The Castaways (19 page)

Thom and Faith were at one end of the boomerang bar with their sixteenth or seventeenth vodkas, and Greg was at the other end brooding over a Sam Adams draft. Delilah had seen Greg’s brooding act a million times before; he used it like a petulant twelve-year-old girl.
If I make moody, faraway eyes, someone will ask me what’s wrong.
Delilah had meant to storm out of the Begonia after closing without a word to anyone. But she was just drunk enough to want another drink. Greg was dopily sitting there and Delilah could not control her urge to vent.

She took the stool next to him, asked Graham for a glass of cabernet, and whispered viciously, “I just don’t get it.”

“I know,” Greg murmured.

“Have you been… talking to her?”

“Sort of,” he said.

“Sort of!” Delilah said. She sounded like the indignant wife, the shrew. She was supposed to be the cool girl, the one who could take any news and shrug it off.

“She came in to talk right before she graduated,” he said. “And we decided to mend the fence.”

“Mend the fence,” Delilah repeated.

“Put everything behind us. She asked for forgiveness.”

Delilah narrowed her eyes. “She’s a liar.”

Greg sipped his beer. The mooniness was disappearing. “Well, she’s not twenty-one.”

“No shit,” Delilah said. “And you made me let her into the bar. I could be fired for that. The Begonia could be shut down.”

“Oh, please,” Greg said.

“I just don’t
get
you,” Delilah said.

“Sure you do, Ash.”

“No,” Delilah said. “I don’t. Were you telling me the truth about that night with April? The whole fucking truth?”

“Yes,” he said.

“I don’t believe you.”

“Nobody believes me.”

“I would like you so much better if you just admitted you were lying. I wouldn’t even care if you said you fucked her that night. Just as long as you told me the truth.”

“Tess feels the same way,” Greg said. “But I have nothing to add or detract from my story. It stands. And at this point, it is dried up. It is
burned
, Delilah. There is no reason to talk about it any further.”

“Except that April came in tonight.”

“Like I said, we mended the fence.”

Delilah’s head was spinning. Graham, behind the bar, was a hologram. Thom and Faith were studiously pretending to watch a rerun of
Law & Order
which was playing on the TV over the bar, but really, Delilah knew, they were listening to every word. She didn’t care. She put her head down on the bar.

“You have no idea how much I love you,” she said.

Greg rubbed her back, but his touch lacked intention. “Sure I do, Ash,” he said. He finished his beer and set the glass down with some purpose.

“Will you play for me?” Delilah asked.

“Not tonight,” he said. “Tonight I have to get home.”

Right, she thought. Big anniversary tomorrow. He had made it by the skin of his teeth through year number twelve.

He stood to leave and Delilah stood as well, thinking,
Change your mind! Stay here! Play for me!
Would he change his mind? Sometime before he reached his car, would he call out to her?

He did not. He climbed into his beat-up 4Runner, which was parked down the block from Delilah’s Rubicon, and he drove out of town.

She did not mean to follow him. They lived only half a mile away from each other, and even though he was way up ahead, she noticed that he did not turn left onto Somerset Lane the way he would have to to go home. He kept going straight. He was headed for Cisco Beach.

Was this it, then? Her cue? Did he know she was behind him? Was she supposed to follow him? She checked her cell phone for a text message: nothing. She followed him anyway, around a bend that gave her vertigo. She put on her turn signal and pulled over to the side of the road. She was very drunk; she should not be driving. If the police got hold of her, she would fail the breathalyzer. She was so drunk she would break the thing. Greg sped away, oblivious. In so many ways he was just a boy. What was she doing? She had a man at home—Jeffrey. Jeffrey was too old and Greg was too young. This was ridiculous. She couldn’t chase Greg like this. She had to get home to bed, she had the twins tomorrow, and she liked to be on top of her game when she had the twins. If she gave the kids free run of the PlayStation while she took a nap, Tess would hear about it. Delilah was so drunk, she could not trust herself to be fortresslike with Greg. She would give in to him tonight, of all nights, and it would end up a mess. It would ruin everything.

Turn around!

Such good advice, but Delilah ignored it. Greg’s taillights were two red pinpricks in the distance, and then he rounded the curve by Sandole’s fish store and disappeared from view. Delilah followed at a law-abiding pace.

