The Castaways (34 page)

“Come Friday at three and I’ll train you,” Vern said. “Bring your working papers.”

Working papers? Delilah fretted. She stood up to leave. What would she do about working papers?

“Before you go,” Vern said. He nodded her back to the kitchen, and a warning bell went off in Delilah’s head. Was this where he tried to have his way with her? And if he did try to have his way with her, might he forgive the fact that she didn’t have working papers?

She followed Vern into the kitchen. It was immaculate—shiny countertops, sparkling stainless steel. In the sink was a wire bucket of clams. Vern took a shell out and pried it open with a short, dull knife.

“Cherrystones,” he said. “Went out this morning myself and got ‘em.”

Delilah peered at the snotlike globule attached to its home shell.

“Mmmm-hmm,” she said.

“Go ahead,” Vern said.

Go ahead what? she thought. Touch it? Take it home? She smiled, sort of.

“Eat it,” he said.

Eat it? She tried not to make a face. She breathed. If she ate this phlegmy-looking raw mollusk, would he forgive her the lack of working papers? She reached out two pincer fingers; he pried the clam loose with his knife. He was keen for her to taste it, not in a little-boy go-ahead-I-dare-you way, but in an avuncular, professorial way. She held the shell. Was she really going to eat it? She was from the Midwest, where there weren’t even any sushi restaurants. Delilah was pretty sure, however, that Thoreau would have eaten the clam; he would have sucked it down for his own edification. Delilah would do the same.

At first it was foreign in her mouth. Slippery, chewy. Then it burst with sweetness. Sugar from saltwater. She swallowed.

Vern said, “Food doesn’t get any fresher than that.”

Delilah headed back to Tennie’s at four o’clock. She chewed on the concrete problem of working papers; it was a relief, actually, to have a concrete problem rather than the abstract ones of whether she would be discovered and whether she was living deliberately or simply falling into another routine.

She opened the door to Tennie’s house—she had been given her own key, which she kept clipped to her belt loop—and she heard a man inside. Her heart tripped up a second as she thought of the black sheep son, the woodcutter. She saw a man’s head, black hair, visible even over the high-backed chair. A big man.

Tennie said, “Well, hello!” in a tone of voice Delilah had not heard her use before. A saved-for-company voice, or maybe an I’m-in-danger voice. Was Tennie being held captive?

“Hi,” Delilah said. She stepped into the living room. The man turned.

It was her father.

One evening after a particularly difficult day, Delilah left the boys with Jeffrey and walked into town. She sat on the curb opposite Tennie Gulliver’s house on Pine Street.

Had that story really been true?

Yes, every word, or approximately so, since that was what memory, or memoir, was: an approximation of the truth. Certain things were crystal-clear—eating the raw clam, seeing her father’s face—but other things were hazy. Like what she and her father had said to each other on the way home. Or how Nico had actually found her. (When she’d asked him, he said,
I followed your breadcrumbs
.) Or what had made her give up her Thoreau dreams and do what was expected of her: finish high school, attend the University of Michigan, graduate in four years, pack up her room, kiss her parents, and then at the age of twenty-two return to Nantucket, where she was able to secure a job at Vern’s as if no time had passed at all. And then she fell in love with the farmer who delivered Vern’s corn on the cob and salad greens. She fell in love with Jeffrey Drake, even though he was not the black sheep woodcutter son, Gully, but rather a man just like her father.

Predictable.

Tennie Gulliver had been dead for years, and Vern had sold both Tennie’s house and his restaurant, taken the money, and bought a place in Florida. Delilah pictured him now as an older man, eating Grand Slam breakfasts at Denny’s. Was he happy?

She fantasized about running away again. Her anger at Andrea Kapenash was a tumor in her lung that was keeping her from breathing properly. Her secret knowledge of Greg’s continuing affair with April Peck was an ulcer in her gut, and the guilt of her silence on that final morning was meningitis, inflaming her brain. Her bones ached with regular old sad sadness. She felt strapped to this island like a crazy person to a bed. If she stayed, she was sure she would die.

