Page 4 of The Castaways
He hung up with the Chief and hurried to catch Delilah. He tapped on her window. She turned, put down the window. The radio was blaring, as always; the kids were bobbing their heads and mouthing the words to a rock song Jeffrey had never heard before. The whole car smelled like strawberries.
Jeffrey looked at Chloe and Finn. The twins were carefree now; they would be carefree for another hour or so. The thought was hideous to him.
“I’m going to follow you home,” Jeffrey said.
“What?” Delilah said. “Why?”
“I’ll meet you there,” he said.
ANDREA
The Summer of Me: it was a joke, but not really. Andrea Kapenash had been a parent for sixteen years, which meant that for sixteen years her summers had consisted of wading pools, plastic beach toys, juice boxes, swim diapers, playgrounds, boogie boards, skim boards, surfboards, baseball camp, football camp, gymnastics camp, lacrosse camp, tennis lessons, golf lessons, sleep-overs, tents set up in the backyard, thousands of packed lunches, thousands of pick-ups and drop-offs, mosquito bites, missing flip-flops, and the constant application of sunscreen. Andrea loved her children, but she could never have predicted the joy she would feel at watching them spread their own wings. Her daughter, Kacy, scooped ice cream at the Juice Bar, a job she loved because she was always busy. The line was always out the door and Kacy felt she was in the center of things. Although it wasn’t exactly brain surgery, she was, in a small way, bringing happiness to people. When Kacy passed a hot fudge sundae across the counter, people smiled, they thanked her, they tipped her. Andrea’s son, Eric, worked two doors down at Young’s Bicycle Shop, setting people up with rental bikes, writing rental agreements, and when the shop wasn’t busy, he was in the back, doing repairs. The job played to his strengths: his easy, natural charm, his attention to detail, his love of tinkering with a machine. Eric had been born with the uncanny ability to fix anything, which had served him well, since the Chief was not handy at all, and furthermore was never home.
Andrea’s summer now fell into the pleasant routine of seeing the kids off to work and going about her day. She was free to do as she liked—go to lunch with Tess, Phoebe, or Delilah, go to the beach and swim to her heart’s content, read half a novel without interruption. She had time to walk into town to go shopping, she had time to linger at the farm truck, picking through vegetables, she had time to stop by the station and see her husband or surreptitiously check on her children working. The Summer of Me: she was an adult again, doing adult things.
She had the time now for simple kindnesses. For example, she had made the world’s most delicious picnic lunch for Tess and Greg’s sail to Martha’s Vineyard: chilled gazpacho with chunks of creamy avocado, lobster salad sandwiches on challah bread, potato salad with bacon and blue cheese, a fruit salad of strawberries, raspberries, mango, and mint, and chewy coconut macaroons. The picnic was an anniversary gift—though as a rule, they did not exchange gifts among their group—because this anniversary was special. It wasn’t the twelve-year milestone that was remarkable; it was the fact that Tess and Greg had managed to stay married through everything that had happened in the past nine months. Greg had been accused of committing a transgression last autumn with one of his students, and whether it had happened or not, the tempest surrounding the accusation would have been enough to topple the strongest fortress; it was the story that would not go away, the rumor that would not die. Everywhere Tess went, she said, she heard whispers. Every time Greg left the house, she harbored suspicions. They screamed, they yelled, they cried, they went into counseling, they gave up counseling, they separated for a week. And yet they hung in there. They stayed married. The anniversary should be celebrated.
Call me when you get home!Andrea said when she dropped off the picnic basket at Tess’s house that morning.
Okay, I will!Tess said. She was wearing a red bikini and jean shorts, and a pair of red sunglasses with white polka dots. In a lower, more serious voice, she said,Thank you for the picnic. You didn’t have to go to all this trouble.
I know I didn’t,Andrea said.But I wanted to.
