Page 50 of The Castaways
It was working. Jeffrey could tell just by looking at Andrea that she felt better.
And so did he.
PHOEBE
Her days grew happier and happier. She woke up and brewed an espresso. She had renewed her membership at the gym; she ran on the treadmill and lifted weights three times a week and attended Pilates twice a week. On Saturdays and Sundays she tried to get Addison to walk with her to the beach, but he usually said no, he didn’t feel like it, he was too tired, too hungover, too lazy. So Phoebe went alone.
She was secretly taking herself off her drugs. Back in 2001, after Reed died, she had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and then, in short order, depression. She took all the drugs prescribed to her and then some, twice as often as she was supposed to, and in this way the pain had subsided. But along with the pain went everything else. Along with the pain went her personhood. Goodbye, Phoebe.
In coming off the drugs, the whole thing was working in reverse. She could think, she could feel. She had appetites. This, she thought, was a basket of raspberries. Yum! This was an egg salad sandwich with arugula on wheat bread. She wanted to eat it, in alternating bites, with crisp, salty gourmet potato chips, the juicy berries, and sips of iced tea with mint. Eating lunch, for the first time in years, gave her joy. Her pathological fear of calories was gone, too. She had desires. On a sunny day she liked to sit for an hour or two by the pool. She liked the warm sun; she liked the cool water. While on the drugs, she had barely been able to tell the difference between the two.
She called Delilah. She wanted to hang out with the kids.
You’re kidding,Delilah said.
Phoebe wanted to go to the beach, ride a boogie board to the shore on a monster wave, and eat a faceful of sand. She wanted to pick a Popsicle out of the cooler and let it drip down her hands. The colors of the water and the sand and the eelgrass in the dunes and even of the Popsicle startled her. Such deep, vibrant color! She could see it, she could appreciate it. It was as if she had been blind and only now was her sight restored. The pink of the raspberries, the deep brown of her espresso, the turquoise of the swimming pool. Amazing!
The sound of the boys, Drew and Barney, laughing. The sound of the waves crashing against the shore. The hum of airplanes making a landing. The James Taylor song on the boom box three towels down. She used to love that song; she still did.
“I can’t believe how wonderful I feel,” Phoebe said.
“That makes one of you,” Delilah said.
It was wrong, all wrong. It was backward. Addison was a shell, a husk. He was miserable and toadish. He was an abuser of alcohol. His lover had died and he was undergoing the predictable decline. Delilah, too, was suffering from nuclear fallout. Her hair was wild and haglike; she admitted she could muster the energy to get in the shower only once a week. Once a week! She was getting dreadlocks. She had put on weight. Delilah had a very sexy, curvy figure, but she stuffed her face mindlessly with the Doritos and Chips Ahoy that she took to the beach for the kids, which went right to her ass. She complained about her ass and her dimpled thighs, she had a harder time getting out of her beach chair, she waddled to the water line, but she kept on snarfing down the snacks. Phoebe invited her to go for walks to the beach, or to Pilates class when the kids were in camp, but Delilah turned her down.I don’t have it in me, Phoebe.And she had quit her job. She couldn’t work at the Begonia anymore, now that Greg was gone. Thom and Faith had replaced Greg with an Irish trio; Delilah had gone in to work one shift to see if she could do it, but when the girl started crooning in her Gaelic accent, Delilah ran out of the bar in tears. She went through her closet and took all her hostessing dresses to the hospital thrift shop.
“But why?” Phoebe said. “They were so pretty.”
“Because,” Delilah said, “I’m never going to wear them again.”
She was declaring her life over, and her sense of fun—which had always been her guiding principle—defeated. All she wanted to talk about was how much she hated Andrea and whether Greg had been screwing April Peck, neither of which interested Phoebe in the slightest. This was how people acted when two of their best friends died tragically—they suffered, they retreated, they regressed. Phoebe was the oddball. She did not want to dwell on Greg and April Peck or Addison and Tess falling in love in the Quaise cottage, or about her visit to Greg and Tess’s house the night before their sail, or about the drowning.
She wanted to move on!
But it looked like she was going alone.
Phoebe wanted something to do. She had agreed to cochair the cocktail party for Island Conservation on August 15. With ten phone calls, the whole event was organized—tent, tables and chairs, caterer, donated beer and wine from Cisco Brewery, swing band, invites. Wheeler Realty was going to be a major underwriter, though Phoebe had cleared this only with Florabel, the receptionist. Addison did not have the attention span to take in the details.
That accomplished, she was ready for the next thing. What was the next thing? She had nearly eight years of energy stored up. Should she resurrect her business? Arrange group cruises through the Mediterranean for the over-sixty-fives? Perhaps join them on the cruise, jump off the ship at the Amalficoast, and take a young Italian lover?
Phoebe ran across the twins by accident. They were in Nantucket Bookworks, standing quietly shoulder to shoulder in front of the chapter books. Phoebe had been adrift in paperback fiction. She thought maybe what her soul was craving was an education. There were so many books she hadn’t read.Madame Bovary, Deliverance, A Room with a View, The Ice Storm, The Corrections, A Handmaid’s Tale, A Thousand Acres, Bastard Out of Carolina, The Emperor’s Children, Bel Canto– God, the list was endless. She picked a pile to start with:I Cannot Get You Close Enough, Prep, The Brambles, Beautiful Children,all from the staff-favorites shelf. Someday in the near future, Phoebe would have her own shelf of favorites. It was a goal. She was all about goals. She wanted to addCatcher in the Ryeto the pile, because that had been Reed’s favorite book. Phoebe had read it—it had been required their sophomore year of high school—but she could not remember one single thing about it except for the boy in Holden’s class who would shout “Digression!” whenever the teacher got off the topic. (But Phoebe thought she might even have been remembering that wrong.)
She could not findCatcher in the Ryeon the shelf with the other Salinger novels. The woman behind the counter told her it was in the young adult section because it was on so many summer reading lists—and that was how Phoebe discovered the twins. Side by side, dark head buzz cut (Finn) next to dark head bob (Chloe), both in stripy T-shirts and shorts. Phoebe nearly cried out at how darling they were, how quiet and serious. Finn was looking at something calledCaptain Underpantsand Chloe was flipping throughA to Z Mysteries. There was something about their silence and composure that made them seem like little adults, a husband and wife, selecting books for a week of evening reading. Because they were twins, Phoebe had an incredibly tender spot in her heart for them. She felt connected to them in a way that she did not feel connected to Drew and Barney. Chloe and Finn were like Phoebe and Reed: a pair, a couple, connected at the hip. At the funeral, Phoebe had said to them,You still have each other.And they had nodded in their composed, adult way. They didn’t need her to tell them what they already knew.
Phoebe did not speak to the twins in the bookstore, or make herself known. They were too perfect. Phoebe wanted to gobble them up; she wanted to vaporize herself and inhabit their flawless bodies.
They were so sad. They were babies abandoned in a basket. Tears welled in Phoebe’s eyes. Could anyone help? Could Phoebe help? Was this it—the thing she was seeking? Was it the twins?
She paid for her stack of books and scanned the store. Where was Andrea? Or… the Chief?
Later, Phoebe called Delilah on the phone and said, “I saw the twins at Bookworks by themselves. As in all alone. Does this seem right to you?”
Delilah said, “It seems negligent. Andrea is unfit. Finn told Barney that Andrea smashed Greg’s guitar against the kitchen counter, right in front of the kids.”
“You’re kidding,” Phoebe said.
“They should be living with us,” Delilah said. “I should have fought for them.”
Fought for them,Phoebe thought.
