Hobby stopped. It was too bad Jake was in Australia. He would have appreciated that his kissing was on par with Zoe’s apple fritters. Hobby would have laughed at this himself if it hadn’t been so tragic.
He skipped ahead. He didn’t want to read about Penny’s getting felt up, or Penny’s discovering Jake’s erection. (He accidentally stumbled across the line Do you feel yourself change when we do this?) He didn’t want to read about Penny’s argument with her voice coach. He was looking for something better, more interesting.
He thought, Come on, Pen, give me something I can work with.
And then, two thirds of the way through the journal, the tone changed. Penny started referring to everyone by their first initials only. Jake became J. Hobby found references to himself and his mother: H at practice, Z at work. J and I home alone but I don’t want to, I can’t explain it, I just don’t feel like it. I’m too sad. Sad about what? J asks me. He wants me to have a reason so he can fix it. But I don’t have a reason. I’m just sad, and sad isn’t even the right word. I’m empty. Since I don’t have a reason, J applies his own reason: hormones.
A few pages later Hobby read this line: A told me to read Moby-Dick. Says I’ll like it.
Hobby thought, A? A is the reason Penny spent nine months plodding through Moby-Dick, only to finally get bogged down on page 236?
A appeared more and more. Hobby couldn’t read fast enough.
J at paper all afternoon. I skipped madrigals, I don’t care if I lose my solo. I spent two hours in the bedroom with A.
Hobby’s head snapped up. While Jake was working on the newspaper, Penny had spent two hours in a bedroom with someone whose name began with an A. Hobby racked his shell-shocked brain. The only A he could come up with was Anders Peashway. Had his sister been fooling around with Anders behind Jake’s back? Anders was good-looking, he was a very fine athlete, a forward on the basketball team, the catcher on the baseball team, one of Hobby’s top lieutenants. But really? Penny and Anders? Anders seemed too clueless for Penny, too provincial. Anders Peashway would go to college someplace where he could play baseball-Plymouth State or, if he was lucky, Northeastern-and then he would return to Nantucket and work for his father building houses. He would buy a boat and fish, he would have children and watch them play in the same gym and on the same fields where he played. Penny could never be interested in someone like Anders, could she?
A told me to read Moby-Dick. Says I’ll like it. There was absolutely no way Anders Peashway had told Penny to read anything, much less an eight-hundred-page classic that dealt with what Anders would have referred to as “old-fashioned shit.”
Hobby kept going. Lay down with A today. Talked. A understands me. A says that sometimes the heart pumps black blood. And that is exactly how I feel. I am poisoned with something, this evil sickness, this lethargy, the inability to care. I’m supposed to be joyous about my voice, my “natural gift.” Z says I have a “responsibility to myself” to develop my talent. God gave me this voice for a reason, Z says. Everyone and their “reasons.” It’s like the rest of the world doesn’t realize that everything that happens is random. A woman kills her two teenagers, she shoots them. She’d had it, she says. They were mouthy. Everyone sympathizes with the kids, and I sympathize with the kids. But sometimes I sympathize with the mother. Sometimes I feel like I’ve had it.
Hobby shut the journal. He shouldn’t have opened it. He was going to have to show his mother. Or maybe not. The heart pumps black blood. There was a black heart on the sketchpad. Penny had been sick, and none of them had known it. Well, one thing had changed: Hobby no longer felt guilty about invading Penny’s privacy. He felt as if she’d meant for him to find her journal.
J is mad that I’m spending so much time with A. Not healthy, he says. He doesn’t get that A is the only one who understands me.
So Jake knew about A, Hobby thought. The idea that A was Anders Peashway still nagged at him. Jake would certainly have said that Penny’s spending so much time with Anders was not healthy. But the Moby-Dick thing? No. Not Anders. No way.
I ask A about her marriage.
Hobby was so surprised to read this line that he nearly ripped the journal in two, and a shooting pain traveled up his bad arm and throbbed in the spot where he’d broken his clavicle. A was a woman, a woman who either was or had been married. So that meant what, exactly? That his sister had been a lesbian? That she was having a relationship with a grown woman? She had been “lying in bed” and sharing her most intimate thoughts with an adult woman, and Jake knew about it and didn’t think it was healthy.
Then Hobby got it. He was daft, yes he was; another person-his mother, for example-would have figured it out right away. A was Ava Randolph.
A says she’s felt alone ever since Ernie died; her loneliness is a shroud and a shield. She internalized the pain she felt over losing her son, and it ate up everything inside her. A is lucky. Ernie is her Reason. It’s something she can pinpoint. I feel like I’m being eaten away from the inside, but I don’t have a Reason. Then I wonder if my Reason is my father, the father who died before I was born. A touches my hair and says, “That’s possible.”
Jesus! Hobby thought. It sounded as if Ava Randolph had been mentoring Penny in the art of insanity and depression. How could Penny feel the loss of a person she’d never known? Hobby was in the same boat, he’d lost his father before he was born too, but he had hardly given it a moment’s thought. On Father’s Day he sometimes felt a twinge, or when he saw other kids throwing the baseball with their dads, but it wasn’t something he ever wanted to cry over. If anything, he was grateful to Hobson senior for giving him top-notch genes. He certainly hadn’t inherited his size or his athletic ability from Zoe.
The most notable thing for Hobby was that in the last fifteen or twenty pages of Penny’s journal, J was hardly mentioned at all. It was all about A.
A wants to move to Australia, but JR has work and J has school. A misses her family. I ask her why she doesn’t just move back alone, and she says she’s in a double bind.
Hobby knew there was no way he could show the journal to his mother. Zoe would hate the thought of Penny’s communing with Ava Randolph. Hobby tried to summon his own images of Ava Randolph, but as with so many of his memories, it was as if someone had broken into the bank and stolen them all. Then he had one: Ava Randolph at the funeral for her baby. She had set the tiny coffin in the hole in the ground, and then she alone had taken up the spade and filled in the hole. The rest of them, including Jordan Randolph, including Al Castle, including the cemetery attendant, had just stood there and watched her. Hobby had been only thirteen years old, but he remembered how the muscles in Ava Randolph’s forearms had tensed, he remembered the way she’d smoothed the dirt across the top, he remembered how, when she was finished, she had stabbed the earth with the blade of the spade, and then she had turned to the rest of them and started to wail.
“He’s gone,” she’d cried. “He’s gone!”
Hobby had never felt so helpless in all his life.
A is the only one who understands me, Penny wrote. I love A.
AVA
It was barely dawn when Jake walked into the garden. Ava was startled, thinking maybe it was an intruder, maybe it was a drunk from the corner pub who had stumbled home to the wrong house. Then she realized that the figure sneaking into the yard was her own child, and he was carrying his duffel bag. They locked eyes for a second, and Ava saw the desperation and defeat on his face. She felt a colossal relief that he was walking toward the shed and not away from it.