Andrea and Tess were first cousins. Their fathers were brothers, the mighty and formidable DiRosa brothers, both narcotics detectives for the Boston Police Department. Andrea had three younger brothers and Tess had three older brothers, so in addition to being cousins, they were sisters, the only DiRosa girls. Andrea was nine years older than Tess, so in addition to being cousins and sisters, they were mother and daughter.
In all of Andrea’s memories of childhood, she was wet. She was diving into the community pool at theYMCA, she was swimming fifty yards off the shore of Thompson Island, sluicing through the green water of Boston Harbor; she was a mermaid, the water was her natural habitat, it was hers and hers alone. Her brothers fooled around in the waves at the beach, but they didn’t swim the way Andrea did.
Andrea’s natural ability in the water gave her authority. Because she was so gifted at something, adults trusted her, they treated her like she was older; from the time she was twelve years old, she was allowed to baby-sit for Tess; she was allowed to take Tess for long walks in her stroller. When Andrea was fifteen and received her junior lifesaving certificate, she was allowed to lead beach excursions for her brothers and her cousins—eight DiRosa children, with Andrea in charge. Andrea swam butterfly for the Boston Latin swim team, and in her senior year she won the city championships in the 100-meter and 200-meter. That same year she pulled a grown man who had had a heart attack while swimming laps out of the middle of the pool at the Y. She was awarded a medal by the city council; her picture was in theGlobe.
When Andrea was eighteen, she got a job as a lifeguard at L Street Beach. She wore a red tank suit and zinc oxide on her nose. She had Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses and a whistle on the end of a braided cord that she spun around her fingers, first this way, then that way. When Tess came to the beach, she sat, quite literally, in Andrea’s shadow, on the first rung of the lifeguard stand, sucking on cherry Popsicles. In Andrea’s memory, it seemed like Tess was there every day. Andrea would look down and see the straight white part in Tess’s dark hair. Tess would swim, and Andrea would watch her. Tess would attempt the butterfly, but she flailed and humped. Andrea tried to teach her the movement, but Tess’s shoulders weren’t strong enough yet, and Andrea was busy working. There were hundreds of kids to watch.
It was at the end of the summer, the week before Andrea started her freshman year at Boston College, that Tess nearly drowned. Andrea was spinning her whistle, scanning the sand and the shallow water, dreaming about finally living away. After months of battling, her parents had agreed to allow her to board, although she easily could have commuted. In the end Andrea’s winning argument was that she was attending BC on a partial swimming scholarship and the team practices were at dawn.You don’t want me riding the T to Brookline at four in the morning, do you?
In truth, Andrea wanted to separate herself from her family. The DiRosa clan was too close-knit, too loud, too steeped in the politics of theBPD, too Italian, with their garlic and ricotta and veal involtini, their heavy gold crosses and crucifixes everywhere she turned. Andrea wanted to experience a life that was quieter, more reserved, more refined, a collegiate life, an intellectual life. (Lord help you!her grandmother said.You’re going to the Jesuits!) The fact that Andrea had not been able to escape the city of her birth discouraged her a little, but there had been no avoiding a Catholic education if her father was to pay for it. Andrea had gotten into Notre Dame as well, but South Bend was deemed too far away.
Andrea was thinking these things, she was twirling her whistle and scanning the shallow water, she was listening to Van Halen on someone’s boom box, she was enjoying the sun on her shoulders, when the feeling struck her: a panic like a sickness. It was as though she had looked down and noticed the lifeguard stand was gone, she was sitting on thin air, about to fall. It wasTesswho was gone. This was not unusual—Tess swam and played and visited the snack bar and the restroom just like everybody else. Andrea saw Tess’s Popsicle stick, stained pink, sticking out of the sand. This wasn’t unusual either; Tess, at age nine, was a habitual litterbug.
Lifeguarding was a job that required assiduousness rather than instinct, but it was instinct that kicked in. Andrea scanned the water out past where any other nine-year-old would be swimming, and there she saw a hand. Or what she thought was a hand. A hand!
