Elin Hilderbrand - Summerland

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Summerland: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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It's June 15th, the night of Nantucket High School graduation. Four juniors are driving home from a party when something goes horribly wrong and there is a crash. The driver of the car, Penny Alistair, is killed, and her twin brother, Hobby Alistair, is left in a coma. Penny's boyfriend, Jake Randolph, and Penny's friend Demeter Castle are unhurt-but suffer tremendous emotional damage. Jake and his family move to the other side of the globe-to the west coast of Australia-in order to escape the horrors of the accident. Demeter falls prey to alcohol abuse and other self-destructive behaviors that nearly lead to her destroying her own life.
SUMMERLAND delves into the circumstances surrounding this accident, the roots of which lie deep in the past, with the first interactions between these four friends and their parents. It's a novel about how tragedy affects individuals, families, and the island community as a whole, and how healing can happen, in even the most devastating circumstances.

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“She doesn’t feel well,” Zoe said. “Maybe she got too much sun. Or maybe the two of you caught a bug.”

“Not a bug,” Hobby said. He looked at Claire, his princess in repose. Her left hand was resting across her abdomen in a way that he felt stated the obvious. Should they tell Zoe now, before he went off on this heinous mission of talking to Demeter at the hospital?

“Mom…,” he said.

“I told Claire that we needed to run an errand,” Zoe said. “And that we’ll be back in an hour or so. That will give her a chance to rest.”

Claire nodded, and Hobby thought, All right, get this over with, then tell Mom. Tell her over dinner, like we planned.

“We’ll be back in an hour,” he said. “Maybe sooner.”

They used the Emergency Room entrance and found Lynne Castle waiting for them. Lynne reached out for Zoe, and the two women hugged for a long time. Zoe was crying and Lynne Castle was crying and there seemed to be a lot of apologizing going on: “I’m sorry…” “No, I’m sorry…” Lynne was so sorry for everything, Zoe was sorry for not calling Lynne back sooner, Lynne was sorry for her daughter’s behavior, Zoe was sorry that she’d had to be the one to blow the whistle. Hobby hung from his crutches and thought, Can we please get this over with? I have my own drama waiting for me at home. But Zoe and Lynne kept speaking in whispers, wiping away tears, squeezing each other’s hands. “I was so blind,” Lynne said. “I was a blind, stupid cow.”

“The important thing,” Zoe said, “is that now she can get the help she needs.”

Hobby let out an audible breath, a cue that his mother-being immune to his childish cries for attention-ignored but Lynne Castle picked up on.

She said, “Hobby. Thank you for agreeing to do this.”

“No prob,” he said. He crutched toward her, hoping to expedite the forward motion that would get this done and get him back home to Claire, then get them to the dinner table where he would tell his mother that he had fathered a child.

Lynne said, “I’ll take you up. Follow me.”

“I’ll wait here,” Zoe said. She eyed the chairs of the waiting room. The place was completely deserted; Dr. Phil was on TV. She put her hand to her mouth, and Hobby thought, This was the place where she learned that Penny was dead.

“Actually,” Zoe said. “I’ll wait in the car.”

Hobby and Lynne walked down the corridor in silence. They waited for the elevator.

Lynne asked, “How are you feeling?”

“Better,” he said. “Everything else works, just not the leg.”

“How much longer with the cast?” Lynne asked.

“They’re not sure,” Hobby said. “Three more weeks, maybe? I’m hoping to get it off before school starts.”

“That would be nice,” Lynne said.

Hobby nodded in agreement.

The elevator doors opened, they filed in, Lynne pressed the button for the third floor, the elevator doors closed. Hobby worried that he smelled like puked-up jalapeños and onions.

Lynne said, “Your mother told you what happened?”

“Not really,” Hobby said. “Just that Demeter is going to Vendever to be… treated.”

