The Castaways (25 page)

But when Jeffrey reached the kitchen, he saw that Greg was on his cell phone. Greg noticed Jeffrey and said quickly, “I’ll call you later.” And hung up. And then, despite the fact that Greg had seen Jeffrey and Jeffrey had seen Greg, Greg closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep.

Delilah, as it turned out, was upstairs sleeping with Barney, who tended to wake up in the middle of the night and want his mother.

Jeffrey did not say anything to Greg about the phone call, but he knew it wasn’t Tess on the other end.

Then there was Thanksgiving itself. Tess had ceded a little ground and allowed Greg to see the kids in the morning. Greg had hoped for a family reconciliation for the holiday, and learning that he was only gaining custody for four hours like the divorced man he was sure to become depressed him. He had nothing planned. Delilah suggested that he take the kids to breakfast at the Downyflake, or for a walk on the beach, but Greg seemed eager to avoid quality time when the twins might have a chance to ask him questions he was ill-equipped to answer, such as
Why is Mom so mad at you?
or
Why are we living at Auntie’s house?

Instead Greg took the twins over to the Drake house, and this, in combination with the overheard phone call, led Jeffrey to understand that Greg was lost, hapless, and in possession of the maturity of a twelve-year-old boy. Jeffrey therefore took over. He rescued the kids from the PlayStation by driving everyone to the farm, where they went for a hayride. Jeffrey drove the tractor, and Delilah and Greg sat in the back with the kids. The kids liked the bumps, and Jeffrey obliged them. The day was sunny but cold. Jeffrey took the long way, all the way around the edge of the property. Time and circumstances were suspended. Everyone had fun, and at the end of the ride they drank apple cider and ate moist pumpkin muffins, and then suddenly it was one o’clock. Delilah had to get home to check on the turkey, and Greg had to get the kids back to the Kapenash house.

Normally the eight of them, plus the six kids, had Thanksgiving dinner together, and Delilah and Andrea alternated years hosting. This year it felt like they had all divorced. The Chief and Andrea had Tess and the kids. Jeffrey and Delilah had Greg. Phoebe and Addison, not wanting to take sides, went to the Ship’s Inn by themselves. It felt awful. Jeffrey, Delilah, Greg, and Drew and Barney held hands around the table and said grace, but when they looked up, they could see how wrong everything was. Jeffrey thought about Ed and Andrea’s table, with Eric and Kacy and Tess and the twins, and he wondered if things felt wrong there, too. He hoped they did.

Jeffrey never found out how or why, but by Sunday night Greg and Tess were back at home with the kids. Four weeks later, the eight of them were on vacation in Stowe and everything was back to normal. Tess had forgiven Greg, forgotten April Peck, and moved on.

Now Andrea was taking the credit for this—or the blame.

“I convinced Tess to take him back. For the kids’ sake. Ed and I both thought that was the best thing.”

“It was the best thing,” Jeffrey said.

“How can you say that?” Andrea said. She was shaking and crying. Her face was wet with tears. Jeffrey wanted to reach out to her, to hold her. He had lost her so long ago, when he wasn’t watching, and although it was his fault completely, it had never seemed fair. Now she was back. She needed something and he would try like hell to give it to her. “How can you say that when she’s dead?”

“Remember when Tess came to visit us?” Jeffrey said. “And she borrowed my bike?”

Andrea wiped at her tears. “And she insisted on riding it barefoot? And she fell and—”

“Broke her arm,” Jeffrey said.

“But we didn’t believe her,” Andrea said. “We didn’t believe her when she said how much it hurt. We made her go to the movies.”

“And we saw
The Player.
”

“And it was the best movie of all time.”

“And we couldn’t figure out why Tess was crying at the end…”

“And it was because of her arm.”

“We took her to the hospital,” Jeffrey said. “You stayed by her side while they X-rayed her and set it.”

“You stayed in the waiting room,” Andrea said. “And fell asleep across four chairs.”

“I felt so guilty,” Jeffrey said. “It was my bike.”

“I felt so guilty,” Andrea said. “She told me her arm was broken and I gave her some Advil and told her to toughen up.”

“We made her sit through that movie.”

Andrea was quiet. She stared at her legs. Her strong, beautiful legs that had nearly gotten her to the Olympics, that had locked around him when they were making love. This was the pornography of grief—going back and remembering a moment in a dead person’s life, step by step. So few people were willing to comb back through it like this, because it was too intimate or too painful or it wouldn’t help anything, it wouldn’t bring the person back. But this, perhaps, was what Andrea needed. Let Tess live in the minute detail of their memories. Jeffrey could see Tess’s teenaged face, as plain as day. He could see her bare toes on the spiky pedals of his Cannondale.

