The Castaways (13 page)

“I’m thinking of quitting,” Delilah said. Her head was spinning. She was drunk. One of the signs of Delilah drunk was that she disclosed pieces of classified information prematurely. She hadn’t discussed quitting the Begonia with Jeffrey, nor with Phoebe—nor, properly, with herself. The thought was just floating around in her mind with sad inevitability. At the funeral reception, Thom and Faith had approached her together and told her to take as much time as she needed before she came back to work. They had been drunk at the reception. They were more or less always drunk or hung over, which was what gave the Begonia the whiff of disrepute among people like Jeffrey and Andrea. But Thom and Faith were good citizens, community people. They loved Delilah and they had loved Greg, who had played the guitar there for over ten years. Thom and Faith had, in their hippie, hazy, funky, freewheeling way, always treated Delilah and Greg as part of their family.

They had also had the misfortune of being present for the fiasco that was Sunday night, Greg’s last night alive. But Delilah wasn’t willing to discuss it with them; she wasn’t going to think about it. She looked at Thom and Faith—Thom with his gray ponytail and John Lennon glasses, and Faith with her signature rouge (some days it was applied more evenly than others). Delilah had tried many times over the years to imagine Thom and Faith making love, and had failed. Likewise, she could not imagine herself ever working a shift at the Begonia again. Thom and Faith feared this, maybe, and hence were offering her lots of leeway—anything to keep the door open. If Delilah could just be honest with herself, she would say that for her, the Scarlet Begonia had always been about Greg, and Greg was dead.

Andrea did not respond to Delilah’s revelation. No surprise there. She just closed the book on the conversation by saying, “The kids will live with us. We’re their family.”

Delilah cut through the Chief’s sandwich with her serrated bread knife and arranged it on a plate with a handful of chips. Jeffrey stepped in off the back deck and said, “What are you girls talking about?”

“Nothing,” they said together, and Delilah was grateful. She had concocted the whole notion of taking Chloe and Finn without consulting Jeffrey. She was a horrible wife. And she was drunker than she thought.

A
ddison’s memory, in regard to Tess, went back only as far as the first time he had kissed her. December 27, in Stowe, Vermont.

He wasn’t sure if he could go back and think about it. Well, wait, maybe, give him a minute. It was sort of like asking him if he could go down and touch his toes now that his femur was broken. But then it occurred to him that all he had left of Tess were these memories, and since no one knew about their relationship, there was no one in the world to talk to about it other than himself. It had crossed his mind to make a truly mind-blowing announcement at Jeffrey and Delilah’s house following the reception. Why not just confess? Make a scene? But Addison loathed scenes. Even now, when he thought about Phoebe shrieking in the parking lot of the Galley, he closed his eyes and breathed in deeply. Never mind the way she’d shattered like a teacup on September 11. Addison decided not to come out with the truth for many reasons—and really, his distaste for scenes was at the bottom of the list. First of all, he didn’t want to hurt Phoebe. Second, he loved his friends, and he wanted to keep them. And somewhere in there was another niggling reason: he feared that if he told everyone that he and Tess had fallen in love, no one would believe him.

Why? Because Tess was married to Greg, who had muscles chiseled out of mahogany, a voice that fell somewhere between Frank Sinatra and John Mayer, eyes that made even Florabel, the receptionist in Addison’s office, who was a lesbian, tremble with nerves and excitement so that she almost spilled her coffee every time Greg walked in. Why why
why
would Tess turn around and have an affair with Addison, who was bald and bespectacled, and who could not even get his own wife to kiss him with tongue?

No one would believe it. They would laugh.

In your dreams!

But it had happened. It was real.

They had all gone to Stowe on the day after Christmas, for what was their sixth (and final) group vacation. Adults only, five days of ski and apres-ski. Addison had gotten hold of the 4BR condo for free in the usual way, which was to say that a man who had bought a five-million-dollar piece of land on Pocomo Point from Addison in the fall had offered the condo to Addison as a thank-you for doing the deal.

Addison said,
Oh, really, Jack, it was nothing.

Jack said,
Take the condo. Week after Christmas, it’s yours. Wife and I are going to St. Barts.

