The Castaways (23 page)

Addison opened the journal.
Where was he?

The handwriting was odd. It was different. It was, he realized after wiping his glasses on his shirt (as if it were his smudged lenses and not half a bottle of Jack Daniels that was keeping him from understanding just what was going on here), a
child’s
handwriting. And then Addison saw the date: May 1981. Tess wrote about her first communion. The wafer, she wrote, tasted like cardboard, when all along she had thought it would taste like peppermint.

He riffled through the other journals. All from her life Before. Tess’s youth and adolescence had been well documented. She despised her mother, worshipped her father, her grandmother was sick, the priest came to the house to administer last rites, her grandmother died. She loved her mother again; she did not want her mother to die! She was in love with a boy named Tanner who played kick ball at recess. In 1987 she wrote:
When I grow up I want to be a teacher. Kindergarten or first grade. I want two kids, a boy and a girl.

Check, check. Did she want a husband who would lie to her? Did she want a bald, bespectacled lover with his own business and a heart full of love and generosity, who would worship at her feet? She did not specify.

In 1990 she wrote:
This summer I want to go visit Andrea on Nantucket.

Check.

Okay, he’d had enough. The top drawers of the desk revealed compact disks, a calculator, stationery, paper clips, string, a high-lighter, index cards, some of which had grocery lists scribbled on them. He, Addison, was nowhere.

But it was impossible, right, to have been involved in a love affair as intense and consuming as theirs was and not discover a trace of it
somewhere?

The computer booted. The screensaver was a picture of Greg and the kids on a bench on Main Street, the three of them blowing pink Bazooka bubbles.

Pop. There went his heart.

I’m afraid you won’t get it.

Addison shut the computer off. He was forty-nine years old and had been classically educated—literature, painting, architecture, sculpture, music, history. The computer, however, was beyond him. At the office he had to ask Florabel for help with anything more involved than e-mail or a standard listing sheet. More to the point, he wanted Greg and the twins to stop ogling him. He was in crisis here! He had been madly, crazily, stupidly in love with a woman. That woman was now dead. He had been named executor of her will; he was in charge of all her earthly possessions. Among them he had expected to find proof, however well coded, that she had been madly, crazily, stupidly in love with him, too. Admit it! He had expected to find Tess’s heart in an envelope that was addressed to him.

Also on Tess’s desk was her engagement calendar. Okay! Maybe here…? Addison shoved aside the computer keyboard, nearly toppling his drink, and scooted the engagement calendar forward. It was open to the week of June 20, and there on the Monday square was a big heart and inside the heart it said:
12th anniversary!
Also in this square it said
Charlotte Inn
and listed the phone number.

Which part of this was the poisoned tip of the arrow? The adorable hand-drawn heart? The exclamation point? Or the name of the charming inn where Tess was planning on making love to her husband?

Addison flipped back through the calendar to January 7, the day Addison had called Tess and told her to meet him at the cottage in Quaise. She had been anxious on the phone. She had said to him,
Jesus, Add, I am so nervous.

And he had said,
Just meet me. Nothing has to happen
.

She showed up late. She had lost her way, she said. She missed the dirt road and had to double back, then she missed it again. When finally she found it, when she pulled the Kia into the driveway of the cottage, Addison understood what she meant by nervous. Whoa! He had been married twice, and he had bedded many other women in his lifetime, but when Tess stepped out of the car, Addison didn’t know what to do. He wanted to blink them back to the parking lot behind Nous Deux. He wanted to conjure the magic they had felt there. Could he do it?

He didn’t know what to say, so he reverted to real estate agent mode, which put both Tess and himself at ease.

Let me show you the house!

The cottage somehow did the trick. Addison had brought in small bouquets of hothouse flowers, put scented soap in the bathroom, put Vivaldi on the stereo. The cottage had pale pink walls and exposed beams and large windows looking out into the bare woods with a blue ribbon of the ocean beyond. The brass bed had forty pillows stacked up at either end. It was a love nest. Tess gasped, then cooed.

Is this yours?

