Elin Hilderbrand - The Castaways

Instead Greg took the twins over to the Drake house, and this, in combination with the overheard phone call, led Jeffrey to understand that Greg was lost, hapless, and in possession of the maturity of a twelve-year-old boy. Jeffrey therefore took over. He rescued the kids from the PlayStation by driving everyone to the farm, where they went for a hayride. Jeffrey drove the tractor, and Delilah and Greg sat in the back with the kids. The kids liked the bumps, and Jeffrey obliged them. The day was sunny but cold. Jeffrey took the long way, all the way around the edge of the property. Time and circumstances were suspended. Everyone had fun, and at the end of the ride they drank apple cider and ate moist pumpkin muffins, and then suddenly it was one o’clock. Delilah had to get home to check on the turkey, and Greg had to get the kids back to the Kapenash house.

Normally the eight of them, plus the six kids, had Thanksgiving dinner together, and Delilah and Andrea alternated years hosting. This year it felt like they had all divorced. The Chief and Andrea had Tess and the kids. Jeffrey and Delilah had Greg. Phoebe and Addison, not wanting to take sides, went to the Ship’s Inn by themselves. It felt awful. Jeffrey, Delilah, Greg, and Drew and Barney held hands around the table and said grace, but when they looked up, they could see how wrong everything was. Jeffrey thought about Ed and Andrea’s table, with Eric and Kacy and Tess and the twins, and he wondered if things felt wrong there, too. He hoped they did.

Jeffrey never found out how or why, but by Sunday night Greg and Tess were back at home with the kids. Four weeks later, the eight of them were on vacation in Stowe and everything was back to normal. Tess had forgiven Greg, forgotten April Peck, and moved on.

Now Andrea was taking the credit for this-or the blame.

“I convinced Tess to take him back. For the kids’ sake. Ed and I both thought that was the best thing.”

“It was the best thing,” Jeffrey said.

“How can you say that?” Andrea said. She was shaking and crying. Her face was wet with tears. Jeffrey wanted to reach out to her, to hold her. He had lost her so long ago, when he wasn’t watching, and although it was his fault completely, it had never seemed fair. Now she was back. She needed something and he would try like hell to give it to her. “How can you say that when she’s dead?”

“Remember when Tess came to visit us?” Jeffrey said. “And she borrowed my bike?”

Andrea wiped at her tears. “And she insisted on riding it barefoot? And she fell and-”

“Broke her arm,” Jeffrey said.

“But we didn’t believe her,” Andrea said. “We didn’t believe her when she said how much it hurt. We made her go to the movies.”

“And we saw The Player. ”

“And it was the best movie of all time.”

“And we couldn’t figure out why Tess was crying at the end…”

“And it was because of her arm.”

“We took her to the hospital,” Jeffrey said. “You stayed by her side while they X-rayed her and set it.”

“You stayed in the waiting room,” Andrea said. “And fell asleep across four chairs.”

“I felt so guilty,” Jeffrey said. “It was my bike.”

“I felt so guilty,” Andrea said. “She told me her arm was broken and I gave her some Advil and told her to toughen up.”

“We made her sit through that movie.”

Andrea was quiet. She stared at her legs. Her strong, beautiful legs that had nearly gotten her to the Olympics, that had locked around him when they were making love. This was the pornography of grief-going back and remembering a moment in a dead person’s life, step by step. So few people were willing to comb back through it like this, because it was too intimate or too painful or it wouldn’t help anything, it wouldn’t bring the person back. But this, perhaps, was what Andrea needed. Let Tess live in the minute detail of their memories. Jeffrey could see Tess’s teenaged face, as plain as day. He could see her bare toes on the spiky pedals of his Cannondale.

“Thank you, Peach,” Andrea said, as she stood up to go. “Thank you.”

Jeffrey was at a loss, because of both her arrival and her departure. “You’re welcome.”

Andrea continued to appear in Jeffrey’s office. Jeffrey never knew when she would show; she didn’t call or forewarn. He would climb the stairs to the attic, and there she would be, sitting in his chair. She always came in the morning, after she dropped off the twins at camp. Jeffrey started to anticipate her visits and look forward to them; on days she didn’t come, he felt let down. He worried, stupidly, that he would never see her again.

He had stumbled across what she wanted. She wanted someone else to remember Tess, to miss Tess, to tell stories about Tess. She wanted a partner in her grief. Not a sympathetic listener-any poor motherfucker could listen. She needed someone to share the burden, to do the talking and remembering for her. No one wanted to do this.

There were certain ways in which Jeffrey didn’t want to do this either. Or couldn’t do it. How much attention had he really given Tess, after all? But he would try, for Andrea.

He was methodical in all things, and so in this endeavor he moved chronologically. The broken arm story led to the story of Tess’s first beer. Tess’s first true, cold beer had been consumed at a bonfire on Ladies Beach under the careful, almost parental watch of Jeffrey and Andrea. A Coors Light in a frosty silver can. Tess’s arm was in a sling, her drinking arm, her everything arm. Jeffrey had to open the can for her and put it in her left hand.

“Had she asked for a beer?” Jeffrey said. “Or did we force it on her?”

“She asked for it,” Andrea said.

Jeffrey did not remember it that way. He remembered that they had packed a cooler for a beach barbecue, and when they opened the cooler, they found they had nothing to drink except beer. They weren’t used to hanging out with teenagers. He remembered saying to Tess, Looks like it’s beer or ocean water.

Andrea covered her eyes. “Oh, God,” she said. “You’re right.”

“And she drank the whole thing down right away and let out that burp they could hear in Portugal.”

“Yes!” Andrea said. She was most delighted by the details she had forgotten. “And we gave her another one and another one and another one.”

“She drank five,” Jeffrey said. “And then she-”

“Puked in the dunes,” Andrea said.

“And we took her home and she passed out on the bathroom floor. And when she woke up in the morning, there were tile marks on her face.”

“Yes!” Andrea shouted. She put her hands up in the air. He had scored again.

“And you made her sign that slip of paper,” Jeffrey said.

“Promising she wouldn’t tell my aunt and uncle,” Andrea said. She was laughing, then crying. Sweetly weeping. “Thank you, Peach,” she said. “Goddamn it, thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” he said.

How about the night Tess met Greg? Could Andrea handle that one? She looked dubious, but Jeffrey pointed out that he wasn’t going to be able to tell stories for very long if he couldn’t mention Greg.

“Okay,” she said. Then she cocked her head. “Wait a minute. You weren’t even there that night.”

“I still know the story. I’ve heard it a hundred times. Do you want me to tell it or not?”

“Tell it.”

Girls’ night out, summer 1995. Andrea, Tess, Delilah, Lisa Shumacher, who waitressed with Tess at the RopeWalk that summer, and Karin Poleman, who had taken over the head lifeguard position from Andrea when Andrea got pregnant with Kacy. The girls went to dinner at the Boarding House, they went for drinks at 21 Federal, drinks at the Club Car, drinks at the RopeWalk, where Lisa and Tess, on their night off, were treated like royalty and plied with tequila shots. Then, finally, they went to the Muse to hear this band everyone was talking about called the Velociraptors.