The Castaways (9 page)

This,
she’d said,
is my heart.

P
hoebe envied Delilah for many reasons, and today another reason was added to that list: Delilah was able to express her grief fully and plainly, like a child. She was in her bed, curled in the fetal position, crying like a baby, sobbing, hiccupping, catching her breath, wiping her nose and face, and then collapsing all over again. She was hysterical, nothing would stop her, and that had to feel good.

Phoebe lay on the other side of Delilah’s bed. She stretched out and covered Delilah’s body with her own. She made a shushing sound as she might for a baby. These gestures didn’t seem to be making any difference to Delilah, but Phoebe stayed there. She felt, as ever, that she was watching the rest of the world from behind frosted glass; there was a barrier between her and everyone else. That barrier had come down for the first time in eight years today, when she had gone to find Addison. She had
lost it
. The news of Greg and Tess dead—delivered by Sophie from her Pilates class, whose husband served in the Coast Guard—had shattered the frosted window, and Phoebe had found herself face-to-face with horror.

Phoebe had been through it all before.

Reed!

Her twin brother had been… how to explain? The dearest person in her life. He had always been there. Since Phoebe was conceived, since the womb, since her first day on earth, the two of them had been a pair, pink and blue, a matched set, meant to be together. The twin relationship sometimes backfired; Phoebe had heard all kinds of weird, twisted stories. When Phoebe was in her twenties, she finally heard her parents speak of the concerns they had had when Phoebe and Reed were young.
You were too close—you spoke only to each other. We wanted to take you to see a therapist.
Phoebe and Reed had developed their own language, which their mother feared was meant to keep the rest of the world at a distance. But when Phoebe thought back to her childhood, there was only peace, comfort, and constant, safe companionship. She and Reed liked each other, they were considerate of each other—even as teenagers. They realized that hurting each other would be akin to hurting themselves. Reed was handsome and popular and smart; he played soccer, basketball, lacrosse. Phoebe was beautiful and popular and smart; she was editor of the year-book and she was a cheerleader.

Reed helped Phoebe with her trig; she helped him with his paper for American lit. He was math and science, she was English and history. Reed could draw; Phoebe could sing. They both sucked at French. Phoebe called him Reedy, Reeder, Free-bird, Sweet Reedy Bird. He in turn called her Twist, short for Twister, short for “twin sister.”

Did people tease them? It was possible, behind their backs. They were too good, too cute and perfect, too close. One night after basketball practice, Reed came home with a swollen eye. Something had happened, a fight with Todd Carrell, a boy Phoebe had broken up with before Christmas. In the locker room, Todd had said something crass about Reed and Phoebe, and Reed had gone wild. Todd Carrell had been sent to the hospital with a broken arm. Rather than being upset, Phoebe was dismissive.

The rest of the world doesn’t understand,
she said.

Later that year Phoebe and Reed were in danger of being voted homecoming king and queen. They both won, but after the Todd Carrell incident, Phoebe understood that the student body wouldn’t be able to handle it. Since Phoebe was on the homecoming committee, she fixed the vote so that Shelby Duncan, who was Reed’s girlfriend and had come in second place, was named the winner.

Phoebe and Reed went to college at the University of Wisconsin. They led separate lives in a natural way. Reed played varsity soccer, majored in business admin, and pledged
TKE
. Phoebe majored in communications and pledged Alpha Kappa Delta. They spoke on the phone daily and met for lunch at the Dairy every Wednesday, just the two of them. After college, they both moved to New York City. Phoebe lived in Chelsea and slugged it out as a catalogue model for nearly a year before she got a job with Elderhostel. Reed lived on the Upper East Side. He worked for Goldman Sachs first, then went to Columbia Business School, then got a job with Cantor Fitzgerald. They still talked on the phone every day (and with the convenience of cell phones, it was usually two and three times a day), and they had lunch every Wednesday at Pastis. Their grandfather died; they drove back to Wisconsin for the funeral together. Reed went through a bad breakup with a woman ten years older than he who happened to be number three on the masthead at
Vogue;
Phoebe met him at McSorley’s, and they got wickedly drunk and hung out on the swings at the Bleecker Street playground until four in the morning.

