Elin Hilderbrand - The Castaways

Freebird. Sweet Reedy Bird.

I’ll call you back when the dust settles here.

When the dust settles.

On TV, the buildings collapsed like a house of cards.

By the time Addison got home, sunburned and smelling strongly of fish, Phoebe had vomited all over their seventeen-thousand-dollar silk Oriental rug, hand-knotted in Tehran, and she had wet herself. Her gym shorts were soaked. She didn’t care. Nothing mattered anymore, not even when Addison gasped and said, “Jesus, Phoebe!” And she realized that she had not wet herself. She was sitting in a pool of her own blood.

It was now eight years later, and everyone had healed and moved on. Phoebe’s parents had started a scholarship at Reed and Phoebe’s high school in Reed’s name. It was a large scholarship with elaborate requirements, and they spent many of their postretirement hours administering it.

Keeps me busy, Phoebe’s father said.

Domino was in fourth grade, living with Ellen Paige and her new husband, Randy, whose wife had been a restaurant manager at Windows on the World. They met at a support group.

It was only Phoebe who was stuck in an acrylic box. She could see out, but she was alone. Untouchable.

It was the drugs. Phoebe was on antidepressants, pain medication, and sleep aides. She had the drugs that Dr. Field liberally prescribed, and she had black-market drugs that she got from Brandon Callahan, Reed’s roommate at Wisconsin, who was a drug rep with-well, Phoebe was hesitant to name the company that Brandon worked for. It was a big company; the drugs were good.

There were those people-Addison, Phoebe’s mother, and to some extent Delilah-who felt that the drugs were harming Phoebe, killing her even. Look what they had stolen from her already-her consulting business had gone under; her body, once fit and toned, was now a bunch of twigs with skin hanging off them like cobwebs. And her personality had vanished. She smiled once a month, she never cried, she never laughed. She had, however, become an excellent listener. Listening was something she could do; many times the drugs made her feel lofty, like she was floating on air above everyone else, a Buddha on a pedestal, a deity calling in from the clouds. She gave sage advice now, everyone (meaning Delilah) said so, because she had no ego. She spoke only the truth because she no longer cared.

Addison and Dr. Field had tried to get her off the drugs. They wanted her to cut back with the eventual goal of quitting altogether. She could see their point. They would wean her off a little at a time, the way one treated frostbite. You warm the feet gradually by rubbing, and the blood returns, the tissue pinkens and comes back to life. This was how it would work with Phoebe. She would go off the drugs and things would come back into focus. She would get an appetite back, she would return to the gym, she would take on a small consulting project or agree to chair a brunch for donors to the Atheneum, she would agree to take tennis lessons with Delilah, she would shop for a dress or a belt, she would be able to watch TV, make love to her husband, bite into a peach, take a swim on a hot day, read a magazine-and enjoy it.

Life is out there waiting for you, Addison said, with Dr. Field nodding beside him. Addison sounded like a TV evangelist, a motivational speaker with a best-selling book. Phoebe understood that Addison was right. Life was waiting for her, she could see it through the clear walls of her box. But she didn’t want to give up the drugs. The drugs were Phoebe’s life support, they were the bubble wrap that kept her from breaking. Reed was dead, he was never coming back; she would never see him again . Even now, eight years later, that fact took her breath away. It was the vertigo. She was falling!

Life was out there waiting for Phoebe, but it was not waiting for Reed, and therefore Phoebe would not, could not, take advantage of it. This seemed childish to the rest of the world, but that was because the rest of the world did not understand what it was like to have a twin like Reed.

Phoebe remained locked in her museum case.

Labeled “Twin sister of September 11 victim.”

Phoebe lay against Delilah, absorbing her sadness. Delilah was rocking and rolling with it; she was hot and heaving. Her grief was pornographic. She was showing Phoebe the raw, pink, gaping, oozing parts of herself.

Tess and Greg were dead. Phoebe had taken four Ativans between the time Sophie had told her the news and the time she reached the Galley to tell Addison. The drugs were clothing her now, covering her like a protective suit. The fascinating thing had been her exhibition in the restaurant parking lot. She had emoted like a regular person-screaming, yelling, crying.

She had been convincing, even to herself.

The call from Danny Browne, the medical examiner, came while the Chief was standing behind Finn at the mirror, doing his necktie.

The funeral was in an hour.

Andrea was with Chloe, upstairs. The hair dryer was droning, Andrea wouldn’t have heard the phone, and so the Chief answered the call-leaving Finn’s tie dangling-despite the fact that Andrea would have said, “Now is not the time, Ed.”

He had to know.

“You’re not going to believe this,” Danny Browne said.

Which was not what the Chief wanted to hear. He had been hoping for a glass of cold water, clean and transparent. He didn’t want murkiness, he didn’t want a goddamn detective story, he didn’t want something he wasn’t going to believe.

And yet he’d had a feeling. Two people trapped under a boat, unable to grapple for the edges or swim until they were free of it?

“His blood alcohol was at.09. Hers was at.06-but she was on other junk.”

“Other junk?”

“Opiates. Your normal cause for finding opiates of this strength in the blood is heroin use.”

Finn stood morosely at the mirror, staring into his own freckled face, which looked exactly like his mother’s, and then, noticing the Chief’s gaze, he fingered the limp tie around his neck as if wondering what to do with it.

Now is not the time, Ed. Andrea was always right.

“Send a copy to me at the station. In a sealed envelope, please, marked ‘Confidential.’ Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” Danny Browne said.

“I mean it,” the Chief said. The Chief did not like to pull rank, but in this instance he had no choice.

“No one else will see it,” Danny said.

The church was filled to overflowing. The Chief had ordered Federal Street closed on the block the church occupied, between Main Street and India Street. People spilled out of the church onto Federal Street, and then around both sides of the church like an apron. The Chief would have said he knew everyone who lived on this island, but he was wrong, apparently. Outside the church were groups of high school students. These were the girls from the singing group and their friends, and Greg’s guitar students-they were easy to pick out, with the long hair and the look of discontent. The Chief knew many of them, recognized others, but that was because he had two kids in high school himself. Kacy and Eric’s close friends had taken seats inside, but these other kids-the Chief could not, in his present state, put a name to a single one-either did not feel worthy of a seat inside or liked the freedom of remaining outdoors. There was another group, young mothers and fathers with small children. These would be Tess’s kindergarten students and their families, past and present. There was a whole generation of parents bringing up kids on this island who were strangers to the Chief. Did they know who he was? He supposed they did.