Oh, you know,
he said, and he laughed. It was a joke, especially after Stowe, how Addison could make a house appear anywhere in the world.
It’s on loan.

There was silence between them. Awkward. God, what to say? What to do?
The Four Seasons
trilled along in the background. And then, just when Addison was afraid that he had made a monumental mistake (what had happened the week before in Stowe was a fluke, an illusion created by the circumstances), Tess ran toward him and jumped into his arms. She wrapped her legs around him.

Was it okay to call that the happiest moment of his life?

They had made love on top of the bed and it was… well, think about it! Addison had made love to his wife only a handful of times in the previous eight years, and even then the lovemaking fell somewhere between fair and marginal. To have a whole, happy, warm, responsive, physically delectable woman, a woman he liked, for the first magical and romantic time was… yeah.

Later, when they lay there, gazing out the window at the stark beauty of the daylight fading between the bare, slender trees, Tess admitted that she had not gotten lost at all. His directions had been perfect. She was late because she’d sat in her car at the end of the road, collecting her nerves, and checking in with Greg, who had the kids at the dentist.

It was a day he would never forget, January 7. On Tess’s calendar what it said was:
Chloe + Finn, dentist, 3:30
P.M.

Dentist! Addison thought. There should be a hand-drawn heart that said
Addison! The Day I Fell in Love!

Addison flipped forward. February. Valentine’s Day, another brutal holiday. Addison had bought Tess a book of love stories. He had driven to the elementary school and surreptitiously left the book on the driver’s seat of Tess’s Kia. Addison asked Tess if she would read the stories. She said she would, but to his knowledge, she hadn’t read a single one.

The square for February 14 said:
LoLa 41. 7
P.M.

Which was where she and Greg had gone to dinner.

On March 3, Addison had told Tess he loved her for the first time. They were in the cottage, listening to Billie Holiday. It was pouring rain outside. Addison lit a fire and made two mugs of coffee with Baileys. It was as perfect a scene as he could imagine. When he lay dying, this would be the moment he reflected on.

He set his mug down. He ran a fingertip along Tess’s jawline.

He said, “I love you, Tess.”

That day should have a hand-drawn heart!

Tess had said, “I love you, too.” Her eyes were clear and dry.

But the square for March 3 was empty.

Addison’s birthday, April 23, said:
Addison b-day (49)
. Greg had been at a singing competition in Lenox with the High Priorities and Tess had, as a surprise, called in sick to school so she could spend the day with Addison at the cottage.

Was it necessary to mention that this was the best present he had ever been given?

She had bagels and cream cheese waiting, and a steaming carafe of coffee, and his newspapers: the
New York Times,
the
Wall Street Journal,
and
USA
Today
for the sports. She had ordered, online, the entire catalogue of the Rolling Stones and said they were going to listen to each of the albums all the way through, in order. They made love. They played chess in bed, then took a tiny nap. They had lunch: somehow she had gotten hold of two bottles of the impossible-to-procure Mersault, which they drank with croque-monsieurs that she whipped up at the stove. And real dill pickles, his favorite! They watched
Casino Royale
and she cried in his arms. They ate two brownie sundaes, one of which had a candle, and Tess sang “Happy Birthday” to him, and at the end she added on the kindergarten chant,
Are you one? Are you two? Are you three?
All the way to forty-nine.

Then she gave him his present: it was a heart cut out of red felt.

She said, “This is my heart.”

Now, he touched the pieces of the heart in his pocket. He had never been without it. He wished he had given her something like this instead of a hardback tome of fusty love stories she would never read. He should have given her a token of his love that she could hold on to, touch so much it fell apart. Why had he not done that?

May 10 was the day he first broached the topic of leaving their respective spouses.
I can’t do this anymore
, he’d said.
I need to be with you. I can make anything happen. Just give me the okay.

She had bit her bottom lip. She was conflicted!

I know what you mean. I know. But…

But: the twins, their friends, their lives. She couldn’t pull the pin.

But: she agreed. She loved him. She would think about it.

On Tess’s calendar, it said:
Meeting w/principal, 4
P.M.

