He took umbrage. “I’m not chained,” he said. Ava stuck around until Columbus Day. Then the Rope Walk closed, and it became too cold to spend the day at the beach, and Ava announced that she was going home.
By that point, she and Jordan were spending every night together in the garage apartment that Jordan was renting on Rugged Road. He had gotten used to sleeping with Ava’s long hair across his face; he had gotten used to her penchant for playing Crowded House while she took a shower. Jordan was reading The Fountainhead at her insistence. But now, when he finished, she would be gone. There would be no one for him to talk about it with. So what was the point? She packed up the things she’d been keeping at Jordan’s apartment, and he threw the book across the room. Their eyes locked. She frowned at him.
Now, twenty-one years later, he thought, What if I’d just let her go?
Ava returned to Perth and got a job waitressing at one of the seafood restaurants in Fremantle. She was saving up money to buy a boat, she said. She wanted to sail to Rottnest Island on the weekends. Jordan wrote her letters proclaiming his love, even though he knew it might be received badly. He called her on Sundays, when the rates were cheaper though still expensive.
He said, “I want you to come back.”
She said, “Why don’t you come here?”
He had no response to this. She laughed. “You can’t. Can you?”
He thought again now, What if I’d just let her go?
Jordan had taken a week’s vacation in the middle of March and traversed the globe to Perth, Australia. When he finally arrived, grungy and sleepless, at the cramped but charming bungalow on a tree-lined street on the banks of the Swan River-the childhood home of his beloved-Ava seemed more amused by his presence than overjoyed. She held him by the arm and introduced him to her siblings and her parents as though he were a curiosity at a traveling sideshow: “This is Jordan! He’s American!” It soon became clear to Jordan that none of the members of Ava’s family had ever heard his name mentioned before.
Ava’s father, Dr. Price, gave the impression of being a thoughtful man. He was nearly seventy; heavily bearded, he smelled like pipe smoke and seemed always to be carrying the Book of Common Prayer. Ava’s mother, whom everyone, including her own children, called Dearie, was an imposing, full-bosomed field marshal of a woman, with copper-colored hair pulled back so severely into a bun that it seemed to stretch her mouth into a grim, unsmiling line. Jordan didn’t like to think ungenerously of anyone, but there was no way around it: the woman was imperious and terrifying. She sniffed at Jordan in greeting. She crossed her arms over her mountainous chest and said to Ava, “I guess he’ll want a shower, then?”
Jordan said, “Hello, Mrs. Price. It’s nice to meet you.” He handed her the jar of Nantucket beachplum preserves that he’d painstakingly transported-wrapped up in his softest T-shirt-ten thousand miles. Dearie squinted at the label and, plainly presuming that the contents were poisonous, set it on the kitchen counter behind her. When Jordan, freshly showered and shaved, checked a little while later, the jar was gone. He suspected she’d thrown it away.
Jordan cornered Dr. Price on the second afternoon to ask for Ava’s hand in marriage. Dr. Price seemed confused, or possibly frightened, by the words Jordan was uttering. Jordan was making himself clear, right? (He was so woefully jet-lagged that the words sounded jumbled to his own ears.) “I want to marry your daughter. I want to live with her in America. I’d like your blessing to do so, sir.” Dr. Price clutched the Book of Common Prayer to his chest, and Jordan felt like some kind of demonic presence that the man was trying to fend off.
Dr. Price said, “Oh, well, I don’t know about that, son. You’ll have to ask her yourself.”
A couple of days later, Jordan chartered a sailboat with the last of his remaining money and proposed to Ava on the bow. He didn’t have a ring to give her, but he hoped that wouldn’t matter. If she said yes, he would buy a ring. He wanted to marry her. Would she marry him?
“Marry you?” Ava said. She looked as confused as her father, and perhaps a little bit horrified. “Are you moving here?”
No, he said. No, he wasn’t moving here. He wanted her to come live with him on Nantucket.
“I don’t get it,” she said. “You mean, leave Australia?”
Jordan had made the journey home shortly thereafter, sleep-deprived and brutally heartbroken. For three months, he licked his wounds. Ava was right, he’d realized that during his seventy-two-hour Australian odyssey: he was chained to the island. So, he would embrace it. He would love the island, he would marry the island.
And then in June-on the eleventh, to be exact (he would never forget the date)-Ava came walking into the newspaper office. Jordan was sitting on the edge of his desk, eating an apple and talking to his layout manager, Marnie, about the size and placement of the Bartlett’s Farm ad. He looked up, and Ava stood there, grinning.
She said, “I thought I might find you here.”
Jordan reached out and touched Jake’s shoulder in the Sydney airport as they hurried down the corridor for the Qantas flight to Perth, which would take them even farther away from Nantucket than they were already. Jake didn’t turn around; he was as immune to Jordan’s touch now as Ava was. Jordan wanted to catch his son’s eye to make sure that Jake understood: they had left.
“For a year,” Jordan had told Marnie, who was now his managing editor. “I’ll be back next summer.” “For a year,” Jordan had told Ava. “I will give you one year.” “For a year,” Jordan had told Jake. “Just a year.”
“My senior year,” Jake had replied.
“Correct.” Jordan couldn’t figure out why Jake wasn’t grateful. After what had happened, getting through his senior year on Nantucket would have been a daily torture. Everything would remind him. The water fountain where he’d met Penny after her French class would remind him. Trying out for the school musical would remind him. Going to football games, organizing the car wash for the senior class, picking a theme song for the prom, opening his locker, hearing kids talk as they passed, confronting the sympathy in his teachers’ voices: all of these things would remind him. “It’s an island,” Jordan had said. “We’re contained. We’re like ball bearings in a bowl.”
“We’re running away,” Jake said. “I’d rather just stay and face it.”
That was because he was young, Jordan thought. And either brave or stupid.
“I’ll turn eighteen in May,” Jake said. “So I can come back then.”
Jordan had nodded. To fight Jake at this point would be fruitless. Jordan was thinking like a typical parent: the change would be good for his son. Jake needed to see another place, breathe different air, walk on different beaches, hear different points of view. They were getting away, not running away.
“I can’t stand to be where she’s not,” Jake had said.
Jordan had closed his eyes and let that sentiment pierce him.
“She’s dead, Jake,” he’d said. “She’s not on Nantucket.”
JAKE
He had been to Australia before with his mother on three separate occasions, but that was before Ernie died, and the last time they’d come, which was the only time Jake could really remember, he was nine years old and they’d stayed with his grandparents in Applecross. Now he and his parents would be living in a rented bungalow in Fremantle, the port city twelve miles south of Perth. His mother loved Fremantle; she called it Freo. It was a magical place, she said. Like Nantucket, she said.
Whether she was being ironic or mean, Jake couldn’t tell.
Out the car window, he spied streets of one-story limestone bungalows with brickwork around the windows, deep front porches covered by aluminum bullnose awnings with lush green plants hanging from them. Rocking chairs, a curled-up orange cat, bicycles, surfboards.