The group vacations were always fun. They were always the
best
(though in Addison’s mind the best of the best had been Vegas, and every trip since had been an earnest attempt to live up to Vegas). This trip to Stowe was especially handicapped because of what had transpired between Tess and Greg. The whole mess with April Peck had been murderous. Addison had heard only Greg’s side of the story: Tess would not forgive him. She would act like she’d forgiven him and then either something would happen (she’d bump into someone at the grocery store who would want to vent their feelings on the topic) or nothing would happen—out of the blue, she would just flip out. She would make Greg tell her the whole story
again,
she would get angry
again,
she would declare that she could never trust him
again
. She wanted him to quit his job, she wanted to move away, she wanted to move out.

Still, they had agreed to the trip to Stowe; they asked Cassidy Montero, on Christmas break from her freshman year at Dartmouth, to baby-sit. Greg was gung-ho about the skiing in a way that made Addison nervous. Addison, despite his many other talents and accomplishments, did not ski. He liked the atmosphere of skiing—the fire-warmed lodge, the view of a snowy mountainside, the clean air, the drinks—but not the sport itself. Addison suspected that Greg’s opinion of his own prowess was inflated—this was generally the case—but at any rate, Greg’s enthusiasm fueled a sense of great expectation for the trip.

So there they were, the eight of them, in colorful Gore-Tex parkas and snow pants, with probably a hundred zippered pockets among them. The Chief and Andrea had their own skis and boots, as did Greg, as did Jeffrey and Delilah. Phoebe had brought her ice skates and her cross-country skis and boots, all carefully preserved relics from her high school years in Wisconsin.

The condo was located two hundred yards from the parking lot of the mountain. It had two stone fireplaces, four sumptuous bedrooms, each with its own marble bath, a gourmet kitchen that Jack the Client had, as a surprise, stocked with Swiss Miss and marshmallows, fondue cheese, exotic salamis, olives, white wine, champagne, and a handle of spiced rum. A deck with an eight-person hot tub overlooked the face of the mountain; from the deck, Addison could pick out tiny figures whooshing down the trails. The furnishings were “luxe lodge”—suede sofas and deep armchairs, a coffee table fashioned from a tree trunk. There were two flat-screen TVs and a sound system with speakers throughout the house.

It was impossible to walk into that condo and feel like anyone except the luckiest person alive. If the fluffy duvet sheathed in English flannel on your bed wasn’t enough, if the deep shearling throw rugs under your feet weren’t enough (it was as if there were fur coats strewn across the floor), then step out onto the deck, where the hot tub was steaming like a cauldron, take a hot buttered rum from the tray Delilah was passing around, help yourself to a cracker topped with goat cheese and hot pepper jelly and look at the mountain while snow fell gently onto the shoulders of your Spyder ski jacket.

“Are you happy?” Addison had asked Tess. He had asked her randomly, because she happened to be standing next to him.

“Deliriously,” she had said.

Had it started there? Not quite. But Addison had been affected by that answer. Something had bloomed under his layers of goosedown, Gore-Tex, cashmere, and 100 percent cotton. He had, via the unexpected perks of his profession, been able to make Tess, who had been sad and anxiety-ridden for months,
deliriously happy
. What had bloomed in Addison’s chest was not love, but self-congratulation. It was a start.

In the morning, everyone drank coffee, munched toast, grabbed bananas or stored them in one of their many zippered pockets for later. Off to the mountain! The ski car—the Chief’s Yukon—was leaving.

Phoebe would take the other car, her and Addison’s Range Rover, up to the Trapp Family Lodge, where she would cross-country ski, get lunch, and have a massage. Phoebe had a little duffel packed with all her stuff, she had her boots hanging over her shoulder by the laces, and her hair was done in two braids, just like the Swiss Miss.

“Okay!” she said. “See you later!”

She looked fine, normal, happy—a woman out to relive the winter sports experiences of her youth and then indulge in the pleasures she had discovered as an adult. Addison would have been fooled had it not been for the tinny quality that her voice took on when she was medicated, as opposed to the pure, melodic silver of her actual voice, though Addison heard that sterling quality so rarely anymore that he wondered if he would even recognize it.

