He tried to talk with her about it on the night of graduation. She was at Patrick Loom’s party, and Hobby cornered her by the food table. Her expression was that of a trapped animal. Her eyes kept darting around the party; she was looking for someone to save her.
Hobby said, “Claire, listen, I don’t know about this.”
She said, “Next year, this is going to be us. It’s going to be us graduating, going away to school, all the parents thinking we hung the moon.”
“You don’t have any doubts?”
She looked at him. Her eyes held a wild light. “Of course I have doubts, Hobby. But I’m seventeen. My mother is a single parent, your mother is a single parent. I am not going to be a single parent, and especially not at seventeen.”
He said, “Well, there’s adoption. We haven’t talked about adoption.”
“Adoption?” she said. Her voice was incredulous, as though he’d suggested doing bong hits in the steeple of the Congregational Church. She took a big sip of whatever was in her Solo cup-Hobby hoped it was seltzer-and excused herself to go to the bathroom.
He saw her later, at Steps Beach, where she was most definitely drinking beer. Or at least holding a beer. Hobby tried to discern how much of it she was actually drinking, but he was so smashed himself from swigging off the bottle of Jim Beam that Demeter had brought that he wasn’t turning out to be much of a detective. Claire was surrounded by her entire posse, and when Hobby approached, she glared at him. He knew he was being what his mother would call relentless, he knew he should wait and call Claire the next day, when their conversation would be both private and sober. But he had the nagging feeling that their decision had to be made that night.
He said, “Claire, can I speak to you for a sec?”
Claire said, “Hobby, please go away.”
“Come on, Claire. Five minutes.”
Annabel Wright, who had cheered for Hobby since they were both eight years old at the Boys & Girls Club, was not cheering for him now. She said, “Hobby, leave Claire alone. You’re drunk.”
Annabel was right. He was drunk. He stayed put, his feet planted in the sand, his hand gripping the cheap plastic cup of not-quite-cold-enough beer that Demeter had poured for him from the keg. Annabel and Claire and the other girls wandered down the beach toward the dunes. At that point Hobby considered asking Demeter to let him have what was left of the Jim Beam. She would probably want to drink it with him, but that might not be too bad. Hobby liked Demeter; partly this was the result of conditioning by his mother, who believed Al and Lynne Castle to be the finest people on earth, and partly it was organic. Hobby thought Demeter was a nice person despite her self-destructive behavior. She had a weight problem, she wasn’t exactly going to be voted Homecoming Queen, but her isolation and her loneliness made her seem wise to Hobby, sort of like a solitary owl. He wondered what would happen if he told Demeter that he had gotten Claire Buckley pregnant. What would she say?
Hobby never followed through on this idea. He got to talking to one person and then another, then Jake found him and Hobby thought to look for Claire one more time-this time just to be polite, to say good-bye; she was, after all, carrying his child-but Claire was nowhere around. He tried texting her, but she didn’t answer, and Hobby was running out of time.
They were leaving the party.
By the beginning of August, Hobby was out of his wheelchair and on crutches. The physical therapist at the hospital, a woman named Meadow, said that he was the best patient she’d ever had. She attributed this to the fact that he’d been so healthy, so strong, and such an exceptional athlete to begin with. But a lot of times, Meadow said, it was the former athletes who were the most challenging to work with, because they were used to having things come easily. They weren’t willing to try. Their fragile psyches didn’t allow for the possibility of failure.
Ha! Hobby laughed at this, while at the same time identifying with it. He wouldn’t be human if a part of him didn’t mourn, didn’t ache for his old, unbroken body and its talents. Coach Jaxon (football) stopped by twice to watch his physical therapy sessions, and both times Hobby saw the gleam of hope in his eyes. Hobby tried to eavesdrop on the whispered conversations between Coach Jaxon and Meadow while he did his twenty-five reps of a simple neck roll, but all he saw was Meadow shaking her head. He wasn’t going to be ready in September, nor the September after that; his body would never again be able to absorb the kind of trauma that football delivered. Another concussion, Meadow told Hobby, if it didn’t kill him, would most likely leave him a vegetable for life. He would never have the quickness or endurance for basketball at the level that he wanted to play it, and though his pitching arm was unharmed, his left arm would always be weak. He was lopsided now, off balance.
Hobby fought against self-pity. He had seen movies about embittered athletes battling back from injury (what movie was he thinking of? he could no longer remember things the way he used to). He wasn’t going to allow himself to become embittered. He could be like Penny, in a box in the ground. He could be brain-dead already, a vegetable that his mother would be saddled with the rest of her life. He wasn’t going to stress out about battling back. He was going to put in the work so he could do the normal things: walk, carry a bag of groceries, and toss a ball, someday, to his son or daughter.
Hobby liked his crutches. They were better than the wheelchair. He had a lot more mobility. His mother didn’t fret about him as much. She started working almost normal hours at the Allencasts’. Hobby thought working was good for his mother; it kept her mind occupied. He was worried about her. She spent a lot of time on the back deck at night, muttering things at the ocean. One night her muttering sounded so conversational that he thought she was on the phone.
When she came inside he asked, “Were you talking to Jordan?”
“No!” his mother screamed. “I was talking to myself!” And she burst into tears.
His mother refused to see a therapist. Meadow had asked Hobby about this, as had Dr. Field. They had apparently both suggested it to Zoe, but to no avail. They thought if Hobby encouraged her, she might agree. He brought it up one night at dinner. The dropped-off meals had ended, thank God. His mother’s food was so much better. But dinnertime was tough. The two of them sat at the table out on the deck, which had three chairs. Penny’s place was empty.
Hobby said, “I think you should talk to someone, Mom. I’ll go with you if you want.”
Zoe said, “If you want to talk to someone, by all means, do it. I’ll set it up for you. But I’m not going.”
“Why not?”
Zoe said, “Because I’m going to process my daughter’s death the way I’m going to process it. I don’t want anyone-not even the kindest, most perspicacious therapist on Earth-telling me how to go about it.”
“I don’t think they tell you anything,” Hobby said. “I think they just listen.” He paused. His mother was moving her corn salad around on her plate. “Don’t you want someone to talk to, Mom?”
Zoe didn’t answer. Hobby cleaned his own plate of corn and steak and greens and dug in for seconds. He asked, “Do you miss Jordan?”
Zoe eyeballed him. Her fork, with nothing on it, was suspended in midair. It felt to Hobby as if he had asked exactly the wrong question, the question that only a daft seventeen-year-old boy would ask.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes I do, actually. I miss him very much.”
That night Hobby had heard his mother crying in bed. He rubbed the heels of his palms into his eye sockets and thought, Penny, wherever you are, can you help me here? He thought of his sister as a magical force, potentially capable of performing any number of miracles now that she was dead. Can you please deliver Mom some comfort? he asked her. It occurred to Hobby that he was passing the buck to his sister yet again where his mother was concerned, and it further occurred to him that he had the power to comfort Zoe himself. He could tell her about the baby. The baby that they’d nearly aborted but that Claire had decided to keep when she found out there had been an accident and learned that Penny was dead and Hobby was in a coma. Life, Claire told him, had suddenly seemed like something else entirely, something huge and precious. And she had life inside of her, a life that was hers and his, and she wasn’t questioning what they would do or how they were going to make it work. She was just keeping his baby safe. She had stood in the midst of the nearly two thousand people who gathered on the football field for the candlelight vigil, and she had felt privileged to be carrying a part of Hobby inside her.