Hobby listened to the madrigal group-all those pretty girls-sing “Ave Maria,” and he was filled with gratitude. It was music, and he could hear it. He cried just for that reason: he was alive. And elsewhere in this church, a tiny knot of a being the size of his thumb was alive inside of Claire. Penny was dead, but he would see her again, and he would tell her how beautiful her funeral had been. He would tell her about the music.
There were weeks of rehab at Nantucket Cottage Hospital. Time to allow his bones to heal. The start down the long road of physical therapy. That was all predictable. What wasn’t predictable was the stuff going on in Hobby’s mind. He became terrified of going to sleep, certain that if he did, he would never wake up again. He had a private room, thank God, and he asked for the lights to be left on at all times, along with the TV. The nurses reported this to Dr. Field; Dr. Field came in to see Hobby. It was like getting a visit from the school principal, except that the real principal, Dr. Major, was a lot less intimidating.
Dr. Field said, “They tell me you don’t want to sleep.”
Hobby said, “Can you blame me?”
Dr. Field laughed his dry laugh. Then his expression went back to being serious. “Your body needs sleep in order to heal, Hobson.”
“I take naps,” Hobby said. This was true. He was so exhausted during the day from not sleeping at night that he drifted off all the time, in brief catnaps where he was just beneath the surface of consciousness but always able to see some light. He had to be aware that life was continuing on around him.
“You need real sleep,” Dr. Field said. “I’ll have the nurses give you something.”
“I don’t want them to give me anything!” Hobby shouted. He never shouted except on the playing field, and certainly never at an adult. But he was scared. He was shouting now in the name of self-preservation. “What if they give me something and I don’t wake up?”
“Okay,” Dr. Field said. “Okay, fine. We’ll take it slow.”
Jake came to visit. Jake looked awful-of course he looked awful, he and Penny had been in love, really in love, not just saying they were. If Penny said her throat hurt, Jake would be up off the couch making her a mug of hot water with lemon before she finished her sentence. They read the same books, they practiced their lines for the musical together, they watched movies and laughed at the same things, they spoke to each other in French and Spanish and Latin. They drew pictures of the house they wanted to live in someday and made lists of names for their future children. When Penny sang, Jake closed his eyes to listen. He had taken good care of her.
Even in the relative isolation of the Cottage Hospital, Hobby had heard Jake’s name being bandied about in an unflattering way because Penny had died while driving his car. But that hadn’t mattered. Hobby wished he had the words to tell people what he knew: Penny was bound and determined to leave this world behind. If she hadn’t done it in Jake’s car, she would have found another way.
“Hey,” Jake said.
“Hey,” Hobby said.
They shook hands. Jake sat in the visitor’s chair that was most frequently occupied by Zoe, who was now back at work.
“How do you feel?” Jake asked.
“Like shit,” Hobby said.
“Good,” Jake said, and they both laughed. “Good that you can tell me the truth, I mean.”
“How do you feel?” Hobby asked.
“Like shit,” Jake said. He teared up, then wiped away the tears with the back of his hand, and Hobby felt like telling him not to bother. Hobby was sick of seeing people try to hide their feelings. What had happened was tragic, and there was no reason to pretend otherwise, no reason to stop the tears. Who cared about being a man? That had no meaning anymore. Being human was far more important than being a man, and human beings expressed their emotions. “My parents are making me move,” Jake told him.
“Move?” Hobby said. “Are they sending you away to school?”
“No,” Jake said. “We’re moving, all three of us, to Perth, Australia.”
“Perth, Australia?” Hobby said. He was something of a geography buff, and as such, he knew that Perth was on the western coast of Australia; it was the most isolated capital city in the world. “For how long?”
“A year.”
“Your dad too?” Hobby asked.
“Yeah, my dad too.”
“Your mom’s from Perth, right?”
“Yeah. I’m not sure why she can’t just go by herself.”
Hobby had no answer for this. Jake’s mother was a mystery. Hobby had seen her maybe once in the last four years. She was like a cicada or a lunar eclipse.
“My dad doesn’t even want to go,” Jake said. “But he tells me we have to.”
“Because of the accident?”
“Because of something.”
Hobby wondered if his mother knew about this. She came in to sit with him every morning and every evening, but she hadn’t mentioned anything about the Randolph family’s moving to Australia. And Jordan Randolph was his mother’s best friend.
“So I wanted to tell you that,” Jake said. “And there’s something else I wanted to ask you.”
Hobby sensed a heavier topic. “What’s that?”
Jake puffed a few times into his clenched fist and Hobby thought, Oh, shit, what is it?
Jake said, “I want to know why.”
“Why what?”
“Why she did it. What the hell went wrong? She was fine right up until she went into the dunes with Demeter. And then she was a basket case, right? So something happened in the dunes. Either Demeter told her something or someone else told her something. A secret or whatever.”
“A secret?” Hobby said. His leg was starting to itch inside its cast, a condition brought on by stress, Dr. Field had told him, but it made Hobby want to cry out for amputation. He took a sip of the lukewarm water at his bedside.
“And I was wondering.” Jake went on, “if you might know what Demeter said. If you’d heard from anyone else what Demeter said. I know you’ve had a lot of visitors.”
“I haven’t heard anything,” Hobby said. “I think people are trying to shelter me from some of the difficult stuff. Have you asked Demeter?” It occurred to Hobby that Demeter hadn’t been in to see him. Her parents, Al and Lynne, had come; Al had apparently been with Zoe at Mass General for the first few days, and Lynne had organized the meal dropoff at his house. Zoe had brought in some of the dishes to share with Hobby, since it was better than the hospital food. But Demeter-nope. He hadn’t seen or heard from her. Was that weird?
“I asked Demeter,” Jake said. “I had to call her, like, sixteen times before she even answered the phone. I asked her what she and Penny had talked about in the dunes. And she said she couldn’t remember.”
“A secret or whatever.” A secret? Hobby was daft when it came to females, his mother and sister had been telling him this for years. He knew only that Penny had been determined to drive off the end of the road, and yes, obviously he knew she was upset, but he hadn’t gotten around to asking himself why. Why? His mother had tried to broach the question with him also, he now realized: “What was Penny like at the party? Did anything happen? Anything unusual that you can remember?”