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.
JORDAN
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.”
JAKE
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.”
“I know. I’m going to do it. Just not yet.”
“I’ll give you a week,” Jordan said. “One week. Then you go. Am I understood?”
“You are understood,” Jake said.
He went to the cemetery and sat by Penny’s grave. As he’d predicted, grass had grown in over the rich, dark soil. Her headstone had been erected: Penelope Caroline Alistair. March 8, 1995-June 17, 2012. Beloved daughter, sister, friend.
Headstones, Jake decided, were stupid and pointless. They told you nothing. When you looked at this headstone, you didn’t know that Penny had bluebell eyes or that she had perfect pitch or that her favorite word in French was parapluie. You didn’t know that her favorite color was lavender or that she wore flip-flops right up until Christmas because shoes made her feet feel trapped, or that she’d had her first orgasm on the catwalk of the auditorium their sophomore year, during a break in a rehearsal for Guys and Dolls.
Jake sat at Penny’s grave and thought about how, in many ways, Australia had been like a dream-Hawk and the ferals around the bonfire and the gurgling fountain in the backyard and his half-Aboriginal cousins and his mother’s happily dousing her fish and chips with vinegar and ogling the statue of Bon Scott. Had any of that been real? Real enough, he supposed, because his mother had stayed behind. She was keeping the Ute and the rental house on Charles Street, and she was adopting a baby girl from China. She and his father were getting divorced. It was weird to think about, his parents’ being divorced; they had been miserable together, but the thought of their splitting hadn’t seemed feasible. But his parents had been cool and unified in their decision; this would be better for everyone, and Jake would go back and visit Ava at Christmas.
Jake had learned something about love just from saying good-bye to Ava at the Perth airport. He’d learned that when you loved someone purely enough, all you wanted was for that person to be happy. Jake knew that his mother was making a tremendous sacrifice in letting him go home. She wanted him to be happy.
There were things about being back on Nantucket that Jake loved: the familiar streets of downtown, the Bean (where he got a cup of American coffee), the flag snapping at Caton Circle, the peppermint stick of the Sankaty lighthouse, the offices of the Nantucket Standard, which smelled familiarly of ink and dusty paper. The Jeep was totaled, and there wouldn’t be another car for Jake, so he’d been riding his bicycle. He’d biked past the Alistair house the day before. Zoe’s car was in the driveway and the front door was open and Jake could hear music playing and he remembered all the times he’d driven up to the house and heard Penny singing inside. Sometimes she sang scales or vocal exercises (“Red leather, yellow leather!”), but other times it was “Fee” by Phish (“In the cool shade of the banana tree…”), or Motown (“Stop! In the Name of Love”), or something folksy, like “If I Had a Hammer,” which was the song she was singing at age eight when Mrs. Yurick first discovered her voice. The thing Jake always thought when he heard Penny singing was that he could listen to her forever, and it would always feel like a privilege.