“Thank you, Peach,” Andrea said, as she stood up to go. “Thank you.”

Jeffrey was at a loss, because of both her arrival and her departure. “You’re welcome.”

Andrea continued to appear in Jeffrey’s office. Jeffrey never knew when she would show; she didn’t call or forewarn. He would climb the stairs to the attic, and there she would be, sitting in his chair. She always came in the morning, after she dropped off the twins at camp. Jeffrey started to anticipate her visits and look forward to them; on days she didn’t come, he felt let down. He worried, stupidly, that he would never see her again.

He had stumbled across what she wanted. She wanted someone else to remember Tess, to miss Tess, to tell stories about Tess. She wanted a partner in her grief. Not a sympathetic listener—any poor motherfucker could listen. She needed someone to share the burden, to do the talking and remembering for her. No one wanted to do this.

There were certain ways in which Jeffrey didn’t want to do this either. Or couldn’t do it. How much attention had he really given Tess, after all? But he would try, for Andrea.

He was methodical in all things, and so in this endeavor he moved chronologically. The broken arm story led to the story of Tess’s first beer. Tess’s first true, cold beer had been consumed at a bonfire on Ladies Beach under the careful, almost parental watch of Jeffrey and Andrea. A Coors Light in a frosty silver can. Tess’s arm was in a sling, her drinking arm, her everything arm. Jeffrey had to open the can for her and put it in her left hand.

“Had she asked for a beer?” Jeffrey said. “Or did we force it on her?”

“She asked for it,” Andrea said.

Jeffrey did not remember it that way. He remembered that they had packed a cooler for a beach barbecue, and when they opened the cooler, they found they had nothing to drink
except
beer. They weren’t used to hanging out with teenagers. He remembered saying to Tess,
Looks like it’s beer or ocean water.

Andrea covered her eyes. “Oh, God,” she said. “You’re right.”

“And she drank the whole thing down right away and let out that burp they could hear in Portugal.”

“Yes!” Andrea said. She was most delighted by the details she had forgotten. “And we gave her another one and another one and another one.”

“She drank five,” Jeffrey said. “And then she—”

“Puked in the dunes,” Andrea said.

“And we took her home and she passed out on the bathroom floor. And when she woke up in the morning, there were tile marks on her face.”

“Yes!” Andrea shouted. She put her hands up in the air. He had scored again.

“And you made her sign that slip of paper,” Jeffrey said.

“Promising she wouldn’t tell my aunt and uncle,” Andrea said. She was laughing, then crying. Sweetly weeping. “Thank you, Peach,” she said. “Goddamn it, thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” he said.

How about the night Tess met Greg? Could Andrea handle that one? She looked dubious, but Jeffrey pointed out that he wasn’t going to be able to tell stories for very long if he couldn’t mention Greg.

“Okay,” she said. Then she cocked her head. “Wait a minute. You weren’t even there that night.”

“I still know the story. I’ve heard it a hundred times. Do you want me to tell it or not?”

“Tell it.”

Girls’ night out, summer 1995. Andrea, Tess, Delilah, Lisa Shumacher, who waitressed with Tess at the RopeWalk that summer, and Karin Poleman, who had taken over the head lifeguard position from Andrea when Andrea got pregnant with Kacy. The girls went to dinner at the Boarding House, they went for drinks at 21 Federal, drinks at the Club Car, drinks at the RopeWalk, where Lisa and Tess, on their night off, were treated like royalty and plied with tequila shots. Then, finally, they went to the Muse to hear this band everyone was talking about called the Velociraptors.

The Velociraptors were five guys who had done a PG year together at the Berkshire School and who had then done separate tours of duty at egregiously preppy colleges like Colgate and Bates and Middlebury, and who had reunited on Nantucket. Greg MacAvoy (Hamilton College) was the lead singer. He was twenty-three years old, he jogged and surfed and lifted weights, he wore a white rope bracelet and a shark’s tooth on a leather choker, he sang while holding a Corona, he sang with his hair in his eyes. He sang “Loving Cup” by the Stones and “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker” by the Ramones, he sang “The Core” by Eric Clap-ton with a hot redhead who tended bar and only came up onstage for that one song. It was well documented that Greg MacAvoy, currently of the Velociraptors (formerly of the garage bands the Porn Stars and Eklipse), could have any woman he wanted. The band house behind the Muse, where the Velociraptors had pretty much taken up residence (though the drummer Beckett Steed’s parents owned a house in Sconset where they technically lived), had a throng of girls teeming around it every night after-hours, like bacteria around a fresh cut. What happened in the band house? Well, pretty much what you’d expect.

