Summerland: A Novel by Elin Hilderbrand Page A

one-story limestone bungalows with brickwork around the windows, deep front porches covered by aluminum bullnose awnings with lush green plants hanging from them. Rocking chairs, a curled-up orange cat, bicycles, surfboards.
    There was a bong sitting on the top of someone’s front wall. His mother must have seen it too, because she laughed.
    “I forgot what this place is like,” she said.
    Jake glanced at his father. Was his father finding Ava’s apparent transformation as amazing as he was? It incensed Jake because it made it seem like his father had been right, or at least partially so.
    “If we leave, things will be better for you,” Jordan had said. “And they’ll be better for your mother.”
    “Not better for me,” Jake had responded. Then, meanly, he’d added, “And Mom is beyond help.”
    But here she was, laughing.
    Jordan stopped the car in front of a house. The car was a beat-up Holden Ute; Jordan’s father had bought it from the rental place. He’d bought it rather than rented it because this wasn’t a vacation: they were
moving
here. The steering wheel was on the wrong side, everybody drove on the wrong side and parked on the wrong side, tight left, wide right—it made Jake dizzy just to watch. Twice during the drive, he’d been sure they were going to crash; his muscles and tendons had tightened like steel cables. One of the benefits of moving to Australia: he would never, ever drive here.
    He was overtired, punchy, ridiculously sad. He wanted Penny. He loved her to distraction, had loved her since preschool, when he’d picked daisies for her on the playground and drawn a crayoned heart and left it in her cubby. They had been dating since ninth grade and having sex since the start of their junior year, and most of the time Jake had felt like nothing could separate them, though more and more often he had begun to suspect that Penny nurtured an interior life that he couldn’t access. She was a complicated and serious person—that was good. She had more soul than the other girls in their school. But she harbored demons—that was bad. Her father had died before she was born, and so, in Penny’s words, it was like there was half of herself that she didn’t recognize and couldn’t understand. She had shadows to dodge, but so did Jake, because his baby brother had died. “You just have to focus on the here- and-now,” he had told Penny. Jake had a list of personal goals: he wanted to follow in Patrick Loom’s footsteps and be valedictorian, he wanted to be president of the senior class, president of the school chapter of the National Honor Society, andeditor of
Veritas,
and he wanted the lead role in the musical again. And he also wanted to be elected Homecoming King if Hobby didn’t get chosen. There was a lot of pressure for Jake to succeed on multiple fronts; expectations were high.
    Expectations were high for Penny, too. She had
serious
talent, talent that was too big for Nantucket. She didn’t like opera, but she could sing on Broadway, or off-Broadway, or she could travel with the cast of
Mamma Mia
or
The Lion King.
She was that good. She would go to college at Juilliard or Curtis or Peabody in Baltimore, and someone would discover her, and she would be whisked away from him. But Penny didn’t worry about things like that; increasingly her mind seemed to be elsewhere, on another plane, in another stratum. Her voice, she believed, was an accidental gift. “It’s like it has nothing to do with me,” she said. “With who I am inside.”
    His parents got out of the car. His father pulled their bags from the back.
    Jake wanted Penny. He wanted to be standing on the ground where she was buried. His brother, Ernie, had been buried in the same cemetery, his body contained in a coffin the size of a shoebox. How could his mother stand to be half a world away from Ernie? Jake would have thought this impossible—but here she was, headed up the walkway to the house, making happy, breathy