The Castaways (24 page)

She was sitting in his chair, so there was nothing for him to do but stand. But he couldn’t stand. It was too hot and he was too rattled by this unexpected visit. He pulled a milk crate out of the shadowy eaves, flipped it over, and sat down at her feet.

They had been a couple for twenty-six months. From May of 1990 until July of 1992. They had met on the steamship on a chilly, miserable, slate-gray day. They had each bought a discolored, overcooked hot dog at the snack bar and were standing together at the ketchup dispenser as the boat lurched like a drunk through the chop. Jeffrey was feeling a little green; he was a man of the land, not the water. He thought maybe his stomach needed food, hence the hot dog, but the ketchup managed to make the hot dog seem less appetizing instead of more. He smiled weakly at Andrea. She was beautiful, raven-haired, robust, surefooted even as the boat rocked. She was confident, a queen. She regally inhaled her hot dog before Jeffrey could even wrap his properly in a napkin.

“Is it your first time on this boat?” she asked. She seemed genuinely concerned for him. He must have looked as bad as he felt.

He nodded. He handed Andrea his hot dog, staggered to the men’s room, and vomited in the toilet.

When he emerged, she was sitting on a bench holding his hot dog gently, like it was a child in her custody.

“You want?” she said.

He shook his head and discreetly (he thought) sucked on a Life Saver.

She said, “Okay if I eat it?”

He nodded.

She said, “Do you talk?”

He whispered, “I do
not
feel well.”

She beamed at him. “You
do
talk!”

He was an ag student, newly graduated from Cornell. She was three years out of BC, a championship swimmer, and this summer she was to be Nantucket’s head lifeguard. It was her third summer on the island. Jeffrey had a deed to a farm left to him by his grandmother’s unmarried half-brother—a great-uncle he hadn’t seen in years.

“I thought that kind of thing only happened in the movies,” Andrea said.

“Me, too,” Jeffrey said. The deed to the farm from Uncle Ted had come as a whopping surprise. Jeffrey’s parents had been astounded. Ted Korkoran had been the only son of Jeffrey’s great-grandfather’s second wife; Ted was a bit of a black sheep, declaring himself homosexual and as such escaping duty in World War II. He moved from Fredonia to Nantucket in 1950. He and his partner, Caleb Mills, bought a farm and worked it together. They had cows that supplied 70 percent of the island’s milk, they had chickens for eggs, pigs for bacon and ham. They slaughtered turkeys at Thanksgiving, and made their own goat cheese long before the public had cultivated a taste for it. Jeffrey had heard these stories from his grandmother, and Jeffrey would see Uncle Ted and his friend Caleb every summer at the Korkoran family reunions, Ted and Caleb as sober and grouchy and properly masculine as all the rest of the Korkoran men. But then Caleb got mysteriously sick and died—this was in the mid-eighties, and it was all kept very quiet—and Uncle Ted stopped attending the reunions. And then, five years later, Uncle Ted died and left his farm to Jeffrey. No one could figure out why. All Jeffrey remembered were Caleb’s recipe for baked beans with brown sugar and Uncle Ted’s dead eye in horseshoes. Ted had left Jeffrey the farm because he received a Christmas card from Jeffrey’s mother every year. He knew Jeffrey was an ag student at Cornell, a farmer-to-be in need of a farm.

And here was a farm.

Andrea listened as she polished off the second hot dog, and then a soft pretzel dripping with yellow mustard. She had been an English major at BC; she loved sprawling family sagas. She came from a large and storied Roman Catholic background herself, complete with closeted priests and nuns living in the basement and undercover cops and Mafia ties.

“And when you get a free century,” she said, “I’ll tell you all about it.”

Meeting Andrea had been all bundled up with Jeffrey’s meeting Nantucket. He set eyes on the quaint gray-shingled town first, then took in the scope of the farm that was now his. A hundred and sixty-two acres of fields—his! A greenhouse and barn, tractors, combines, plows—his! A dilapidated little house that had not been cleaned out and hence still contained the day-to-day detritus of a lonely bachelor. Andrea was there with him when he first set foot in Uncle Ted’s house. She saw the dishes in the rack by the kitchen sink, the pie-crust table that supported a rotary phone and the King James Bible, the two single beds side by side in the house’s only bedroom. On the bedside table was a photograph of Ted and Caleb in front of the barn, holding chickens in their arms like babies. Andrea was there because she decided before the steamship even docked that Jeffrey needed her help. What he was doing—seeing the farm for the first time, taking inventory, and uncovering the life of the man who had left it to him—was not something he should do without a friend.