When he checked in the trash of their bathroom, he saw that she’d taken two Percocets (prescribed to her “for pain”) as well as her Ativan—and he knew she had secret stashes of oxycontin, valium, and Ambien with her at all times. But he wasn’t going to waste time hunting them down. He hoped she didn’t fall through a hole in the ice or get lost in the woods.

That left Addison in the condo… with Tess. He hadn’t realized it, but Tess did not end up going along with the others. She didn’t ski, though Greg had spent much of their four-hour, wine-soaked fondue dinner the night before trying to convince her to take a private lesson. Tess had been reluctant, but Greg seemed to have persuaded her in the end. And yet when Addison closed the door behind Phoebe (he stayed at the sidelight until Phoebe pulled away, wondering if it was wise even to let her drive in the snow, much less ski) and returned to the kitchen to his coffee and the
Wall Street Journal,
there was Tess at the table, wearing a heather gray Nordic sweater and black leggings and socks, assiduously punching numbers into her cell phone again and again.

“There’s no reception here,” she said.

“Who are you trying to call?”

“The kids. The baby-sitter.” Tess smiled, then flushed, embarrassed. “I know they’re fine, but…”

“You’re a good mother,” Addison said. “And good mothers worry.”

She set the phone down on the kitchen table and looked at him. Really looked at him with her wide blue eyes. It took him by surprise.

“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for saying that.” She cast her eyes down at the table. “Greg thinks it’s ridiculous how much I worry. But they’re my children. I like to know they’re okay. I like to know what they’re doing, what they’re eating, if they slept well, what they dreamed about.”

“They’re lucky to have you,” Addison said.

“I don’t want them to think I’ve just abandoned them, the day after Christmas. And the tree is still up with the lights on it, and I told Cassidy not to build a fire, but it gets so cold in our house, so then at the last minute I told her that if it was freezing then it was okay for her to build a fire, and I was up half the night worried that she
would
build a fire and the house would burn down…”

“You don’t have to explain it to me,” Addison said. “I get it.”

Tess sighed. “I guess I’ll have to call them from town. What are you up to today?”

“I’m going to the fitness center right now,” Addison said. “Then I thought I might walk into town for some lunch.”

Tess was staring at him. She was pretty, like a doll. Of course, Phoebe was pretty like a doll, too. Phoebe was an exquisite china doll, delicate, fragile. Tess was pretty like a Bobbsey Twin, like Mary Ann from
Gilligan’s Island.
She was cute, perky, freckled, kindergarten-teacher pretty.

“What?” he said.

“I like it that you made a plan for yourself,” she said. “You’re not worried about the others, you’re not worried about Phoebe—”

I’m always worried about Phoebe,
he thought. But he would never say this to Tess.

“You just asked yourself what you wanted to do today, and you’re going to do it.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m very selfish.”

“My New Year’s resolution is to be more selfish,” Tess said. “To do things that I want to do—not that the kids want me to do, or Greg wants me to do. What I realized—this year, you know—is that I put far too much time and effort into looking out for Greg. And meanwhile, Greg is looking out for Greg. He’s doing a terrible job, of course.”

Here Tess gave a weak laugh, and Addison thought,
Are we going to talk about it?

Tess paused. She looked for a moment like she was sizing him up. Was he worthy of a conversation about the big, forbidden topic?

He was not.

She said, “So one of the things I decided is that I’m going to spend more time and energy taking care of myself.” She fiddled with her iPhone; with its yellow cover, it was as bright as a child’s toy. “I don’t even know where to start.” She glanced up. “So for today, can I tag around with you?”

Had it started then? Getting closer.

Addison filled with warmth. And anticipation. Would it seem odd to the others if he and Tess spent the day together? The hallmark of these group trips had always been unexpected alliances. Addison remembered the four-hour canoe trip he and the Chief had taken during their vacation at the Point, on Saranac Lake. They had gotten lost somehow, had debarked and carried the canoe over their heads like Indians until they came across a dirt road, where they hitched a ride back to the Point with two dope-smoking hippies who seemed markedly less jolly when they discovered Ed was a police chief. That story was now legend. It remained the touchstone of Addison and Ed’s friendship.