Page 48 of The Castaways
Jeffrey was at a loss, because of both her arrival and her departure. “You’re welcome.”
Andrea continued to appear in Jeffrey’s office. Jeffrey never knew when she would show; she didn’t call or forewarn. He would climb the stairs to the attic, and there she would be, sitting in his chair. She always came in the morning, after she dropped off the twins at camp. Jeffrey started to anticipate her visits and look forward to them; on days she didn’t come, he felt let down. He worried, stupidly, that he would never see her again.
He had stumbled across what she wanted. She wanted someone else to remember Tess, to miss Tess, to tell stories about Tess. She wanted a partner in her grief. Not a sympathetic listener—any poor motherfucker could listen. She needed someone to share the burden, to do the talking and remembering for her. No one wanted to do this.
There were certain ways in which Jeffrey didn’t want to do this either. Or couldn’t do it. How much attention had he really given Tess, after all? But he would try, for Andrea.
He was methodical in all things, and so in this endeavor he moved chronologically. The broken arm story led to the story of Tess’s first beer. Tess’s first true, cold beer had been consumed at a bonfire on Ladies Beach under the careful, almost parental watch of Jeffrey and Andrea. A Coors Light in a frosty silver can. Tess’s arm was in a sling, her drinking arm, her everything arm. Jeffrey had to open the can for her and put it in her left hand.
“Had she asked for a beer?” Jeffrey said. “Or did we force it on her?”
“She asked for it,” Andrea said.
Jeffrey did not remember it that way. He remembered that they had packed a cooler for a beach barbecue, and when they opened the cooler, they found they had nothing to drinkexceptbeer. They weren’t used to hanging out with teenagers. He remembered saying to Tess,Looks like it’s beer or ocean water.
Andrea covered her eyes. “Oh, God,” she said. “You’re right.”
“And she drank the whole thing down right away and let out that burp they could hear in Portugal.”
“Yes!” Andrea said. She was most delighted by the details she had forgotten. “And we gave her another one and another one and another one.”
“She drank five,” Jeffrey said. “And then she—”
“Puked in the dunes,” Andrea said.
“And we took her home and she passed out on the bathroom floor. And when she woke up in the morning, there were tile marks on her face.”
“Yes!” Andrea shouted. She put her hands up in the air. He had scored again.
“And you made her sign that slip of paper,” Jeffrey said.
“Promising she wouldn’t tell my aunt and uncle,” Andrea said. She was laughing, then crying. Sweetly weeping. “Thank you, Peach,” she said. “Goddamn it, thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” he said.
How about the night Tess met Greg? Could Andrea handle that one? She looked dubious, but Jeffrey pointed out that he wasn’t going to be able to tell stories for very long if he couldn’t mention Greg.
“Okay,” she said. Then she cocked her head. “Wait a minute. You weren’t even there that night.”
“I still know the story. I’ve heard it a hundred times. Do you want me to tell it or not?”
“Tell it.”
Girls’ night out, summer 1995. Andrea, Tess, Delilah, Lisa Shumacher, who waitressed with Tess at the RopeWalk that summer, and Karin Poleman, who had taken over the head lifeguard position from Andrea when Andrea got pregnant with Kacy. The girls went to dinner at the Boarding House, they went for drinks at 21 Federal, drinks at the Club Car, drinks at the RopeWalk, where Lisa and Tess, on their night off, were treated like royalty and plied with tequila shots. Then, finally, they went to the Muse to hear this band everyone was talking about called the Velociraptors.
The Velociraptors were five guys who had done a PG year together at the Berkshire School and who had then done separate tours of duty at egregiously preppy colleges like Colgate and Bates and Middlebury, and who had reunited on Nantucket. Greg MacAvoy (Hamilton College) was the lead singer. He was twenty-three years old, he jogged and surfed and lifted weights, he wore a white rope bracelet and a shark’s tooth on a leather choker, he sang while holding a Corona, he sang with his hair in his eyes. He sang “Loving Cup” by the Stones and “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker” by the Ramones, he sang “The Core” by Eric Clap-ton with a hot redhead who tended bar and only came up onstage for that one song. It was well documented that Greg MacAvoy, currently of the Velociraptors (formerly of the garage bands the Porn Stars and Eklipse), could have any woman he wanted. The band house behind the Muse, where the Velociraptors had pretty much taken up residence (though the drummer Beckett Steed’s parents owned a house in Sconset where they technically lived), had a throng of girls teeming around it every night after-hours, like bacteria around a fresh cut. What happened in the band house? Well, pretty much what you’d expect.
On the night in question, Tess was drunk.
“We were all drunk,” Andrea chimed in.
Tess was wearing jeans, flip-flops, a white T-shirt, a green bandanna in her hair, and dangly silver earrings. She and the rest of the girls were dancing right up front; their beers were sitting on the edge of the stage, next to the amplifiers. With all the girls on the dance floor and the promise of yet more girls banging down the door of the band house, what was it about Tess that caught Greg’s attention? The green bandanna? The sparkling earrings? The freckles on her nose or her big blue eyes or her tiny feet with nails painted a color called Cherry Pie?
She knewallthe words to “Low Spark of High Heeled Boys.” He noticed that. He smiled at her, winked at her. At the break, he said to his bass player, “Hey, that little Gidget girl is hot.” He dispatched a roadie to speak to her.
“Greg wants to know if you’ll join him in the band house later.”
Roadie asked Tess this in front of all the girls. Roadie offered Tess a cold Corona, a present from Greg. The girls stared, speechless.
