The Castaways (16 page)

She grabbed six rib-eye steaks. They were far more expensive than the steaks she usually bought, but who cared anymore about money? Andrea cut down the cereal aisle to the cashier—and bad luck. In front of her in line was Heather Dickson, wife of one of Ed’s sergeants, whom Andrea had not seen since this happened. When Heather saw Andrea, her face instantly registered that cross between sympathy and pity that Andrea so detested.

Andrea held up a hand, not in greeting but in traffic-cop sign language.
STOP
. Please don’t speak. I cannot handle the kindest words.

Although Heather’s husband was a policeman who did occasionally direct traffic outside the Boys & Girls Club, Heather did not pick up on the meaning of Andrea’s sign language. She said, “Oh, God, Andrea, how are you? I’ve been thinking of you.”

How am I?
Andrea thought.
I am a stark raving lunatic. Look at me: I can’t even draw the breath to answer you. I am going to try a nod and a whispered lie.
“I’m okay, thanks.”

Heather stared intently. She hadn’t heard. But she got the message, maybe, that Andrea was losing her marbles and should be dropped like a hot potato. “Please let me know if you need anything,” she said as she piled her bags into her cart and rolled out of the store.

Andrea stared at the steaks wrapped in plastic. Need anything?

That night Ed was late. Kacy had been entertaining the twins outside with Frisbee, but she had been promoted to the evening shift at the Juice Bar and had to get to work. Eric was playing in the adult softball league for the bike shop team. Andrea marveled at the difference between two children with their own lives and two children who needed everything done for them. Finn, Andrea had learned, couldn’t even tie his shoes.

You’re seven years old!
Andrea had said.
And you can’t tie your shoes?

Mom always did it,
he said.

This was true. Tess was guilty as charged. She babied the kids. She did everything for them, even to their own detriment. Finn could not tie his shoes. He could not pick out his own pajamas or pour a glass of milk.

Andrea lit the grill. She had too much food; she had not realized that both Eric and Kacy would miss dinner. Although, really, she thought, when was the last time either of them had been home for dinner? They were putting themselves outside the house on purpose. They didn’t want to be at home with their deranged mother.

The flames jumped as Andrea laid the steaks down.

Was there a hell? She wondered. Really, was there? She had been a Catholic for forty-four years, educated by the nuns and the Jesuits, and this was the first time she’d thought to ask.

Chloe came out on the deck, holding a piece of robin’s-egg-blue construction paper folded in half. Andrea took the paper but did not look at Chloe.

“What have we here?” Andrea asked.

“A formal request,” Chloe said.

This should have been enough to make Andrea smile, but it was beyond her. She opened the paper. It had been decorated around the edges with curlicues, flowers, and birds. At the top, Chloe had written:
A Formal Request.

[_Can we please go to Auntie Dee’s house tomorrow after camp _
and perhaps spend the night?

Andrea was speechless. She resisted the urge to throw the formal request onto the grill flames. It was innocent, she reminded herself. Chloe and Finn wanted to see their friends. But still, the “formal request” was for “Auntie Dee’s house.” Auntie Dee would cut their grilled cheese into fun shapes; she would permit them to run through the sprinkler until the fireflies came out. The twins did not want Andrea. They wanted Delilah. She couldn’t blame them, but it infuriated her.

She handed the formal request back to Chloe, not able to look her in the eye. “We’ll see,” she said.

Chloe stood before her for one resigned moment. “That means no.”

“That means we’ll see.”

Chloe fled.

Andrea collapsed onto a deck chair and sank her face in her hands.
Need anything?

“I need Tess back,” she whispered. Denial was such a stupid phase of grief, especially for a forty-four-year-old woman who had lost both her parents and well knew that death happened to each and every one of us. And yet at any second the finality of Tess’s death could level Andrea. She wanted to rip her hair out, tear her clothes, get on her knees and beg the sky,
Bring her back!

The grill was smoking. Andrea pulled the steaks off just as the Chief walked onto the deck.

