The Castaways (20 page)

But Delilah and Phoebe didn’t matter anymore. The only person who mattered was gone.

When the kids came home from camp, Andrea was ready. She was wearing her bathing suit and a pareo. She had packed juice boxes and Fritos. She had done nothing all morning except sit on the edge of the bed, breathing in, then out, trying to prepare herself for an afternoon at the beach with the kids.

There really was no explanation for what happened. The kids got into their suits, put on their flip-flops, and waited by the mudroom door. Eric was home, making himself a ham sandwich before heading to work. Andrea stuffed beach toys into a mesh bag for the kids. She felt a sudden burst of anxiety, as if someone were blowing up a balloon in her chest cavity.

She said, “We’ll go to the beach, but you kids are not allowed to set foot in the water.”

“What?” Chloe said.

“We want to swim,” Finn said.

“No,” Andrea said. How to explain her cold, clear panic? If they swam, they would drown. Andrea had been a lifeguard for years. She knew what she was talking about. They would drown and she would not be able to save them. It was beyond her to save anyone.

She cast around the mudroom for something to throw. She saw Greg’s guitar. She was not thinking. She was not, at that moment, a human being. She was a robot with a short circuit. She took the guitar out of its case, carried it into the kitchen, and smashed it against the countertop.

It cracked, the strings popped; the cacophonous noise was satisfying to Andrea, the destruction met a need somewhere in her dark insides. Smash it, smash it! She was so angry.

The twins were crying. Andrea did not realize this until Eric brought it to her attention. Eric, her fifteen-year-old son, had her in some kind of death grip that he must have learned either from his father or from watching wrestling on TV.

“Drop the guitar, Mom. The twins are crying.”

She dropped the guitar. It fell to the floor with a racket. The twins clung to each other.

This was rock bottom, Andrea thought. The lowest point on any grief’s trajectory.

Right?

E
very free minute he had, he studied the toxicology report. Willing it to make sense. Willing it to say something different. Tess had had opiates in her bloodstream. The kind of opiate that was most commonly found in heroin. Heroin! But there had been no needle marks, Danny Browne said.

So, what?
the Chief asked.
She snorted it?

Doesn’t look like it
, Danny said.

It didn’t matter. The Chief repeated this phrase. Greg and Tess were dead and nothing would bring them back. But the Chief hated to think that Tess had been high on something. Had Greg drugged her? Had he taken her out on a sail because he wanted to hurt her? She had been missing that hank of hair. But maybe he had been trying to save her. It didn’t matter, but it did matter. A sequence of events had unfolded out on the water and nobody knew what they were. They had both been drinking; Tess had been high. There was so much anger between them. But it was their anniversary and Andrea had made that picnic. Five calls from Addison in half an hour. See? The Chief ordered himself to stop thinking about it, but he couldn’t. And there was nobody to talk it over with.

Jeffrey, maybe. The Chief would think about it.

His phone buzzed. Molly, the dispatcher, said, “Chief, your son is on line three.”

He tucked the tox report into his desk drawer and locked it.

It was not a phone call he had hoped for. Eric said, “Mom has officially lost it.”

And the Chief, steeling himself, said, “What do you mean?”

“She smashed Greg’s guitar to bits in front of the twins, and now she’s locked herself in her room. The twins are crying.”

“Where’s Kacy?”

“She’s at work. I was getting ready to leave for work, too, but then Mom flipped out so I called the shop and told them I would be a little late.”

“Did something trigger your mother?”

Eric said, “Would you please come home?”

He had a ton of work to do. He had his entire summer force to place on their assignments for the Fourth of July. He had parking tape to secure, barriers to erect, and there was a party on Hulbert Avenue that former president Clinton would be attending, so he would be dealing with the Secret Service. The Chief had not even planned on taking a lunch, but now… Well, this didn’t sound like something he could ignore.

“I have to go out,” he told Molly. “Back shortly.”

Things at home were just as Eric had reported. The kids were in their bathing suits with towels around their necks, sitting in front of the television eating blindly from a bag of Fritos. Their breathing was ragged and hiccuppy. The guitar lay in the middle of the kitchen floor, smashed, its strings broken and haywire.

