-she’d seen her mother standing at the sink with the bottles of vodka and gin and vermouth, sniffing their contents before pouring them down the drain. The jig was up: Demeter had been found out.

Demeter looked at her mother, and Lynne Castle looked back at her and smiled. She said, “Hi, honey. Are you feeling hungry for a snack?”

Demeter stared at the crackers and peanut butter in her hands as if astonished to find them there. A knife for the peanut butter would have been nice, but Demeter wasn’t willing to take one step closer to her mother or the bottles she was emptying. The cabinet above the refrigerator was hanging open. Her mother must realize that Demeter had drunk the vodka and replaced it with water, and drunk the Dewar’s and replaced it with iced tea. Lynne Castle did get it, right? Somehow Demeter didn’t think she did. Her mother was living in outright denial about what was going on. Ignore the obvious signs that your daughter is an alcoholic, but please make sure she has a snack if she feels hungry.

This depressed Demeter all the more. And made her angrier. She retreated to her room.

Jake called. The first time was Sunday night at seven o’clock. Demeter was asleep, but Lynne Castle slipped a note under her bedroom door: Jake called. He wants to speak to you.

Okay, wait. This deserved some thought. How long and how desperately had Demeter waited for a boy to call her? How many times had she fantasized that someone like Hobby or Jake would discover something in her that no one else could see, not even Demeter herself? Some latent, hidden beauty, some spark, some capacity for happiness, for joy?

Demeter didn’t harbor fantasies anymore. Fantasies were all distinctly in the past. Jake wasn’t calling Demeter so they could commiserate, so they could cry together or hold on to each other, say “Oh my God, what the fuck?” or celebrate how fortunate they were to be alive, present some kind of united front or wallow together in their survivors’ remorse.