She was a cat, Jeffrey always said, because she could see in the dark. It was one of her many unsung talents, and tonight it was a talent she was grateful for. She was four or five hundred yards away when she spotted two cars parked at the end of Cisco Beach. Two cars: one was Greg’s 4Runner, and the other was a white Jeep Cherokee.

Delilah swung into the next driveway. A voice was screaming in her head—no words, just screaming. She looked again. She was very, very drunk, an unreliable witness. Yes, it was a white Jeep Cherokee. April’s car. Greg had come to Cisco Beach, to
their
spot—his and Delilah’s—to meet April Peck, and… what? Mend some more of that fence?

Screaming.

Delilah backed the car out of the driveway, turned around, and headed for home.

She vowed she would never speak to him again. She didn’t care what kind of rift it caused within the group. Greg MacAvoy was a rat bastard and Delilah would not speak to him.

The next morning Tess showed up at a little after nine to drop off the twins. Delilah felt like absolute crap; she had vomited up the contents of her stomach in a lurid cabernet hue. She had cried, and spilled her guts to Jeffrey. She was leaden, her head ached, her stomach was puckered like a lemon, her balance was off, she was exhausted. She had not slept for a minute. She could not stop thinking of the two cars, side by side, and then the imagined scene between Greg and April Peck that followed.

Delilah had showered and dressed and made the kids Belgian waffles with caramelized bananas and whipped cream for breakfast. She had to put up a front for Tess. Delilah would take the kids to the beach, then to the farm for strawberry-picking, then home to make jam and eat cheeseburgers, and perhaps end the day with ice cream sandwiches, sparklers on the back deck, and a game of Monopoly.

Tess, when she arrived with the kids, seemed a little off. She looked adorable in a red bikini top and white denim shorts, cutesy flip-flops, starlet sunglasses, but her smile was tentative. Something was on her mind. What was it? She was in full apoplectic mode as far as leaving the children was concerned. She kissed them half a dozen times each, she said
I love you
fourteen times, and she came back from the car for one more hug apiece.
I love you so much, please, please be good, make healthy choices, I’ll be back tonight or tomorrow morning at the latest, depends on how your father does with the sailing. It’s pretty windy.

Delilah knew Tess was ambivalent about sailing, and every other sport that involved the open water. She said, “Are you nervous, Tess, about the sail?”

“Terrified,” Tess said plainly. She met Delilah’s eyes with what felt like an indecent amount of honesty.

Delilah hung in the balance for a suspended moment. Shouldn’t honesty be met with honesty?

She couldn’t bear to think about it now. Could not bear it! Delilah’s decision could not be taken back, any more than Greg’s indiscretions could be taken back, any more than Tess and Greg could be brought back from the dead. It was all over and done.

And yet the whole mess festered in Delilah. Physically she was healthy, but her emotional state was frayed. Two weeks after Greg and Tess died, she had nearly caused four catastrophic car crashes. She drove, but she did not pay attention. She did not sleep. Phoebe gave her enough Ambiens to euthanize an army battalion and still she did not sleep. She was tired all day with the kids; she dropped the boys off at camp and then had to set the kitchen timer to remind herself to pick them up. She did not have the energy for fishing or hiking around Quaise Swamp or taking a kayak off the Jetties. She gave the kids too much money for the snack bar, or she dropped them at the movies, and then she sat listlessly in her car for two hours with the air-conditioning on, watching people go into and come out of the Begonia. She had not given Thom and Faith an answer about her job, but she would have to tell them soon that she was not coming back.

She stopped cooking. Every night it was pizza or prepared food from the farm. And she had stopped drinking. This last change may have sounded like it was for the best—better, certainly, than Delilah drinking herself into a coma every night. But Delilah’s relationship with alcohol had always been positive, and now alcohol was one more thing she couldn’t bring herself to enjoy.

She tried to be kind to Jeffrey, and he in turn was extraordinarily solicitous with her. He brought her flowers and just-picked vegetables and jars of preserves that the girls in the farm kitchen had put up. He took the kids and let her sleep. He did not say, “Pizza, again?” He looked at her grieving and considered it normal. He was wary of the sleeping pills and happy about her abstinence. He knew there was something else, but he did not ask her what it was.

