The Castaways (32 page)

Nine o’clock! At home they would have eaten pot roast at five-thirty, been finished and cleaned up by six, had the kids in bed with stories by six-thirty, and been back down with the dishwasher churning at seven, while outside snow piled up or the wind screamed like a woman in agony. Some nights they watched reruns of
The Sopranos,
some nights they rented movies, some nights they crawled into bed at seven-thirty with the latest David McCullough tome and fell asleep after ten pages. Some nights they cleaved to each other and made love despite being weighed down by the layers of flannel, chenille, and goose down. Every night, save for the ones when they gathered at the Begonia, they were fast asleep by nine o’clock.

But not in South Beach! In South Beach they arrived at the threshold of the restaurant at nine o’clock and were escorted to their table, where they sat, without deviation, in this order: Phoebe, Addison, Tess, Greg, Delilah, Jeffrey, Andrea, the Chief. They were a strand of
DNA
, repeated, then repeated again. They ate things like sushi and soft-shell crabs in a Meyer lemon reduction, and they shared desserts with passion-fruit foam and honeycombed pineapple. They drank wine at dinner and ended with shots of Sambuca or sips of tequila. And then, feeling happy-happyhappy and
ready to go,
they cabbed it to a nightclub. At the first nightclub,
BED
, the doorman had their names on a list, provided by Genevieve, and they were whisked past the waiting mob (made up mostly of teenagers, Jeffrey noticed; truly, to fit in in South Beach, they needed to be twenty years younger). They were shown to an alcove with two cocktail tables pushed together and four ultrasuede cubes where they could sit, should they want to sit.

They looked out over the dance floor, at more gorgeous Europeans lounging on round beds in the midst of a sea of gyrating young bodies.

Jeffrey ordered a bottle of champagne and a bottle of Grey Goose and tonic and lemons. A beer for the Chief (twenty dollars) and four bottles of Icelandic water. They came with a dish of salted cashews, presumably complimentary, delivered by their preternaturally beautiful (though scowling) cocktail waitress. She poured everyone a drink with disdain. (She knew their type--married thirty- and forty-somethings, probably with a stable of kids back home, wherever they lived, Peoria or East Bumblefuck, Idaho.) Jeffrey took a sip of his ice-cold vodka tonic with a twist and declared it an elixir of youth. He was ready to dance.

They let loose in a wild, free, sexual way. Jeffrey had never moved his body like this in public. There had been some crazy parties at Cornell, of course, but this was elemental, tribal, it was a trip to the moon. Jeffrey was released. Was he thirty-eight? The father of two small boys? The owner of a hundred and sixty-two acres of permafrosted land? It didn’t matter. He took off his jacket, slid off his tie, unbuttoned his shirt. He was sweating, he was breathless, he was dancing, he was living!

And he was not alone. There, like satellite planets coming in and out of his orbit, were Greg, Phoebe, Delilah, the Chief, Tess—and a guy Jeffrey didn’t recognize, an interloper who was getting awfully close to Phoebe. Jeffrey was aware of this much, and he was about to ask the guy to step back. Phoebe could not be counted upon to protect her own airspace; she seemed not even to notice this guy.

Then Jeffrey realized the interloper was Addison without his glasses. He had taken his glasses off, he was sweating too profusely, they would slip off, the dancing was so wild, they would fall off. The reason the interloper kept bumping into people was because it was Addison, the sight-impaired. He could not see a damn thing without his glasses, and Jeffrey wondered what it felt like to be dancing in a blur of bodies, to be reliant on sound, smell, touch. Jeffrey wanted to be Addison.

Just then a cry went up and Jeffrey was nudged in the ribs. He turned. It was the Chief, pointing. Across the dance floor there was an elevated stage with two poles. There were two women dancing, three women, four women.

“Look at the girls!” the Chief shouted.

The girls, the women—Delilah, Phoebe, Tess, and Andrea—were all up onstage, spinning around poles, lifting their legs, throwing their heads back. Phoebe was the most beautiful of the four women, and the best dressed, in a short go-go number of red-and-orange fringe. But she was the weakest dancer—spaced out, she was a cross between a Deadhead and bad Twyla Tharp. Tess was adorable and Gidgety in her white pants and navy striped nautical top; she had been born to do the twist. These two used their good judgment and hopped down from the stage into the arms of the strapping black bouncers. This left Delilah and Andrea. Jeffrey—and everyone else on the dance floor—was mesmerized. They danced separately with their poles in a surprisingly erotic way (okay, Delilah had watched a lot of
Sopranos
episodes this winter, but where had Andrea learned to pole-dance?). Then they came together in a sensual, crowd-pleasing moment, and Jeffrey felt aroused, then disturbed. The only two women he’d ever made love to—well, it was powerful to see them together like that.