On the night in question, Tess was drunk.

“We were all drunk,” Andrea chimed in.

Tess was wearing jeans, flip-flops, a white T-shirt, a green bandanna in her hair, and dangly silver earrings. She and the rest of the girls were dancing right up front; their beers were sitting on the edge of the stage, next to the amplifiers. With all the girls on the dance floor and the promise of yet more girls banging down the door of the band house, what was it about Tess that caught Greg’s attention? The green bandanna? The sparkling earrings? The freckles on her nose or her big blue eyes or her tiny feet with nails painted a color called Cherry Pie?

She knew
all
the words to “Low Spark of High Heeled Boys.” He noticed that. He smiled at her, winked at her. At the break, he said to his bass player, “Hey, that little Gidget girl is hot.” He dispatched a roadie to speak to her.

“Greg wants to know if you’ll join him in the band house later.”

Roadie asked Tess this in front of all the girls. Roadie offered Tess a cold Corona, a present from Greg. The girls stared, speechless.

Tess said, “The band house? No way.”

Delilah said, “Are you crazy? Every woman on Nantucket wants that guy.”

But Andrea approved of Tess’s answer. Andrea had a baby and a two-year-old at home; she was mother superior. She was drinking and having fun like the rest of them—more than the rest of them—but she did not want to see her beloved younger cousin, Tess, disappear into the opium den/syphilis shack that was the band house.

Tess said no, and Greg was fired up. The hunt was on!

“What did he do to get her?” Andrea scanned Jeffrey’s desk for a piece of paper. She wanted to make a list.

“He tried to find out her last name,” Jeffrey said.

“Failed,” Andrea said.

“He tried to get her phone number.”

“Failed.”

“But then someone told him where she waitressed…”

“He showed up at the RopeWalk with flowers.”

“Didn’t work.”

“The next time he showed up with that CD he made her. With ‘Romeo and Juliet’ by Dire Straits on it.”

“Didn’t work.”

“He ordered the lobster dinner to impress her.”

“It was just like Greg to be so misguided,” Andrea said. “Ordering the lobster was not impressive.”

He asked her out each and every time. Where did she want to go? The Chanticleer? The Wauwinet? Beckett Steed’s parents had a Boston Whaler. Did she want to go out on the Whaler?

“She told him she was afraid of the water,” Andrea said quietly.

Did she want to go on a picnic? Would she meet him for breakfast? Coffee?

He showed up at her yoga class; he did all the positions, hoping she was watching him in her peripheral vision. He waited for her by the water cooler, but she breezed past him.

“He borrowed a dog,” Andrea said. “That golden retriever.”

Jeffrey shook his head. “Jesus. I forgot about the dog.”

“She almost fell for it,” Andrea said. “But when she found out it wasn’t his, it set him back.”

“So what was it, in the end?” Jeffrey said. The Greg-in-pursuit-of-Tess story was in fact a well-documented and much-laughed-about legend, and the first-night-at-the-Muse story could easily be told by people (like himself) who hadn’t even been there. But what had flipped her? What had changed her mind? Jeffrey couldn’t remember, or didn’t know.

“I gave her permission,” Andrea said. “I told her the guy clearly deserved a chance, he was going to so much trouble. I told her it was okay to relent. To say yes. And that was all she needed. She did.”

“Oh,” Jeffrey said.

“Thank you, Peach.”

Jeffrey nodded. “You’re welcome.”

He did not tell anyone about Andrea’s visits or about the recounting of Tess’s life in obscene detail. Meaning he did not tell Delilah. This was unprecedented, because one of Jeffrey’s hallmark qualities was that he was an open book. His accounts were honest, his slate clean. He hid nothing; he had no secrets. He prided himself on operating this way; he felt it gave him the upper hand. Delilah had secrets; she had hundreds of hours unaccounted for that fell under the category of “time to myself” and was therefore unimpeachable. She was always hiding something, covering up, making excuses. It was exhausting to live that way; Jeffrey could see the toll it took on her, harboring an entire emotional life she refused to share with him.