There was a bong sitting on the top of someone’s front wall. His mother must have seen it too, because she laughed.
“I forgot what this place is like,” she said.
Jake glanced at his father. Was his father finding Ava’s apparent transformation as amazing as he was? It incensed Jake because it made it seem like his father had been right, or at least partially so.
“If we leave, things will be better for you,” Jordan had said. “And they’ll be better for your mother.”
“Not better for me,” Jake had responded. Then, meanly, he’d added, “And Mom is beyond help.”
But here she was, laughing.
Jordan stopped the car in front of a house. The car was a beat-up Holden Ute; Jordan’s father had bought it from the rental place. He’d bought it rather than rented it because this wasn’t a vacation: they were moving here. The steering wheel was on the wrong side, everybody drove on the wrong side and parked on the wrong side, tight left, wide right-it made Jake dizzy just to watch. Twice during the drive, he’d been sure they were going to crash; his muscles and tendons had tightened like steel cables. One of the benefits of moving to Australia: he would never, ever drive here.
He was overtired, punchy, ridiculously sad. He wanted Penny. He loved her to distraction, had loved her since preschool, when he’d picked daisies for her on the playground and drawn a crayoned heart and left it in her cubby. They had been dating since ninth grade and having sex since the start of their junior year, and most of the time Jake had felt like nothing could separate them, though more and more often he had begun to suspect that Penny nurtured an interior life that he couldn’t access. She was a complicated and serious person-that was good. She had more soul than the other girls in their school. But she harbored demons-that was bad. Her father had died before she was born, and so, in Penny’s words, it was like there was half of herself that she didn’t recognize and couldn’t understand. She had shadows to dodge, but so did Jake, because his baby brother had died. “You just have to focus on the here- and-now,” he had told Penny. Jake had a list of personal goals: he wanted to follow in Patrick Loom’s footsteps and be valedictorian, he wanted to be president of the senior class, president of the school chapter of the National Honor Society, and editor of Veritas, and he wanted the lead role in the musical again. And he also wanted to be elected Homecoming King if Hobby didn’t get chosen. There was a lot of pressure for Jake to succeed on multiple fronts; expectations were high.
Expectations were high for Penny, too. She had serious talent, talent that was too big for Nantucket. She didn’t like opera, but she could sing on Broadway, or off-Broadway, or she could travel with the cast of Mamma Mia or The Lion King. She was that good. She would go to college at Juilliard or Curtis or Peabody in Baltimore, and someone would discover her, and she would be whisked away from him. But Penny didn’t worry about things like that; increasingly her mind seemed to be elsewhere, on another plane, in another stratum. Her voice, she believed, was an accidental gift. “It’s like it has nothing to do with me,” she said. “With who I am inside.”
His parents got out of the car. His father pulled their bags from the back.
Jake wanted Penny. He wanted to be standing on the ground where she was buried. His brother, Ernie, had been buried in the same cemetery, his body contained in a coffin the size of a shoebox. How could his mother stand to be half a world away from Ernie? Jake would have thought this impossible-but here she was, headed up the walkway to the house, making happy, breathy sounds.
There was a green front lawn, divided into two squares by the stone walk. There were two limestone walls divided by a set of three steps leading to the front porch. At the base of each of the walls was a water garden growing tall white flowers on stalks.
“Look how green everything is,” Ava said. “This is winter.”
Yes, Jordan remembered this from his previous visits. The winter was lush and green; the summer was hot and dry, leaving the grass brittle and brown. Right now, in early July, the heart of winter, the sun was out, and the temperature was about 70 degrees Fahrenheit. It might even be colder on Nantucket, where it was summer.
The porch had a long bench swing made of teak.
“Handsome,” his mother said, touching it. If she sat on it, Jake was certain he would weep. How could she be returning to life when Penelope was dead?
There was a screen door, and beyond that, the house was open. There was no one here to meet them, though his mother had five siblings living nearby and he, Jordan, had twenty-six cousins. But his father had promised that for the first few weeks, it would be just the three of them getting used to things. Jake was grateful for that. In September he would enroll at the American School, but he would have to attend class only three days a week. The other two days would be dedicated to independent study.
The house smelled like eucalyptus. The floors were made of polished wood the color of Coca-Cola, but the rest of the house was finished in old wood pocked with nail holes and knots. The doors were mismatched, as if they had been salvaged from other houses. Jake moved tentatively forward. A doorway to his right revealed a bedroom with a stone fireplace, and on the left was the master, with its own attached sunroom and bathroom. Farther down the hallway was another door that opened up into the common space, a living room with wooden beams, a bigger stone fireplace, and a couple of comfortable-looking leather couches. Up one step was the kitchen, which had a red brick floor and a huge old stove with a blackened griddle. Next to the stove were a deep enamel sink and an old-fashioned refrigerator, white with rounded corners and a chrome pull handle. There were two sixteen-paned windows that faced the backyard, and in front of the windows a massive oak table with six chairs. A cast iron chandelier hung over the table. Jake liked the kitchen, then hated himself for liking it. His mother had stopped cooking after Ernie died, and she barely ate, and so what was the point of this warm, wonderful room? Maybe she was going to start cooking again, maybe the three of them would sit around the oak table and eat together as a family. The mere thought made Jake livid. But why? He had wanted that for so long, ever since that painful morning four years earlier when he’d been awoken by his mother’s screaming.
“Mom?” Jake had called out. But she hadn’t heard him.
Afterward, Jake and his father had gradually adjusted to the way things were, to the disturbing mystery of a human being that Ava had become. Dinnertime was all about eating from pizza boxes and takeout cartons whenever they got a free minute-more often separately than together. But now, now that Penny was dead and they had moved halfway across the world, now Ava was going to become the Barefoot Contessa?
The three of them stepped, single file, out the back door and into the garden. The yard was enclosed on either side by waist-high limestone walls with a spiked wrought iron fence above. The garden was a rectangle bordered by beige pebbles. Inside the pebbles was grass, inside the grass was a bed of red and orange flowers, and inside the bed was a circular limestone fountain. There was a bench in the grass where his mother, in her former state, would have sat and stared at the shooting plume of water all afternoon.
Jake felt his father’s hand on his shoulder. Jake was going to start biting in a minute.
“And here’s the best part,” his father said.
There was a shed at the back of the property. But not a shed-a guesthouse. Jordan opened the door and stepped inside. One square bedroom with a sink and, behind a curtain enclosure, a toilet. There were two eyebrow windows high over the bed, two small tables flanking the bed, a bureau, a desk.