They kissed once, briefly but passionately, and Jeffrey’s heart stopped, went into free-fall, then started again, pounding in sync with the bass. The Chief whistled, then pounded Jeffrey on the back.

“Look at our girls!” The Chief’s tone of voice said it all: this was enough fantasy to last him the rest of his life!

As for Jeffrey, well, what was he to think? How to process this? The only two women he had ever loved had kissed each other. Jeffrey’s past and his present, his present and his future… he wasn’t sure what was going on inside him.

Addison said, “What just happened?”

He couldn’t see. He’d missed it!

Jeffrey kept dancing. He spun around, he put his hands in the air. Those were his women, this was his entourage. They either fit in or stuck out, he was either not himself or more himself than he’d ever been before. He was hot and more than hot, he was warm, finally warm. This had been his idea. His idea! He was in heaven. They all were.

A
re you going to tell him? Are you going to tell him you love me?

I’m afraid.

I’m afraid you won’t get it.

The $9.2 million deal closed without a hitch, and Wheeler Realty received a check for $368,000, half of which went into Addison’s pocket. Normally this would have been cause for celebration (corporate and personal), but Addison was distracted.

What to do with Tess’s cell phone?

He had flat-out lied to the Chief. Addison was by no means an honest person—he was a real estate agent, after all, prone to stretching the truth, and he had for six months concealed his affair with Tess. But something about looking Ed Kapenash in the eye and flat-out lying about Tess’s phone instilled fear and shame.

Should Addison come clean? Tell Ed that yes, he had the phone? Show Ed the text messages? Tess was afraid—of the water, of Greg, of something more nebulous? There was no way to figure out what had happened on the boat. The Chief had one idea; Addison had another. Should Addison confess to the affair? What would that help? It would help nothing, he decided. It would only hurt.

Addison tucked Tess’s iPhone in the top drawer of his desk, which locked with a key. Addison had one key and Florabel had a spare key swimming in the ashtray where she kept paper clips, rubber bands, and safety pins. The Chief would never find Tess’s phone in Addison’s top drawer, though it was the obvious first place to look. Should Addison move it? Take it home or put it in his car? The skin on the phone was traffic-light yellow, bright as an alarm, impossible to miss. Would Phoebe find it?

He pulled the two pieces of the felt heart from his pocket. He was not only emotionally feeble, but mentally feeble as well. He believed that this heart had power, that it meant something. As he handled it, it ripped again. The heart was disintegrating. Was this a sign? Addison could not accept it as a sign.

Florabel loomed over his desk. She eyed the torn, misshapen pieces of heart on his desk.

“What is that?” She sounded disgusted, as if they were pieces of pig heart.

“Nothing,” he said.

“You need to pull yourself together, Dealer,” Florabel said. As ever, the woman was speaking the brutal truth. She slapped a whopper of a check down on his desk, covering the scraps of felt. “There’s some money. Go get yourself a shrink.”

T
houghts of escape occupied her at all times, the way some people, she supposed, fantasized about sex with Robert Downey Jr., or winning the lottery and buying a power yacht, or being selected for
American Idol
. Freedom had always been Delilah’s drug of choice, and now, who could blame her? Tess and Greg were dead, everything was painful; even breathing hurt. Delilah dreamed about living alone in the South of France, riding a funny European bicycle down a path cut between fields of lavender toward a charming village where she would buy a baguette and runny Camembert and a bottle of wine that would aid her quest to block out everything that came before—her life on Nantucket, her friends, her husband, her children.

She used to love a crowd, she used to demand the company of others, but now she wanted only to be alone.

And even that wasn’t quite true. She couldn’t stand herself. She wanted to unzip her body and step out of it. She wanted to be attached to a machine that would erase her memory, obliterate her guilt, wipe her clean.

She had run away once before, in high school. There had been no reason for it other than boredom, a standard-issue teenage restlessness, and a desire to see what other possibilities the world contained. Delilah had had a pleasant childhood and a less-pleasant-but-still-okay adolescence, growing up in South Haven, on the shores of Lake Michigan. Delilah’s father, Nico Ashby, was a real estate developer, responsible for the burgeoning suburban sprawl in the acreage just off the lake. He brought South Haven Taco Bell, Blockbuster, I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt, Lucky Nail Salon, Subway, Stride Rite Shoes, and Mailboxes, Etc. He also had his hand in the bigger, uglier, more egregious development along Route 31 toward St. Joe’s—the Wal-Mart with its attendant Big Boy Diner, the Staples, the eighteen-theater Cineplex, the Applebee’s, the Borders. Nico Ashby and his wife and two daughters lived in a stunning Victorian house on the bluff that overlooked the town harbor and the South Haven Yacht Club (where Nico had been president for nine years). Nico was a local hero—a successful businessman, a philanthropist, a member of Rotary and the Lions Club, a model husband and father, a big, good-looking guy with a full head of dark hair, a bronze tan in three seasons, and a booming laugh. Nico Ashby—everyone knew him, everyone liked him.

