Elin Hilderbrand - Summerland

The names of the Nantucket Whalers were announced over the loudspeaker one by one, and while our eyes were on the field, they were also on Hobby. How would it feel for him to watch his former teammates being cheered, knowing that he could no longer play among them? How would it feel to hear Maxx Cunningham introduced as the team’s new quarterback?

Hobby handled it not only with grace but with exuberance. Despite his still-healing leg, he alone in the crowd stood for the announcement of each player. He clapped and whooped. When his lieutenants were announced-Anders Peashway, Colin Farrow-he whistled. And he cheered perhaps the loudest when his successor, Maxx Cunningham, rushed onto the field.

At the center of the field, Coach Jaxon took the microphone.

He said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to call Hobson Alistair onto the field.”

Hobby turned to his mother. The crowd quieted. We watched as Hobby scooted out past Claire and made his way down the stairs and through the gate that led onto the field. The players on the sideline parted to let him through. With what looked like painless ease, Hobby jogged out to the center of the fifty-yard line.

Coach Jaxon said, “Ladies and gentlemen, Hobson Alistair.”

Instinctively we all stood, and the applause was thunderous. Hobby looked shocked by the whole thing at first, but then he grinned and waved. We watched Zoe and Claire standing right along with everyone else, clapping. Claire gave a piercing whistle, loud enough to raise the dead.

Coach Jaxon held up the white home jersey, #11 Alistair, that Hobby used to wear and would have been wearing right then if things had been different. He said, “Tonight we retire number eleven.”

The crowd went wild.

Coach Jaxon handed Hobby a football, and with the perfect spiral we all remembered, Hobby threw the ball to Maxx Cunningham, who, though startled, managed to put out his hands and catch it.

We thought we were witnessing the resolution of the story right there on the Whalers’ field, but of course there were other, connected narrative lines unfolding simultaneously elsewhere.

At seven o’clock in the morning in springtime air that smelled of a peppermint grove, Ava Price Randolph was finishing her second cup of tea and the previous day’s crossword puzzle. Her hands shook a little as she washed her teacup in the sink. She was nervous. In a scant hour, her sister May was coming to drive her to her first appointment with the adoption agency. When Ava had talked to Meaghan, the adoption counselor, on the phone, she had said that the adoption process could take up to five months, and that it would require patience and fortitude.

“I’m committed,” Ava said.

“Good,” Meaghan said.

Meaghan already knew the salient facts about Ava’s situation. The applicant was the mother of one son, age seventeen, who was currently living with his father in America, and another son who had died of SIDS at eight weeks old. She was single, but supported by the husband from whom she was now amicably separated. She had a large family with many helping hands all within a twenty-kilometer radius. She was committed to being a mother again.

Ava missed both Jake and Jordan enormously. For nearly twenty years she had been married, and for more than seventeen years, a mother. Now she was alone. She missed the sound of Jordan’s snapping open the pages of a newspaper and Jake’s humming along to the music on his headphones-but in the sunny bungalow in Fremantle, in contrast to the dark days she’d spent living in Ernie’s nursery in the house in Nantucket, Ava didn’t feel lonely. She liked the quiet, and when she closed her eyes, she saw a bright light that she knew was her future.

If Ava could have seen the action unfolding on the football field on Nantucket just then, if she could have seen Jordan and Jake and Zoe and Claire all applauding as Hobby took a bow for the crowd, raised two fingers in a V for victory, and yelled out, “Retired at age seventeen!” she would have smiled. She would have thought, They are where they’re supposed to be. And so am I.

Ava’s cell phone chirped. She had a text message from Roger Polly that said, Good luck today! She smiled, thinking, Such a lovely man. Although God only knew what would happen there. She texted him back, Nervous!

Then she heard a car honking outside, and she checked out the front window to see her sister May idling at the curb in her minivan. God forbid any member of her family actually take thirty seconds to stop the car and come to the door.

Ava gathered her purse, her spring coat, and her documents, which were nestled in a manila folder, and she closed the door behind her. She hurried down the steps.

“Come on!” May called through her open window. “Let’s go get ourselves a baby!”

At seven o’clock in the evening on that September Friday, Al and Lynne Castle were driving to Vendever to pick up their daughter, Demeter, who had successfully completed thirty days of treatment for alcoholism. It still boggled Lynne’s mind that this had actually transpired, that Demeter had developed this disease while living under her parents’ roof, and that she and Al had had absolutely no idea. Lynne had run through the gamut of emotions herself, from denial to anger to grief. She had questioned the very core of her being. She had thought of herself as a good mother, and yet her youngest child, her only daughter, had essentially slipped through the cracks into a dark and sinister netherworld on her watch. Lynne had been too busy to notice, too smug, too self-absorbed, too self-congratulatory. On the night of the accident, where had she been? She had been at a series of graduation parties for Pumpkin Alexander, Patrick Loom, Garrick Murray, and Cole Lucas. She hadn’t considered the fact that while she and Al were “putting in appearances” at no less than four parties, Demeter was sitting home alone. Of course the girl was drinking. In merely imagining the isolation and loneliness that her daughter must have felt that night, Lynne wanted to reach for a glass of bourbon herself. Lynne wasn’t the wonderful mother she’d thought she was. She was hardly a mother at all. She was a silly woman who had put her business and her clean, orderly home and her charitable boards and her committees and her position in the community ahead of her own daughter.

As Al drove through the gathering dark, Lynne sighed.

In response, Al turned up the radio. He listened to the worst music ever made, what Lynne always thought of as A.M. Gold-Tony Orlando and Dawn, Ambrosia, Dr. Hook. Listening to the radio with Al made her feel a hundred years old. And the fact that he turned the music up when he heard her sigh instead of asking her what was on her mind simply infuriated her. She nearly asked Al to pull over right that second so she could get out. He would never do that, of course. She would have to demand that he get out, and then she would have the satisfaction of leaving him behind as she sped off with some decent music playing. Lynyrd Skynyrd or Bruce Springsteen, something she had listened to back in the Mazda RX4 with Beck Paulsen.

But she would never do that, either.

If Lynne Castle could have seen the scene unfurling at the football field-Jordan and Jake approaching the stands and, after an affirmative nod from Zoe, taking seats on the bleachers directly behind her and Hobby and Claire, and the five of them standing as the elementary school music teacher, Mrs. Yurick herself, sang the National Anthem in her warbling soprano, and Zoe reaching back and squeezing the heck out of Jordan’s hand because every atom of her at that moment yearned for her daughter-well, Lynne would have wished only that she were among them. She would have acknowledged the new, startling circumstances of their lives-that Penny was dead, that Hobby was permanently sidelined, that Jordan and Ava had split, that Jake was heartbroken, that Demeter was an alcoholic, that Claire Buckley was pregnant, that Zoe loved Jordan but didn’t know how to make that feel right, that Jordan was determined to find a way to make it feel right, that none of them were quite the people they seemed, or even the people they thought they were-and she would have said, “Okay, fine, I’ll take it all. As long as we’re together.”