Delilah stood up from the curb. A family by the name of Hebner had bought Tennie Gulliver’s house, and it looked a lot better now. The Hebners had jacked up the house and squared the foundation; they had replaced windows and painted the trim and replaced the old door knocker with a brass clamshell. Still, it was Tennie’s house, the very same house where Delilah had spent exactly one night the May she was sixteen. She had been so brave and so stupid. Delilah was older now by more than double; her own life’s circumstances had been squared and given a new coat of paint. But really, nothing had changed.

T
hey had sent out seven hundred and fifty invitations to the cocktail party that would celebrate Island Conservation’s purchase of the ninety-two-acre parcel in the savannah, and they had three hundred and ten people
RSVP
to say they were coming. Phoebe and Addison had bought benefactor tickets at a thousand dollars apiece, but Phoebe had not heard from Jeffrey and Delilah or the Chief and Andrea. Her own friends! She had sent them invitations with her name as cochair circled in red pen and festooned with stars as a kind of self-deprecating joke, but she hoped the message was clear: this was her thing, and they would be expected to come. Phoebe had a surprise planned, to boot, which they could not miss. Attendance was mandatory at a hundred and fifty bucks a ticket. It wasn’t the ticket price that was holding them back, Phoebe knew; both couples could afford it. What was holding them back was their grief, their retreat from everyday normal, happy life. With the state Andrea and Delilah were in, they probably didn’t even open their mail.

Phoebe would have to call them. Before, when faced with an unpleasant task, she would take a valium (three, four, six) and operate in a fog. But now she considered her pills poison. She had thrown every last prescription bottle into a shoe box and tucked the shoe box away. She wasn’t hiding it from herself; now she was hiding it from Addison.

The necessary evil of the phone calls. Delilah first, because with Delilah things were slightly easier.

“Hello?” Delilah said aggressively. This could be good or bad.

“My benefit?” Phoebe said. “The Island Conservation thing next Friday? You and Jeffrey are coming.”

“No.”

“Yes, you are. There is no excuse that will work with me. You have to be there. It’s the first thing I’ve chaired in a hundred years.”

“I’m not going to anything this summer. This is the summer of no. This is the summer that wasn’t.”

Well, that was true. In previous summers the eight of them had been out all the time: at the celebrity softball game that benefited the kids’ school, at the circus for the Atheneum, at cocktail parties, at the back table at the Company of the Cauldron, at the back bar of 21 Federal, at the summer concert for the Boys & Girls Club, at the Boston Pops benefit for the hospital. This year they had done exactly nothing.

“Understood,” Phoebe said. Who was she to talk? She had been on a mental vacation for eight years. “But this you have to come to. This one thing. One night. Mark and Eithne are catering. Mark said he’d make the gougeres with the melty cheese in the middle for you especially, okay, darling?”

“Not okay.”

“Why not?”

“I won’t be here.”

“Where will you be?”

Silence. She was either bluffing or being dramatic. She never went away in the summer. Nantucket was Delilah’s playground. Nobody enjoyed the island as much as Delilah. At ten o’clock at night you would find her at the turtle pond with her kids, dangling raw chicken from a string, waiting for the calm surface to break. Or grilling three-inch rib-eyes on her back deck, drizzling heirloom tomatoes with olive oil, jumping up and down if her croquet ball actually cleared the wicket. Or singing along as Greg sang “Hey Girl” at the Begonia.

“Where are you going?” Phoebe asked.

“To hell in a handbasket.”

“Jesus, Delilah, you’re coming to my event, that’s all there is to it. Please? For me?”

“I can’t.”

“I have a surprise for you. A big, happy surprise.”

“That’s not going to work.”

“Sure it is. I’m going to
RSVP
you for two people. Get a baby-sitter, okay?”

Silence.

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

Phoebe could not bring herself to call Andrea. Some disturbing stories had reached Phoebe’s ears. Andrea allowed the twins to roam town unsupervised, and she was acting out in other destructive ways. Phoebe could not call up with the frivolous business of a cocktail party. But Andrea and the Chief had to be there. Because of the surprise.

And so Phoebe called the Chief. The dispatcher, Molly, put her right through.

“Hey, Sunshine,” the Chief said.

“Hey, Eddie.”

“What’s up?”

