Page 63 of The Castaways
Addison tucked Tess’s iPhone in the top drawer of his desk, which locked with a key. Addison had one key and Florabel had a spare key swimming in the ashtray where she kept paper clips, rubber bands, and safety pins. The Chief would never find Tess’s phone in Addison’s top drawer, though it was the obvious first place to look. Should Addison move it? Take it home or put it in his car? The skin on the phone was traffic-light yellow, bright as an alarm, impossible to miss. Would Phoebe find it?
He pulled the two pieces of the felt heart from his pocket. He was not only emotionally feeble, but mentally feeble as well. He believed that this heart had power, that it meant something. As he handled it, it ripped again. The heart was disintegrating. Was this a sign? Addison could not accept it as a sign.
Florabel loomed over his desk. She eyed the torn, misshapen pieces of heart on his desk.
“What is that?” She sounded disgusted, as if they were pieces of pig heart.
“Nothing,” he said.
“You need to pull yourself together, Dealer,” Florabel said. As ever, the woman was speaking the brutal truth. She slapped a whopper of a check down on his desk, covering the scraps of felt. “There’s some money. Go get yourself a shrink.”
DELILAH
Thoughts of escape occupied her at all times, the way some people, she supposed, fantasized about sex with Robert Downey Jr., or winning the lottery and buying a power yacht, or being selected forAmerican Idol. Freedom had always been Delilah’s drug of choice, and now, who could blame her? Tess and Greg were dead, everything was painful; even breathing hurt. Delilah dreamed about living alone in the South of France, riding a funny European bicycle down a path cut between fields of lavender toward a charming village where she would buy a baguette and runny Camembert and a bottle of wine that would aid her quest to block out everything that came before—her life on Nantucket, her friends, her husband, her children.
She used to love a crowd, she used to demand the company of others, but now she wanted only to be alone.
And even that wasn’t quite true. She couldn’t stand herself. She wanted to unzip her body and step out of it. She wanted to be attached to a machine that would erase her memory, obliterate her guilt, wipe her clean.
She had run away once before, in high school. There had been no reason for it other than boredom, a standard-issue teenage restlessness, and a desire to see what other possibilities the world contained. Delilah had had a pleasant childhood and a less-pleasant-but-still-okay adolescence, growing up in South Haven, on the shores of Lake Michigan. Delilah’s father, Nico Ashby, was a real estate developer, responsible for the burgeoning suburban sprawl in the acreage just off the lake. He brought South Haven Taco Bell, Blockbuster, I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt, Lucky Nail Salon, Subway, Stride Rite Shoes, and Mailboxes, Etc. He also had his hand in the bigger, uglier, more egregious development along Route 31 toward St. Joe’s—the Wal-Mart with its attendant Big Boy Diner, the Staples, the eighteen-theater Cineplex, the Applebee’s, the Borders. Nico Ashby and his wife and two daughters lived in a stunning Victorian house on the bluff that overlooked the town harbor and the South Haven Yacht Club (where Nico had been president for nine years). Nico was a local hero—a successful businessman, a philanthropist, a member of Rotary and the Lions Club, a model husband and father, a big, good-looking guy with a full head of dark hair, a bronze tan in three seasons, and a booming laugh. Nico Ashby—everyone knew him, everyone liked him.
Delilah’s mother, Connie Ashby, nee Albertson, was short, dark-haired, trim, pretty, and obsessed with the following things: her person (exercising, hair, skin, nails, and clothes, clothes, clothes), her daughters (bake sales, Girl Scouts, summer camp, decorating for school dances), and her husband. She met Nico at Michigan State; he was a starting linebacker, she was a cheerleader, petite enough to serve as the top of the human pyramid, the cherry on the ice-cream sundae. And yes, these people really got married. They were beautiful and blessed, they were successful, they had gorgeous, healthy daughters.
Delilah was loved and encouraged. She was brilliant in school, a fact that made her parents proud, but Delilah’s precocity also allowed her the time and leeway to goof off. Delilah, as a teenager, was not beautiful. Her hair was too wild and curly; she wore braces for years. She had huge breasts and the rear end to counterbalance it. She wasvoluptuous,her mother said, but Connie Ashby weighed ninety pounds soaking wet (as did Delilah’s sister, Caitlin), and it was clear that having a voluptuous daughter perplexed her.
