Page 47 of The Castaways
“He hurt her,” Andrea said. “Last fall, that whole thing? He cut her heart out. And she was never the same. The week they separated? God, Jeffrey. We talked for hours. She was trying to make sense of it.Do you think he lied to me? Do you think he lied to Flanders? Do you think something happened between him and that girl?And the answer is, Yes, of course.Somethinghappened, we don’t know what, we’ll never know exactly what. And there’s Greg, sending flowers and hounding her cell phone and calling the house begging and pleading…”
“Yeah,” Jeffrey said. “That was a weird week.”
While Tess was at the Kapenash house with the twins, Greg had taken refuge at Jeffrey and Delilah’s. It was, of all awful things, the week of Thanksgiving, the holiest family holiday, but despite that, or maybe because of that, Tess decided to take the kids and leave. She had meant to go to her brother’s house in Pembroke, to visit her mother at the nursing home in Duxbury, but in the end she had simply sought refuge with Andrea. She slept with Andrea in Andrea’s bed and the kids slept in the guest room. And Greg, although he had his house to himself, slept on Jeffrey and Delilah’s leather couch each night. He never stayed over intentionally—otherwise he would have used the guest room. He came over for dinner and drinks, and he and Delilah stayed up so late talking and he was so drunk that he ended up crashing on the couch. And in the morning he would be awakened by Drew and Barney and SpongeBob SquarePants. He would eat Delilah’s delicious breakfasts, talk about going home to grab a shower, but then there would be college football and lunch and Barney begging him to play the guitar… and he just stayed on and on. A few of those nights, Greg and Delilah worked at the Begonia and came home absurdly late. Jeffrey was busy at the farm market—the kitchen had orders for three hundred fresh turkeys and six times that many side dishes—and if he didn’t catch every nuanced detail of what was going on, could anyone blame him? Delilah was the head paramedic of this particular train wreck; she was in charge of tending to Greg. Jeffrey noted Greg’s attempts to reach Tess, but she was not taking his calls. He heard about a bouquet of flowers sent, and returned to the florist by Tess. Jeffrey wasn’t sure how he felt about the whole thing; what he wanted was to stay out of it. This was, no doubt, what the Chief was doing, and this was what Addison and Phoebe were doing. The prizefight was between Tess (and her trainer, Andrea) and Greg (and his trainer, Delilah) in the opposite corner. Jeffrey did not love it that his house had inadvertently become Greg’s camp; he felt like he was harboring a fugitive.
There had been one night in particular that bothered Jeffrey. It was four-thirty in the morning and Jeffrey was rising for the day when he noticed that Delilah was not in bed. He tiptoed out to the kitchen for coffee and he heard Greg’s voice. Greg was murmuring to someone. Although Jeffrey was the last person to eavesdrop, he couldn’t help it—and goddamn it, this was his house. Jeffrey thought,If he is talking to Delilah like that, I am going to throw him out.Because, really, Jeffrey had had enough of the Greg and Delilah confidante thing. Greg was not good for Delilah, or for Jeffrey and Delilah’s marriage.
But when Jeffrey reached the kitchen, he saw that Greg was on his cell phone. Greg noticed Jeffrey and said quickly, “I’ll call you later.” And hung up. And then, despite the fact that Greg had seen Jeffrey and Jeffrey had seen Greg, Greg closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep.
Delilah, as it turned out, was upstairs sleeping with Barney, who tended to wake up in the middle of the night and want his mother.
Jeffrey did not say anything to Greg about the phone call, but he knew it wasn’t Tess on the other end.
Then there was Thanksgiving itself. Tess had ceded a little ground and allowed Greg to see the kids in the morning. Greg had hoped for a family reconciliation for the holiday, and learning that he was only gaining custody for four hours like the divorced man he was sure to become depressed him. He had nothing planned. Delilah suggested that he take the kids to breakfast at the Downyflake, or for a walk on the beach, but Greg seemed eager to avoid quality time when the twins might have a chance to ask him questions he was ill-equipped to answer, such asWhy is Mom so mad at you?orWhy are we living at Auntie’s house?