Addison flipped back to the twentieth of June and the insidious heart. A slip of paper fell to the floor. He picked it up. It was a poem, ripped, not cut, from a magazine. From
The New Yorker.
He recognized the type.

The poem was by Michael Ryan, the title was “Sixtieth Birthday Dinner.” What interested Addison, of course, were the lines that Tess had underlined. Here it was—finally!—a message.

My life with you has been beyond beyond

And there’s nothing beyond it I’m seeking

...

I wouldn’t mind being dead

If I could still be with you.

Addison read the lines, then read them again. His heart floated. It was all he’d been looking for, a snippet like this. A love note.

He folded the poem and slid it into his front pocket. He looked at the heart, enthusiastically marking their twelfth anniversary. He pulled the poem back out. Had she clipped this for Greg? As an anniversary present? To write in his card? Or was it meant to be for Addison?
Oh, please,
he thought. It was a love poem, a beautiful sentiment, it was
them
.
Their
life together, short as it was, had been “beyond beyond.” There was nothing beyond it Addison was seeking.

I wouldn’t mind being dead/If I could still be with you.

He couldn’t process that, for the obvious reasons.

For Greg? For Addison? There was nothing else for him here—nothing else! And so, fuck it, Addison was going to claim the poem. Tess had read it and thought of him, she had impulsively torn it out of the magazine to give to him or recite to him over the phone. He was fooling himself, maybe, but he was keeping the poem.

He rinsed his glass and tucked the bottle of Jack under his arm. As he was walking out of the house, he realized he hadn’t found the present Phoebe had given to Tess.

What was it?

O
n the fifteenth of July, the corn was ready. It had been the perfect growing season; everything was ahead and bountiful. The strawberries were finished now, but the crop had been legendary; the squash and zucchini and cukes were runaways, multiplying faster than rabbits.

And on July 15, corn. The earliest ready date in twenty-five years. Jeffrey almost didn’t believe it, but he peeled the husks back on ten ears of butter and sugar, all of them pearly and mature, bursting, ready to go. He tasted them raw. Sweet. He sent pickers out and went upstairs to his office to notify his accounts—thirty-two accounts on Nantucket alone, and another dozen on the Cape. There were local farms on the Cape, but many places preferred his corn, grown thirty miles out to sea in that sandy soil. There was something about it.

Jeffrey’s office was above the retail space of the farm market. It was, properly, the attic. It had open studs on a wicked slanted ceiling and it was hotter than hell, despite the efforts of strategically positioned fans. The sun beat down on the roof and Jeffrey was directly underneath. This kept it toasty warm in winter, but it was a frying pan today, July 15, the official first day of corn.

“Whew!” he said aloud when he reached the top of the stairs. To no one, because Jeffrey’s office was his and his alone. He worked without an assistant, and everyone else—the farm market manager, the marketing person, the head chef, the buyer—all had offices on the first floor, which was air-conditioned. Jeffrey had segregated himself on purpose because he was a serious person who savored silence and his privacy.

It was beastly hot. There was sweat in his eyes. He pulled a bandanna out of his back jeans pocket (yes, a real red bandanna—Delilah teased him, but he didn’t care) and wiped his face.

There was someone sitting in his chair. Andrea.

He was speechless. But not surprised. Somehow he’d expected her. The other day he’d spied a beat-up black Jeep Wrangler in the parking lot and his heart had sung out a short, sweet tune because he thought it was Andrea’s—but then he realized that Andrea no longer drove a Jeep. She hadn’t driven one in over fifteen years. He was losing his mind.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey, Peach,” she said. She was wearing a white T-shirt and jean shorts. Her dark hair was in a ponytail. There were flip-flops on the floor, but her bare feet were tucked under her bare, tanned legs. Andrea’s legs were her best feature; they were very strong, taut, powerful. They weren’t sexy to look at, maybe, but they were sexy for sex—she used to tense and kick and fight him off. He remembered this instantly and it embarrassed him, and then he thought about how her showing up here in this dim, sultry room was like the beginning of one of the porn movies Delilah tried to get him to watch to spice up their sex life. He felt a surge of energy. Entirely inappropriate. He forgot all about the corn.