She was right. She helped him find someone to clean out the house, she showed him where the Town Building was so he could register the deed in his name, she drove him around in her black Jeep with the top down, even though Nantucket in May was cold and windy and rainy. (Did anything grow here? Jeffrey had to wonder. Maybe the farm was a joke.) She took him for chowder and steamed lobsters and scallops wrapped in bacon. She let him crash on the floor of her room in the rental house that she shared with two other lifeguards. And then, after a full week of this platonic, almost sisterly help, she invited him into her bed and took his virginity.

Because, yes, Jeffrey had been a virgin at twenty-two. Owing to his girlfriend Felicity Hammer’s love of Jesus and her refusal to make love to him until the day they were married.

Andrea was different from Felicity in every way. Andrea was strong and athletic and dark-haired and capable and Italian and Catholic and confident of her many talents and charms. Felicity was blond and petite and meek and easily frightened; she was shy and God-fearing, she was a small-town Baptist whose father had sent her to community college. She was a baker and a knitter. She wanted six children. Felicity had thought that once Jeffrey got settled with the farm, he would send for her and they would get married.

But meeting Andrea at the ketchup dispenser changed that. Andrea was a storm, a force of nature. He could not resist her any more than he could stop the rain. They fell in love. In October they moved in to the tiny farmhouse, now clean, cozy, and all fixed up. They made love, they made pasta, they made curtains for the windows. Jeffrey made a plan for the farm. He got rid of all the livestock except for the chickens. Chickens and eggs he could handle; everything else was too expensive and beyond the perimeters of his expertise. He wanted to grow things: corn, vegetables, flowers. He had no money. He went to the bank for a loan way beyond what he would be able to pay back in this lifetime, but they gave him the money eagerly, with the land as collateral. Andrea got a job teaching private swim lessons at the community pool.

They were happy. They talked about getting married. They talked about kids. They ate a lot of eggs. They had nicknames for each other. He called her Andy. She called him Peach, which had something to do with sex—how he tasted, or the fact that he’d been a virgin until she took a bite out of him.

Life was weird, right? It was weird because Jeffrey and Andrea had been happy, they had been a couple on their way to matrimony and wedded bliss, until somehow it unraveled. As though a sweater had a snag and he pulled at it, or she did, and one by one the stitches came undone until it was a pile of yarn at their feet. Jeffrey was obsessed with the farm, consumed by it; he could not give Andrea his full attention, he could not give her any attention. She complained, he heard her complaining, but he could do nothing about it. He was single-minded, he always had been, and his mind was on the farm, the fields, the crops, the business of it.

At the beginning of their third summer together, Andrea, once again Nantucket’s head lifeguard, went to a party for town employees, where she met the new police chief. Young guy, she said. Single. From Swampscott.

And two weeks later she moved out.

In all honesty, Jeffrey was too busy to do anything to stop her. By the time he got off his goddamn tractor in the figurative sense, Andrea and the new police chief, Ed Kapenash, were engaged.

Life was weird, because instead of Jeffrey’s relationship with Andrea ending, it started a new incarnation. At first Jeffrey was tentatively friends with the newlywed Kapenashes; then Jeffrey met Delilah and they became couple-friends with Ed and Andrea. Andrea’s cousin Tess started dating Greg, and they moved to the island permanently, then Phoebe and Addison joined the scene and the eight of them, over time, developed an insanely tight bond. What did Delilah call them? The Castaways. And it did, at times, seem like just the eight of them alone on a deserted island.

Life was weird because although Jeffrey had seen Andrea every week for nearly twenty years, seeing her now sitting in his chair was sort of like seeing her for the first time. On a rolling boat, by the ketchup dispenser.
You do talk!
It was as if he’d looked up, finally, after getting the farm running, profitable, and fully staffed, and noticed that she was gone. And he went looking for her. And he found her here, in his chair. Because there was something about her that transported him back. The nickname, Peach. Or the way it was just the two of them here, alone, unlikely to be interrupted. (Had that happened even once since they split?) Or it was the way she was looking at him.

“What are you doing here?” he asked her.

She said, “I’m having a hard time.”

