Elin Hilderbrand - The Castaways

The square for February 14 said: LoLa 41. 7 P.M.

Which was where she and Greg had gone to dinner.

On March 3, Addison had told Tess he loved her for the first time. They were in the cottage, listening to Billie Holiday. It was pouring rain outside. Addison lit a fire and made two mugs of coffee with Baileys. It was as perfect a scene as he could imagine. When he lay dying, this would be the moment he reflected on.

He set his mug down. He ran a fingertip along Tess’s jawline.

He said, “I love you, Tess.”

That day should have a hand-drawn heart!

Tess had said, “I love you, too.” Her eyes were clear and dry.

But the square for March 3 was empty.

Addison’s birthday, April 23, said: Addison b-day (49) . Greg had been at a singing competition in Lenox with the High Priorities and Tess had, as a surprise, called in sick to school so she could spend the day with Addison at the cottage.

Was it necessary to mention that this was the best present he had ever been given?

She had bagels and cream cheese waiting, and a steaming carafe of coffee, and his newspapers: the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and USA Today for the sports. She had ordered, online, the entire catalogue of the Rolling Stones and said they were going to listen to each of the albums all the way through, in order. They made love. They played chess in bed, then took a tiny nap. They had lunch: somehow she had gotten hold of two bottles of the impossible-to-procure Mersault, which they drank with croque-monsieurs that she whipped up at the stove. And real dill pickles, his favorite! They watched Casino Royale and she cried in his arms. They ate two brownie sundaes, one of which had a candle, and Tess sang “Happy Birthday” to him, and at the end she added on the kindergarten chant, Are you one? Are you two? Are you three? All the way to forty-nine.

Then she gave him his present: it was a heart cut out of red felt.

She said, “This is my heart.”

Now, he touched the pieces of the heart in his pocket. He had never been without it. He wished he had given her something like this instead of a hardback tome of fusty love stories she would never read. He should have given her a token of his love that she could hold on to, touch so much it fell apart. Why had he not done that?

May 10 was the day he first broached the topic of leaving their respective spouses. I can’t do this anymore , he’d said. I need to be with you. I can make anything happen. Just give me the okay.

She had bit her bottom lip. She was conflicted!

I know what you mean. I know. But…

But: the twins, their friends, their lives. She couldn’t pull the pin.

But: she agreed. She loved him. She would think about it.

On Tess’s calendar, it said: Meeting w/principal, 4 P.M.

Addison flipped back to the twentieth of June and the insidious heart. A slip of paper fell to the floor. He picked it up. It was a poem, ripped, not cut, from a magazine. From The New Yorker. He recognized the type.

The poem was by Michael Ryan, the title was “Sixtieth Birthday Dinner.” What interested Addison, of course, were the lines that Tess had underlined. Here it was-finally!-a message.

My life with you has been beyond beyond

And there’s nothing beyond it I’m seeking

…

I wouldn’t mind being dead

If I could still be with you.

Addison read the lines, then read them again. His heart floated. It was all he’d been looking for, a snippet like this. A love note.

He folded the poem and slid it into his front pocket. He looked at the heart, enthusiastically marking their twelfth anniversary. He pulled the poem back out. Had she clipped this for Greg? As an anniversary present? To write in his card? Or was it meant to be for Addison? Oh, please, he thought. It was a love poem, a beautiful sentiment, it was them . Their life together, short as it was, had been “beyond beyond.” There was nothing beyond it Addison was seeking.

I wouldn’t mind being dead/If I could still be with you.

He couldn’t process that, for the obvious reasons.

For Greg? For Addison? There was nothing else for him here-nothing else! And so, fuck it, Addison was going to claim the poem. Tess had read it and thought of him, she had impulsively torn it out of the magazine to give to him or recite to him over the phone. He was fooling himself, maybe, but he was keeping the poem.

He rinsed his glass and tucked the bottle of Jack under his arm. As he was walking out of the house, he realized he hadn’t found the present Phoebe had given to Tess.

What was it?

On the fifteenth of July, the corn was ready. It had been the perfect growing season; everything was ahead and bountiful. The strawberries were finished now, but the crop had been legendary; the squash and zucchini and cukes were runaways, multiplying faster than rabbits.

And on July 15, corn. The earliest ready date in twenty-five years. Jeffrey almost didn’t believe it, but he peeled the husks back on ten ears of butter and sugar, all of them pearly and mature, bursting, ready to go. He tasted them raw. Sweet. He sent pickers out and went upstairs to his office to notify his accounts-thirty-two accounts on Nantucket alone, and another dozen on the Cape. There were local farms on the Cape, but many places preferred his corn, grown thirty miles out to sea in that sandy soil. There was something about it.

Jeffrey’s office was above the retail space of the farm market. It was, properly, the attic. It had open studs on a wicked slanted ceiling and it was hotter than hell, despite the efforts of strategically positioned fans. The sun beat down on the roof and Jeffrey was directly underneath. This kept it toasty warm in winter, but it was a frying pan today, July 15, the official first day of corn.

“Whew!” he said aloud when he reached the top of the stairs. To no one, because Jeffrey’s office was his and his alone. He worked without an assistant, and everyone else-the farm market manager, the marketing person, the head chef, the buyer-all had offices on the first floor, which was air-conditioned. Jeffrey had segregated himself on purpose because he was a serious person who savored silence and his privacy.

It was beastly hot. There was sweat in his eyes. He pulled a bandanna out of his back jeans pocket (yes, a real red bandanna-Delilah teased him, but he didn’t care) and wiped his face.

There was someone sitting in his chair. Andrea.

He was speechless. But not surprised. Somehow he’d expected her. The other day he’d spied a beat-up black Jeep Wrangler in the parking lot and his heart had sung out a short, sweet tune because he thought it was Andrea’s-but then he realized that Andrea no longer drove a Jeep. She hadn’t driven one in over fifteen years. He was losing his mind.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey, Peach,” she said. She was wearing a white T-shirt and jean shorts. Her dark hair was in a ponytail. There were flip-flops on the floor, but her bare feet were tucked under her bare, tanned legs. Andrea’s legs were her best feature; they were very strong, taut, powerful. They weren’t sexy to look at, maybe, but they were sexy for sex-she used to tense and kick and fight him off. He remembered this instantly and it embarrassed him, and then he thought about how her showing up here in this dim, sultry room was like the beginning of one of the porn movies Delilah tried to get him to watch to spice up their sex life. He felt a surge of energy. Entirely inappropriate. He forgot all about the corn.

She was sitting in his chair, so there was nothing for him to do but stand. But he couldn’t stand. It was too hot and he was too rattled by this unexpected visit. He pulled a milk crate out of the shadowy eaves, flipped it over, and sat down at her feet.