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him. They shared this right; he had played with their sons in their backyards. He had cracked the Glovers’ powder-room window with a line drive. He had gone with Butch Farrow and Butch’s son Colin to his first Patriots game. Anders Peashway’s father, Lars, had driven both boys to and from basketball camp in Springfield every June.
    Hobby had bestowed a greatness on the island, a grace.
    He would never play again, the fathers thought.
    The mothers thought the same thing Zoe Alistair thought. Two words:
Wake up
.
    Day 2: No change.
    Day 3: No change. Al Castle reported that Zoe was refusing to eat. She wouldn’t leave the hospital, even though Al had booked her a room at the Liberty Hotel next door. She slept across the chairs in the hallway outside Hobby’s room. One of the nurses had brought her a pillow and a blanket.
    Day 4: The junior class, which was now the senior class, organized a candlelight vigil. Normally any collective action by the junior class would have been spearheaded by Jake Randolph, but Jake wasn’t part of this. Neither was Demeter Castle (though Demeter tended to run along the margin of things anyway). The general understanding was that Jake Randolph and Demeter Castle were both too intimately involved in what had happened to take part in the vigil. And so the vigil was led by other members of the junior class: Claire Buckley, who had gone to the prom with Hobby but who could not rightly claim to be his girlfriend, Annabel Wright, captain of the cheerleading squad, and Winnie Potts, who had played Rizzo in the musical
Grease
. These three girls wore flowing white dresses and handed out white taper candles and long-stemmed white roses (Mr. Potts was a florist in town). A group gathered at dusk in a circle on the newly mowed football field. At first it was just the core group of girls and their siblings and their parents and their friends, but then the crowd grew. Several employees from Marine Home Center—where Hobby worked every summer hauling lumber—showed up, as did many of Hobby’s teammates and parents of teammates and a handful of oldtimers who came to the games just to see Hobby play. The staff of Al Castle’s car dealership came, as did the waitresses from the Downyflake, who served the football team weekly spaghettidinners, and the volunteers from the Boys & Girls Club, where Hobby had honed his athletic skills as a kid, and the pilots who had flown Hobby and his teammates to their games off-island, and Hobby’s teachers, and every member of the Board of Directors of the Nantucket Chamber of Commerce, and a group of nurses from the hospital, including Patsy Ernst. Dr. Field attended, as did the high school principal, Dr. Major, and the superintendent and several policemen, including Chief Kapenash. These people we expected. The people we didn’t expect were the summer residents, newly arrived on island, who came to show their support because this, they suspected, was the real Nantucket. The summer people stood around the perimeter, nervously checking their Panerai watches and searching through their lightship baskets for a Kleenex. They weren’t sure they were welcome at this ceremony, but Claire and Annabel and Winnie gave each of them a candle and a rose anyway. Strength in numbers.
    Winnie Potts spoke first. Her voice was strong and clear. She asked us to pray—first for the departed soul of Penelope Alistair, and second for the safe return to consciousness of Hobson Alistair. The mothers all prayed for Zoe Alistair—we had been too harsh on her in the past, we realized—and then the Reverend Grinnell of the Unitarian Church materialized out of nowhere with a cordless microphone. He led us in a resonant, if rambling, beseechment to the Higher Power. We wondered, of course, if the Alistairs had attended the Unitarian Church. No one remembered their ever doing so. The only church the Alistairs had set foot inside, once a year, was the Catholic one, on Christmas Eve, though we