“Hey,” he said. “Those smell good.” His voice was light and chipper. How could he be chipper? It was twenty minutes to eight. He had stayed at work for twelve hours. He didn’t want to be at home with her either.

Andrea stared at the platter of steaks. They did smell good, and they had cost her seventy dollars. The grocery store was booby-trapped with land mines. She couldn’t stand to see anybody she knew. She didn’t want pity or sympathy or understanding. But neither could she tolerate cheerful, normal life moving on. She was falling apart. Couldn’t anyone see that she was
falling apart?

She flipped the steaks off the deck, and they landed in her unwatered perennial bed.

“Jesus!” the Chief said. He grabbed her arm. “Andrea! What the
hell?
”

Need anything?
She crumpled.

That night, after the Chief had pulled the steaks out of the garden dirt and washed them off, sliced them thinly, and cajoled both the twins and Andrea to eat, Andrea wandered into her bedroom, lay down on her bed fully clothed, and fell immediately to sleep.

She had the dream a third time. The man shouting for help, shouting in a language she didn’t understand, but no matter, she understood the urgency. She swam out, she grabbed hold of him, she said,
Just float. I’ll get us in. I’m a lifeguard!
She noticed his deep blue eyes. And then later, when he was walking away, she noticed his salt-and-pepper curls, his earring. When Phoebe lifted her face from the towel, Andrea felt her heart break. Of course he belonged to someone else. He belonged to Phoebe. But she felt something else, too: hope, anticipation.

And there they were, in the Jeep, clawing at one another, sucking, biting. He was behind her, but she didn’t like it.
I want to see you!
she said.
I want to see your face!
She could feel his fingers on her nipples, his mouth on her neck. But she wanted to see his face! She turned.

It was Jeffrey.

D
elilah was the best storyteller, and so she would tell the story of Greg and April Peck, the whole sphere of it—Greg’s side, April’s side, Tess’s side. That was the only way to understand. To hear only Greg’s side or only April’s side was like taking one slice out of an apple and claiming the rest of it wasn’t rotten.

Delilah considered herself a neutral third party, a Switzerland, a safe place for either Tess or Greg to go. But really, it was so much more complicated than that. (The most frustrating thing about being an adult was, indeed, how complicated everything was. Throw a party, write a letter to the editor, buy your children a PlayStation—there would be consequences and repercussions you never expected.) The Greg-and-April-Peck story was complicated by the fact that Delilah was in love with Greg.

Okay, there, she’d said it.

She was in love with Greg MacAvoy, who was now dead. And would it be flattering herself to say that he had been in love with her, too? Halfway in love? Delilah had been his confidante, his almost-lover. They were always
this close
to crossing the line into
that territory.

It had started in Vegas, at Le Cirque, with his hand on her foot and then trilling up the back of her leg. This had tipped her off: Greg was interested. His interest made her interested. His interest had, tangentially, been responsible for her taking the dining room manager position at the Begonia. She wanted to be close to Greg outside of the scope of their group friendship. How? The Scarlet Begonia. Delilah worked four nights a week, most of them nights when Greg played and sang. It was officially impossible to watch Greg up onstage with his dark hair flopping in his eyes and his vine tattoo encircling his biceps and his feet in deck shoes no matter what the weather and listen to him sing “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and feel anything except powerless against his charms. Every woman in that bar, on any given night, would sleep with him. Delilah placed herself in a distinct category from these women; she was his friend.

But just admit it, Delilah!

No, it was more than that. To sleep with Greg MacAvoy would be a disaster. She had slept with his type before—nascent rock stars, athletes just off the winning field. They looked at Delilah like she was a juicy cheeseburger, they devoured her… and then they wiped their mouths with a napkin and walked away.

She wanted Greg to love her, to value her—someday—more than he valued Tess.

