Free Summerland: A Novel by Elin Hilderbrand Page A

change.” “Tell Jordan not to run a story—nothing, not one word.” “No change.”
    Only a mother could be so single-minded. She went back over every second of his life. Everything! Holding him for the first time—just him alone, while the doctors were still pulling out Penny. His eyes squeezed shut, his tiny fist jammed in his mouth. They were twins, but he was technically her firstborn. He had made her a mother. In the first moment of holding him she had felt that magnificent rush of love, powerful and terrifying.
    Hobby smiling for the first time, Hobby eating peaches from a jar, roly-poly Hobby, too chubby to pull himself up. His sister was already cruising around the room by holding on to the furniture. He would watch her and start to cry. Zoe had captured it on film. There had been one rare night a few months earlier when both Hobby and Penny were both home for dinner, and Zoe made shrimp and grits, their favorite, and after dinner she pulled out the old videos from when they were babies: Hobby sitting on the floor like a potted plant, bawling his eyes out, and Penny toddling circles around him.
    Zoe had tousled Hobby’s hair—sandy like his father’s, not dark like hers and Penny’s—and said, “Oh, but did you catch up to her later!”
    Hobby had mastered the art of skipping stones by the time he was four years old. He was always running and jumping, climbing things—trees, cars, bookshelves. Zoe signed him up for swimming lessons at the community pool. Other mothers gossiped or read books while their kids swam, but she rested her chin on the aluminum railing of the balcony and watched Hobby. Zoe could go on forever about the games. His first year playing football at the Boys & Girls Club, the coach had put him in at quarterback. He had quick hands, one of the fathers said, and quick feet. He was a head taller than everyone else on the team. On the basketball court, he shot 75 percent from the free-throw line. He hit his first home run at age ten. Zoe remembered jumping up and down in her chef’s clogs, making a racket against the metal bleachers. Hobby later retrieved the ball out of right field and gave it to her. When Hobby was ten, his mother was his only girl.
    There were private things about Hobby, too. For a stretch of months, he’d been afraid of the dark. This was Zoe’s fault. She’d had the Castles and the Randolphs over for dinner one night, and they’d gotten onto the topic of the Columbine shootings. Hobby was still lingering around the dinner table, hoping that one of the adults would pass him an unfinished dessert. And, too, he liked adult conversation more than other kids did. He observed the adult world, then tried to process it so that it made sense to him. Zoe should have banished him from the table that night or put an abrupt end to the discussion, but she had had three or four glasses of Cabernet, and she liked to prove to other people that her kids could thrive in a house where they weren’t constantly sheltered from the harsh realities of the world. And so she had let the conversation go on around him. About the two gunmen—boys hooked on violent video games—who had killed twelve of their classmates and a teacher and then themselves.
    That night, Hobby had climbed into bed with her. He wascrying. He couldn’t stop thinking about those kids shooting other kids. Killing them.
    “I’m sorry,” Zoe had said. Here was her liberal parenting coming back to bite her in the ass. “I shouldn’t have let you hear that.”
    He came in night after night for months, for a year.
    “What happens when we die?” he asked her once.
    Zoe could remember wanting to say something encouraging about Heaven, a place up above where you could sit on a puffy white cloud and watch what was happening on Earth. Where certain angels, maybe, even had the power to make the Red Sox win. But instead, she gave him the only truth she had: “I don’t know. No one knows.”
    “Well, where is our