Elin Hilderbrand - The Castaways

They had sent out seven hundred and fifty invitations to the cocktail party that would celebrate Island Conservation’s purchase of the ninety-two-acre parcel in the savannah, and they had three hundred and ten people RSVP to say they were coming. Phoebe and Addison had bought benefactor tickets at a thousand dollars apiece, but Phoebe had not heard from Jeffrey and Delilah or the Chief and Andrea. Her own friends! She had sent them invitations with her name as cochair circled in red pen and festooned with stars as a kind of self-deprecating joke, but she hoped the message was clear: this was her thing, and they would be expected to come. Phoebe had a surprise planned, to boot, which they could not miss. Attendance was mandatory at a hundred and fifty bucks a ticket. It wasn’t the ticket price that was holding them back, Phoebe knew; both couples could afford it. What was holding them back was their grief, their retreat from everyday normal, happy life. With the state Andrea and Delilah were in, they probably didn’t even open their mail.

Phoebe would have to call them. Before, when faced with an unpleasant task, she would take a valium (three, four, six) and operate in a fog. But now she considered her pills poison. She had thrown every last prescription bottle into a shoe box and tucked the shoe box away. She wasn’t hiding it from herself; now she was hiding it from Addison.

The necessary evil of the phone calls. Delilah first, because with Delilah things were slightly easier.

“Hello?” Delilah said aggressively. This could be good or bad.

“My benefit?” Phoebe said. “The Island Conservation thing next Friday? You and Jeffrey are coming.”

“No.”

“Yes, you are. There is no excuse that will work with me. You have to be there. It’s the first thing I’ve chaired in a hundred years.”

“I’m not going to anything this summer. This is the summer of no. This is the summer that wasn’t.”

Well, that was true. In previous summers the eight of them had been out all the time: at the celebrity softball game that benefited the kids’ school, at the circus for the Atheneum, at cocktail parties, at the back table at the Company of the Cauldron, at the back bar of 21 Federal, at the summer concert for the Boys & Girls Club, at the Boston Pops benefit for the hospital. This year they had done exactly nothing.

“Understood,” Phoebe said. Who was she to talk? She had been on a mental vacation for eight years. “But this you have to come to. This one thing. One night. Mark and Eithne are catering. Mark said he’d make the gougères with the melty cheese in the middle for you especially, okay, darling?”

“Not okay.”

“Why not?”

“I won’t be here.”

“Where will you be?”

Silence. She was either bluffing or being dramatic. She never went away in the summer. Nantucket was Delilah’s playground. Nobody enjoyed the island as much as Delilah. At ten o’clock at night you would find her at the turtle pond with her kids, dangling raw chicken from a string, waiting for the calm surface to break. Or grilling three-inch rib-eyes on her back deck, drizzling heirloom tomatoes with olive oil, jumping up and down if her croquet ball actually cleared the wicket. Or singing along as Greg sang “Hey Girl” at the Begonia.

“Where are you going?” Phoebe asked.

“To hell in a handbasket.”

“Jesus, Delilah, you’re coming to my event, that’s all there is to it. Please? For me?”

“I can’t.”

“I have a surprise for you. A big, happy surprise.”

“That’s not going to work.”

“Sure it is. I’m going to RSVP you for two people. Get a baby-sitter, okay?”

Silence.

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

Phoebe could not bring herself to call Andrea. Some disturbing stories had reached Phoebe’s ears. Andrea allowed the twins to roam town unsupervised, and she was acting out in other destructive ways. Phoebe could not call up with the frivolous business of a cocktail party. But Andrea and the Chief had to be there. Because of the surprise.

And so Phoebe called the Chief. The dispatcher, Molly, put her right through.

“Hey, Sunshine,” the Chief said.

“Hey, Eddie.”

“What’s up?”

She told him: cocktail party for Island Conservation, her first flight in eight years, it was important to her that he and Andrea come.

“Okay, then, we’ll come.”

“You will?”

“Of course. I’ve been wanting to get out of the house. It will be good for Andrea, too. Real good.”

Phoebe agreed with this. But wait-she felt funny. This was too easy; Phoebe had questions. Had they gotten the invitation when she sent it? If they had gotten it, why had they not responded? Phoebe had the strange feeling that Andrea had opened the invitation and had thrown it away, or, in her current state of mind, soaked it in gasoline, stuck it in a bottle, and turned it into a Molotov cocktail. Ed normally ran everything past Andrea first; he was the police chief, but everyone knew who the real chief was. It wasn’t like him to make plans for both of them like this, without even asking.

“And I have a surprise,” Phoebe said. “At the party.”

“Is it legal?”

Phoebe laughed. “Yes.”

“Well, okay, then. We’ll see you next Friday, if not before.”

Phoebe hung up. Mission accomplished. She should be happy.

But…?

Something felt weird, not quite right on either front. Or maybe what felt wrong was that there had been only two phone calls instead of three. No call to Greg and Tess. She couldn’t let herself follow this train of thought, it would do her in, she would become just like the rest of them, singing a song out of tune. She would not think about it. She went out to the pool.

Florabel approached his desk with astonishing news. A couple named Legris Pouffet and Hank Drenmiller had made a full-price offer on the cottage in Quaise. Florabel looked like she was about to burst open like a piñata. Penny candy for everyone! Safe to say that Addison had never seen her this animated. Florabel was a lipstick lesbian, a stunning woman who despised everyone. She had managed the Wheeler Realty office for over a decade, but the first listing Addison had given Florabel to handle, with full commission, was the Quaise cottage, and this only recently, since Tess’s death, since Addison could not bear to think about the cottage at all, much less deal with the business of selling it. The cottage was owned by an elderly couple from Princeton, New Jersey; the husband sat on the board of trustees at Lawrenceville, and this was how Addison had met him. The elderly couple had three cowboy children-they lived in places like Cody, Wyoming, and San Antonio, Texas-who had no interest in Nantucket and wanted their parents to sell the place. Sell it, yes, but the couple wanted three million dollars, not a penny less, for a four-hundred-square-foot summer cottage, and because of a three-hundred-year-old Wampanoag cemetery that abutted the property, a covenant was in place stating that the cottage could not be expanded. The cottage was essentially unsellable at that price with those restrictions; it had languished on the market for years.

Addison eyed Florabel suspiciously. “These Puffy Drenmillers know they can’t add on, right? They can’t tear it down and build something else. They can’t touch it. They know this?”

“Yes!” Florabel said. She had told him once that she had been a cheerleader in high school, and as improbable as this had seemed at the time (she was an utter bitch, prone to sniffing at people, granting only her favorites a malicious smile), he now caught a glimpse of her game-day enthusiasm.