The Castaways

ANDREA

T he first week of July was too hot to sleep. Normally the Chief and Andrea installed an air conditioner in their bedroom window, but this year they did not. The twins were up many times in the night, and Andrea wanted to be able to hear them. Andrea took sleeping pills, but they didn’t work. She lay in bed, sweaty and drugged and so psychologically addled that she could not sleep.

During the day she was a zombie.

She had moved on from denial, or so she thought. She knew, intellectually, that Tess was dead and not coming back. She resisted the urge to call Tess’s house to see if she would pick up; she did not drive by the house to see if Tess was out in the front garden, deadheading the daylilies. Ed was at work all the time. It was his job to insure the island’s public safety 24/7. Additionally, he was thinking about Tess and Greg. He was trying to figure out what happened. Didn’t she want to know what happened?

No, she didn’t. She just wanted it to unhappen.

Andrea was in some other stage of grief, one not previously documented by the authors of grief books. She was in a stage that should be known as Long Periods of Exhausted Stupor Punctuated by Psychotic Episodes.

One day, however, she got herself to the beach to swim. This was Ed’s idea. Ed was a big proponent of getting-back-to-normal. Even if Andrea didn’t feel normal, she could do normal things, and this might help.

Go to the beach, he said. Swim.

She put on her tank suit. She packed a towel and her goggles. She settled in her usual spot on the beach. It was the first week of July, and the beach was crowded with people getting on with their normal, happy lives on vacation. How could they do it? Andrea walked to the water’s edge. She filled with a terrible dread, a sickening revelation, which was by no means new, but which struck her in a new way.

She had not become a nun.

She had stood at the foot of Tess’s prostrate nine-year-old body and she had prayed to God. She had in fact made a pact: Spare Tess and I will devote my life to you.

But how easy it had been to let her end of the bargain go once it turned out that Tess was okay. What happened to people who did that? They ended up in hell.

She, Andrea, was in hell.

She could not swim. She could not even make it back to the bluff to her car. She was going to have to call Ed and have him come get her. He had come nearly two weeks earlier to tell her the news. (She could not think about it.) She retrieved her cell phone from her bag to call the station, but there was no reception. She couldn’t call Tess at home, because no one would answer.

Andrea pitched her cell phone into the ocean.

A guy on a towel a few yards away from her said, “Whoa!”

Ed was at work trying to figure out “what happened,” but Andrea already knew what happened. She had made a promise and then not upheld it. God had waited years and years, but he had come back for Tess.

Andrea looked blankly at the guy on the towel.

She needed help. This was rock bottom. It had been two weeks since Tess and Greg had died. Molly, the dispatcher, dropped off a book about grieving, which Andrea had been unable to read, but she was pretty sure that if she read it, it would tell her that grief had a trajectory and that two weeks after a death a mourner hit bottom. Dumped a platter of rib-eyes into the garden. Threw her cell phone into the ocean.

But then the next day Andrea woke up feeling worse. How could she feel worse when she had already hit rock bottom? She was despondent and restless. She could not pour the children’s cereal or pack their lunches. She asked Kacy to do it, and Kacy did it without complaint while Andrea sat on the edge of her bed, paralyzed. The bed was unmade, she should make it; Ed would tolerate many things, but not an unmade bed. She could not make it. Kacy was such a good kid. She must have her own grief, she must miss Tess and Greg, too, but Andrea couldn’t ask. She started to cry.

Kacy came into the bedroom and said, “I’ll bike with the kids to camp.”

Andrea nodded. Kacy did not leave. She said, “But they want to go to the beach this afternoon, Mom. And you promised you’d take them.”

“Did I?” Andrea had no recollection.

“You did.”

She took a deep breath. Air. Sometimes air helped. Like right this second. Andrea believed she could take the kids to the beach—the north shore, where it was placid—and watch them like a hawk while they swam. And then later, tonight maybe, she would ask Kacy how she was feeling about things. Ed was a big believer in reaching out. Step outside of yourself for a minute, he said. Call Delilah, or Phoebe.

But Delilah and Phoebe didn’t matter anymore. The only person who mattered was gone.

When the kids came home from camp, Andrea was ready. She was wearing her bathing suit and a pareo. She had packed juice boxes and Fritos. She had done nothing all morning except sit on the edge of the bed, breathing in, then out, trying to prepare herself for an afternoon at the beach with the kids.

There really was no explanation for what happened. The kids got into their suits, put on their flip-flops, and waited by the mudroom door. Eric was home, making himself a ham sandwich before heading to work. Andrea stuffed beach toys into a mesh bag for the kids. She felt a sudden burst of anxiety, as if someone were blowing up a balloon in her chest cavity.

She said, “We’ll go to the beach, but you kids are not allowed to set foot in the water.”

“What?” Chloe said.

“We want to swim,” Finn said.

“No,” Andrea said. How to explain her cold, clear panic? If they swam, they would drown. Andrea had been a lifeguard for years. She knew what she was talking about. They would drown and she would not be able to save them. It was beyond her to save anyone.

She cast around the mudroom for something to throw. She saw Greg’s guitar. She was not thinking. She was not, at that moment, a human being. She was a robot with a short circuit. She took the guitar out of its case, carried it into the kitchen, and smashed it against the countertop.

It cracked, the strings popped; the cacophonous noise was satisfying to Andrea, the destruction met a need somewhere in her dark insides. Smash it, smash it! She was so angry.

The twins were crying. Andrea did not realize this until Eric brought it to her attention. Eric, her fifteen-year-old son, had her in some kind of death grip that he must have learned either from his father or from watching wrestling on TV.

“Drop the guitar, Mom. The twins are crying.”

She dropped the guitar. It fell to the floor with a racket. The twins clung to each other.

This was rock bottom, Andrea thought. The lowest point on any grief’s trajectory.

Right?