Andrea blew her whistle—three short blasts, an emergency! She jumped recklessly from the top of the stand and nearly broke both her knees. She grabbed her board, dashed into the water, and started paddling. Andrea spied a flash of someone’s face—yes, it was Tess! Tess was out way over her head. What was she doing out there? The face disappeared, the hand slapped the water. Andrea abandoned her board; it was slowing her down. She was the fastest flyer in the city—she could get there quicker on her own. She swam to the spot where the hand and face had been and dove down and pulled Tess up off the bottom. The effort of this, of getting sixty pounds of deadweight to the surface, nearly killed her. Tess was waterlogged. But not dead, right? Andrea could not let herself worry about anything except textbook lifesaving. Get the swimmer under the chin and paddle with her to the board, secure the board under Tess, and swim for shore. There were lifeguards coming toward her, three of the big lunks Andrea worked with, whom she had thought completely useless until this moment. One of them, Hugo, took Tess and the board and powered her to shore. The other two guards, Roxbury and Toxic Moxie (these were their nicknames; Andrea had no idea what their real names were), laid Tess out on a towel and pumped her chest and gave her mouth-to-mouth while Andrea stood at Tess’s feet and shivered and said the Hail Mary and promised God that if Tess lived, Andrea would repay him by becoming a nun.
An ambulance arrived. There was a crowd around Tess’s gray, limp body, including Roxbury, Toxic Moxie, and Andrea, who was praying and standing as still as a statue of the Virgin Mary. The paramedics sliced through the bystanders, and as they did, Toxic Moxie put the breath into Tess that saved her. He blew death out. Tess coughed up harbor water, spewing out a whole stream in a projectile vomit, and then she pinkened. The crowd sighed, and Andrea wept as Tess opened her eyes. Andrea thought,I will become a nun.
She was forty-four years old now and swimming once again. She hadn’t swum in sixteen years; she had been too busy building sandcastles, and later watching her kids boogie board, pacing back and forth on the shore while they battled the pounding waves. But she was back at it religiously, half a mile of freestyle out past the breakers. God, it felt good! She wore goggles now, showing her age; her eyes couldn’t take the salt anymore. She swam and swam and swam—all the way down to Surfside—and then she swam back. When she climbed out of the water, her legs were shaky and weak from the workout. She was reminded of the superstar she used to be, the fastest swimmer in high school, and then in college. She had been named to the First Team All-American; she had broken four Big East fly records; she had made it to the Olympic Trials in Mission Viejo, where she missed placing in the 200-meter by three one-hundredths of a second.
During the years that her children had been small, Andrea had rarely looked upon her trophies or thought about her name on the record board that hung at the Boston College pool. But when she did, she wondered, was that swimmer really the same person as the one who was now mixing rice cereal with baby food? This summer, swimming as strongly as ever, the answer was yes. (She pictured herself flipping at the wall, or shaking her muscles loose on the blocks before tensing for the gun…)
Andrea DiRosa!
It was impossible to see with her goggles on—it was like looking through a windshield in a downpour. But when she emerged from the water, she thought she saw the Chief sitting on her towel. She removed her goggles. It was the Chief, Ed Kapenash, Eddie, her husband of eighteen years, sitting on her beach towel in his uniform. His cruiser was parked up on the bluff. From out of nowhere the feeling returned, the sick, panicked suspicion that she was sitting on air and was about to fall. It was five-thirty. The kids got off work at six and the Chief normally knocked off around seven, if there were no emergencies.
Was there an emergency now, or a lack of emergencies? Had he shown up to surprise her, to be romantic? The Chief had only one facial expression and that was stoic, but at this moment the stoic looked different, though Andrea couldn’t say how.
“Is everything okay?” Andrea said.
He patted the spot beside him on the towel. “Sit down.”
“Is it one of the kids?”
