Elin Hilderbrand - Summerland

“Just drive,” he said to his mother again. “Please.”

Zoe started the car, and the air-conditioning kicked in. They backed out of the parking spot, and Hobby felt marginally better with the movement.

“Did you see Lynne on your way out?” Zoe asked.

“No,” he lied. He had seen Lynne standing over by the vending machines, talking to Percy Simons, who served on the Board of Selectmen with Al Castle, but he’d walked right past them.

“I wonder how Demeter is getting to Vendever,” Zoe said.

Hobby shrugged. He imagined just coming out with it: “Demeter told Penny that she saw you and Jordan having sex. And that was the thing that did it, I guess.”

That really might have been the thing that did it, too, he thought. Penny had been so close to their mother. Penny told Zoe everything, and it would have come as a devastating shock that the river didn’t flow both ways. Penny had always been happy that Zoe didn’t date; she wanted her all to herself, whereas Hobby had always worried that their mother was lonely. But she had never seemed lonely when Jordan was around.

Then Hobby remembered the journal. Penny had kept nothing private from Zoe except her close relationship with Ava Randolph. So it was a double whammy: not only had Zoe betrayed Penny, she had also betrayed Ava, who was Penny’s friend and confidante.

This might have been what drove Penny to do what she did. But it could just as easily have been the knowledge of Jake’s kissing and touching Winnie Potts in the Pottses’ basement after the cast party. Or it could have been the whispered news that Hobby had gotten Claire Buckley pregnant and they had scheduled an abortion.

The whole world had secrets, Hobby thought. Everyone was fallible. Everyone. Zoe Alistair, Jordan Randolph, Ava Randolph, Al and Lynne Castle-all fallible. Penny would have hated that answer. She’d been tethered to this world only by her belief in the people around her. If she’d somehow lost that belief, if the people she loved and trusted the most had turned out not to be who she thought they were-yes, Hobby could see how she could have just floated away.

Which was exactly what she’d done.

It had been her choice. Penny herself was to blame. She had caused the accident. She had killed herself.

“Listen,” she’d said to him. “I’m going now.”

Hobby felt tears running down his face. He wiped at them, and this immediately attracted his mother’s attention.

“Honey,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

“Claire’s pregnant,” he said.

September

The day before school started, Zoe took Hobby to get his final cast off. They had spent an absurd amount of time at the hospital over the past three months, and now, with Claire having the baby, there would be even more hospital time in front of them. But that would be good, happy hospital time, just as getting the cast off was good. Hobby sat on the examining table, all six foot six of him, and Ted Field got out his Sawzall and cut the plaster into pieces. Hobby’s leg underneath was pale and shrunken, which only emphasized how brown and strong his other leg was. He looked like a doll that had been cobbled together out of mismatched parts.

Hobby dug at his newly exposed leg with his fingernails. “It doesn’t even itch,” he said, “but I’ve been dying to scratch it for months.”

Ted Field laughed. Zoe saw the humor too, but she felt tears rise. The final cast. She thought, Thank God you’re alive.

That afternoon, at home, Hobby slowly made his way down the steps to the beach and went for a swim in the ocean. Zoe watched him from the deck. He waved. She waved back.

Claire came for dinner. She did that so often these days that Zoe saw no point in getting rid of the third chair at the round outdoor table. It would always be Penny’s chair, but at least now there was someone else there to occupy it.

Claire was starting to show. There was a swell at her belly, and her breasts were full to bursting, and her skin was clear, and her hair had shine. Her fingernails were long for the first time in her life-playing field hockey and basketball and lacrosse, she’d always had to clip them-and Zoe took her to R. J. Miller for a manicure. Someone in the salon who didn’t know them asked if they were mother and daughter.

Zoe froze. Mother and daughter. She didn’t know how to answer that question.

Claire piped up, “I’m her son’s girlfriend.”

Both Zoe and Rasha Buckley went with Claire and Hobby to the ultrasound appointment. The four of them saw the shadowy, ghostlike image of the baby floating on the screen, and Zoe was overwhelmed with emotion, thinking back to her own ultrasound eighteen years earlier: the moment she had learned she was carrying twins. Hobson senior had whooped like a rodeo hand, as if he’d hit for a hundred grand on the penny slots. Stick a little something in, get back something priceless.

Claire and Hobby had decided not to ask the sex of the baby, but from the picture on the screen, there was no doubt.

“Oh,” Claire said. “It’s a boy.”

“Look at that equipment!” Hobby said.

Claire was due in February The plan was for her to keep up with her schoolwork at home until the baby was six or eight weeks old, and then go back to school for the end of her senior year. She and Hobby were both going to apply to colleges-and the next fall, when the baby was seven months old, Zoe and Rasha would take over. Zoe would have the baby for three days a week, and Rasha for four. Zoe would turn Penny’s room into a nursery. She would become a mother again. She couldn’t lie: she had been hoping and praying that the baby was a girl. She had been thinking it might be another Penny, a Penny reborn, reincarnated, returned to her in the form of this baby. But that was Zoe’s delusion, her false assumption, her pointless hope.

The baby was a boy.

“A boy,” Rasha said with equanimity.

Zoe wasn’t ready to speak yet, though she could feel the others waiting for her to chime in. She studied the image on the screen: a baby, a real, live, human baby. If the accident had never happened, if Penny were still alive and Hobby were still whole and he had told her that he’d gotten Claire pregnant, Zoe would have advised her to have an abortion. But now, looking at the screen, at the baby’s tiny toes and his thumb in his mouth, she marveled that her former self could have dismissed the wonder of life so hastily.

“A baby boy,” she said.

“We decided that if it was a boy, we’d name him Hobson,” Hobby said. “Hobson the third. It’s like the name of a king.”

Zoe let out a soft cry.

The day after Hobby got his cast removed, Zoe dropped him off at school. The first day of senior year, a scant three months after the last day of his junior year, and yet now his world was completely different.

“Thanks, Mom,” Hobby said. He wrestled with his backpack and the single crutch that he still needed for walking. “I promise I’ll get my license soon.”

“I would be just as happy if you never learned to drive at all,” Zoe said.

“I know,” Hobby said. He patted her knee. “But it’d be a little weird, you driving me and my baby around.”

Zoe smiled and nodded. She was short on words. Today was one of those days that she had been dreading; she hadn’t slept at all the night before. Zoe watched the other kids filing into the school, the girls all brushed out and made up, dressed carefully in capri pants and cute tops. They congregated in groups, shrieked, giggled, talked a million miles an hour. There was that palpable energy in the air, the buzz that surrounded something’s starting . If things had been different, if Penny had been alive and Jake and Jordan had been here, this day would have been one to celebrate rather than one to survive. Penny had always loved the start of school, the fresh notebooks and sharpened pencils, the new pink erasers, the unopened books.