Elin Hilderbrand - The Castaways

At the beginning of their third summer together, Andrea, once again Nantucket’s head lifeguard, went to a party for town employees, where she met the new police chief. Young guy, she said. Single. From Swampscott.

And two weeks later she moved out.

In all honesty, Jeffrey was too busy to do anything to stop her. By the time he got off his goddamn tractor in the figurative sense, Andrea and the new police chief, Ed Kapenash, were engaged.

Life was weird, because instead of Jeffrey’s relationship with Andrea ending, it started a new incarnation. At first Jeffrey was tentatively friends with the newlywed Kapenashes; then Jeffrey met Delilah and they became couple-friends with Ed and Andrea. Andrea’s cousin Tess started dating Greg, and they moved to the island permanently, then Phoebe and Addison joined the scene and the eight of them, over time, developed an insanely tight bond. What did Delilah call them? The Castaways. And it did, at times, seem like just the eight of them alone on a deserted island.

Life was weird because although Jeffrey had seen Andrea every week for nearly twenty years, seeing her now sitting in his chair was sort of like seeing her for the first time. On a rolling boat, by the ketchup dispenser. You do talk! It was as if he’d looked up, finally, after getting the farm running, profitable, and fully staffed, and noticed that she was gone. And he went looking for her. And he found her here, in his chair. Because there was something about her that transported him back. The nickname, Peach. Or the way it was just the two of them here, alone, unlikely to be interrupted. (Had that happened even once since they split?) Or it was the way she was looking at him.

“What are you doing here?” he asked her.

She said, “I’m having a hard time.”

He said, “She worshipped you, Andrea. You were her friend and her sister and her mother wrapped up into one. You did right by her.”

Her tears were silent. “How can you say that? She’s dead.”

“It was an accident.”

“Was it?”

“Wasn’t it?” Jeffrey said. He shifted on the milk crate. He had a nugget of classified information that no one else knew, that had been lobbed at him like a hand grenade by April Peck. I was with him the night before he died. But what did that mean? Did it mean anything? Was it even true? (In his heart, Jeffrey felt it was true. He realized now that Greg had been hiding something.) One thing was for sure: Jeffrey was not going to share this radioactive nugget with Andrea.

“I don’t know,” Andrea said. “All I can tell you is that I’m in agony. I am hurting worse than I could ever imagine I could hurt. Like I lost one of the kids. Like a stranger came into my house and held Kacy’s head under the bathwater until she died. And I wasn’t around. I let it happen.”

“Greg was the stranger?” Jeffrey said. “He was Tess’s husband. Twelve years they were married.”

“He made her miserable.”

“Did he?” Jeffrey said. Jeffrey’s understanding of Greg and Tess’s marriage-before April Peck-was that Tess had loved Greg with the same ardor and enthusiasm that she loved everyone else in her life. “So you wish you’d… what? Spoken up at their wedding, when the priest offered the chance?”

“He hurt her,” Andrea said. “Last fall, that whole thing? He cut her heart out. And she was never the same. The week they separated? God, Jeffrey. We talked for hours. She was trying to make sense of it. Do you think he lied to me? Do you think he lied to Flanders? Do you think something happened between him and that girl? And the answer is, Yes, of course. Something happened, we don’t know what, we’ll never know exactly what. And there’s Greg, sending flowers and hounding her cell phone and calling the house begging and pleading…”

“Yeah,” Jeffrey said. “That was a weird week.”

While Tess was at the Kapenash house with the twins, Greg had taken refuge at Jeffrey and Delilah’s. It was, of all awful things, the week of Thanksgiving, the holiest family holiday, but despite that, or maybe because of that, Tess decided to take the kids and leave. She had meant to go to her brother’s house in Pembroke, to visit her mother at the nursing home in Duxbury, but in the end she had simply sought refuge with Andrea. She slept with Andrea in Andrea’s bed and the kids slept in the guest room. And Greg, although he had his house to himself, slept on Jeffrey and Delilah’s leather couch each night. He never stayed over intentionally-otherwise he would have used the guest room. He came over for dinner and drinks, and he and Delilah stayed up so late talking and he was so drunk that he ended up crashing on the couch. And in the morning he would be awakened by Drew and Barney and SpongeBob SquarePants. He would eat Delilah’s delicious breakfasts, talk about going home to grab a shower, but then there would be college football and lunch and Barney begging him to play the guitar… and he just stayed on and on. A few of those nights, Greg and Delilah worked at the Begonia and came home absurdly late. Jeffrey was busy at the farm market-the kitchen had orders for three hundred fresh turkeys and six times that many side dishes-and if he didn’t catch every nuanced detail of what was going on, could anyone blame him? Delilah was the head paramedic of this particular train wreck; she was in charge of tending to Greg. Jeffrey noted Greg’s attempts to reach Tess, but she was not taking his calls. He heard about a bouquet of flowers sent, and returned to the florist by Tess. Jeffrey wasn’t sure how he felt about the whole thing; what he wanted was to stay out of it. This was, no doubt, what the Chief was doing, and this was what Addison and Phoebe were doing. The prizefight was between Tess (and her trainer, Andrea) and Greg (and his trainer, Delilah) in the opposite corner. Jeffrey did not love it that his house had inadvertently become Greg’s c & he felt like he was harboring a fugitive.

There had been one night in particular that bothered Jeffrey. It was four-thirty in the morning and Jeffrey was rising for the day when he noticed that Delilah was not in bed. He tiptoed out to the kitchen for coffee and he heard Greg’s voice. Greg was murmuring to someone. Although Jeffrey was the last person to eavesdrop, he couldn’t help it-and goddamn it, this was his house. Jeffrey thought, If he is talking to Delilah like that, I am going to throw him out. Because, really, Jeffrey had had enough of the Greg and Delilah confidante thing. Greg was not good for Delilah, or for Jeffrey and Delilah’s marriage.

But when Jeffrey reached the kitchen, he saw that Greg was on his cell phone. Greg noticed Jeffrey and said quickly, “I’ll call you later.” And hung up. And then, despite the fact that Greg had seen Jeffrey and Jeffrey had seen Greg, Greg closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep.

Delilah, as it turned out, was upstairs sleeping with Barney, who tended to wake up in the middle of the night and want his mother.

Jeffrey did not say anything to Greg about the phone call, but he knew it wasn’t Tess on the other end.

Then there was Thanksgiving itself. Tess had ceded a little ground and allowed Greg to see the kids in the morning. Greg had hoped for a family reconciliation for the holiday, and learning that he was only gaining custody for four hours like the divorced man he was sure to become depressed him. He had nothing planned. Delilah suggested that he take the kids to breakfast at the Downyflake, or for a walk on the beach, but Greg seemed eager to avoid quality time when the twins might have a chance to ask him questions he was ill-equipped to answer, such as Why is Mom so mad at you? or Why are we living at Auntie’s house?