The Castaways (15 page)

Oh no!
he thought. She was going to cry!

“I want to leave him,” she said.

“And go where?” Addison said.

Tears dripped down her face. “I don’t know,” she said. “Paris?”

It had started there. They did not need the petites tartes Tatin with Calvados ice cream that Sandrine sent out, nor did they need the chocolate truffles or the slender flutes of rose champagne. (“Billecart-Salmon,” Sandrine said. “Un cadeau.” A gift.) But they enjoyed them anyway.

Addison paid the bill with five one-hundred-dollar bills, which made Tess gasp even louder than she had at the gym when she thought he was in cardiac arrest. He whisked her out of there, stopping only to kiss Sandrine on both cheeks and say, “Le dejeuner de ma vie.”

He and Tess were holding hands as they left the restaurant. Nous Deux.
We Two.
That morning at eight o’clock, Tess MacAvoy had been Phoebe’s friend and, more saliently for Addison, Greg’s wife. She had been a secondary or tertiary theme in the symphony of Addison’s life; she had been a figure in the background.

Now, however, she was his.

They stood under the awning at the back door of the cafe, facing a small parking area where there was only one car, an ancient silver Peugeot—most likely Sandrine’s. Addison bent down and kissed Tess—and yes, it did occur to him that he’d consumed an entire bottle of wine, followed by a glass of champagne. He was drunk and so was she. The kiss could fail. It could be like kissing his little sister. But their lips connected and there was a spark, an electric charge, a surge of attraction. The kiss was the right thing. He kissed her again. And again. And again, and then they were kissing in the back parking lot of Nous Deux. Tess’s arms locked around him. He pulled her in. She was his now. Did she know this?

So that there was no mistaking what all this meant, he said, “I may have just fallen in love with you. Okay?”

And she said, “Okay.”

Addison was crying now. Of course he was crying. The silly, sad tears of a little boy, though he had no recollection of feeling like this as a child. This feeling was adult. There were so many things he could never bring himself to do again: he would never go to Stowe, he would never order that bottle of Mersault, he would never eat a croque-monsieur. He would never kiss anyone for the first time.

He had Tess’s iPhone, pilfered from the Coast Guard’s bag of her personal effects. He felt guilty for stealing it. But then, guess what? The Chief called to inform him that he was the executor of the MacAvoy wills.

“What?” Addison said. And because his memories of Tess started this past December, it took a while to come back to him.

He
had
agreed to serve as executor. Back in 2000, when Greg and Tess bought their house on Blueberry Lane. Addison was their Realtor, he was at the closing with their attorney, Barry Karsten, a big, affable fellow of Danish descent. When the papers were all signed, Barry suggested that Greg and Tess make wills. He could write them up.

“Right now?” Greg said.

“All you need to figure out is who you’d like to be the executor and what happens to the house if you both die at the same time.”

Tess said, “We’re trying to get pregnant.”

Barry Karsten said, “Okay! We’ll account for that.”

Addison had barely been listening, but he had been at the right place at the right time (or, as he’d thought of it then, the wrong place at the wrong time). Greg asked him to serve as executor. Since Greg and Tess had both taken the day off from teaching to attend the closing, Barry ended up printing out a boilerplate will for each of them. They all signed.

“And you mean to say that Greg and Tess never signed another will?” Addison said.

The Chief muttered something, throwing in the words “god-damn careless,” but under the terms of the existing wills, the twins got everything anyway. No guardians had been named for the children, and this was the thing that the Chief didn’t understand. It was an egregious oversight. But the last thing Tess and Greg had planned on was… dying.

So, put honestly, Addison knew he was the executor of Greg’s and Tess’s wills, but, like being the permanent treasurer for the Class of 1977 at Lawrenceville, he’d forgotten, because he never expected the job to have any responsibilities.

Tess’s iPhone was suddenly under his jurisdiction. All of the MacAvoy property was under his control. He would go through the house, see what was there; he would have free rein over the most intimate nooks and crannies of Tess’s and Greg’s life—the bank statements, the drawers of the bedside tables, the diaries.

It terrified him.

T
wice she had the same dream. Then three times. It was such a stupid way to manifest her grief. So cliched and predictable that Andrea was too embarrassed to tell anyone about it. There was no one to tell anyway, since Tess was dead.

The dream was real, though. This was to say, she was really having it. Once. Then again. Then a third time, with a variation.

