Lynne said, “Your mother told you what happened?”
“Not really,” Hobby said. “Just that Demeter is going to Vendever to be… treated.”
“She was caught stealing vodka from the Allencasts’ house while her landscaping crew was working there,” Lynne said. “You mom was the one who saw her do it, actually. And so Demeter got fired. When I asked Demeter, she said she wasn’t planning on drinking the vodka. She said she was going to give it away to friends. And I, like a fool, believed her.”
Yes, Hobby thought, that was foolish. Demeter drank all the time, she drank a lot. She was… well, other kids like Anders Peashway called her a lush. But maybe Mrs. Castle hadn’t realized that Demeter drank, or maybe she’d known that Demeter drank but not how much. Parents were funny that way, always wanting to believe the best about their kids. When Hobby was a father, he was going to be the ultimate realist. He wasn’t going to believe a word his child said. He was going to be a vigilante-especially if he had a girl.
Lynne went on: “Then I found, oh, maybe two dozen empty bottles in her closet and an additional eighteen bottles that were still full. Vodka, tequila, wine. I could hardly believe it.”
Hobby’s eyebrows jumped. Really? Man, that was something.
“All of the bottles were stolen,” Lynne said. “She took them from the houses where she was landscaping. Oh, and she stole from the Kingsleys, the family she babysits for. That was where she got the bottle of Jim Beam you were all drinking on the night of graduation.”
“Ah,” Hobby said. To say anything more seemed unwise.
“She stole the bottles because she had to have the alcohol and we don’t keep any around the house,” Lynne Castle said. “Not a drop. And she had to have it. Because she’s an alcoholic.”
Hobby clenched the grips of his crutches.
“An alcoholic at seventeen,” Lynne said.
The elevator doors opened-Thank you, God, thought Hobby-and he and Lynne Castle filed out. Hobby followed Lynne down the corridor. His hospital room had been on the second floor and not the third floor, that was a small blessing. As it turned out, the third floor was even bleaker and more hopeless-seeming than the second floor. Hobby broke out in a sweat despite the air-conditioning. It was hard to be back here.
Demeter was the only person in a double room. Hobby had pictured her lying in bed wearing a johnny, like a sick person, but she was in her regular clothes-cargo shorts and a T-shirt-sitting on the side of the bed, reading a book. When she saw her mother and Hobby, she set the book aside and gripped the edge of the bed as if it were a ledge she was about to leap from.
Lynne said, “Look who I found!” As though Hobby’s sudden presence in the room were a happy surprise and not 100 percent by design.
Demeter stared at him. Her eyes were vacant, and Hobby thought, They’ve drugged her.
“Hey, Meter,” Hobby said.
She gave a little smile, and Hobby had a flashback to sitting in the circle at the Children’s House next to her when they were little. He remembered her dimpled knees and pigtails. He remembered the cream cheese and jelly sandwiches in her lunchbox.
“Hey,” she said.
She didn’t look half bad. She was tan, and she was thinner. She had brushed her hair, and it hung down long and straight and shiny. The blond streak was so pretty that Hobby wanted to reach out and touch it.
Lynne Castle said, “Well, I guess I’ll leave you two alone.” As though they were on a date or something. Hobby looked down at the floor and counted this as one of the most awkward moments of his life, and to make matters worse, Lynne Castle, instead of leaving as she had just promised, lingered for a few strangled moments longer, looking from her daughter, Demeter, an alcoholic at seventeen, to Hobby, who had recently lost his twin sister and spent nine days in a coma. She was no doubt thinking about the children they had once been and wondering what had gone so horribly wrong, and whether it was her fault or just bad luck visited on them from above. Probably Lynne wanted to stay and hear what Demeter had to say, and could Hobby blame her? He was both dying of curiosity and waiting in dread.
What? What was she going to say? What did she have to tell him?
His leg itched in its cast.
Lynne Castle sighed, then turned and left, closing the door firmly behind her.
DEMETER
He looked supremely uncomfortable, dangling from his crutches like a scarecrow propped up in a cornfield.
“Do you want to sit?” she said.
“No,” he said. Then he changed his mind: “Actually, yes.” He moved to the chair and sat down, his left leg straight out in front of him in its cast.
She didn’t know how to start. She sort of felt like she should thank him for coming.
He said, “Jesus Christ, Meter, what is it? Just tell me!”
She had rehearsed it in her head. “I told Penny something in the dunes.”
“About Jake?” Hobby said.
About Jake? she thought.
“What about Jake?” she said.
“About me, then?” Hobby said. His eyes were rolling, and his forehead was sweating. “Did you tell her something about me?”
“No,” Demeter said. “I told her something about your mom and Jordan Randolph.”
Hobby narrowed his eyes, and his nose twitched. He leaned forward in the chair, and Demeter noticed the toes on his cast-foot wiggling. “What?” he said. “What did you tell her?”
“That I saw them together.”
“What the fuck does that mean?” Hobby said. “You saw them together, so what? They used to be together all the time. They were friends. You know that.”
“I saw them together together,” Demeter said.
“What? You mean, like, kissing?”
“I mean like more than kissing.”
“For God’s sake, Meter, what?”
“I saw them… well, I saw them having sex. On the deck of your house. A couple of days before graduation.”
Hobby stared at her. His expression was inscrutable. This, Demeter decided, was the most frustrating thing about life: it was impossible to tell what other people were thinking.
“What do you mean, you saw them having sex?” Hobby said. “I don’t get that.”
Demeter’s hands were shaking. She needed a drink. But she was never going to drink again. Never again, for the rest of her life. That was impossible of course, but that was what Dr. Field and her parents had been trying to convince her of. In less than an hour she would be picked up and transported to Vendever, where counselors and doctors and addiction experts were going to teach her how to live without drinking.
“I saw them having sex,” she said. “I cut school. That Thursday.”
It had been a glorious day with a scrubbed-clean feel to the air and a pure June-blue sky. That morning Demeter had drunk the dregs of a bottle of Dewar’s, the last of her parents’ stash, and she had also taken a few swigs off the bottle of Jim Beam that she’d swiped from the Kingsleys’. But she needed more alcohol, another bottle at least, and the idea of stealing from someone she knew had lodged in her brain. It had been so easy to lift the bottle from the Kingsleys’ house. Demeter ran through a list of all the people she knew, or whom her parents knew, who drank, and Zoe was the most promising candidate. Zoe always drank wine, though Demeter also had memories of margarita parties at the Alistairs’, and cosmopolitans and martinis, and hot rum toddies in winter. She knew Zoe’s kitchen practically as well as her own, she knew that Zoe would be at work, and she knew that the sliding door facing the ocean would be unlocked.
So Demeter drove to the end of Miacomet Pond and parked her Escape. She told herself she was just going for a walk on the beach, no crime there. She trudged the two or three hundred yards to the Alistairs’ steps. She left her sandals on the beach and was unusually light and quick up the steps in her bare feet. She was dreaming of having a cold glass of white wine, and maybe a short nap in the sun on the chaise longue, before returning to school after lunch, just in time for English, which was the only class she could stand.