Summerland: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

grape soda, root beer. And every single time that Demeter had babysat for her over the past five years, Mrs. Kingsley had opened her arms as wide as they would go and said, “Help yourself to whatever you want.”
    This had been a rare form of torture, especially after the kids were in bed and Demeter was faced with empty hours of homework or independent reading or the two hundred channels of the Kingsleys’ satellite TV. Demeter’s cell phone lay charging on the Kingsleys’ granite countertop, but no one ever texted, and no one ever called. That wasn’t strictly true: at least once a night, Demeter’s mother, Lynne, would text her to ask how things were “coming along.” Demeter never responded to these messages; she found receiving texts from her mother humiliating. Now and then Demeter sent a text out to Penny, but that was a shot in the dark. Demeter would write something general and innocuous like, what u doin? And on occasion, Penny would text back, hanging with J. Or, sometimes, hanging with A, who was Ava, Jake’s mother. To Demeter, Ava Randolph was a tragic figure along the lines of Mr. Rochester’s crazy wife locked in the attic in
Jane Eyre
. But to Penny, she was more like Sylvia Plath or Virginia Woolf: brilliant, artistic, bipolar, possibly suicidal.
    “Is Mrs. Randolph okay?” Demeter had asked her mother once.
    “ ‘Okay’?” Lynne Castle said.
    “I mean, I know she’s still really sad about the baby,” Demeter said. The baby had died when Demeter and Jake and Penny and Hobby were in seventh grade. “But what does she do? Like, with her life, what does she
do?
”
    “That’s an interesting question,” Lynne Castle said. This was the kind of answer that made Demeter want to scream. Her parents were all about validation. What Demeter wanted was the truth.
    “Tell me, Mom,” Demeter said.
    “She’s just…” Lynne held her hands out, as if checking for rain. “Well, it seems to me that Ava is lost.”
    Lost? Demeter was alarmed to learn that a person could make a career out of being
lost
. She worried that this might someday be
her
career.
    “Did someone sell it to you?” the Chief asked. He held the bottle in two hands. “Someone on-island?”
    Demeter was startled. Her thoughts had digressed so dramatically that she had forgotten she was under this line of questioning.
    “No,” she said, honestly.
    “Someone off-island?” the Chief asked. He sounded relieved, and she couldn’t blame him. He didn’t want to have to shut down a local business for selling liquor to minors. Demeter knew she should just tell him she had bought the Jim Beam off-island. “Off-island” was the whole rest of the world, an infinite bigness filled with people and places and things. It was impossible to police “off-island,” because where would you start?
    Did Demeter want to lie? No, she did not. Her alternative was to admit that she’d stolen the Jim Beam from the Kingsleys, but to explain that it hadn’t felt like stealing because Mrs. Kingsley always said, “Help yourself to whatever you want.” And so lastweek, on a particularly fragrant spring night, the night of the Nantucket High School awards ceremony, which Demeter wasn’t attending because she hadn’t been selected to receive any awards, she had helped herself to the bottle of Jim Beam. And what she wouldn’t be able to tell Chief Kapenash was how happy and liberated taking the bottle had made her feel. It was secret and contraband; it was a bandage to have ready for a time in the future that might be even worse than that night. It was numbness in a bottle, oblivion in liquid form. Demeter knew this because she had already systematically run through every drop of alcohol in her parents’ house. Al and Lynne Castle weren’t drinkers—not a beer at a ball game, not a glass of wine at book club. At dinner Al had water and Lynne drank a glass of milk, like a child. That they even kept any alcohol in the house stunned Demeter. She