Boys did not love Delilah, but they liked her. Her best friends were all boys, the best-looking boys in her class—the athletes, the dope smokers, the clowns. They liked her whip-smart sense of humor, her sense of freedom. Delilah Ashby was not afraid of anyone.
She ran away in early May, when the periphery of the lake was blooming with dogwoods and azaleas. The Ashby family had just gotten back from a week in Fort Lauderdale, where Delilah had looked upon the university students on spring break with envy. Freedom! She dreamed of a highway with no one on it, a deserted stretch of beach, an endless ribbon of blue sea, a grid of city blocks where no one knew her name and no one expected her to show up for lacrosse practice or memorize theorems or sit down to dinner at six and contribute to the conversation. Delilah itched, she could not sleep, the house was suffocating her. School and the kids in it—even Dean Markbury, whom she loved with the ferocity of a lion—were slowly killing her with their predictable sameness. She had to get out.
She needed money. She had saved seven hundred dollars from baby-sitting, and over the course of four days she stole. She stole from her father’s wallet, from her mother’s stash for tipping the manicurist, from petty cash in the kitchen drawer where the family grabbed five or ten dollars for the offering basket at church. She stockpiled a thousand dollars. She estimated it would last her three weeks.
She left in the middle of the night on her bike. In her backpack was the money, two bottles of water, an extra pair of jeans, a bra, five pairs of underwear, three tissue-thin T-shirts, her lacrosse workout clothes, sunglasses, flip-flops, and a box of Pop-Tarts. It was all she could ever imagine needing.
She had left a note on the kitchen table in the spot where members of her family normally left notes for one another. She had given the note careful thought. It said,See ya!Delilah wanted her parents to know that a) she had not been abducted, but rather was walking away from this nice life of her own volition, and b) she was not leaving in anger, but rather in the spirit of self-discovery. “See ya!” would also, hopefully, keep her mother from completely losing her mind, implying as it did that mother and daughter would set eyes on each other again. Delilah, although self-centered and self-absorbed, realized that what she was doing would destroy her parents as well as thirteen-year-old Caitlin, who worshipped her. (Delilah had peeked in on Caitlin before she left. Caitlin was breathing heavily through her orthodontic headgear. The sight of her and the knowledge of Caitlin’s deep impending sorrow almost kept Delilah from going.) But Delilah was infected with the desire to beFREE, and once she was biking along the Blue Star Highway, her spirit soared. She was headed to Saugatuck, where she would catch a bus to Grand Rapids, and in Grand Rapids she would catch the bus to New York, where she would catch the Chinatown bus to Boston, and in Boston she would take the Plymouth & Brockton line to Hyannis. From Hyannis she would ride the ferry to Nantucket Island, a destination she had discovered in the pages ofNational Geographic,which she read in the high school library while she was supposed to be researching a paper on Blaise Pascal. She stumbled across the article about Nantucket by accident, but she was captivated by the way it looked—all quaint and historic and New Englandy. It looked like home.
And God, what a feeling when the bus pulled out of the depot, when the driver punched her ticket and said, “In Grand Rapids, head to bay nine. Bus to New York City.” The sensation of miles of asphalt putting time and distance between Delilah and the life that held her down titillated her. She wasn’t running from anything, she wasn’t running toward anything—she was just running for running’s sake, and it was a drug: the blurred landscape out the window was a soothing poultice for her itch. Go, go, go!
She transferred buses in Grand Rapids. Peed in the terminal, bought some peanut butter crackers because somewhere in her head was her mother’s voice nagging her about protein. She had both seats to herself practically the whole way to New York. She stretched out and used her backpack as a pillow, she read seventeen of theComplete Stories of John Cheever,which had been assigned in her English class. She noted, with a certain satisfaction, the difference between reading a book because it was assigned and reading a book because she wanted to. Which led her to her next quasi-intellectual thought, which concerned Henry David Thoreau and his desire to live deliberately.
And that, Delilah decided, was why she had hopped on this bus. She was going to Nantucket Island because she wanted to live deliberately, she wanted to choose her path every second of her existence, she wanted to cultivate a heightened awareness. She was in charge of her well-being; she was her own person. Forget the edicts of home and school, the din of the hallways and the obligation she felt when Dean Markbury handed her a joint. (She had to take a toke to be socially acceptable.) She was free of that now.
Sing it:Free!