The Chief marched back to the bedroom. It was locked. He knocked once, to be considerate.

“Andrea? Open up.”

Nothing. His heartrate picked up. Andrea would never, ever do anything to hurt herself. She didn’t have it in her. But apparently she had it in her to do a Motley Crue destruction number on the guitar, which he would also have said was beyond the pale. He reached up to the lintel and pulled down the pin that would open the door.

He stepped inside. Andrea was on the bed facedown, her head under a landslide of pillows. She was wearing her black tank suit and a black, orange, and hot pink pareo that she had bought during their group trip to Sayulita, Mexico.

“Andrea?”

She didn’t move. She was, however, breathing. The Chief sat down next to her. His hands were ice-cold; he was afraid to touch her with such cold hands. He was afraid to touch her at all. She was formidable in her grief, terrifying. Anything he or the kids said or did could set her off—she would shout or berate them or start to cry so hard it resembled an epileptic seizure. It unnerved the kids—his own kids and Chloe and Finn—and it made the Chief feel both angry and helpless. Andrea was grieving more deeply than the rest of them because Tess had been her cousin and her best friend and everything else in between. There was guilt mixed in there, too, about the swimming accident twenty-six years earlier, about bringing Tess to Nantucket at all.
I couldn’t save her, Ed! I couldn’t keep her safe!
He heard her talking to him while he was falling asleep, but clearly he didn’t have the words to comfort her, because her sadness only grew worse and manifested itself in more disturbing ways.

Smashing Greg’s guitar against the kitchen countertop?

The Chief had tried, gently, to remind her that she was responsible for two more lives now—young, impressionable lives. She had demanded custody of the kids, she had requisitioned them, and now she had to
raise
them. She had to deal with her grief reasonably; she had to lead by example. If pressed to share his truest thoughts, the Chief would say that Andrea was not fit to bring up the twins, not right now. She should have let Delilah take them for the summer when Delilah offered. She would then have had the time and space to exorcise the demon of her grief.

“Andrea?” he said.

She didn’t respond. He lifted the pillows until she was exposed. Her eyes were open.

“I need help,” she said.

S
he had done the unthinkable.

An invitation had come for a Fourth of July party on Hulbert Avenue, a big, splashy party thrown by summer resident Caroline Nieve Masters, and Phoebe had accepted.

Caroline and Phoebe had served together on the board of directors of the Atheneum a decade earlier; they had been friends. In the intervening years, since September 11, when Phoebe resigned from the Atheneum board and the two other boards she sat on, she and Caroline had lost touch. There had been one awkward encounter when Caroline saw Addison and Phoebe out to dinner at 21 Federal, and she had approached the table cheerfully and asked Phoebe if she would consider sitting on the Circus Flora committee. Phoebe and Addison were out celebrating Phoebe’s thirty-fifth birthday, which was also Reed’s thirty-fifth birthday, but Reed would not be turning thirty-five because he was dust, and to compensate for this fact Phoebe had taken three valiums and, to numb herself further, one of the contraband pills that she had gotten from Brandon, which Brandon referred to only as the Number Nine. Throw in a glass and a half of the outrageously expensive Mersault that Addison had ordered to blur his own edges and you had Phoebe in such a haze that she was barely able to keep her head off the table. She looked at Caroline, but did not see her. She spoke, but did not say anything intelligible.

Caroline seemed confused. Addison said, “Phoebe is trying to keep her plate clear these days.”

Caroline said of course, she understood, and beat a hasty retreat. Phoebe had not heard from her since, and had seen her only in passing. Just like the rest of the women from her previous life.

So the invitation came as a surprise. And even more unlikely was the burst of anticipation Phoebe felt. She wanted to go to this party. She asked Addison if they could go to Caroline Masters’s party on the Fourth and he looked at her dully, then shrugged. Addison was the emotionally hobbled one now. Since Greg and Tess had died, he had done little more than drink whiskey, stare out the window, and cry in his sleep.