Phoebe could go on and on explaining and still not quite capture what she was trying to get across. She did not fight with Reed. When they disagreed, they did so nicely. They knew each other too well to fight; they understood each other completely. The bottom line was: Phoebe had never in her life felt lonely. Because she always had Reed. Her best friend. Her double. He was she, she was he, they were pink and blue, two halves of a whole.

Reed met a girl and got married. Moved to Connecticut. Phoebe loved her sister-in-law, Ellen Paige, and helped her organize Junior League luncheons in New Canaan. Phoebe then met Addison and moved to Nantucket. The Wednesday lunches became a thing of the past, but Phoebe and Reed still talked on the phone two or three times a day. They spent a week together in Wisconsin at Christmas. Reed and Ellen Paige came to Nantucket for a week in June; Phoebe and Addison went to Connecticut for a week in October.

Ellen Paige got pregnant and had a baby boy. His name was Domino, but Phoebe called him Sweet Reedy Junior. She spoiled him rotten, sending him a monogrammed bathrobe, a full Brio train set, a four-foot stuffed giraffe from
FAO
Schwarz.
I’m an auntie! The
auntie. Reed’s baby was her baby.

In my will,
Phoebe said,
everything goes to him.

What could Phoebe say about September 11 that hadn’t already been said in sixty languages? It was a beautiful day. Addison got up early to go shark fishing with Bobby D. Phoebe was headed to the gym, but she gagged and spit in the kitchen sink over the smell of her usual espresso. She was grossed out, but she was happy, too.

She was pregnant! She, Phoebe Wheeler, was going to have a baby!

Phoebe hadn’t even realized she wanted a baby. In fact, when asked, she was adamant that she
didn’t
want a baby. She didn’t want to ruin her body, she didn’t want to cramp the lifestyle that she and Addison had cultivated, she didn’t want to deal with poop or vomit or her own filled-to-bursting milkmaid breasts, which would undoubtedly leak all over her Elie Tahari camisole tops. But since Domino had come into the world, Phoebe had softened toward the idea. She would have a baby girl, and her daughter and Domino would be Reed and Phoebe, the next generation. On September 11, she was eleven weeks and four days along. She and Addison had gone for an amniocentesis and found out that the baby was perfectly healthy, and yes, it was a girl.

There was no reason Phoebe couldn’t exercise, the doctor said. In fact, she should exercise.
Just don’t overdo it, and be sure to eat!
(Phoebe blanched; she was not a big eater. She feared calories as if they were poisonous spiders, and now, with the nausea, even her usual diet of espresso, celery sticks, and fat-free yogurt dip wouldn’t stay down.)

At the gym, Phoebe got on the treadmill. Only three days until her first trimester was over and she could tell people she was pregnant. She had told her parents, of course, and Reed and Ellen Paige, and Delilah and Jeffrey and Tess and Greg and Andrea and the Chief. But, for example, Jeremy, the adorable boy who checked IDs at the front desk of the gym, didn’t know. He must have looked at the slight swell of Phoebe’s belly and thought she was eating too much banana pudding, complete with Nilla Wafers and whipped cream. (This was Phoebe’s favorite dessert, but she didn’t let herself get within a hundred yards of it.) Phoebe wanted to stick by the first-trimester rule, because she felt that the only thing worse than miscarrying would be people pitying her for miscarrying. Phoebe had always been lucky and blessed; her life had been happy. Pity was foreign and horrible to her; she feared it more than calories or poisonous spiders.

As Phoebe ran, she watched the
Today
show. It was eight-thirty. There was a half-hour limit on the machines at the gym, but if there wasn’t a line (which there wouldn’t be, now that all of the summer people had gone home), she could push it to sixty minutes. At five minutes to nine, Phoebe was hitting a wall. She was feeling worn down, shaky, short of breath. The doctor had told her not to overdo it. She should stop. She had a Pilates class at four, anyway. But she put on her headphones and kept going.

She was listening to Taylor Dayne sing “Tell It to My Heart,” and her feet were moving now. She had her second wind; she was feeling better than she had all summer. And this was what all the pregnancy books said: the day will come when the nausea and fatigue will end and the pregnant woman will feel good. Phoebe was thinking about this, wondering if it was okay to believe that her turning point had arrived today, Tuesday, September something, when she noticed something happening on TV. The
Today
show was cut short; they had Tom Brokaw on, looking very serious. Then there was footage—a plane flying into the side of a tall building. People crowded in among the treadmills, trying to see the TV. Jeremy from the desk was among them.