The bus stopped just before crossing the George Washington Bridge. Delilah had had a seatmate since they stopped in Williamsport, Pennsylvania—a brown-skinned man of indeterminate ethnicity (Salvadoran? Thai? Lebanese?). The man was about fifty and stunningly handsome. He had bulging arms, he wore a tight black T-shirt and jeans, he wore a diamond stud in his left ear and a pair of Ray-Ban Wayfarers. He had nice feathery black hair, and he wore what looked to be an expensive watch. But what was riveting about this man was that he held a pack of cigarettes in his hands the entire time he was on the bus. He opened the pack, inspected the filter ends, counted them perhaps, shut the pack. Opened the pack, pulled a cigarette halfway out, dreamed about lighting up right there on the bus, the inhale, the burn, the satisfaction, the high. The addiction met. Delilah was fascinated with watching his struggle. The want, the can’t-have. The need, denied, minute after minute. It was almost sexual, watching this handsome, tough-seeming man, older perhaps than her father, want it want it want it. It was transferable. Delilah wanted a cigarette, too, and she wanted this man. The boys Delilah had known at school had wanted only one thing: to touch her breasts, to ogle them, bare. Would this man also want that? Did he notice her breasts? She breathed deeply, squared her shoulders, tried to edge her breasts into his field of vision. He wanted only the cigarettes.
The bus stopped; the mighty bridge loomed in the windshield. The man stood up, collected his backpack. Delilah was heart-broken. No! He could not leave! Was this even his stop, or was he getting off the bus solely so he could smoke? She wanted to follow him. Who was he, what was his name, where did he live, what country was he from, where was he going, what had he been doing in Williamsport, Pennsylvania (“Home of the Little League World Series,” the sign said). There were a thousand stories contained within this man, a thousand stories in Delilah herself and everyone else on this bus, not to mention the thousand stories of the 8 million residents of the city on the other side of the bridge. Delilah watched this man’s back—she would never see him again, of this she was sure—and then she eyed the cherry-red cover of the Cheever. It was a grain of sand. The stories that made up the world were infinite, like the stars.
New York to Boston, Boston to Hyannis. Out the window, Delilah saw the ocean. On the ferry to Nantucket, she scanned the local paper and found several ads for rooms to rent. She craved a small space of her own, a hole in the wall, a hiding place like Anne Frank’s where the Nazis wouldn’t find her. She was very far away from home, and yet she felt exposed and obvious, as though she had a camera trained on her. She disembarked from the ferry. There were people waiting on the dock, but none of the people was waiting for her. She was a sixteen-year-old girl who had traveled twelve hundred miles to get here, to Nantucket Island, her newly discovered spiritual home.
The best thing about Nantucket was that it fulfilled its promises. It looked exactly as it did in the magazine. If anything, the air was more rarefied than Delilah expected—it was fresh, and filled with salt spray, evergreen scent, and fog. Delilah found a pay phone on the wharf and started dialing numbers from the ads in the newspaper. The first place she called had already filled the room, the second place ditto. The third place ditto, and this worried Delilah, because everyone knew the third time was a charm. At the fourth number, no one answered. Delilah filled with a hot, prickly panic. This was an island—shehadto find a place to stay. It wasn’t like she could just move a town over. The fifth place had to work (there were only five ads), but the man who answered the telephone asked Delilah how old she was (she said nineteen) and then what she looked like. Delilah had heard all the requisite warnings about people who didn’t have her best interest at heart. She hung up. It was four-thirty in the afternoon. She was dangerously close to screaming out,What have I done?
Deep breath. She called the fourth place back, let the phone ring fifteen times, and after the sixteenth time someone answered. A little old lady. Yes, the room was still available. The room was free of charge. The woman—Tennie Gulliver, her name was—just wanted someone else in the house, someone to take out the trash, which she could no longer do, someone to be around in case the unthinkable happened. Delilah would be responsible for paying a quarter of the electric bill in addition to her phone charges. Okay?
“Okay,” Delilah said.
Tennie Gulliver gave Delilah directions; she could walk from the wharf. Delilah slung her bag over her shoulder and walked through Nantucket town. The houses were dignified and old-fashioned; they had window boxes planted with geraniums and majestic front doors. There were lights coming on and cooking smells. Delilah crossed the cobblestones, she walked up brick sidewalks past galleries and restaurants and antique shops, an ice-cream parlor, a jewelry store.
Tennie Gulliver’s house was on Pine Street, just off Main. It was an ancient among the elderly; the plaque on the front of the house said it had been built in 1704. The house stooped and sagged. The shingles were mildewed and the white paint of the trim was flaking away.