Phoebe couldn’t help him. He was on his own. Phoebe had not been able to grieve for Greg and Tess since her outburst in the Galley parking lot. She had used up her sadness and horror and now she was empty. If anything, she felt better than she had in years. It was backward. She felt almost normal. She looked at her bottles of scrips and thought,
I really don’t need these.
But she took them anyway, just in case.

The best thing about Caroline Masters’s party was that it would be a reprieve from the torrent of misery about Tess and Greg. Caroline Masters hadn’t known Tess and Greg, and her fancy New York friends and Nantucket summer neighbors hadn’t known Tess and Greg, nor did they know that Phoebe had lost friends named Tess and Greg. Phoebe would be free.

She bought a red cocktail dress at Eye of the Needle and made a hair appointment. And at six o’clock on the Fourth, when Addison slumped in the club chair with his Jack Daniels and turned on Wimbledon, Phoebe declared that if he wasn’t going to shower and change, she would go by herself.

Fine
, he said.
Go
.

He was saying it as a challenge, a dare. He thought she would chicken out. Phoebe had not been out at night without Addison since Reed died. But tonight, yes, she would go, with or without him. It was so weird, the way she felt. She felt reborn, as though she had been preserved in ice all these years and was just now thawing out. She felt liberated! She could not help Addison with his grief, but she could be kind. After all, he had stuck by her for years and years.

“You’re sure you don’t want to come?” she said. “It will be fun, Add. Swede and Jennifer will probably be there. And their friend Hank. We used to have fun with them, remember? Maybe Hank will invite us on his boat again.”

“No boats,” Addison said. He was like an autistic person, with his short sentences repeated over and again. The phrase he muttered most often under his breath, which Phoebe knew she wasn’t supposed to hear, was,
He killed her.

Meaning Greg killed Tess. But Phoebe had a different idea about that.

“Okay, no boats,” she said. No sailing, no sailboats, no boats of any kind. “Sorry.” Dealing with Addison now was like dealing with a child. He was so drunk all the time that she had to undress him most nights, direct him to the shower, and put him to bed. The more she thought about it, the more firmly she believed that it would be a terrible idea to drag Addison to this party. He would drink too much and embarrass them both.

Phoebe kissed the top of his bald head. “I’m going. I’ll be home… well, when I get home.”

He nodded, then muttered something she didn’t hear, and she didn’t ask him to repeat it.

She was free! She was (slightly) high on her happy pills and she had drunk a slender flute of champagne in the bathroom as she dressed, and these combined to provide a warm, optimistic buzz. She was suffused with the holiday spirit. What was that song she and Reed had blared in high school?
Hey, baby, it’s the Fourth of July!
Their father, Phil, had bought them a bona-fide mail Jeep and presented it to them on their sixteenth birthday. It had a cassette deck and crummy speakers, which they pushed to the limit. Phoebe had her license, but she always let Reed drive. Who knows where they had ever been headed, but Phoebe could say for certain that those rides with Reed driving and the window open to the dairyland smell of the Wisconsin dusk and the music blaring had been the happiest rides of her life.

She felt almost that happy now.

When Phoebe found out about Addison and Tess, she thought it was just a sex thing. She was no dummy. She understood men’s needs, and since for years she had been unable to climax, she assumed that Addison would discreetly go elsewhere. Phoebe had gotten the tip-off from Addison’s receptionist, Florabel, about the cottage in Quaise. Addison “showed the cottage to clients” several times a week, Florabel said, but strangely, no one ever wanted to rent it. When Phoebe went to look for Addison there (“He’s there all the time,” Florabel said), she saw Tess’s car parked in the dirt driveway. Phoebe could not believe it, so she had tiptoed right up to the window and had seen them together. Through a little detective work, she figured out that Addison and Tess were in love. Phoebe had been too hampered by the confines of her own mind to summon the anger she knew she was supposed to feel about this. Instead she watched (silently, secretly) as their love unfolded. She watched it like a TV program. Addison was more in love than Tess was; Phoebe could tell the affair was going to end badly. As indeed it had.

Traffic was being redirected at Hulbert Avenue. It was a mess, and Phoebe feared her good mood would be thwarted by something as mundane as a long and winding detour. But there, standing on the corner in his spiffy black-and-white uniform, was the Chief. Phoebe rolled down her window.