Elin Hilderbrand - The Castaways

Delilah’s mother, Connie Ashby, née Albertson, was short, dark-haired, trim, pretty, and obsessed with the following things: her person (exercising, hair, skin, nails, and clothes, clothes, clothes), her daughters (bake sales, Girl Scouts, summer camp, decorating for school dances), and her husband. She met Nico at Michigan State; he was a starting linebacker, she was a cheerleader, petite enough to serve as the top of the human pyramid, the cherry on the ice-cream sundae. And yes, these people really got married. They were beautiful and blessed, they were successful, they had gorgeous, healthy daughters.

Delilah was loved and encouraged. She was brilliant in school, a fact that made her parents proud, but Delilah’s precocity also allowed her the time and leeway to goof off. Delilah, as a teenager, was not beautiful. Her hair was too wild and curly; she wore braces for years. She had huge breasts and the rear end to counterbalance it. She was voluptuous, her mother said, but Connie Ashby weighed ninety pounds soaking wet (as did Delilah’s sister, Caitlin), and it was clear that having a voluptuous daughter perplexed her.

Boys did not love Delilah, but they liked her. Her best friends were all boys, the best-looking boys in her class-the athletes, the dope smokers, the clowns. They liked her whip-smart sense of humor, her sense of freedom. Delilah Ashby was not afraid of anyone.

She ran away in early May, when the periphery of the lake was blooming with dogwoods and azaleas. The Ashby family had just gotten back from a week in Fort Lauderdale, where Delilah had looked upon the university students on spring break with envy. Freedom! She dreamed of a highway with no one on it, a deserted stretch of beach, an endless ribbon of blue sea, a grid of city blocks where no one knew her name and no one expected her to show up for lacrosse practice or memorize theorems or sit down to dinner at six and contribute to the conversation. Delilah itched, she could not sleep, the house was suffocating her. School and the kids in it-even Dean Markbury, whom she loved with the ferocity of a lion-were slowly killing her with their predictable sameness. She had to get out.

She needed money. She had saved seven hundred dollars from baby-sitting, and over the course of four days she stole. She stole from her father’s wallet, from her mother’s stash for tipping the manicurist, from petty cash in the kitchen drawer where the family grabbed five or ten dollars for the offering basket at church. She stockpiled a thousand dollars. She estimated it would last her three weeks.

She left in the middle of the night on her bike. In her backpack was the money, two bottles of water, an extra pair of jeans, a bra, five pairs of underwear, three tissue-thin T-shirts, her lacrosse workout clothes, sunglasses, flip-flops, and a box of Pop-Tarts. It was all she could ever imagine needing.

She had left a note on the kitchen table in the spot where members of her family normally left notes for one another. She had given the note careful thought. It said, See ya! Delilah wanted her parents to know that a) she had not been abducted, but rather was walking away from this nice life of her own volition, and b) she was not leaving in anger, but rather in the spirit of self-discovery. “See ya!” would also, hopefully, keep her mother from completely losing her mind, implying as it did that mother and daughter would set eyes on each other again. Delilah, although self-centered and self-absorbed, realized that what she was doing would destroy her parents as well as thirteen-year-old Caitlin, who worshipped her. (Delilah had peeked in on Caitlin before she left. Caitlin was breathing heavily through her orthodontic headgear. The sight of her and the knowledge of Caitlin’s deep impending sorrow almost kept Delilah from going.) But Delilah was infected with the desire to be FREE, and once she was biking along the Blue Star Highway, her spirit soared. She was headed to Saugatuck, where she would catch a bus to Grand Rapids, and in Grand Rapids she would catch the bus to New York, where she would catch the Chinatown bus to Boston, and in Boston she would take the Plymouth & Brockton line to Hyannis. From Hyannis she would ride the ferry to Nantucket Island, a destination she had discovered in the pages of National Geographic, which she read in the high school library while she was supposed to be researching a paper on Blaise Pascal. She stumbled across the article about Nantucket by accident, but she was captivated by the way it looked-all quaint and historic and New Englandy. It looked like home.

And God, what a feeling when the bus pulled out of the depot, when the driver punched her ticket and said, “In Grand Rapids, head to bay nine. Bus to New York City.” The sensation of miles of asphalt putting time and distance between Delilah and the life that held her down titillated her. She wasn’t running from anything, she wasn’t running toward anything-she was just running for running’s sake, and it was a drug: the blurred landscape out the window was a soothing poultice for her itch. Go, go, go!

She transferred buses in Grand Rapids. Peed in the terminal, bought some peanut butter crackers because somewhere in her head was her mother’s voice nagging her about protein. She had both seats to herself practically the whole way to New York. She stretched out and used her backpack as a pillow, she read seventeen of the Complete Stories of John Cheever, which had been assigned in her English class. She noted, with a certain satisfaction, the difference between reading a book because it was assigned and reading a book because she wanted to. Which led her to her next quasi-intellectual thought, which concerned Henry David Thoreau and his desire to live deliberately.

And that, Delilah decided, was why she had hopped on this bus. She was going to Nantucket Island because she wanted to live deliberately, she wanted to choose her path every second of her existence, she wanted to cultivate a heightened awareness. She was in charge of her well-being; she was her own person. Forget the edicts of home and school, the din of the hallways and the obligation she felt when Dean Markbury handed her a joint. (She had to take a toke to be socially acceptable.) She was free of that now.

Sing it: Free!

The bus stopped just before crossing the George Washington Bridge. Delilah had had a seatmate since they stopped in Williamsport, Pennsylvania-a brown-skinned man of indeterminate ethnicity (Salvadoran? Thai? Lebanese?). The man was about fifty and stunningly handsome. He had bulging arms, he wore a tight black T-shirt and jeans, he wore a diamond stud in his left ear and a pair of Ray-Ban Wayfarers. He had nice feathery black hair, and he wore what looked to be an expensive watch. But what was riveting about this man was that he held a pack of cigarettes in his hands the entire time he was on the bus. He opened the pack, inspected the filter ends, counted them perhaps, shut the pack. Opened the pack, pulled a cigarette halfway out, dreamed about lighting up right there on the bus, the inhale, the burn, the satisfaction, the high. The addiction met. Delilah was fascinated with watching his struggle. The want, the can’t-have. The need, denied, minute after minute. It was almost sexual, watching this handsome, tough-seeming man, older perhaps than her father, want it want it want it. It was transferable. Delilah wanted a cigarette, too, and she wanted this man. The boys Delilah had known at school had wanted only one thing: to touch her breasts, to ogle them, bare. Would this man also want that? Did he notice her breasts? She breathed deeply, squared her shoulders, tried to edge her breasts into his field of vision. He wanted only the cigarettes.

The bus stopped; the mighty bridge loomed in the windshield. The man stood up, collected his backpack. Delilah was heart-broken. No! He could not leave! Was this even his stop, or was he getting off the bus solely so he could smoke? She wanted to follow him. Who was he, what was his name, where did he live, what country was he from, where was he going, what had he been doing in Williamsport, Pennsylvania (“Home of the Little League World Series,” the sign said). There were a thousand stories contained within this man, a thousand stories in Delilah herself and everyone else on this bus, not to mention the thousand stories of the 8 million residents of the city on the other side of the bridge. Delilah watched this man’s back-she would never see him again, of this she was sure-and then she eyed the cherry-red cover of the Cheever. It was a grain of sand. The stories that made up the world were infinite, like the stars.