In her more generous moments she thought, Jordan tried to love me through the worst of it, he tried to pull me out of the hole. She thought, Zoe tried too. She made and delivered all that food, and I never once thanked her, I never once reached out. She sent that beautiful letter, and I threw it away. I couldn’t talk to either of them, I couldn’t talk to anybody. So they turned to each other. Was that really such a surprise?
When had Penny first approached Ava? When had she first knocked on the door of Ernie’s nursery? When had she asked Ava what she was watching (the umpteenth rerun of Home and Away), when had she asked her what she was reading (Melville)? Ava didn’t remember exactly. One day when Jake wasn’t home, Penny had just appeared, and in that lovely, innocent way of hers, she had started talking-about Jake and school, and then about her voice, the impossible burden of it, and then about the leaden weight in her heart that she couldn’t account for, which she said she couldn’t tell anyone else about.
“You’re the only one who gets it,” Penny had said. “I can’t tell Jake, and I can’t tell my mother.”
For months Ava had borne witness to the girl’s sadness, to the lows of Penny’s psyche-unfathomable, probably, to anyone but her. Ava had stroked her pretty head and said, “Yes, I know how you feel, darling girl.”
Ava had believed that Penny was suffering from the malaise common to all teenage girls: “No one understands me. My mom and I used to be close, but now she doesn’t get it. She thinks I’m the luckiest girl alive. If I told her I felt like this, she would ship me straight off to a psychiatrist. She’s done that to me before.”
Ava had thought, Every girl needs a woman to talk to who is not her mother; every girl needs a place to vent her feelings where she won’t be judged. Ava was pleased that Penny had sought her out, she was gratified. She had won over Zoe’s daughter. She thought, I’m taking good care of her.
Now, with Jake, Ava faced a monstrous guilt. Ava had seen the warning signs, she had seen that Penny was capable of putting herself or others in danger, and she had done nothing to prevent that possibility. She should have told Jordan, or Lynne Castle. Or Zoe. Of course, she should have told Zoe.
Ava said, “She used to talk about what was on her mind, Jake. Her concerns, her worries, her sadness. She felt safe talking to me about those things, I think, because I was so sad too, about Ernie.”
Jake nodded. He sipped his coffee.
Ava said, “If I had it to do over, I would go to her mother. I would tell Zoe some of the things that Penny told me. I would try to get her some help.”
“It wasn’t your fault, Mom,” Jake said. “It was my fault. It was something I did.” He looked at her, and his eyes filled with tears, and then he was sobbing, and Ava went around the table and knelt in front of him and gathered him into her arms.
“Oh, honey, no,” she said. “You were wonderful to Penny.”
“No, I wasn’t,” he said. “I mean, most of the time I was pretty good, but not always.”
Ava shushed him and smoothed his hair. She had spent so long mourning the child she’d lost, she thought, that she had missed out on caring for the child she had. She said, “It’s impossible to do right by someone all the time, Jake. I am very much living proof of that. We hurt the people we care about, intentionally and unintentionally. But if there is one thing I’m confident about, it’s that Penelope Alistair knew that you loved her.”
Jake sniffed and wiped at his nose with his sweatshirt, and Ava rose to grab a box of tissues. She eyed the door to the master bedroom: still closed.
Jake sighed and seemed to collect himself. He took another sip of coffee. “This is good.”
Ava refilled his mug. She wasn’t sure whether to stand up or sit down. He was talking to her and she was listening, but what Jake didn’t know, what he wouldn’t know until he was a parent himself, was how grateful she was. She didn’t deserve this.
He said, “So as you probably figured out, I tried to run away.”
She decided to sit. Her throat felt as if it were going to close. Run away. She said, “Where did you go?”
He said, “I went to South Beach. I hung out around this bonfire with a bunch of people I didn’t know. Ferals.”
Ava winced. The term was awful. Ferals. And yet such people had been hanging around Perth and Freo since she was a young girl, and that was what they’d always been called: feral. Ava had seen them at South Beach herself thirty years ago-the dreadlocks, the tattoos and piercings, the dirty mattresses that they dragged out to the park and lounged across as they smoked marijuana and played their guitars and sketched in journals and read Orwell or Proust. They cooked on camp stoves and slept with their dirty feet hanging out of the windows of their vans.
“One of them, this guy named Hawk, said I could ride with him across the Nullarbor, to Adelaide first and then across to Sydney.” Jake paused. “I gave him some money.”
“Oh,” Ava said. She tried not to sound alarmed. “How much?”
“Two hundred and sixty dollars,” Jake said. He stared into his coffee cup. “It seemed like kind of a bargain at the time.”
“So then what happened?” Ava asked.
“Well, then I had some beers, and I… smoked some marijuana, or what I thought was marijuana, and then I blacked out in the sand. And when I woke up, they had taken the rest of my money and my credit card and my shoes and my camera, and they’d left.”
“Ah,” Ava said. She had heard from Jordan that Jake had lost the credit card, and that after giving him a lecture about fiscal responsibility, Jordan had called to cancel it. “I see.”
“So then I came back here,” Jake said.
“And that’s when I saw you sneaking in the side door with your bag,” Ava said.
“You didn’t tell Dad?”
“No.”
“I knew you didn’t tell Dad,” Jake said. “He would have wanted to have a heart-to-heart about it right away.”
“No doubt.”
“In a way I’m kind of glad it didn’t work out,” Jake said. He took a deep breath. “Because I couldn’t stand to think about you being worried, not knowing where I was, not knowing where I was sleeping or what I was eating or who I was with.”
“Thank you,” Ava said.
“I know you love me, Mom.”
Ava felt tears burning her eyes. “You know I love you, but you’ll never understand how much.”
“You seem really happy here.”
“I never thought I would feel like myself again,” Ava said. “But now I do.”
“Dad’s not happy,” Jake said.
“No,” Ava said. “He’s not. I know he’s not.”
Jake said, “I wish there was a way that we could all be happy at the same time, in the same place.”
Ava had been stunned when Jordan came to her and said he thought they should move to Australia.
“We’ll go to Perth, we’ll rent a house, we’ll try it for a year,” he said. “I can take a leave of absence; Marnie can run the paper, she’s more than capable.”
Ava said, “Jake? School?”
“He can go to school in Australia.”
“His senior year?” she said.
“Ava, we need to get him out of here.”
She had flared up with anger. She had been asking Jordan to move to Perth for how many years, and they were leaving now because Jake had to get off the island?
She said, “So this is all for Jake, then?”
“And you,” Jordan said. “Mostly for you. If I just wanted to get Jake off the island, if that was my only motivation, I could think of places we could go that are a hell of a lot closer than Perth, Australia.”