It went as follows: Andrea was her normal self, sitting in her chair on the beach, reading her book. There was shouting from offshore. Someone was drowning. Andrea ran to the shoreline. It was a man caught in the riptide. Andrea motioned with her arms; she shouted:
Swim with it—it will carry you down the beach, but you’ll be okay.
She was a lifeguard, with a lifeguard’s instincts and knowledge. She did not want to go in to save this man; he was too big. In a rip like this, he would take her down. She cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted. She had faith that the man would get it; he would save himself! But he was going under. She lost sight of his face. She started swimming. She reached him, got him under the chin. She could do this. In lifesaving class, Andrea had practiced on dummies that weighed twice as much as she did.

It was when they were almost to the shore, when Andrea knew they were both going to be safe, that she allowed herself to look at the man’s face. He had blue eyes, the most piercing eyes she had ever seen. He was, this man, disturbingly handsome. When they reached shore, Andrea waited for him to thank her, but instead the man turned and walked down the beach, away from her. Andrea watched his buttocks in a black Speedo and the triangle of his upper body. His hair was salt-and-pepper curls; he wore a silver hoop earring. He walked toward a woman lying on a towel, a woman who most definitely had not been present when he was shouting for help in the water. The woman raised her head at his approach. It was Phoebe. Andrea thought,
Of course, Phoebe.
She was heartbroken.

Then, seconds later, Andrea and the man—Pyotr, his name was, he spoke only Russian, though she had no idea how she knew this—were making love against the side of her Jeep. They were, put more accurately,
fucking
. Because it was wild, tear-at-your-clothes, breathless, stranger sex, sex such as Andrea had never experienced in her life. Pyotr opened the passenger side of Andrea’s Jeep. Andrea sat in the seat while he tasted her.

The Jeep was the same Jeep she had owned during her first summer on Nantucket. She was confused. She asked Pyotr where it had come from. In Russian, which she somehow understood, he said,
It’s okay, it’s your Jeep, you can do what you want in it.

Andrea woke up in a panic, her heart shrieking, her hormones raging. She looked at Ed, asleep like a grizzly bear next to her. She filled with guilt. She was riled up, as sexually aroused as she had ever been in her life. Should she wake Ed? And do what? Tell him that she’d had an erotic dream about a man that she’d saved from drowning? A Russian man named Pyotr who was having a relationship with Phoebe? She thought,
He was drowning. Of course he was drowning.
But that wasn’t what made her sad. What made her sad was that Jeep, the black Jeep she’d bought off the lot at Don Allen Ford in the middle of her first summer, when she was so flush with cash she didn’t know what to do with it. She had driven the Jeep from the dealership straight to the ferry dock, where she picked up Tess, who was fifteen years old, leaving home alone for the first time.

Tess had been wowed by the island, the gray-shingled, cobblestoned quaintness of it, and she had screamed for joy about the black Jeep with the top down. A beach buggy that they could ride in with their dark DiRosa hair flying out behind them.

The dream came again four nights later, at the end of a particularly brutal day, and Andrea recognized it. She knew what was going to happen. She knew the man would shout for help, she knew she would save him, she knew he would leave her for Phoebe, she knew he would come back to her and they would mate like wild animals. In the Jeep, with Andrea’s legs hooked up over the roll bar. This time there was more shame, more worry. She was worried about indecent exposure; she was worried about the police showing up!
The police
.

Pyotr said, “It’s your car. You can do what you want in it.”

Once she’d had the dream a second time, it was like a TV show she’d become addicted to, or a novel she was reading. The details plagued and baffled her. She thought about the dream for four or five minutes of every hour. Pyotr—who was he? Andrea had never known anyone like him. But that wasn’t possible, was it? Her mind’s eye couldn’t just create a person out of thin air. Pyotr must have been a person she’d seen somewhere, at some point during her life. He was sitting at a cafe during her semester in Florence; he was in her subway car one of the thousands of times she’d ridden the T; she had seen him with his wife at a restaurant. At Straight Wharf, perhaps, where she and Ed went every year on her birthday. The identity of Pyotr nagged at her, as did her mounting sexual energy. She and Ed made love when the spirit moved them—once every two weeks, say, normally in the morning when they woke up together and sunlight was pouring through their bedroom windows, or rain was tapping, and Ed found himself with an erection and, being the practical man that he was, decided it shouldn’t go to waste. The sex was nice. It was familiar and pleasant. Ed knew what Andrea liked; he got the job done.