They hung out nearly every night after closing. Greg drank copiously and played a private concert for Delilah, Thom and Faith, Graham the bartender, and whoever else happened to be lingering. He and Delilah talked, he told her everything—or if not everything, then most things, things he did not tell Tess. It happened organically. They started talking about their kids. Barney had been only eight months old when Delilah went to work, the twins were a year and a half, Drew was two. Talking about the kids, after a few drinks, morphed into talking about their spouses. How long had it been before both of them realized there was no forbidden territory? Delilah complained:
Jeffrey acts like my father! I did not want to marry my father!
Greg complained:
Tess treats me like one of the children! She thinks I am completely incompetent!
They were simpatico in their restlessness. And where did this lead them? It led to nights when, at three in the morning, Delilah would drive Greg home. Greg would sometimes sit in the passenger seat oblivious to the world before stumbling to his front door, his guitar in its case banging into him like an inebriated sidekick. But he would sometimes direct Delilah to Cisco Beach, where they would watch the waves. Greg would tell her how much he wanted to touch her, kiss her, make love to her, and Delilah would stave him off.
We can’t, it will end up in such a mess, our incredible friendship trashed, the guilt will kill you, you don’t think so now, but trust me.

A few nights he shushed her, his finger, callused from too many E minor chords, lightly touching her lips. And then he cupped his hand around her neck and pressed his face to her ear. He breathed into her until she thought,
Okay. Just this one time, okay.
But they had never so much as kissed. Not even one kiss. She held steady. Her body was the Hoover Dam, resisting the force of all that water. It
could
hurt. It would hurt Tess and Jeffrey and the four little children at home; it would hurt Greg and Delilah’s friendship. Once Greg had her, he would weary of her. It wouldn’t be as great as he hoped. Whereas to keep him at bay, to keep him always wanting this thing that was just beyond his reach, was to hold him captive.

He sent her love notes on cocktail napkins and cardboard coasters:
You look beautiful tonight. Will you run away with me?
He made her CDs and left them in her car; he sent her text messages from school:
U staying late 2nite?
He dedicated songs from the stage:
This one’s for you, Ash
(because her maiden name was Ashby). He told her dirty jokes, he noticed when she got a pedicure. He said,
You are my best friend.
When they were all together, the eight of them, the group, he sent her a signal—two fingers, crossed.
You and me, babe.

Then came April Peck.

Greg had a day job. He was the high school music teacher. It should not have been allowed—to put someone so goddamn good-looking, with so much magnetism and talent, in that position. But there it was. Greg taught music appreciation to all ninth-graders, he taught guitar to juniors and seniors (this was mostly boys), and he directed the exclusive all-girls a capella group, the High Priorities. It was the girls who were the problem. These were girls with voices like angels, with perfect pitch. When a girl made it into the High Priorities—it was fiercely competitive; tryouts were the first week of May every year, and the whole student body held its breath to find out who made it—she stayed until she graduated. The High Priorities, the twelve of them, were Greg’s darlings. They were all in love with Greg; that was no secret. They were his groupies, his harem. They baked him cookies, they left elaborate illustrated notes like “We ♥ U, Mr. Mac!” on his chalkboard while he was at lunch, they endured painful scales and voice exercises
(“Red leather, yellow leather!”)
. They memorized lyrics in twenty-four hours. Greg lifted his hands and they sang; he brought his hands down and they stopped.

All the girls were beautiful. Even if they were heavy (and yes, it did seem like the best singers were heavy) or had acne or wore braces or their toes turned in. They were all beautiful when they were onstage in their white jeans and pink cashmere twinsets. They were sassy and sexy, they were luminous, aglow. So much feminine beauty and energy and talent, those bodies blossoming, those hearts unfolding, the desire and the jealousy and the yearning for praise, for distinction and admiration—God, it was a time bomb. Delilah had warned Greg about this: all those girls with their raging hormones, their new breasts, their asses squeezed into skin-tight jeans, all falling over themselves to make Greg MacAvoy happy, to be chosen for solos, to sing like a nightingale. It would get him in trouble one day. He had to be careful.

But Greg
was
careful. Delilah had for years watched him be careful. He taught his girls to sing together, to practice blending their voices.
Harmony!
he shouted.
Listen to one another!
He agonized over who to give solos to; he never played favorites.
You’re all my favorites
, he told them again and again.
You’re all my highest priority.