“Well, I’m reporting it to the police,” Alice Hillier said. “A full bottle of Mount Gay, gone.”
We, the year-round residents of Nantucket, who bumped into one another constantly in the winter-at the gas station, at lunch at A. K. Diamond’s, at the community pool, at five o’clock Mass on Saturdays, among the shelves of Nantucket Bookworks, at the paint counter in Marine Home Center, and in the aisles of the Stop & Shop (we always saw at least half a dozen people we knew every time we set foot in the Stop & Shop)-rarely had any contact in the summer. In the summer we were busy working, or we went away to our houses in New Hampshire while renting out our Nantucket homes for ten thousand dollars a week. Or we took trips to the Grand Canyon, or had houseguests-our brother from Chicago with his wife and two kids-and found ourselves doing things like driving up to Great Point with meatball subs from Henry’s, waving to all the strangers on the beach. And then, of course, when we did randomly see one another-say, while waiting to use the ladies’ room upstairs at Le Languedoc-we were happy. Another Nantucketer! A member of our tribe! We talked quickly, eager to catch up but reluctant to stay away from the dinner table for too long.
It was during one such chance meeting-Sara Boule and Annika DeWan were both waiting for prescriptions from Dan’s Pharmacy, Sara for her Ativan, Annika for Augmentin to cure her son’s tenth ear infection of the summer-that the topic of Claire Buckley arose. Annika asked Sara, who was a great good friend of Rasha Buckley’s, if Claire was “okay.”
“Because I’ve called her to babysit no less than four mornings this summer, and all four times-maybe five, come to think of it-she turned me down. And then last week, when I took the kids to the Juice Bar for frappes, I saw that she wasn’t working there, either. Doesn’t that seem strange?”
Sara met this question with what struck Annika as a loaded silence. “Yes,” she finally said. “That does seem strange. I think perhaps there is something going on with Claire.”
And in this way, as only something as insidious as gossip could manage, the following was discovered:
Claire Buckley had been fired from her job at the Juice Bar, not because she had called in sick three times in a row with the stomach flu, but because when she finally did come in to work a shift, she left her post briefly to vomit in the back alley.
“This is ice cream,” the manager purportedly said upon finding Claire a retching, weepy mess. “There’s a line out the door, and every third one of those people is going to walk out of here with your germs because you weren’t considerate enough to think of our customers and call in sick.”
“I didn’t want to get fired,” Claire supposedly said.
“You’re fired,” said the manager.
Claire wasn’t going to field hockey camp at Amherst College this year, as she had done for the past two summers. In fact, she wasn’t planning on playing field hockey in the fall at all, even though she was slated to be the team captain. Kate Horner, the coach, was on a biking vacation in France and couldn’t be called upon to verify these claims, but surely she must have been crying into her Cabernet. To lose her best senior! We couldn’t believe it. We could hardly remember a time when we had seen Claire without her mouthguard.
Claire Buckley had been seen twice out in public over the summer. Once was on the fast ferry with her mother, Rasha. The girl, usually so peppy and outgoing, had on this occasion seemed pale and quiet and reserved. She was reading The Secret Life of Bees and barely looked up when Elizabeth Kingsley came over to say hello. It was Elizabeth Kingsley who made allowances for the fact that perhaps Claire wasn’t herself because of all that had happened with the accident. After all, hadn’t she been the one to sit at Hobby Alistair’s bedside when he was in his coma? “I think that accident affected our teenagers”-Elizabeth used the royal “our” here; her own kids were only eight, five, and three-“more deeply than we realize,” she said. “My babysitter, Demeter Castle, is totally changed. I can’t really say how; she’s just… different now.”
The other place where Claire Buckley was spotted was in the waiting room of Dr. Field’s office, again in the company of her mother, Rasha. More precisely, Claire and Rasha were holding hands, and Claire was visibly upset. This was reported by Mindy Marr, who conceded that the girl might still be shaken up by the accident-but while Ted Field was many things, he was not a shrink.
“No,” Mindy said. “I think Claire was there for another reason.”
“What reason?” we asked, as though Mindy Marr held the answer, as though she were something more than just a random person who happened to walk through the waiting room at the right time.
“She looked heavy,” Mindy said. “Heavier.”
Could be depression, we thought. But Mindy’s voice was coy; it contained unspoken possibilities. Something else? Another reason?
And then, instead of being disproved, as we were certain it would be, the suspicion was confirmed: Rasha Buckley confided in Sara Boule, and Sara Boule, constitutionally unable to keep a secret, told one of the rest of us: Claire Buckley was ten weeks pregnant.
“Pregnant!” We gasped. “Ten weeks pregnant!”
We were unable to say another word. But in this shared silence, it became clear that we were all thinking the same thing.
HOBBY
He had watched her go. They had been connected since before birth, so it seemed only right that he should be the one she’d choose. They were squeezed together in an unfamiliar place-not life, not death, but somewhere in between. It was as dark and moist as a womb, and he and Penny were face to face, and Penny was saying to him, clear as a bell, “Listen, I’m going.”
Casually, as though she were telling him she was walking home from the library:
“Listen, I’m going.”
He hadn’t had an answer ready; he had been unable to speak. He had a vague understanding that they’d been in an accident, and he figured he must be much worse off than Penny because she told him she was leaving while he couldn’t seem to get a message from his brain to his tongue. What would he have said? “I’m coming with you” was his first instinct. But then he realized that if he went with Penny his mother would be left alone, and he understood that he could not leave his mother alone. He wanted to say, “Don’t go. Stay. Please don’t leave.” But Penny was willful, stubborn, she did what she wanted, she would never listen to him, he couldn’t make her stay.
He remembered seeing her blue eyes get bigger and bigger until they were like oceans he could swim in. Then she evaporated before his eyes. She was gone, and he knew she wasn’t coming back.
His mother asked him if he remembered anything about being in the coma. Had he had any dreams? Had he felt any pain? The answer to both of those questions was no. He’d been in a coma for nine days, they told him, but to him it had felt like only a few seconds. He remembered being in the car and Penny’s flooring it. Hobby had watched the speedometer out of sheer awe and stupid drunkenness. How fast could the car go? His thoughts were those of a child. He’d never believed they’d get hurt. Even when they approached the end of Hummock Pond Road and Penny sped up instead of slowing down, Hobby had thought only, Oh, shit, we’re going to crash. But he didn’t think of getting hurt, and he certainly didn’t think of dying. They were all seventeen years old, and seventeen-year-olds didn’t die. Their bodies were made out of things that bounced back: rubber and fishing line.