They had not had sex since Tess died. Ed had assumed sex was the furthest thing from Andrea’s mind. (She would have thought this way, too, if she were Ed.) Plus they now had two little kids in the house, and whereas Finn slept soundly, Chloe was sometimes up three and four times in the night, searching the house for her parents.

Maybe the lack of sex was to blame for these dreams, then? Maybe Andrea was, at the age of forty-four, about to hit menopause, and so her body was throwing itself a surprise party?

Or it was grief. Which, like every other human emotion, revealed itself in ways that made sense and ways that didn’t.

They were, all of them, drowning. Ed was drowning in work. Andrea was drowning in meanness.

Delilah had asked for Greg’s guitar. Barney wanted to learn to play it, she said.

Although Addison was the executor (a fact that made Andrea feel like she was choking on her son’s gym sock), the bag of personal effects from the Coast Guard was at the Chief and Andrea’s house. What remained were the leather overnight bag and the guitar. The guitar was something of a golden egg.

“Barney really wants it,” Delilah said. “He’s dying to learn.”

Andrea had seen Barney, Delilah’s younger son, sit at Greg’s feet every single time Greg played. He was the most devoted worshipper at Greg’s temple. He was probably the only six-year-old who knew all the lyrics to “Bell Bottom Blues.” Andrea was not surprised that Barney wanted the guitar. They had all joked about how Barney would be the next Greg. Greg, but famous. Ha!

“Eric has asked for the guitar,” Andrea said. “We gave it to Eric.”

This was not true. Andrea had asked Eric if he wanted the guitar, and Eric said he’d have to think about it. When Andrea asked him again, Eric said he didn’t want the guitar. He wasn’t musical, could not carry a tune, would be mortified to play in front of anyone. He didn’t want it.
Give it to someone else,
he said.

Andrea, frankly, had been glad. She thought Greg’s temple was a cult. It sucked you in, but it wasn’t real.

So here was Andrea drowning in meanness: Barney wanted the guitar, he was the correct spiritual heir, Eric did not want the guitar, Andrea was glad Eric did not want the guitar. And still she would not give the guitar to Delilah.

Despicable! Andrea kept a firm line over the phone, but inside she was cringing at her behavior. Tess had died and Andrea was turning into a witch.

Delilah was upset. She pleaded again on Barney’s behalf, but halfheartedly. She hung up without saying goodbye. Andrea supposed she would go to Addison. Get a court order, maybe, for the guitar. Fine! Let her!

Andrea had a moment of weakness. Or was it strength? (Everything was so inside out, she could not tell the difference.) She would call Delilah back and offer Barney the guitar.

But no, she wouldn’t.

Andrea’s copy of
The English Patient
with its cover and the first eighteen pages ripped out lay on the counter. She could still finish it, Ed pointed out, since the part she had yet to read was unharmed.

She threw the book in the trash, then started wailing. Didn’t he see? Didn’t he see the way everything was ruined?

Andrea tried to put her energies elsewhere. She tried to focus on the twins. But the twins were like little goblins; they both looked so much like Tess that they scared Andrea. Andrea was losing hold of her sanity; she was frightened by two seven-year-olds. Looking at them was like looking at Tess, and Tess was dead. She was never coming back. Andrea would never see her again. She was
dead
. The reality gripped Andrea around the neck like two bony hands. She avoided looking at the twins. She was barely able to pour their Cheerios, pack their lunch boxes, and get them to camp. Once they were gone (running from the car, exhilarated by their freedom), Andrea drove aimlessly around the island. She was searching for something. What would help? She pulled into an unfamiliar driveway and burst into tears. She screamed with her fist jammed in her mouth.

She went to the grocery store to buy steaks. This was a normal, everyday act. This was what people did when they were alive: they went to the market to shop for food, which they turned into meals. The grocery store was chilly and indifferent. The produce section featured neat pyramids of plums, peaches, nectarines, grapes, wedges of watermelon. Knobs of gingerroot, bags of coleslaw mix. How could any of this matter? Tess was
dead,
she was in a
coffin,
in the
ground
not a half-mile away. But she was gone. That smiling face, that perky voice. Dead. Andrea hurried through the store to the butcher shop. If Andrea had died and Tess was alive, would Tess be able to make a trip to the store? Yes, of course. But Andrea was not Tess. She felt like she was going to asphyxiate. Air, she needed air; she needed to be outside. But being outside felt wrong, too. How could Andrea enjoy sunshine and the breeze when Tess was in the ground? She couldn’t be inside and she couldn’t be outside. She was a mess.