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ChapterThree
The Senior Class of 1995 sent Jeremy Farley’s hospital room a ton of bouquets of flowers, chocolates, music tapes, brand-new boomboxes, handwritten notes, and a big banner that read GET WELL SOON in blue and white school colors. From outside the hospital room, Alana listened to the nurse tease Jeremy gently about his numerous admirers, including several “attractive” young women who’d dropped off cards that afternoon. Alana’s heart burned with jealousy.
Everyone knew the reason Jeremy had been in his truck that night. Back at the bonfire, he’d chatted with Todd for over twenty-five minutes about wanting to break up with Alana. Todd had pushed him to do it. Alana could practically hear Todd telling him,“Come on. You’re going to be a quarterback at Notre Dame. You can have any girl you want. Sure, Alana Copperfield’s the prettiest girl in Nantucket. But college is a whole other story.”
From a distance, Todd and the rest of the bonfire-goers had watched Jeremy chase after Alana. The accident itself had happened a little more than a half-mile from the bonfire itself. Apparently, when they’d heard the sirens, Todd and the rest of the bonfire crew had panicked, sensing a shift in the universe. Tiffany had said that they’d initially thought Alana was the one who’d wrecked. “Since you’d drank a few beers, you know,” she’d said, her gaze slipping toward the ground.
Alana hadn’t seen Jeremy since the accident. He’d been in and out of comas for the first two weeks and required numerous surgeries on his legs. For a while, the gossip was that he would never walk again. After the most recent surgery, the doctors had given him a sixty-percent chance of walking, with an “absolutely zero percent” chance of ever playing football again.
News of the accident flashed across the United States with a number of headlines:
“Prospective Notre Dame Quarterback in Accident that Will Sideline his Career Forever.”
“Was the New Notre Dame Quarterback Drinking and Driving?”
“Does the USA Put Too Much Pressure on its Young Athletes?”
“Notre Dame Revokes Nantucket Quarterback’s Scholarship.”
The nurse appeared in the doorway between Jeremy’s hospital room and the hallway, where Alana stood quietly with Jeremy’s letterman jacket splayed across her arms. The nurse’s smile faltered. “Can I help you?”
“I’d like to um… Would it be possible that I see Jeremy?”
The nurse pursed her lips. “Visiting hours are finished for the evening.”
Alana bent her head low. “I got here as soon as I could. Could you maybe make an exception?” (Actually, she’d sobbed for the better part of the past three hours in her car, trying to drum up the courage to enter the hospital.)
The nurse scanned the letterman jacket draped across her arm. Alana watched her put the pieces together, realizing that Alana was the girl Jeremy had been chasing after. The girl who’d made such a fit and destroyed Jeremy’s future.
“You’ll have to come back another time,” the nurse told her, taking the letterman jacket.
Without the jacket, goosebumps ran up across Alana’s arms. She was suddenly freezing. “Will you tell him to call me?” Alana whispered. Since he’d come out of his coma, she’d called the hospital several times but hadn’t managed to speak to him.
“I’ll do what I can, honey. But Jeremy needs his rest. He doesn’t need anyone around here messing with him.”
Alana felt like the scum at the base of a shadowed rock.
Alana drove home after that. Sweat pooled in her armpits and coated her blue blouse. It was eighty-one degrees on May 17th, only a couple of weeks before her high school graduation, but she didn’t bother to open the windows and instead sweltered in the heat, enjoying the way the sweat across her cheeks joined with her tears.
The Copperfield House had its windows and doors flung open to bring in the glorious breeze off the Nantucket Sound. Brightly-colored curtains fluttered within, and piano music— probably Bernard, although maybe one of the residents— streamed out. Alana stood in rapt attention, her knees clacking together beneath her. She realized in an abstract way that she hadn’t bothered to eat anything that day and had hardly touched anything the day before. Her legs felt like Jell-O beneath her.
Alana entered the front door of the “family” side of The Copperfield House. Her father was, in fact, seated at the piano, his eyes fluttering from open to closed as his fingers danced across the keys and patterned out a classical tune. When he got like this, Greta always said he was “lost in another world.”
Alana headed into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator to inspect its contents. Out on the porch overlooking the water, Greta and two writers in the residency spoke about the writer Marcel Proust; Greta had begged Alana to read Proust along with them, to put her thoughts elsewhere. It was difficult to get pre-accident Alana to read, as she’d been popular with a million social responsibilities. Post-accident Alana could hardly string two healthy thoughts together, let alone sit down to read a book.
Alana grabbed a cracker from the box on the counter and chewed on the corners, wandering back toward the Copperfield Artist Residency, which you entered through the back hallway. There, Greta and Bernard had set aside rooms for painting and drawing, reading and writing, playing music, and editing film. The residents also had a private kitchen in case they didn’t want to eat with the rest of the Copperfields every single night.
Although Alana didn’t call herself an artist in any way, she still liked to poke around back there and check out what people had done during their stay. Often, she felt the paintings and drawings were primitive or overly modern, rarely ever hitting the mark. The music she heard was often very experimental, nothing her ear could pull together with any real understanding. Still, she revered these people. Like her parents, they’d set out into the world with a real vision of what they wanted to do. That was looking less and less likely for her.
From the window at the far end of the hallway, Alana paused to watch the seagulls circle the beachgoers overhead, their eyes violent and black as they cawed.
“Creepy birds, aren’t they?” A voice rang out behind her.
Had this been Alana before the accident, she might have jumped. But this was post-accident Alana, a seventeen-year-old girl in the midst of enormous loss. Nothing phased her.
“I’ve always thought it’s funny that they’re featured in every painting of every beach,” she said, turning to catch the dark eyes of Asher Tarkin, the brooding painter who’d been at The Copperfield House the previous two months.
Asher’s smile was jagged, almost mean-spirited, but in a way that suited Alana just then. “Painters who paint beaches aren’t exactly painters, in my book.”