Phoebe was hesitant to slow down or stop; her pace was perfect. She was having that experience when her body and the machine were working optimally together.

She kept going. Again they showed the plane flying into the building. More people crowded in. They didn’t want to use the treadmill, they just wanted to watch the news. Phoebe removed her right earbud and said to Jeremy, “What’s going on?”

“A plane hit the World Trade Center,” he said.

Phoebe gagged. Okay, wait. Wait! She punched the correct sequence of buttons on the treadmill to make it slow down, then stop. Her insides were a brewing storm; she was going to lose her bowels right there on the treadmill in front of everyone. Another indignity of the pregnant body. She could not get her breath. She had that shaky, hot, diarrhea feeling. She was afraid to move for fear of erupting. There was a word on her tongue, one word, but she had to deal with her personal emergency first. Get out of the gym! She had to get her bag, her
phone,
she had to get to her car. Before leaving the gym, she checked the TV screen again. The World Trade Center? In New York City? Of course that’s what the building was. She had been watching the screen just like everybody else, she had seen the plane fly into the building—through the building—just like everybody else, but she had been so inward-looking, so consumed with the cardiovascular and reproductive systems of her own body, that she had not thought to wonder where the building was. If pressed, she would have said Jerusalem or Lebanon, or some other part of the world where planes flew into buildings, either because political strife was a part of the everyday or because they just weren’t as careful as Americans. But New York City? The World Trade Center?

She was holding the word in her mouth like a piece of hard candy. She spit it out.

Reed!

She ran down the stairs to her car, dialing. Number one on her speed dial, before Addison even, was Reed at work. Cantor Fitzgerald, hundred and first floor, the World Trade Center, Tower One.

She got his voicemail.

“Jesus, Reed, call me!” she screamed.

Two women Phoebe knew vaguely were getting out of their cars in the parking lot. One of them, Jamie, said, “Hey, Phoebe! Are you okay?”

Phoebe waved, got into her car. Call Addison! The receptionist at Addison’s office, Florabel, answered the phone. Phoebe detested Florabel and suspected the feeling was mutual.

Phoebe said, “Addison, please?”

Florabel didn’t recognize Phoebe’s voice, because Phoebe’s voice was held hostage by panic. Florabel said, “Mr. Wheeler is out of the office today. Would you like his voicemail?”

Shit! Addison was fishing! Phoebe hung up. She tried Addison’s cell phone and got his voicemail. He was so far offshore, he would never have reception.

She called Reed back. It was five after nine.

“Hey, Twist,” he said. His voice was calm, but in the background Phoebe could hear shouting, which seemed more frenzied than the usual Cantor shouting. “You would not believe what is happening here. Have you seen the news?”

“Sort of,” she said. “Are you okay?”

“Well, I just threw up in my trash can,” he said. “Because I tell you what, people are
dead
over in that other building. You should see the smoke. It stinks, even in here.”

“What are they… are they saying anything?”

“We’re supposed to sit tight. Some of the guys—Ernie, Jake, you know—they want to go to the ground to watch, but there’s debris falling. It’s safer, I think, to stay put.”

“You think?”

“That’s what…”

“What?” Phoebe said. She couldn’t hear.

“I’ll call you back when the dust settles, okay? I love you. I’m going to be fine, I promise.”

“Okay,” Phoebe said.

“I have to call Ellen Paige. She’s at play group with Domino, but when she hears about this, she’s going to freak.”

“Okay. I love you,” Phoebe said.

“Hey,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

“Me?” Phoebe said. “I feel fine.”

There was a noise. Honestly, it sounded like a lion roaring, or a wave crashing over her head. The line went dead. Phoebe nearly sideswiped the mailman, who was filling boxes on Old South Road.

She watched footage of the plane hitting the second tower on Addison’s sixty-inch plasma TV, in the closed-up, air-conditioned, professionally decorated comfort of her own home. Outside, the day shimmered. Nantucket was as tranquil and lovely as it had ever been. Phoebe turned her stare outside, in a daze. According to Tom Brokaw, America was under attack. Phoebe waited for the planes to come screaming over the ocean. Nothing. A monarch butterfly settled momentarily on the picnic table, then flew away.