The Castaways

THE CHIEF

B ecause the accident occurred out on the water and not on the land that fell under his jurisdiction, it was unusual that the Chief was the first one to find out. But that was the benefit of an official position: he was a lightning rod for information, a conduit. Everything went through him first.

Dickson, his best sergeant, came into the office without his usual peppermint breeze of self-confidence. Was he sick? His skin was the color of frostbite, even though it was the first day of summer. In the seconds immediately before Dickson shuffled in, the Chief had been thinking of Greg with envy. The wind was strong; you couldn’t ask for a better day to sail. Greg planned to go all the way to the Vineyard, and if he caught the gusts, he would be there in five minutes. Tess would hate it; she would be clinging to the mast or down below in the cramped head, her face as green as a bowl of pea soup.

“What’s up?” the Chief said. Dickson, who had the broadest shoulders the Chief had ever seen on a human being, was hunched over. He looked like he was going to upchuck right there on the Chief’s desk. He had gotten a haircut that morning, too, his summer buzz, which made his head seem square and strange, his scalp vulnerable.

“The Coast Guard just called,” Dickson said. “There’s been an accident on the water.”

“Hmmm,” the Chief said. This was the stuff of his days: accidents, crime, people fucking up in big ways and small. Mostly small, he had come to realize after seventeen years on the force.

“Chief?” Dickson said. “The MacAvoys are dead.”

The Chief would have called himself impossible to faze. Even on an island as privileged and idyllic as Nantucket, he had seen it all: an eight-year-old boy shot in the face by his father’s hunting rifle, a woman stabbed fifty-one times by a jealous ex-boyfriend, heroin overdoses, a Bulgarian prostitution ring, cocaine, ecstasy, moonshine, high school kids stealing diamond rings from beach cabanas, gangs, and a host of domestic disputes, including a man who broke a chair over his wife’s head. As it turned out, the Chief was right, he was impossible to faze, because when Dickson said, The MacAvoys are dead —the MacAvoys being Tess, Andrea’s cousin, and Greg, the closest thing to a brother or a best friend the Chief had ever had—the Chief coughed dryly into his hand. That was the extent of his initial reaction—one raspy cough.

“What?” the Chief said. His voice was barely a whisper. What? What are you telling me? His hands were cold and numb, and he stared at his phone. It was not reasonable, at this point, to panic, because there might have been a mistake. So many times there were mistakes, messages got crossed, people jumped to conclusions; so many times things weren’t as bad as they seemed. He could not call Andrea until he spoke to the Coast Guard and found out exactly what had happened. It was four-thirty now. Andrea would be… where? At the beach still, he supposed. The kids, finally, both had summer jobs, and by Memorial Day weekend Andrea had embarked on what she called “the Summer of Me.” She had been good to her word, too, doing her power walking every morning and spending the afternoons on the south shore, swimming like the Olympic Trials qualifier that she was. She was getting fit, getting tan, and exercising her mind by reading all those thought-provoking novels. She tried to talk to the Chief about the novels when they climbed into bed at night, but the Chief’s life was its own novel and he didn’t have room in his mind for any more characters. Just yesterday he had heard Andrea on the phone with Tess, talking about her book. He had overheard words like ambivalence and disenchantment , words he had no use for.

The Chief could not raise his eyes to Dickson’s about-to-puke face. He could not call his wife and drop the bomb that would destroy the landscape of her life. Her first cousin, her closest friend—a person Andrea held dearer, possibly, than himself—Tess MacAvoy, was dead.

Maybe.

“I don’t know what happened,” Dickson said. The Chief couldn’t look at him or the haircut so short it looked painful. “They just called to say there was an accident. And the MacAvoys are dead.”