Delilah’s mother, Connie Ashby, nee Albertson, was short, dark-haired, trim, pretty, and obsessed with the following things: her person (exercising, hair, skin, nails, and clothes, clothes, clothes), her daughters (bake sales, Girl Scouts, summer camp, decorating for school dances), and her husband. She met Nico at Michigan State; he was a starting linebacker, she was a cheerleader, petite enough to serve as the top of the human pyramid, the cherry on the ice-cream sundae. And yes, these people really got married. They were beautiful and blessed, they were successful, they had gorgeous, healthy daughters.

Delilah was loved and encouraged. She was brilliant in school, a fact that made her parents proud, but Delilah’s precocity also allowed her the time and leeway to goof off. Delilah, as a teenager, was not beautiful. Her hair was too wild and curly; she wore braces for years. She had huge breasts and the rear end to counterbalance it. She was
voluptuous,
her mother said, but Connie Ashby weighed ninety pounds soaking wet (as did Delilah’s sister, Caitlin), and it was clear that having a voluptuous daughter perplexed her.

Boys did not love Delilah, but they liked her. Her best friends were all boys, the best-looking boys in her class—the athletes, the dope smokers, the clowns. They liked her whip-smart sense of humor, her sense of freedom. Delilah Ashby was not afraid of anyone.

She ran away in early May, when the periphery of the lake was blooming with dogwoods and azaleas. The Ashby family had just gotten back from a week in Fort Lauderdale, where Delilah had looked upon the university students on spring break with envy. Freedom! She dreamed of a highway with no one on it, a deserted stretch of beach, an endless ribbon of blue sea, a grid of city blocks where no one knew her name and no one expected her to show up for lacrosse practice or memorize theorems or sit down to dinner at six and contribute to the conversation. Delilah itched, she could not sleep, the house was suffocating her. School and the kids in it—even Dean Markbury, whom she loved with the ferocity of a lion—were slowly killing her with their predictable sameness. She had to get out.

She needed money. She had saved seven hundred dollars from baby-sitting, and over the course of four days she stole. She stole from her father’s wallet, from her mother’s stash for tipping the manicurist, from petty cash in the kitchen drawer where the family grabbed five or ten dollars for the offering basket at church. She stockpiled a thousand dollars. She estimated it would last her three weeks.

She left in the middle of the night on her bike. In her backpack was the money, two bottles of water, an extra pair of jeans, a bra, five pairs of underwear, three tissue-thin T-shirts, her lacrosse workout clothes, sunglasses, flip-flops, and a box of Pop-Tarts. It was all she could ever imagine needing.

She had left a note on the kitchen table in the spot where members of her family normally left notes for one another. She had given the note careful thought. It said,
See ya!
Delilah wanted her parents to know that a) she had not been abducted, but rather was walking away from this nice life of her own volition, and b) she was not leaving in anger, but rather in the spirit of self-discovery. “See ya!” would also, hopefully, keep her mother from completely losing her mind, implying as it did that mother and daughter would set eyes on each other again. Delilah, although self-centered and self-absorbed, realized that what she was doing would destroy her parents as well as thirteen-year-old Caitlin, who worshipped her. (Delilah had peeked in on Caitlin before she left. Caitlin was breathing heavily through her orthodontic headgear. The sight of her and the knowledge of Caitlin’s deep impending sorrow almost kept Delilah from going.) But Delilah was infected with the desire to be
FREE
, and once she was biking along the Blue Star Highway, her spirit soared. She was headed to Saugatuck, where she would catch a bus to Grand Rapids, and in Grand Rapids she would catch the bus to New York, where she would catch the Chinatown bus to Boston, and in Boston she would take the Plymouth & Brockton line to Hyannis. From Hyannis she would ride the ferry to Nantucket Island, a destination she had discovered in the pages of
National Geographic,
which she read in the high school library while she was supposed to be researching a paper on Blaise Pascal. She stumbled across the article about Nantucket by accident, but she was captivated by the way it looked—all quaint and historic and New Englandy. It looked like home.