She told him: cocktail party for Island Conservation, her first flight in eight years, it was important to her that he and Andrea come.

“Okay, then, we’ll come.”

“You will?”

“Of course. I’ve been wanting to get out of the house. It will be good for Andrea, too. Real good.”

Phoebe agreed with this. But wait—she felt funny. This was too easy; Phoebe had questions. Had they gotten the invitation when she sent it? If they had gotten it, why had they not responded? Phoebe had the strange feeling that Andrea had opened the invitation and had thrown it away, or, in her current state of mind, soaked it in gasoline, stuck it in a bottle, and turned it into a Molotov cocktail. Ed normally ran everything past Andrea first; he was the police chief, but everyone knew who the real chief was. It wasn’t like him to make plans for both of them like this, without even asking.

“And I have a surprise,” Phoebe said. “At the party.”

“Is it legal?”

Phoebe laughed. “Yes.”

“Well, okay, then. We’ll see you next Friday, if not before.”

Phoebe hung up. Mission accomplished. She should be happy.

But…?

Something felt weird, not quite right on either front. Or maybe what felt wrong was that there had been only two phone calls instead of three. No call to Greg and Tess. She couldn’t let herself follow this train of thought, it would do her in, she would become just like the rest of them, singing a song out of tune. She would not think about it. She went out to the pool.

F
lorabel approached his desk with astonishing news. A couple named Legris Pouffet and Hank Drenmiller had made a full-price offer on the cottage in Quaise. Florabel looked like she was about to burst open like a pinata. Penny candy for everyone! Safe to say that Addison had never seen her this animated. Florabel was a lipstick lesbian, a stunning woman who despised everyone. She had managed the Wheeler Realty office for over a decade, but the first listing Addison had given Florabel to handle, with full commission, was the Quaise cottage, and this only recently, since Tess’s death, since Addison could not bear to think about the cottage at all, much less deal with the business of selling it. The cottage was owned by an elderly couple from Princeton, New Jersey; the husband sat on the board of trustees at Lawrenceville, and this was how Addison had met him. The elderly couple had three cowboy children—they lived in places like Cody, Wyoming, and San Antonio, Texas—who had no interest in Nantucket and wanted their parents to sell the place. Sell it, yes, but the couple wanted three million dollars, not a penny less, for a four-hundred-square-foot summer cottage, and because of a three-hundred-year-old Wampanoag cemetery that abutted the property, a covenant was in place stating that the cottage could not be expanded. The cottage was essentially unsellable at that price with those restrictions; it had languished on the market for years.

Addison eyed Florabel suspiciously. “These Puffy Drenmillers know they can’t add on, right? They can’t tear it down and build something else. They can’t touch it. They know this?”

“Yes!” Florabel said. She had told him once that she had been a cheerleader in high school, and as improbable as this had seemed at the time (she was an utter bitch, prone to sniffing at people, granting only her favorites a malicious smile), he now caught a glimpse of her game-day enthusiasm.

“And they still offered three million dollars?”

“Yes!” Florabel said. Her wide blue eyes were about to pop into bouquets of violets. She was genuinely happy. All it had taken was money, a 6 percent commission on three million dollars.

“Okay,” Addison said. “Great. Good for you. Write it up.” His voice was maudlin. He could not summon even a trace of perfunctory congratulation. He, Addison Wheeler, Wheeler Dealer, who loved nothing more than fresh ink on a purchase-and-sale agreement, who had been known to throw his hat in the air when a financing contingency was waived, who had been known to treat the entire office to a five-course lunch at the Wauwinet when a major property closed, could not even fake a smile in response to the news that an unsellable property had sold.

Florabel, thank God, could not have cared less about Addison’s underwhelming response. She just wanted to be smug about her news with everyone in the office, and Addison was her first stop. He had given her the listing, but it had been something of a gag, a white elephant. Florabel had had beginner’s luck—well, either that or she had true Realtor’s skill, the ability to interface the right buyer with the right property.

She moved on to Arthur Dimmity’s desk; Arthur could be counted on to scowl with undisguised envy, which Florabel would find gratifying. Addison should have given the listing to Arthur, he realized now; Arthur would have a hard time with a lemonade stand in the desert. He handled only rentals.