Then he wondered, did she do the same things now that Penny was dead, or did she sink into a pile on the floor and cry?
He pulled in behind her Karmann Ghia in the driveway so she couldn’t just get into it and drive off. He approached the house quietly, like a criminal. It wasn’t safe for her to live alone out here at the beach, in a house that didn’t lock up properly. He’d been telling her that for years, but she never listened to him. She wasn’t afraid of anything, she said. Or anyone.
Normally he knocked-two long raps followed by two short ones, Morse code for the letter Z. But this time he slipped in the screen door without announcing himself. The sun was low, but it hadn’t set yet. Jordan could see her, as he’d expected, out on the deck-the citronella candles, the glass of wine. Her house, he noted, was a mess. The counter was lined with fruit baskets and decaying flower arrangements and little altars to Penny that her girlfriends from school must have made, complete with photographs and framed poems and stuffed animals. There were empty wine bottles spilling out of the recycling bin. The fridge was probably filled with covered dishes, and somehow this struck Jordan as funny-the idea of other people’s bringing Zoe food, inedible offerings that she would eventually toss down the stairs to the beach for the seagulls to eat.
He stepped out onto the deck. “Zoe?” he said.
She looked up, unsurprised. “Hey,” she said.
“Hey”? He didn’t know what to do with Hey. He’d been expecting a Get out! He’d been expecting a full glass of sauvignon blanc aimed at his head. But part of him had also held out hope that she’d jump into his arms.
He said, “I came to talk to you.”
She said, “Well, yeah, I expected that. Sooner or later.”
He didn’t dare sit on the chaise with her, though he could see the ghost of them making love there-both of them naked, Zoe riding him, her breasts swinging, him thrusting until she cried out. June 14. Twenty days earlier. A lifetime ago.
He pulled up one of the upright chairs that matched the chaise and rested his elbows on his knees. She was wearing white denim shorts and a navy halter top and the hideous blue rhinestone earrings that Hobby had bought for her the Christmas he was ten, which had become a family joke but which Jordan suspected were a joke no longer. Now she wore them in earnest; now they were likely her favorite earrings. Zoe’s hair was naturally dark, and she usually had it cut in an artful shag with the ends colored, but now the red had faded, and Jordan noticed some gray in her part. She looked pale and wore no makeup-she who liked always to be tan, even in the middle of January, and who favored electric-green eyeliner on a conservative day.
Jordan couldn’t take his eyes off her. This, he supposed, must be closer to what she’d looked like as a child. He could see Penny in her today, when he had never really seen her there before. Was that tragic or poetic, he wondered-the mother’s starting to look more like the daughter only now that the daughter was dead?
“I don’t know what to say,” he said. He had thought of things in the middle of the night, that was his job as a journalist, getting to the heart of the matter, but all that he’d so carefully scripted escaped him now.
“Nothing to say,” she said. “It’s not your fault. There was nothing wrong with the car. Penny was just driving too fast. She was upset about something, Hobby said.”
“Upset about what?” Jordan said. “Did something happen?”
“She was a seventeen-year-old girl,” Zoe said. “Things were happening with her every second of every day. I go back and forth between wanting to know exactly what it was and being afraid to know. Does it matter? I ask myself. She was driving recklessly, and she knew better. She could have killed all four of them, Jordan, and that would have made this conversation a very different one.” Zoe looked at the ocean. “Can you imagine?”
If Jake had died in the accident? No, he couldn’t imagine.
“What do you feel like?” he asked.
“I can’t explain it.”
“Try.”
“I don’t want to try.” She slugged back some wine.
“Have you seen the tox report?”
“I have. She was clean,” she said.
“She was?”
Zoe flashed her eyes at him. “You didn’t doubt that, did you?”
“I didn’t know. The other kids were drinking…”
“Well, Penny hadn’t had a drink since that horrible night at the Peashways’ house.”
“But she was the one driving because the other kids had been drinking. Do you feel angry about that?”
“Hobby said Jake offered to drive, but Penny insisted.” Zoe rubbed her knees. “You didn’t need to come here, Jordan. I don’t blame you, and I don’t blame your son.”
“I did need to come here,” Jordan said. “I needed to come here because I love you.”
She laughed, a tired bleat. “Ah,” she said. “That.”
“Yes,” he said. “That. Our relationship. My love for you. Do you know how hard it’s been not being able to talk to you, Zoe? Not being able to hold you and mourn with you? You shut me out.”
“Why is it always all about you?” Zoe asked.
“I’m not talking about me,” he said. “I’m talking about us.”
“There is no us,” Zoe said. “You want to know why I slapped you? Because for nearly two years I believed there was an us. But when they told me that Penny was dead and Hobby was in a coma, I realized there was only a me. A me who had lost one child and nearly lost another. And there you were across the room. You were going to go back to your house with your son and your wife. I slapped you because I was angry and hurting, but also because you allowed me to believe that there was an us when there was no us. There was never an us, and there’s never going to be an us.”
“So what are you saying?” Jordan asked. “You want me to leave Ava? Yes, Zoe, yes: I will leave Ava.”
“Now?” Zoe said. She finished her wine and poured herself some more. “Now that I’ve lost a child, now because you feel sorry for me…”
“That’s not why.”
“Why, then? Why now and not before?”
“Because I’ve learned about the power of my feelings. This thing, this crisis, has brought them into focus.”
“Do you know how ridiculous you sound?”
Yes, actually, he did know he sounded ridiculous. Yes, he did know he was a day late and a dollar short; he should have left Ava a long time ago. He had thought he was staying with Ava out of honor, but really he’d been staying out of cowardice.
“I want to be with you,” he said.
“I can’t be with you,” Zoe said. “It’s over.”
“Zoe…”
“For so many reasons,” she said.
“You’ve been through hell,” he said.
“Try not to explain my condition to me,” Zoe said. “Try to let me process this on my own terms. Let me make my own decisions.”
It was dark now. Jordan heard a popping noise, and he saw a flash of light in the sky. He stood up and moved to the edge of the deck. Down the beach, someone was setting off fireworks. He had either forgotten or simply not realized: it was the Fourth of July.
“And the decision you’re making is that our relationship is over?” he said.
“Over.”
“I don’t accept that.”
“You’re going to have to,” she said.
“I don’t.”
She stood up. She raised her hand, and he flinched, thinking she might slap him again. But instead she removed his glasses and wiped their lenses off on the hem of her blue cotton halter top, and the gesture was so familiar and so tender that Jordan nearly wept. When she placed the glasses back on his face, her hand grazed his cheek, and he feared this might be the last time she would ever touch him.