Elin Hilderbrand - The Castaways

Tess’s iPhone was suddenly under his jurisdiction. All of the MacAvoy property was under his control. He would go through the house, see what was there; he would have free rein over the most intimate nooks and crannies of Tess’s and Greg’s life-the bank statements, the drawers of the bedside tables, the diaries.

It terrified him.

Twice she had the same dream. Then three times. It was such a stupid way to manifest her grief. So clichéd and predictable that Andrea was too embarrassed to tell anyone about it. There was no one to tell anyway, since Tess was dead.

The dream was real, though. This was to say, she was really having it. Once. Then again. Then a third time, with a variation.

It went as follows: Andrea was her normal self, sitting in her chair on the beach, reading her book. There was shouting from offshore. Someone was drowning. Andrea ran to the shoreline. It was a man caught in the riptide. Andrea motioned with her arms; she shouted: Swim with it-it will carry you down the beach, but you’ll be okay. She was a lifeguard, with a lifeguard’s instincts and knowledge. She did not want to go in to save this man; he was too big. In a rip like this, he would take her down. She cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted. She had faith that the man would get it; he would save himself! But he was going under. She lost sight of his face. She started swimming. She reached him, got him under the chin. She could do this. In lifesaving class, Andrea had practiced on dummies that weighed twice as much as she did.

It was when they were almost to the shore, when Andrea knew they were both going to be safe, that she allowed herself to look at the man’s face. He had blue eyes, the most piercing eyes she had ever seen. He was, this man, disturbingly handsome. When they reached shore, Andrea waited for him to thank her, but instead the man turned and walked down the beach, away from her. Andrea watched his buttocks in a black Speedo and the triangle of his upper body. His hair was salt-and-pepper curls; he wore a silver hoop earring. He walked toward a woman lying on a towel, a woman who most definitely had not been present when he was shouting for help in the water. The woman raised her head at his approach. It was Phoebe. Andrea thought, Of course, Phoebe. She was heartbroken.

Then, seconds later, Andrea and the man-Pyotr, his name was, he spoke only Russian, though she had no idea how she knew this-were making love against the side of her Jeep. They were, put more accurately, fucking . Because it was wild, tear-at-your-clothes, breathless, stranger sex, sex such as Andrea had never experienced in her life. Pyotr opened the passenger side of Andrea’s Jeep. Andrea sat in the seat while he tasted her.

The Jeep was the same Jeep she had owned during her first summer on Nantucket. She was confused. She asked Pyotr where it had come from. In Russian, which she somehow understood, he said, It’s okay, it’s your Jeep, you can do what you want in it.

Andrea woke up in a panic, her heart shrieking, her hormones raging. She looked at Ed, asleep like a grizzly bear next to her. She filled with guilt. She was riled up, as sexually aroused as she had ever been in her life. Should she wake Ed? And do what? Tell him that she’d had an erotic dream about a man that she’d saved from drowning? A Russian man named Pyotr who was having a relationship with Phoebe? She thought, He was drowning. Of course he was drowning. But that wasn’t what made her sad. What made her sad was that Jeep, the black Jeep she’d bought off the lot at Don Allen Ford in the middle of her first summer, when she was so flush with cash she didn’t know what to do with it. She had driven the Jeep from the dealership straight to the ferry dock, where she picked up Tess, who was fifteen years old, leaving home alone for the first time.

Tess had been wowed by the island, the gray-shingled, cobblestoned quaintness of it, and she had screamed for joy about the black Jeep with the top down. A beach buggy that they could ride in with their dark DiRosa hair flying out behind them.

The dream came again four nights later, at the end of a particularly brutal day, and Andrea recognized it. She knew what was going to happen. She knew the man would shout for help, she knew she would save him, she knew he would leave her for Phoebe, she knew he would come back to her and they would mate like wild animals. In the Jeep, with Andrea’s legs hooked up over the roll bar. This time there was more shame, more worry. She was worried about indecent exposure; she was worried about the police showing up! The police .

Pyotr said, “It’s your car. You can do what you want in it.”

Once she’d had the dream a second time, it was like a TV show she’d become addicted to, or a novel she was reading. The details plagued and baffled her. She thought about the dream for four or five minutes of every hour. Pyotr-who was he? Andrea had never known anyone like him. But that wasn’t possible, was it? Her mind’s eye couldn’t just create a person out of thin air. Pyotr must have been a person she’d seen somewhere, at some point during her life. He was sitting at a café during her semester in Florence; he was in her subway car one of the thousands of times she’d ridden the T; she had seen him with his wife at a restaurant. At Straight Wharf, perhaps, where she and Ed went every year on her birthday. The identity of Pyotr nagged at her, as did her mounting sexual energy. She and Ed made love when the spirit moved them-once every two weeks, say, normally in the morning when they woke up together and sunlight was pouring through their bedroom windows, or rain was tapping, and Ed found himself with an erection and, being the practical man that he was, decided it shouldn’t go to waste. The sex was nice. It was familiar and pleasant. Ed knew what Andrea liked; he got the job done.

They had not had sex since Tess died. Ed had assumed sex was the furthest thing from Andrea’s mind. (She would have thought this way, too, if she were Ed.) Plus they now had two little kids in the house, and whereas Finn slept soundly, Chloe was sometimes up three and four times in the night, searching the house for her parents.

Maybe the lack of sex was to blame for these dreams, then? Maybe Andrea was, at the age of forty-four, about to hit menopause, and so her body was throwing itself a surprise party?

Or it was grief. Which, like every other human emotion, revealed itself in ways that made sense and ways that didn’t.

They were, all of them, drowning. Ed was drowning in work. Andrea was drowning in meanness.

Delilah had asked for Greg’s guitar. Barney wanted to learn to play it, she said.

Although Addison was the executor (a fact that made Andrea feel like she was choking on her son’s gym sock), the bag of personal effects from the Coast Guard was at the Chief and Andrea’s house. What remained were the leather overnight bag and the guitar. The guitar was something of a golden egg.

“Barney really wants it,” Delilah said. “He’s dying to learn.”

Andrea had seen Barney, Delilah’s younger son, sit at Greg’s feet every single time Greg played. He was the most devoted worshipper at Greg’s temple. He was probably the only six-year-old who knew all the lyrics to “Bell Bottom Blues.” Andrea was not surprised that Barney wanted the guitar. They had all joked about how Barney would be the next Greg. Greg, but famous. Ha!

“Eric has asked for the guitar,” Andrea said. “We gave it to Eric.”

This was not true. Andrea had asked Eric if he wanted the guitar, and Eric said he’d have to think about it. When Andrea asked him again, Eric said he didn’t want the guitar. He wasn’t musical, could not carry a tune, would be mortified to play in front of anyone. He didn’t want it. Give it to someone else, he said.