Zoe understood what people wanted: they wanted to hear that she was all right. It was something particularly American, or perhaps it was just human nature to ask, “How are you doing? Are you doing all right?”
“Well, I lost a child,” Zoe thought she might say. “And not only my child, but my best friend. So, no, I am not doing all right. And if that’s not the answer you’re looking for, then please don’t ask me.”
But Zoe had been raised well by her parents, she had spent four years at Miss Porter’s; she didn’t have it in her to be rude.
“I’m okay,” she said now, to Dorenda. “I guess. Considering the circumstances.”
Dorenda seemed satisfied with this answer, and Zoe wondered just how much of a lie she was telling. Was she okay? In her opinion, she had managed to do only the bare minimum. She had buried Penny properly. She had examined and then dismantled the dozens of altars that had been dropped off at the house, tributes of flowers and candles and photographs and stuffed animals and poems. She had put the photographs in a shoebox and thrown everything else away. She had opened all of the condolence cards and letters she received. She had cleaned her kitchen and gotten rid of the trash and the recycling. She had visited Hobby at the hospital, followed his progress through physical therapy, and focused only on his homecoming. Once he was home again, things had become both better and worse. Zoe wanted him where she could see him and take care of him, but she bristled at his efforts to take care of her. He wanted to talk about Penny all the time. Accepting her death had seemed to come easily to him-how was that possible? He talked about her casually, as though she were away at the music camp in Interlochen, as though they would both see her again in a matter of weeks. He was either a lot better adjusted than Zoe or a lot worse off.
“She’s not coming back,” Zoe wanted to tell her son. “You do know that, right?”
Zoe had believed she knew all she needed to know about dealing with death. She had lost Hobson senior; she had lost both her parents. She understood death’s grim permanence. But when it was your own child, that took on a new dimension. She would never see Penny again. Penny-the little girl she had pushed from her womb, nursed at her breast, held in her arms, kissed, cuddled, spanked, taught, fed, talked to, laughed with, cried with, loved.
On the night Penny lost her virginity to Jake, she had climbed into bed with Zoe. She had thrown an arm across her mother’s barely conscious body, laid her head on her shoulder, and said, “We did it, Mommy.”
Zoe had opened her eyes and inhaled the scent of her daughter’s hair and felt tears burn her eyes. She was crying not because of the news itself-if anything, Penny and Jake had waited longer than Zoe had expected they would-but because Penny was sharing it with her. In some important way, Zoe realized, she had succeeded as a mother. “You can tell me anything,” she had told Penny, and Penny had taken her at her word.
“Are you okay?” Zoe asked.
“Yes,” Penny whispered. “I love him.”
And Zoe said, “I know you do.”
Over the weeks and months that followed, Penny had climbed into bed with Zoe often, and Zoe had marveled that the little-girl-becoming-a-woman had wanted so much love and comfort from her mother. All of Zoe’s other friends were complaining of the opposite. But Penny and Zoe had always had that kind of relationship.
“I love you twice as much as any other mother loves her child,” she’d sworn to her once.
Penny’s body had been as familiar to Zoe as her own. How was it possible that she would never hold that body again? The answer was, it wasn’t possible. In which case Hobby was right: they could live only in some sort of suspended state of delusion, certain that Penny would someday be returned to them.
Dorenda said, “That was a lovely piece in the paper.”
“It was,” Zoe agreed, though she hadn’t actually read it. She had, at Hobby’s insistence, sent some photographs to the newspaper, but she hadn’t been able-forgive her-to face reading the article about her dead daughter. She had folded the piece and saved it in a drawer. Down the road, maybe, when she was better equipped for it emotionally than she was now, she would take it out and read it.
“And how about the white cross?” Dorenda said. “I had Philip drive me down so I could see it for myself.”
“Cross?” Zoe said. Her automatic response to anything even vaguely religious was one of severe allergy, falling just short of anaphylactic shock. “What cross?”
“The big one at the end of the road,” Dorenda said. “Where the girls have been singing.”
Zoe tilted her head.
Dorenda said, “You haven’t seen the cross?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh,” Dorenda said. For a second she seemed embarrassed. “Well, it’s hardly a secret. There’s a seven-foot cross at the end of Hummock Pond Road. And the girls from the madrigal group gather there to sing each night at sunset. It’s a tribute to Penny.”
Zoe asked, “Who built the cross?”
“I don’t know,” Dorenda said. “One of the girls’ fathers must have. It’s just two boards nailed together. But there are bouquets of flowers at the base and ribbons fluttering around it, things like that.”
Zoe bent her head. Dorenda Allencast laid a feather-light hand on her back. Dorenda probably thought she was overcome with emotion at the beauty of the gesture. But what Zoe felt like shouting was that there shouldn’t be a tribute unless she said there should be a tribute. A seven-foot cross? Bouquets? Girls from the Nantucket Madrigals singing every night at sunset? What Zoe thought was, She was my daughter! How can anyone’s grief matter but mine? This was a horrible, awful, ungenerous thought. Penny’s death was turning her into a small, mean person.
That night, on her way home from work, Zoe drove out to the end of Hummock Pond Road to look at the cross. It was visible from two hundred yards away, even in the dark. Its white arms reached up from the sand like a ghost’s. Zoe parked her car and got out. The night was warm enough, finally, that she didn’t need a jacket, but her hands were ice-cold. Here she was, in the spot where it had happened. The cross must mark the point of impact.
The cross was as white as bone. As Dorenda promised, there were bouquets of flowers at the base, and satin ribbons wound around it that reminded Zoe of a maypole without, however, doing much to ameliorate the stark religious significance of the cross itself. The cross meant what? she wondered. That a soul had departed from this spot? A girl was driving too fast, and then she crashed the car and died.
Part of Zoe wanted to pinpoint exactly who was responsible for constructing the cross, who had painted it, which father had loaded it into the back of his pickup truck and driven it down here. Who had erected it? Whose idea had the singing been? But Zoe guessed that it had been a collective effort by the girls, Penny’s friends and acquaintances, who wanted to make a statement dramatic enough to match their overwhelming emotions. A girl they had grown up with, had known and loved, had admired and looked up to, had died.
She existed for more than just me, Zoe thought. For more than me and Hobby.
Penny had been part of a class, a school, a community. Other people wanted to pound a cross into the ground for her, sing for her, publish a valediction in the newspaper for her. Who was Zoe to tell them they couldn’t? She didn’t like it because it made her feel as if there were less of Penny to claim. She needed Penny all to herself. She was mine, she thought. Mine.