“She was caught stealing vodka from the Allencasts’ house while her landscaping crew was working there,” Lynne said. “You mom was the one who saw her do it, actually. And so Demeter got fired. When I asked Demeter, she said she wasn’t planning on drinking the vodka. She said she was going to give it away to friends. And I, like a fool, believed her.”

Yes, Hobby thought, that was foolish. Demeter drank all the time, she drank a lot. She was… well, other kids like Anders Peashway called her a lush. But maybe Mrs. Castle hadn’t realized that Demeter drank, or maybe she’d known that Demeter drank but not how much. Parents were funny that way, always wanting to believe the best about their kids. When Hobby was a father, he was going to be the ultimate realist. He wasn’t going to believe a word his child said. He was going to be a vigilante-especially if he had a girl.

Lynne went on: “Then I found, oh, maybe two dozen empty bottles in her closet and an additional eighteen bottles that were still full. Vodka, tequila, wine. I could hardly believe it.”

Hobby’s eyebrows jumped. Really? Man, that was something.

“All of the bottles were stolen,” Lynne said. “She took them from the houses where she was landscaping. Oh, and she stole from the Kingsleys, the family she babysits for. That was where she got the bottle of Jim Beam you were all drinking on the night of graduation.”

“Ah,” Hobby said. To say anything more seemed unwise.

“She stole the bottles because she had to have the alcohol and we don’t keep any around the house,” Lynne Castle said. “Not a drop. And she had to have it. Because she’s an alcoholic.”

Hobby clenched the grips of his crutches.

“An alcoholic at seventeen,” Lynne said.

The elevator doors opened-Thank you, God, thought Hobby-and he and Lynne Castle filed out. Hobby followed Lynne down the corridor. His hospital room had been on the second floor and not the third floor, that was a small blessing. As it turned out, the third floor was even bleaker and more hopeless-seeming than the second floor. Hobby broke out in a sweat despite the air-conditioning. It was hard to be back here.

Demeter was the only person in a double room. Hobby had pictured her lying in bed wearing a johnny, like a sick person, but she was in her regular clothes-cargo shorts and a T-shirt-sitting on the side of the bed, reading a book. When she saw her mother and Hobby, she set the book aside and gripped the edge of the bed as if it were a ledge she was about to leap from.

Lynne said, “Look who I found!” As though Hobby’s sudden presence in the room were a happy surprise and not 100 percent by design.

Demeter stared at him. Her eyes were vacant, and Hobby thought, They’ve drugged her.

“Hey, Meter,” Hobby said.

She gave a little smile, and Hobby had a flashback to sitting in the circle at the Children’s House next to her when they were little. He remembered her dimpled knees and pigtails. He remembered the cream cheese and jelly sandwiches in her lunchbox.

“Hey,” she said.

She didn’t look half bad. She was tan, and she was thinner. She had brushed her hair, and it hung down long and straight and shiny. The blond streak was so pretty that Hobby wanted to reach out and touch it.

Lynne Castle said, “Well, I guess I’ll leave you two alone.” As though they were on a date or something. Hobby looked down at the floor and counted this as one of the most awkward moments of his life, and to make matters worse, Lynne Castle, instead of leaving as she had just promised, lingered for a few strangled moments longer, looking from her daughter, Demeter, an alcoholic at seventeen, to Hobby, who had recently lost his twin sister and spent nine days in a coma. She was no doubt thinking about the children they had once been and wondering what had gone so horribly wrong, and whether it was her fault or just bad luck visited on them from above. Probably Lynne wanted to stay and hear what Demeter had to say, and could Hobby blame her? He was both dying of curiosity and waiting in dread.

What? What was she going to say? What did she have to tell him?

His leg itched in its cast.

Lynne Castle sighed, then turned and left, closing the door firmly behind her.

DEMETER

He looked supremely uncomfortable, dangling from his crutches like a scarecrow propped up in a cornfield.

“Do you want to sit?” she said.

“No,” he said. Then he changed his mind: “Actually, yes.” He moved to the chair and sat down, his left leg straight out in front of him in its cast.

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