Elin Hilderbrand - The Castaways

Delilah was furious. Whereas Tess was heartbroken, devastated, incredulous, and confused, Delilah was just angry. She believed April Peck.

Greg said, No one at home wants to hear me play.

True.

Greg tasted like beer.

True.

Greg played her “Tiny Dancer.” This was Greg’s favorite song. It was his theme song. It was the best song in his repertoire, his sexiest, most soulful song. It was the song he sang when he wanted something from his audience. It was his seduction song.

Greg said, Please don’t leave. I need… I need… I need…

What?

Delilah knew what the next word was. He had said it to her only a few weeks before.

Something.

Greg was suspended from his teaching position for two weeks. “Suspended” was the word that went around town, with all its negative connotations. Greg was a restless teenage boy who had gone looking for trouble and found it. The school administration called the suspension a “temporary leave of absence.”

Dr. Flanders, the superintendent (who, Delilah knew through Thom and Faith, had more than a few skeletons dangling in his own closet), said, “Mr. MacAvoy is taking a leave of absence while we sort the matter out.”

April Peck took a “leave of absence” also. Her mother, Donna Peck, who had encouraged April to confront the administration, whisked her away to Hawaii. The Four Seasons, Maui.

Delilah felt betrayed. Greg needed “something,” but why did that “something” have to be April Peck, a seventeen-year-old siren with a voice that was a cross between Renée Fleming’s and Alicia Keys’s? April Peck was too obvious. She showed up at nine o’clock on a Sunday night, a contestant from a wet T-shirt contest and crying to boot, and Greg didn’t have the willpower or the common sense to kick her out?

Well, he said he did, but Delilah didn’t believe him.

I need… I need… I need…

What Delilah thought was, He was supposed to need me.

What certain people knew (Delilah, Jeffrey, Addison, and Phoebe) was that the Chief had had a private chat with Dr. Flanders on Greg’s behalf. The two men had met in a secret chamber at the police station. The Chief either slipped Flanders the equivalent of a maître d’s fifty-dollar bill or he exerted his considerable authority. The Chief talked to Flanders as a favor to Andrea, who wanted it for Tess, who wanted it for her kids.

This has to get swept under the rug. He can’t lose his job. What will we do for money? He has to be fully exonerated.

And in fact the school administration decided to believe Greg. Not in absolute terms, perhaps, but enough to salvage his job and dismiss April Peck from the High Priorities. Both Donna Peck and Derek Foster, April’s boyfriend, protested this ruling, but they had no clout. Greg had tenure, he had worked in the school for twelve years without incident, he was the father of two young children, he was well respected and well liked in the community, his wife was a teacher in the district, he was a fine musician and an all-around asset to the music department, and the High Priorities were a source of local pride: they had won competitions at the state and national levels; they had traveled to Italy and Luxembourg.

And there was the chief of police factor.

And what the administration knew that no one else did was that the high school phys ed teacher, Bob Casey, had long been complaining to the superintendent’s office that April Peck was lascivious, her behavior in school inappropriate and dangerous to teachers who were only trying to help her.

And and and! When the superintendent and his “inquiry team” asked April Peck which book she had gone to retrieve from her locker on the night in question, Sunday, October 23, April Peck floundered.

“Which book? ”

“That’s the question, Miss Peck. Which book were you coming to school to get?”

“You mean the title?”

The inquiry team frantically scribbled notes.

She said, “Why do you want to know that?”

“It’s just a question,” Flanders said. “We’re asking you the title of the book you came to get.”

Finally she said, “A Separate Peace.”

Which was required reading for freshmen. Not seniors.

With news of this prime-time flub, the plaintiff caught in a lie, Greg crowed his innocence with a previously unseen confidence and vigor. The girl’s a liar! She’s been lying all along!

What Delilah chose to believe was that Greg was both lying and telling the truth, as was April. The truth fell somewhere in between. The truth was an amalgam of his details and hers. But the truth had been burned in the incinerator, dumped in the ocean a hundred miles off the coast. They would never know the truth.

For weeks and then months, Delilah was cool and distant with Greg. She had been denying him for years, yes, but for all of those years she had been in love with him. Surely he realized this? Surely he understood that turning to April Peck would wound her? The cocktail napkins and cardboard coasters that came to her now said, Do you still hate me?

Onstage, he said, This song is for you, Ash . And it was Natalie Merchant’s “Kind and Generous.” Or it was “Landslide,” Delilah’s all-time sentimental favorite.

In February, once the matter was dead and buried in the public eye and almost so among the eight of them, Delilah said, “You had everyone else fooled, but not me.”

And he said, “That’s too bad. You’re the only person who matters.”

Which sounded like total bullshit, but she was won over anyway.

If the story had ended there, it would still have been awful, but ultimately it would have been forgivable. It would have been catalogued under We all fuck up. So what?

But then.

Fast-forward almost as far as you could go (there was an end point now, because Greg was dead), to the night before Greg died. Another Sunday night. It was now June 19, and the Begonia was filled with tourists whom Delilah didn’t know. It was a blah night; Delilah was feeling a little flat, a little premenstrual, a little down. Greg and Tess’s anniversary was the following day, they were going on a sail to the Vineyard, they were taking a champagne picnic, Greg was taking his guitar, he had written Tess a song, they were going to stay overnight in a Relais & Châteaux property. Fabulous.

Would Delilah watch the twins while they were gone?

Delilah had a Cinderella complex going; her ego was hurt, and her heart, and her hopes. Nine months earlier Greg’s marriage to Tess had been looking like a terminal case, but now here it was, rising like a phoenix out of the ashes. She pretended to be happy for them, but she wasn’t.

At five minutes to ten, April Peck walked into the Begonia. Delilah nearly stumbled in her very high and wicked Jimmy Choos. She was surprised the alarms weren’t going off. The little-lying-bitch alarms.

Delilah rushed her. April was wearing a shell-pink slip dress embroidered all over with tiny flowers and a pair of expensive-looking silver stilettos. She looked stunning and mature and confident-nothing like the other girls who had tried to pass themselves off in here. If Delilah hadn’t known better, she would have said the girl was of age, or close enough to let slide. But she did know better.

“The kitchen just closed, April,” Delilah said. “And you’re underage. So I can’t let you in.”

April stared. “How do you know my name?”

Delilah stared back. What was the savvy answer? The truth? They lived on an island where everyone sort of knew everyone else. Delilah and Jeffrey went to all of the High Priorities concerts to support Greg, so Delilah supposed the first time she had seen April Peck was in the high school auditorium two springs earlier. Even among all the lovely songbirds, April Peck had stood out. She was the most beautiful of the beautiful, and she had a solo in “Fire.” Her voice had been rich and smoky and simmering and strong. Before all this shit with Greg, April Peck had been the kind of teenager adults noticed because she had star quality. And after all this shit with Greg, Delilah was mortified to admit, she had stalked April Peck a time or two.