Instead Greg took the twins over to the Drake house, and this, in combination with the overheard phone call, led Jeffrey to understand that Greg was lost, hapless, and in possession of the maturity of a twelve-year-old boy. Jeffrey therefore took over. He rescued the kids from the PlayStation by driving everyone to the farm, where they went for a hayride. Jeffrey drove the tractor, and Delilah and Greg sat in the back with the kids. The kids liked the bumps, and Jeffrey obliged them. The day was sunny but cold. Jeffrey took the long way, all the way around the edge of the property. Time and circumstances were suspended. Everyone had fun, and at the end of the ride they drank apple cider and ate moist pumpkin muffins, and then suddenly it was one o’clock. Delilah had to get home to check on the turkey, and Greg had to get the kids back to the Kapenash house.
Normally the eight of them, plus the six kids, had Thanksgiving dinner together, and Delilah and Andrea alternated years hosting. This year it felt like they had all divorced. The Chief and Andrea had Tess and the kids. Jeffrey and Delilah had Greg. Phoebe and Addison, not wanting to take sides, went to the Ship’s Inn by themselves. It felt awful. Jeffrey, Delilah, Greg, and Drew and Barney held hands around the table and said grace, but when they looked up, they could see how wrong everything was. Jeffrey thought about Ed and Andrea’s table, with Eric and Kacy and Tess and the twins, and he wondered if things felt wrong there, too. He hoped they did.
Jeffrey never found out how or why, but by Sunday night Greg and Tess were back at home with the kids. Four weeks later, the eight of them were on vacation in Stowe and everything was back to normal. Tess had forgiven Greg, forgotten April Peck, and moved on.
Now Andrea was taking the credit for this—or the blame.
“I convinced Tess to take him back. For the kids’ sake. Ed and I both thought that was the best thing.”
“It was the best thing,” Jeffrey said.
“How can you say that?” Andrea said. She was shaking and crying. Her face was wet with tears. Jeffrey wanted to reach out to her, to hold her. He had lost her so long ago, when he wasn’t watching, and although it was his fault completely, it had never seemed fair. Now she was back. She needed something and he would try like hell to give it to her. “How can you say that when she’s dead?”
“Remember when Tess came to visit us?” Jeffrey said. “And she borrowed my bike?”
Andrea wiped at her tears. “And she insisted on riding it barefoot? And she fell and—”
“Broke her arm,” Jeffrey said.
“But we didn’t believe her,” Andrea said. “We didn’t believe her when she said how much it hurt. We made her go to the movies.”
“And we sawThe Player.”
“And it was the best movie of all time.”
“And we couldn’t figure out why Tess was crying at the end…”
“And it was because of her arm.”
“We took her to the hospital,” Jeffrey said. “You stayed by her side while they X-rayed her and set it.”
“You stayed in the waiting room,” Andrea said. “And fell asleep across four chairs.”
“I felt so guilty,” Jeffrey said. “It was my bike.”
“I felt so guilty,” Andrea said. “She told me her arm was broken and I gave her some Advil and told her to toughen up.”
“We made her sit through that movie.”
Andrea was quiet. She stared at her legs. Her strong, beautiful legs that had nearly gotten her to the Olympics, that had locked around him when they were making love. This was the pornography of grief—going back and remembering a moment in a dead person’s life, step by step. So few people were willing to comb back through it like this, because it was too intimate or too painful or it wouldn’t help anything, it wouldn’t bring the person back. But this, perhaps, was what Andrea needed. Let Tess live in the minute detail of their memories. Jeffrey could see Tess’s teenaged face, as plain as day. He could see her bare toes on the spiky pedals of his Cannondale.
“Thank you, Peach,” Andrea said, as she stood up to go. “Thank you.”
