The Castaways (42 page)

Drew insisted. “Mom said!”

Barney said, “Get off of me!”

Delilah left Finn moaning and groaning and separated her boys. She whipped off Barney’s clothes with no mercy while Drew complained.

“You said I could help!”

She threw the fouled clothes into a pile in the corner. What she needed was the overnight bag from the car. Could she in good conscience send Drew to go get it? He was strapping and athletic, he could deal with the car keys and the hotel key card, he could get the bag and trek all the way back here. But could he do it in the middle of the night, when—Delilah was sure—there were abductors and pedophiles lurking in the fields beyond the hotel parking lot?

No.

“I have to go get the overnight bag,” Delilah said. She wanted her toothbrush and the kids needed a change of clothes.

Delilah waited until Finn was strong enough to stand up, then she walked him to the bed where his sister was fast asleep, stripped him to his boxers, and got him under the covers. She adjusted the air conditioner. The room was starting to smell. Delilah threw a few of the thin hotel towels over the obvious places where Finn had vomited.

“I’ll be right back,” Delilah said to Drew. Barney was huddled under the covers.

“Can I watch TV?” Drew asked.

“No,” Delilah said. It was one in the morning. What would be on the hotel TV but pornography?

“Please?”

“No, Drew. Everyone else is asleep.”

He gave her a face. “This place sucks. I hate it here.”

Well, that made two of them, but Delilah couldn’t articulate this because the kids would take their cues from her. She had to be upbeat, no matter what. “I only pulled over because your brother was sick. This isn’t anyplace we’re staying.”

“Where are we staying?” Drew asked. “Where are we going?”

Michigan, she thought. The idea had taken root in her. The kids splashing in the lake, the kids picking blueberries.

“Someplace else,” she said.

She hiked down to the parking lot for the bag. She was exhausted. Really fucking tired. She just wanted to sleep.

When she got back to the room, she heard a noise she did not like. The door to the bathroom was shut. She pushed it open.

Drew was on his knees, puking into the bathtub.

E
veryone had left her except for the Chief and the hundred other people who were dancing. Phoebe had no shortage of dance partners. She danced with Swede, she danced with Hank Drenmiller, she danced with the executive director of Island Conservation. They all told her how wonderful she was, how generous and kindhearted. Phoebe felt like the belle of the ball, the way she used to feel on special nights before Reed died, like she was pretty and charming and so, so lucky to have been born into her life.

But something was eating at her, an impostor feeling, a feeling that she did not deserve any of this. She had been drinking champagne all night to combat this feeling, but as was always the case with alcohol, her underlying feelings became stronger rather than weaker. Pretense peeled away, exposing…

The band finished “These Boots Were Made for Walking,” and Phoebe and the executive director separated and politely clapped. Phoebe scanned the crowd. Everyone was having a
lot
of fun; she could feel good about that. She saw Eddie on the fringes of the room, holding a savannah sidecar. He wasn’t dancing and he wasn’t talking to anyone, but he looked happy.

Phoebe was rafting down a champagne river. The band launched into “Love Potion Number Nine.” Phoebe grabbed the Chief’s hand. “Come on, Eddie. Let’s dance.”

“I don’t dance,” the Chief said. “You know that. Not with my wife, not with the Queen of England.”

Phoebe pulled him onto the dance floor. “But with me, tonight, yes.”

“No,” he said, but he was trying not to smile.

“It’s my party,” Phoebe said, “and you’ll dance if I want to.”

And guess what? The Chief could dance. He was as strong and solid and surefooted as Phoebe’s father. He led, she followed. She was seventeen again, at the Whitefish Bay Pool Club at her homecoming dance. She had been runner-up as queen to Shelby Duncan, Reed’s girlfriend. Reed and Shelby had looked silly but sweet in their foil crowns.

Phoebe became confused. The Chief twirled her, then gathered her up in his arms. He was her father. He was a safe place. She looked him square in the eye. He stopped, held her out at arm’s length.

“That was a great thing you did,” he said.

Phoebe said, “There’s something I have to tell you.”

The Chief did not move. The song ended, people clapped. Phoebe was falling. Falling! She let go of her pole and toppled into the champagne river. She was drowning. Would anyone save her?

