Page 45 of The Castaways
I wouldn’t mind being dead
If I could still be with you.
Addison read the lines, then read them again. His heart floated. It was all he’d been looking for, a snippet like this. A love note.
He folded the poem and slid it into his front pocket. He looked at the heart, enthusiastically marking their twelfth anniversary. He pulled the poem back out. Had she clipped this for Greg? As an anniversary present? To write in his card? Or was it meant to be for Addison?Oh, please,he thought. It was a love poem, a beautiful sentiment, it wasthem.Theirlife together, short as it was, had been “beyond beyond.” There was nothing beyond it Addison was seeking.
I wouldn’t mind being dead/If I could still be with you.
He couldn’t process that, for the obvious reasons.
For Greg? For Addison? There was nothing else for him here—nothing else! And so, fuck it, Addison was going to claim the poem. Tess had read it and thought of him, she had impulsively torn it out of the magazine to give to him or recite to him over the phone. He was fooling himself, maybe, but he was keeping the poem.
He rinsed his glass and tucked the bottle of Jack under his arm. As he was walking out of the house, he realized he hadn’t found the present Phoebe had given to Tess.
What was it?
JEFFREY
On the fifteenth of July, the corn was ready. It had been the perfect growing season; everything was ahead and bountiful. The strawberries were finished now, but the crop had been legendary; the squash and zucchini and cukes were runaways, multiplying faster than rabbits.
And on July 15, corn. The earliest ready date in twenty-five years. Jeffrey almost didn’t believe it, but he peeled the husks back on ten ears of butter and sugar, all of them pearly and mature, bursting, ready to go. He tasted them raw. Sweet. He sent pickers out and went upstairs to his office to notify his accounts—thirty-two accounts on Nantucket alone, and another dozen on the Cape. There were local farms on the Cape, but many places preferred his corn, grown thirty miles out to sea in that sandy soil. There was something about it.
Jeffrey’s office was above the retail space of the farm market. It was, properly, the attic. It had open studs on a wicked slanted ceiling and it was hotter than hell, despite the efforts of strategically positioned fans. The sun beat down on the roof and Jeffrey was directly underneath. This kept it toasty warm in winter, but it was a frying pan today, July 15, the official first day of corn.
“Whew!” he said aloud when he reached the top of the stairs. To no one, because Jeffrey’s office was his and his alone. He worked without an assistant, and everyone else—the farm market manager, the marketing person, the head chef, the buyer—all had offices on the first floor, which was air-conditioned. Jeffrey had segregated himself on purpose because he was a serious person who savored silence and his privacy.
It was beastly hot. There was sweat in his eyes. He pulled a bandanna out of his back jeans pocket (yes, a real red bandanna—Delilah teased him, but he didn’t care) and wiped his face.
There was someone sitting in his chair. Andrea.
He was speechless. But not surprised. Somehow he’d expected her. The other day he’d spied a beat-up black Jeep Wrangler in the parking lot and his heart had sung out a short, sweet tune because he thought it was Andrea’s—but then he realized that Andrea no longer drove a Jeep. She hadn’t driven one in over fifteen years. He was losing his mind.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey, Peach,” she said. She was wearing a white T-shirt and jean shorts. Her dark hair was in a ponytail. There were flip-flops on the floor, but her bare feet were tucked under her bare, tanned legs. Andrea’s legs were her best feature; they were very strong, taut, powerful. They weren’t sexy to look at, maybe, but they were sexy for sex—she used to tense and kick and fight him off. He remembered this instantly and it embarrassed him, and then he thought about how her showing up here in this dim, sultry room was like the beginning of one of the porn movies Delilah tried to get him to watch to spice up their sex life. He felt a surge of energy. Entirely inappropriate. He forgot all about the corn.
She was sitting in his chair, so there was nothing for him to do but stand. But he couldn’t stand. It was too hot and he was too rattled by this unexpected visit. He pulled a milk crate out of the shadowy eaves, flipped it over, and sat down at her feet.
They had been a couple for twenty-six months. From May of 1990 until July of 1992. They had met on the steamship on a chilly, miserable, slate-gray day. They had each bought a discolored, overcooked hot dog at the snack bar and were standing together at the ketchup dispenser as the boat lurched like a drunk through the chop. Jeffrey was feeling a little green; he was a man of the land, not the water. He thought maybe his stomach needed food, hence the hot dog, but the ketchup managed to make the hot dog seem less appetizing instead of more. He smiled weakly at Andrea. She was beautiful, raven-haired, robust, surefooted even as the boat rocked. She was confident, a queen. She regally inhaled her hot dog before Jeffrey could even wrap his properly in a napkin.
“Is it your first time on this boat?” she asked. She seemed genuinely concerned for him. He must have looked as bad as he felt.
He nodded. He handed Andrea his hot dog, staggered to the men’s room, and vomited in the toilet.
When he emerged, she was sitting on a bench holding his hot dog gently, like it was a child in her custody.
“You want?” she said.
He shook his head and discreetly (he thought) sucked on a Life Saver.
She said, “Okay if I eat it?”
He nodded.
She said, “Do you talk?”
He whispered, “I donotfeel well.”
