Page 43 of The Castaways
He went into their bedroom. Which was dangerous, he knew. It was a bad neighborhood where his feelings would likely get mugged. He armed himself with a stiff drink.
He ransacked the place. First her dresser. In her top drawer, he recognized her underwear, the bras, the belts, the bathing suits. But there was other lingerie in there that he’d never seen before. Lingerie she wore for Greg. There were pajamas and nighties that he’d never seen because he and Tess had never spent the night together.
In the other drawers were shirts, shorts and skirts, pants and jeans. No Addison. Her side of the closet? Dresses, sweaters, shoes. No Addison.
Her bedside table. A book calledExploring Nature on Nantucket,with pages folded down and passages highlighted. A copy ofOlivia Forms a Band. A novel calledThe Good Wife.Addison scanned the back. The title to this one was too rich to ignore. But Addison was too drunk to make sense of the jacket copy. And, too, he was distracted by the fact that he was sitting on Tess and Greg’s bed. He had never sat on this bed. He had not ever realized that Tess and Greg slept in a regular double bed. They must have slept on top of each other, or at the very least in each other’s arms. A demoralizing thought. He abandoned the bedside table for the desks. There was Greg’s desk, with the laptop computer, which contained, Addison knew, a music library of over fifty thousand songs. And then there was Tess’s desk and Tess’s computer. He turned her computer on.
He was shaking. The desk drawers were right there at his fingertips; he could open them. He would have to open them and decide what to do with the contents—he was the executor! He opened the drawer at the bottom. Hanging folders held… ABCs, counting, colors, shapes: kindergarten lesson plans. He shut this drawer. The other side contained more hanging folders—the twins’ birth certificates, the paperwork for the house, their medical insurance, car insurance, her diploma from Boston College, her Massachusetts teaching certificate… but no certificate of Being in Love with Addison. No Appeal to the Commonwealth for a Divorce from Greg MacAvoy.
He moved up a drawer. It was stuffed with kids’ drawings, snapshots, birthday cards, Mother’s Day cards, end-of-the-year-you’re-a-great-teacher cards. In the opposite drawer, Addison found a stack of journals. Pay dirt! With Parkinson hands, Addison lifted the journal that was on top. Open it? He did nothaveto open it as executor. In fact, he was pretty sure that as the sage author ofExecutoring for Dummieshe should advise readersnotto open it. It was an invasion of privacy. He should give the journals to the next of kin, unread.
Addison opened the journal.Where was he?
The handwriting was odd. It was different. It was, he realized after wiping his glasses on his shirt (as if it were his smudged lenses and not half a bottle of Jack Daniels that was keeping him from understanding just what was going on here), achild’shandwriting. And then Addison saw the date: May 1981. Tess wrote about her first communion. The wafer, she wrote, tasted like cardboard, when all along she had thought it would taste like peppermint.
He riffled through the other journals. All from her life Before. Tess’s youth and adolescence had been well documented. She despised her mother, worshipped her father, her grandmother was sick, the priest came to the house to administer last rites, her grandmother died. She loved her mother again; she did not want her mother to die! She was in love with a boy named Tanner who played kick ball at recess. In 1987 she wrote:When I grow up I want to be a teacher. Kindergarten or first grade. I want two kids, a boy and a girl.
Check, check. Did she want a husband who would lie to her? Did she want a bald, bespectacled lover with his own business and a heart full of love and generosity, who would worship at her feet? She did not specify.
In 1990 she wrote:This summer I want to go visit Andrea on Nantucket.
Check.
Okay, he’d had enough. The top drawers of the desk revealed compact disks, a calculator, stationery, paper clips, string, a high-lighter, index cards, some of which had grocery lists scribbled on them. He, Addison, was nowhere.
But it was impossible, right, to have been involved in a love affair as intense and consuming as theirs was and not discover a trace of itsomewhere?
The computer booted. The screensaver was a picture of Greg and the kids on a bench on Main Street, the three of them blowing pink Bazooka bubbles.
Pop. There went his heart.
I’m afraid you won’t get it.
Addison shut the computer off. He was forty-nine years old and had been classically educated—literature, painting, architecture, sculpture, music, history. The computer, however, was beyond him. At the office he had to ask Florabel for help with anything more involved than e-mail or a standard listing sheet. More to the point, he wanted Greg and the twins to stop ogling him. He was in crisis here! He had been madly, crazily, stupidly in love with a woman. That woman was now dead. He had been named executor of her will; he was in charge of all her earthly possessions. Among them he had expected to find proof, however well coded, that she had been madly, crazily, stupidly in love with him, too. Admit it! He had expected to find Tess’s heart in an envelope that was addressed to him.
Also on Tess’s desk was her engagement calendar. Okay! Maybe here…? Addison shoved aside the computer keyboard, nearly toppling his drink, and scooted the engagement calendar forward. It was open to the week of June 20, and there on the Monday square was a big heart and inside the heart it said:12th anniversary!Also in this square it saidCharlotte Innand listed the phone number.
Which part of this was the poisoned tip of the arrow? The adorable hand-drawn heart? The exclamation point? Or the name of the charming inn where Tess was planning on making love to her husband?
Addison flipped back through the calendar to January 7, the day Addison had called Tess and told her to meet him at the cottage in Quaise. She had been anxious on the phone. She had said to him,Jesus, Add, I am so nervous.
And he had said,Just meet me. Nothing has to happen.
She showed up late. She had lost her way, she said. She missed the dirt road and had to double back, then she missed it again. When finally she found it, when she pulled the Kia into the driveway of the cottage, Addison understood what she meant by nervous. Whoa! He had been married twice, and he had bedded many other women in his lifetime, but when Tess stepped out of the car, Addison didn’t know what to do. He wanted to blink them back to the parking lot behind Nous Deux. He wanted to conjure the magic they had felt there. Could he do it?
He didn’t know what to say, so he reverted to real estate agent mode, which put both Tess and himself at ease.
Let me show you the house!
The cottage somehow did the trick. Addison had brought in small bouquets of hothouse flowers, put scented soap in the bathroom, put Vivaldi on the stereo. The cottage had pale pink walls and exposed beams and large windows looking out into the bare woods with a blue ribbon of the ocean beyond. The brass bed had forty pillows stacked up at either end. It was a love nest. Tess gasped, then cooed.
Is this yours?
Oh, you know,he said, and he laughed. It was a joke, especially after Stowe, how Addison could make a house appear anywhere in the world.It’s on loan.
There was silence between them. Awkward. God, what to say? What to do?The Four Seasonstrilled along in the background. And then, just when Addison was afraid that he had made a monumental mistake (what had happened the week before in Stowe was a fluke, an illusion created by the circumstances), Tess ran toward him and jumped into his arms. She wrapped her legs around him.
Was it okay to call that the happiest moment of his life?