Phoebe told the Chief as they sat on folding chairs in the dark night outside the bright oval of the tent.

“I gave Tess a pill,” she said. “Only one. But it was a doozy.”

Phoebe tried to explain, but her words were jumbled. Tess and Addison having an affair, in love, discovered by Phoebe in the cruel, cold days of early April. She saw them together at the Quaise cottage, but she said nothing. What could she say? She understood. In a weird, drug-addled way, she approved. But not really, of course. Not wholly or completely. She had her moments of clarity, her flare-ups of jealousy. Addison was in love with Tess. But Phoebe said nothing, did nothing. She hid beneath a shroud of drugs. She waited. Days, weeks, months. She watched the affair; she took its temperature. Addison was in deeper than Tess. Tess wanted to pull away; Addison wouldn’t let her. He wanted her to leave Greg. How did Tess feel about this? Phoebe couldn’t tell.

Tess came to Phoebe two days before her anniversary. The sail was going to happen; they had checked the forecast. There would be plenty of wind. Greg was gung-ho about the sail, about the anniversary celebration; they needed it, they deserved it. He had a surprise. He had written her a song. Andrea was making a picnic. Delilah was taking the kids overnight.

Tess had not needed to ask. Phoebe anticipated her. She knew Tess was nervous about the sail (all that open water, the wind, the waves), and there was additional anxiety on top of it, something else, something Tess was going to do or say, something she was either going to confess or suppress.

Phoebe said, “I’d like to give you something.”

Tess looked like she might protest. No gifts! Delilah went to Phoebe for drugs, as did Andrea and Greg when they had a pulled shoulder muscle or a headache. But never Tess.

“That would be great,” Tess said.

Phoebe could have taken it easy on her. Ativan, Xanax, even a valium or two would have been enough to take the edge off. But in the back of her mind, Phoebe held the vision she had seen through the cottage window. Addison in bed, holding Tess in his arms, Tess’s eyes closed, Addison gazing at the ceiling.

Phoebe gave her one of the precious Number Nines, the contraband pills that came from Reed’s college roommate Brandon, off the big drug company black market. She would send Tess straight to the heroin stratosphere.

“Be sure to take it with food,” Phoebe directed. She put the pill in Tess’s palm and folded her fingers over it.

“She took it,” the Chief said.

Phoebe nodded. Tess had taken the pill, and she had drunk the champagne that Andrea had packed. Then the boat caught a gust and Tess had lurched or been thrown overboard. She was not a great swimmer under the best of circumstances, and with the drug coursing through her, she hadn’t stood a chance.

Greg most likely had died trying to save her.

Finally Phoebe cried. Not the breathless, hysterical sobs that she had released in the shock of first finding out, but rather, she cried deeply. She was a bottomless well of sorrow, guilt, and regret. She cried like a woman who had done the unthinkable. She had killed her best friend, leaving two children motherless.

“I didn’t mean to kill her,” Phoebe said. “I just wanted to… I don’t know… give her a shove. But what else can I think now, but that I…”

Even with ten savannah sidecars in him, the Chief was a man of reason. He touched her back and said, “You didn’t kill her. You gave her the pill to calm her nerves. You were trying to help her.”

Phoebe wanted to be tried for murder. She wanted death row.

“I could have given her Ativan,” Phoebe said. “But I gave her the Number Nine.”

“The pill wasn’t what killed her. She drowned. She fell off the boat, which would make it an accident. Or…”

“Or she was pushed,” Phoebe said.

“Or she was pushed.” The Chief sighed. “But here’s the thing—I’m glad you told me. The drug showed up on the tox report, and that tox report has been eating at me since… I didn’t know what to think. Well, what I thought was that Greg shot her full of smack, then dumped her overboard so he could be with April Peck.”

Phoebe said, “What I did was no better. I gave her a pill I knew she couldn’t handle. I wanted to ruin her anniversary. Tess was having an affair with my husband and I wanted to turn her into a zombie. And then she
died,
Eddie. She is dead and Greg is dead, and it is
my fault
.”

“All you did was give her the pill,” the Chief said. “You didn’t make her take it.”