That she had loved Greg and Greg had loved her, but they had not acted on this love.

That Greg had had a relationship of some sort with the little blond bin Laden.

That Delilah had not been brave enough to speak the truth.

T
he first week of July was too hot to sleep. Normally the Chief and Andrea installed an air conditioner in their bedroom window, but this year they did not. The twins were up many times in the night, and Andrea wanted to be able to hear them. Andrea took sleeping pills, but they didn’t work. She lay in bed, sweaty and drugged and so psychologically addled that she could not sleep.

During the day she was a zombie.

She had moved on from denial, or so she thought. She knew, intellectually, that Tess was dead and not coming back. She resisted the urge to call Tess’s house to see if she would pick up; she did not drive by the house to see if Tess was out in the front garden, deadheading the daylilies. Ed was at work all the time. It was his job to insure the island’s public safety 24/7. Additionally, he was thinking about Tess and Greg. He was trying to figure out what happened. Didn’t she want to know what happened?

No, she didn’t. She just wanted it to unhappen.

Andrea was in some other stage of grief, one not previously documented by the authors of grief books. She was in a stage that should be known as Long Periods of Exhausted Stupor Punctuated by Psychotic Episodes.

One day, however, she got herself to the beach to swim. This was Ed’s idea. Ed was a big proponent of getting-back-to-normal. Even if Andrea didn’t feel normal, she could do normal things, and this might help.

Go to the beach, he said. Swim.

She put on her tank suit. She packed a towel and her goggles. She settled in her usual spot on the beach. It was the first week of July, and the beach was crowded with people getting on with their normal, happy lives on vacation. How could they do it? Andrea walked to the water’s edge. She filled with a terrible dread, a sickening revelation, which was by no means new, but which struck her in a new way.

She had not become a nun.

She had stood at the foot of Tess’s prostrate nine-year-old body and she had prayed to God. She had in fact made a pact:
Spare Tess and I will devote my life to you.

But how easy it had been to let her end of the bargain go once it turned out that Tess was okay. What happened to people who did that? They ended up in hell.

She, Andrea, was in hell.

She could not swim. She could not even make it back to the bluff to her car. She was going to have to call Ed and have him come get her. He had come nearly two weeks earlier to tell her the news. (She could not think about it.) She retrieved her cell phone from her bag to call the station, but there was no reception. She couldn’t call Tess at home, because no one would answer.

Andrea pitched her cell phone into the ocean.

A guy on a towel a few yards away from her said, “Whoa!”

Ed was at work trying to figure out “what happened,” but Andrea already knew what happened. She had made a promise and then not upheld it. God had waited years and years, but he had come back for Tess.

Andrea looked blankly at the guy on the towel.

She needed help. This was rock bottom. It had been two weeks since Tess and Greg had died. Molly, the dispatcher, dropped off a book about grieving, which Andrea had been unable to read, but she was pretty sure that if she read it, it would tell her that grief had a trajectory and that two weeks after a death a mourner hit bottom. Dumped a platter of rib-eyes into the garden. Threw her cell phone into the ocean.

But then the next day Andrea woke up feeling worse. How could she feel worse when she had already hit rock bottom? She was despondent and restless. She could not pour the children’s cereal or pack their lunches. She asked Kacy to do it, and Kacy did it without complaint while Andrea sat on the edge of her bed, paralyzed. The bed was unmade, she should make it; Ed would tolerate many things, but not an unmade bed. She could not make it. Kacy was such a good kid. She must have her own grief, she must miss Tess and Greg, too, but Andrea couldn’t ask. She started to cry.

Kacy came into the bedroom and said, “I’ll bike with the kids to camp.”

Andrea nodded. Kacy did not leave. She said, “But they want to go to the beach this afternoon, Mom. And you promised you’d take them.”

“Did I?” Andrea had no recollection.

“You did.”

She took a deep breath. Air. Sometimes air helped. Like right this second. Andrea believed she could take the kids to the beach—the north shore, where it was placid—and watch them like a hawk while they swam. And then later, tonight maybe, she would ask Kacy how she was feeling about things. Ed was a big believer in reaching out.
Step outside of yourself for a minute,
he said.
Call Delilah, or Phoebe.