Elin Hilderbrand - Summerland

She was dead. In the ground.

Zoe watched Hobby make his way to the entrance. He was mobbed by people. Of course. Zoe didn’t even recognize some of the kids, but all of them wanted to high-five Hobby, the sports hero who was a sports hero no longer, who was something bigger and more important now. He had cheated death. He had survived.

Zoe waited until Hobby had disappeared through the front doors of the school, then she drove off. She wanted to do something: go home and make a soufflé, or take a spinning class, or rummage through her desk drawers for the unsmoked joint that her catering client Jonesy Vick, a graying, ponytailed record producer, had given her at the end of a particularly debauched dinner party. She hadn’t smoked dope in years, but something about the thought appealed to her today-get high, put on one of her bootleg Dead tapes, stare at the ocean.

But really, Zoe, she thought.

She decided she would drive to Cisco Beach to see the white cross. She had been doing this more and more often lately. She drove to the cross and thought about Penny, and sometimes she hummed “Ave Maria.” It made her feel better. It was, she supposed, a little like a prayer.

Zoe Alistair praying, she thought. And she laughed, because who would ever have believed it?

It was September 4, an absolutely perfect blue morning, warm but not hot and sticky, as the last half of August had been. Zoe drove with the car windows down, her left elbow poking out into the sun. Now that Hobby was back at school, she could start catering again, get her business up and running before the holidays. Football started next week. Zoe had notions of calling Al and Lynne and inviting them over, and she could ask Rasha and Claire, too, and she could make clam chowder. Maybe she would go up to Coatue one afternoon and harvest the clams herself.

She thought about dragging her ancient clam rake (bought at a yard sale during her first week on the island, because she had believed then that every real Nantucketer should own a clam rake) through the soft, marshy sand of the low-tide shallows on Monomoy Beach, coming up with a handful of cherrystones at a time. It never got old; it was always as exciting as panning for gold and finding nuggets in her sieve. She would take two or three dozen clams home and shuck them herself, then she’d sauté a diced Vidalia onion in half a stick of butter. She’d add the clams, some fresh Bartlett’s corn, fish stock, white wine, fresh thyme, and heavy cream, and an hour later she’d have a pot of chowder. She and Hobson senior had fantasized about just this kind of sustainable cooking, about owning cows and pigs, and growing herbs and carrots and baby lettuces, and running a farm-to-table restaurant. Making clam chowder, she realized, was probably as close as she was ever going to get to that dream, but that was okay.

As she approached the end of Hummock Pond Road, she experienced the particular floaty feeling that she’d been having recently whenever she came here, as though she were levitating. She wasn’t sure if it was a response to seeing the white arms of the cross or if it was her imagining what Penny had felt in the final seconds of her life. The speed, the lift, the flight.

Zoe saw the arms of the cross bisecting the brilliant blue of the sky. The visual effect was no less majestic than that inspired by the Cristo Redentor, overlooking Rio de Janeiro. But then something else caught Zoe’s eye: a familiar car, a Land Rover, and a man leaning against it.

Zoe hit her brakes. Her legs were liquid, threatening to dissolve. She felt panic, then euphoria, then panic again. She narrowed her eyes, certain she was mistaken. She wouldn’t let herself believe it.

She pulled up next to the car. The man turned.

Jordan.

Zoe had an urge to do what Penny had done on that terrible night in June: hit the gas and keep going. The car would crash, she would die, but so what? Anything was preferable to experiencing the overwhelming fact of Jordan, here. It was Jordan, right?

He walked toward her car. She bent her head forward and pressed her fingertips into her eyes.

She thought, My God, what do I do?

He reached in through her open window and circled his fingers around her wrist and gently pulled her hand away from her face.

“Hey,” he said. “I was wondering if you ever came here.”

His voice. She couldn’t stand it. She was going to collapse, she was going to crumble. She loved him. She had tried to forget the love. She had tried to shrink it with the power of her mind until it was small enough to tuck away. She had tried to focus on other things-Hobby, Claire, the baby, her cooking. She had tried to tell herself that life was long and she was young and she would find someone else. She tried to convince herself that by leaving, Jordan had done them both a favor.

“Zoe,” he said.

She turned her face and bravely took in the sight of him. The blue eyes that she had first noticed on Fathers’ Night at the Children’s House. Did she want to come do puzzles with him? The lips she had first kissed in the room at the Charlotte Inn on Martha’s Vineyard. What they had done was wrong, there were no excuses, but Zoe could at least say she had done the wrong thing for the right reason. She had done it for love.

“Are you real?” Zoe asked. So many strange things had happened already this summer that it was not impossible that she was now hallucinating. Her mind so desperately craved Jordan that she had conjured him. She thought, Why didn’t you call me or email me or text me? Why didn’t you tell me you were coming home? Why didn’t you warn me? But she knew Jordan, and therefore she knew that he had been too afraid to call. He would have wanted to see in her person, so he could tell her whatever he had to tell her face to face. He’d come back because there was a problem at the paper, or he’d come back because he missed her, or he’d come back because he and Ava had patched up the marriage and they were moving permanently to Australia.

“I’m real,” he said. He still held her by the wrist, and with his other hand he reached out to wipe away her tears.

He got the words out as quickly as he could. He was a journalist to his core. Report the facts.

“I came back. Jake came back. Ava stayed behind. We’re divorcing. She’s adopting a baby. I love you, Zoe. I love you.”

He skipped the first week of school. This was surprising. All he’d wanted was to leave Australia and get home. Together his parents had jumped through all kinds of hoops to get him home in time, and yet when the morning of the first day arrived, he found himself unable to go. He worried that his father might have been right after all; maybe he should have stayed in Fremantle and finished up at the American School there. Because the thought of returning to the halls of Nantucket High School without Penny spooked him. He had been many things-an honors student, president of the Student Council, editor of the newspaper, star of the annual musical-but none of these things mattered or made sense without Penny. It was his senior year, he had to endure it, he didn’t have a choice, and yet what he kept thinking was, Why bother?

What he thought was that there would be memories of Penny everywhere. Every single kid at that school would know about his loss. He would have to face people like Winnie Potts and Annabel Wright and Anders Peashway. He would have to face Hobby.

Australia, he thought, would be better. Anonymity and loneliness would be better.

To his father, he punted. “I don’t know how to explain it,” he said. “I’m just not ready.”

“They’re expecting you,” Jordan said. “I brought you all the way home for this. You told your mother this was the only thing you wanted.”