He said, “She worshipped you, Andrea. You were her friend and her sister and her mother wrapped up into one. You did right by her.”

Her tears were silent. “How can you say that? She’s dead.”

“It was an accident.”

“Was it?”

“Wasn’t it?” Jeffrey said. He shifted on the milk crate. He had a nugget of classified information that no one else knew, that had been lobbed at him like a hand grenade by April Peck.
I was with him the night before he died.
But what did that mean? Did it mean anything? Was it even true? (In his heart, Jeffrey felt it was true. He realized now that Greg had been hiding something.) One thing was for sure: Jeffrey was not going to share this radioactive nugget with Andrea.

“I don’t know,” Andrea said. “All I can tell you is that I’m in agony. I am hurting worse than I could ever imagine I could hurt. Like I lost one of the kids. Like a stranger came into my house and held Kacy’s head under the bathwater until she died. And I wasn’t around. I let it happen.”

“Greg was the stranger?” Jeffrey said. “He was Tess’s husband. Twelve years they were married.”

“He made her miserable.”

“Did he?” Jeffrey said. Jeffrey’s understanding of Greg and Tess’s marriage—before April Peck—was that Tess had loved Greg with the same ardor and enthusiasm that she loved everyone else in her life. “So you wish you’d… what? Spoken up at their wedding, when the priest offered the chance?”

“He hurt her,” Andrea said. “Last fall, that whole thing? He cut her heart out. And she was never the same. The week they separated? God, Jeffrey. We talked for hours. She was trying to make sense of it.
Do you think he lied to me? Do you think he lied to Flanders? Do you think something happened between him and that girl?
And the answer is, Yes, of course.
Something
happened, we don’t know what, we’ll never know exactly what. And there’s Greg, sending flowers and hounding her cell phone and calling the house begging and pleading…”

“Yeah,” Jeffrey said. “That was a weird week.”

While Tess was at the Kapenash house with the twins, Greg had taken refuge at Jeffrey and Delilah’s. It was, of all awful things, the week of Thanksgiving, the holiest family holiday, but despite that, or maybe because of that, Tess decided to take the kids and leave. She had meant to go to her brother’s house in Pembroke, to visit her mother at the nursing home in Duxbury, but in the end she had simply sought refuge with Andrea. She slept with Andrea in Andrea’s bed and the kids slept in the guest room. And Greg, although he had his house to himself, slept on Jeffrey and Delilah’s leather couch each night. He never stayed over intentionally—otherwise he would have used the guest room. He came over for dinner and drinks, and he and Delilah stayed up so late talking and he was so drunk that he ended up crashing on the couch. And in the morning he would be awakened by Drew and Barney and SpongeBob SquarePants. He would eat Delilah’s delicious breakfasts, talk about going home to grab a shower, but then there would be college football and lunch and Barney begging him to play the guitar… and he just stayed on and on. A few of those nights, Greg and Delilah worked at the Begonia and came home absurdly late. Jeffrey was busy at the farm market—the kitchen had orders for three hundred fresh turkeys and six times that many side dishes—and if he didn’t catch every nuanced detail of what was going on, could anyone blame him? Delilah was the head paramedic of this particular train wreck; she was in charge of tending to Greg. Jeffrey noted Greg’s attempts to reach Tess, but she was not taking his calls. He heard about a bouquet of flowers sent, and returned to the florist by Tess. Jeffrey wasn’t sure how he felt about the whole thing; what he wanted was to stay out of it. This was, no doubt, what the Chief was doing, and this was what Addison and Phoebe were doing. The prizefight was between Tess (and her trainer, Andrea) and Greg (and his trainer, Delilah) in the opposite corner. Jeffrey did not love it that his house had inadvertently become Greg’s camp; he felt like he was harboring a fugitive.

There had been one night in particular that bothered Jeffrey. It was four-thirty in the morning and Jeffrey was rising for the day when he noticed that Delilah was not in bed. He tiptoed out to the kitchen for coffee and he heard Greg’s voice. Greg was murmuring to someone. Although Jeffrey was the last person to eavesdrop, he couldn’t help it—and goddamn it, this was his house. Jeffrey thought,
If he is talking to Delilah like that, I am going to throw him out.
Because, really, Jeffrey had had enough of the Greg and Delilah confidante thing. Greg was not good for Delilah, or for Jeffrey and Delilah’s marriage.