Phoebe would not be comforted. “It’s the strongest opiate out there. It’s not even legal, Ed. I would take one, you know, in the darkest days, and I would be in outer space. I couldn’t drive or make a sandwich. I couldn’t wash my hair. I was so out of it.” She looked at him. “I’m a monster.”

The Chief took her hand. The tent blazed before them like a big white birthday cake. Phoebe felt exhausted, weak, full of heartache. The fact of the matter was, she missed Tess. The absolute truth was that Tess and Addison could have gotten married and left Phoebe homeless and destitute, and it still would have been better than this, because Tess and Greg would be alive. They would all be together. Still.

W
here, where, where?

He was the woman’s husband. He should know the inner workings of Delilah’s mind. And he did, didn’t he? It was Delilah’s belief that people were predictable. They always acted like themselves; no one was truly capable of change. Presumably she applied this theory to herself. In their first, torrid week of dating, she had described herself as a bird that was unable to be captured or caged. She told him the story of how she’d run away in high school. Every time he and Delilah argued, she threatened to leave. Her presence in his life, she’d always maintained, was temporary. This had felt like an empty threat, because Delilah had a deep dedication to house and home. Their house was a finely feathered nest; it was a haven for their children and their friends and their friends’ children. Would Delilah have expended so much energy building and nurturing a home only to abandon it? She assured him she would. And look, she had.

Jeffrey had called Addison and Phoebe at home, but no one answered; he didn’t want to bother them on their cell phones if they were still at the party and ruin their good time. He didn’t call the Chief or Andrea because he didn’t want either of them to panic—to put out an
APB
or call Delilah a kidnapper.

He told himself he was overreacting. Delilah had gotten stuck off-island and for some reason had not been able to find a way to contact him.

But he was a smart man and he knew his wife. This had to do with Tess and Greg. It had, Jeffrey believed, to do with Delilah and Greg. Delilah and Greg had worked at the Begonia together for years; they had spent God knows how many late nights together drinking, smoking dope, singing, and keeping each other’s secrets. Delilah always took Greg’s side; she was his champion. She was his closest friend in a circle where they were all close friends. Jeffrey was too proud to admit it, but their friendship had always gotten under his skin. He blamed it for certain deficiencies in his own relationship with Delilah. Greg got to be her boyfriend, leaving Jeffrey to be her… what? Her father. Here was Jeffrey now, another version of Nico Ashby, chasing down his daughter who was on the lam.

He took another beer out of the fridge and sat down in a chair, to wait until morning.

T
here was only an inch or so left in the second bottle of Mersault. Both Addison and Andrea were quite drunk, but despite the raw and emotionally treacherous nature of their discussion, they were having a good time. Or maybe it was just Addison having a good time. He and Andrea had stopped talking, but they were listening to jazz, bobbing their heads, and Andrea, while not exactly smiling, had softened her exasperated expression.

She said, “Tell me why you got kicked out of Princeton.”

“Ah,” Addison said. “The Princeton story.”

“Ed says it’s a great story.”

“But it’s just that—a story. I didn’t actually get kicked out of Princeton. I just didn’t graduate with my class because I was short on math credits.”

“Tell the story anyway.”

And so he obliged. The week before graduation, Addison and his buddy Blake Croft crashed a garden party that the dean was throwing for donors to the annual fund. Addison and Blake wore straw boaters and pastel dinner jackets. They drank Mount Gay and tonics and ate oysters from the raw bar to improve their virility. The dean, recently divorced, was at the party with an extremely beautiful and extremely young woman named Nadine. Nadine targeted Addison, engaged him in a private, racy conversation, and then led him by the hand to the powder room, where they… Here Addison wiggled his eyebrows, but Andrea did not crack a smile. Addison, in his defense, did ask Nadine about the dean, and she said, “Oh, he’s an old fuddy-duddy.” Addison happened to agree.

When Nadine and Addison emerged from the powder room, disheveled and glowing, the dean was standing there, waiting in line.

“But that wasn’t the bad part,” Addison said.

“What was the bad part?” Andrea deadpanned.

“Nadine wasn’t the dean’s date,” Addison said. “It was his daughter.”

“Oh,” Andrea said, nonplussed.

Addison shook his head. He was very drunk. Perhaps he’d told it wrong.