The Castaways

THE CHIEF

E very free minute he had, he studied the toxicology report. Willing it to make sense. Willing it to say something different. Tess had had opiates in her bloodstream. The kind of opiate that was most commonly found in heroin. Heroin! But there had been no needle marks, Danny Browne said.

So, what? the Chief asked. She snorted it?

Doesn’t look like it , Danny said.

It didn’t matter. The Chief repeated this phrase. Greg and Tess were dead and nothing would bring them back. But the Chief hated to think that Tess had been high on something. Had Greg drugged her? Had he taken her out on a sail because he wanted to hurt her? She had been missing that hank of hair. But maybe he had been trying to save her. It didn’t matter, but it did matter. A sequence of events had unfolded out on the water and nobody knew what they were. They had both been drinking; Tess had been high. There was so much anger between them. But it was their anniversary and Andrea had made that picnic. Five calls from Addison in half an hour. See? The Chief ordered himself to stop thinking about it, but he couldn’t. And there was nobody to talk it over with.

Jeffrey, maybe. The Chief would think about it.

His phone buzzed. Molly, the dispatcher, said, “Chief, your son is on line three.”

He tucked the tox report into his desk drawer and locked it.

It was not a phone call he had hoped for. Eric said, “Mom has officially lost it.”

And the Chief, steeling himself, said, “What do you mean?”

“She smashed Greg’s guitar to bits in front of the twins, and now she’s locked herself in her room. The twins are crying.”

“Where’s Kacy?”

“She’s at work. I was getting ready to leave for work, too, but then Mom flipped out so I called the shop and told them I would be a little late.”

“Did something trigger your mother?”

Eric said, “Would you please come home?”

He had a ton of work to do. He had his entire summer force to place on their assignments for the Fourth of July. He had parking tape to secure, barriers to erect, and there was a party on Hulbert Avenue that former president Clinton would be attending, so he would be dealing with the Secret Service. The Chief had not even planned on taking a lunch, but now… Well, this didn’t sound like something he could ignore.

“I have to go out,” he told Molly. “Back shortly.”

Things at home were just as Eric had reported. The kids were in their bathing suits with towels around their necks, sitting in front of the television eating blindly from a bag of Fritos. Their breathing was ragged and hiccuppy. The guitar lay in the middle of the kitchen floor, smashed, its strings broken and haywire.

The Chief marched back to the bedroom. It was locked. He knocked once, to be considerate.

“Andrea? Open up.”

Nothing. His heartrate picked up. Andrea would never, ever do anything to hurt herself. She didn’t have it in her. But apparently she had it in her to do a Motley Crue destruction number on the guitar, which he would also have said was beyond the pale. He reached up to the lintel and pulled down the pin that would open the door.

He stepped inside. Andrea was on the bed facedown, her head under a landslide of pillows. She was wearing her black tank suit and a black, orange, and hot pink pareo that she had bought during their group trip to Sayulita, Mexico.

“Andrea?”

She didn’t move. She was, however, breathing. The Chief sat down next to her. His hands were ice-cold; he was afraid to touch her with such cold hands. He was afraid to touch her at all. She was formidable in her grief, terrifying. Anything he or the kids said or did could set her off—she would shout or berate them or start to cry so hard it resembled an epileptic seizure. It unnerved the kids—his own kids and Chloe and Finn—and it made the Chief feel both angry and helpless. Andrea was grieving more deeply than the rest of them because Tess had been her cousin and her best friend and everything else in between. There was guilt mixed in there, too, about the swimming accident twenty-six years earlier, about bringing Tess to Nantucket at all. I couldn’t save her, Ed! I couldn’t keep her safe! He heard her talking to him while he was falling asleep, but clearly he didn’t have the words to comfort her, because her sadness only grew worse and manifested itself in more disturbing ways.

Smashing Greg’s guitar against the kitchen countertop?

The Chief had tried, gently, to remind her that she was responsible for two more lives now—young, impressionable lives. She had demanded custody of the kids, she had requisitioned them, and now she had to raise them. She had to deal with her grief reasonably; she had to lead by example. If pressed to share his truest thoughts, the Chief would say that Andrea was not fit to bring up the twins, not right now. She should have let Delilah take them for the summer when Delilah offered. She would then have had the time and space to exorcise the demon of her grief.

“Andrea?” he said.

She didn’t respond. He lifted the pillows until she was exposed. Her eyes were open.

“I need help,” she said.