The Castaways

ADDISON

H e needed a book. Executoring for Dummies.

The Chief had been into Tess and Greg’s house twice to get the kids’ belongings, the first time for shorts, shirts, bathing suits, pajamas, underwear, toothbrushes, and the second time for toys: the Nintendo DS, the DVD collection, the bikes, the boogie boards, the stuffed animals. Both times the Chief went, he called Addison to clear it.

I’m only going upstairs, the Chief said. To the kids’ rooms. For the kids’ things. Okay?

Okay, said Addison.

Implicit in the Chief’s asking was the fact that Addison had yet to do anything about the rest of the house. He was the executor, it was his job, he’d better get on it.

Executoring for Dummies did not exist. He checked.

So, then, maybe he would write it.

He listed his duties in a notebook.

Give away or dispose of (sell?) furnishings (china, silver, etc., to Chloe)

Give away or dispose of personal effects

Clean house (call Nicole at Swept Away)

Sell cars (call Don Allen Ford)

Put house on market/sell house

Pay debts (credit card, mortgage, etc.)

Set up college/trust funds

Figuring out exactly what had happened out on the water was not on this list. Naming Greg MacAvoy as Tess’s murderer was not on this list.

Addison had a hard time getting past Tess’s iPhone. He looked through the calls: all those calls from him, in addition to calls from Andrea, Delilah, Phoebe, Lisa Shumacher. And the text messages troubled him. The night before the sail, a Sunday night, a night when Addison knew Tess had been with the kids because Greg was singing at the Begonia, Phoebe had sent Tess a text message that said, I’ll be over in five minutes.

Addison did not remember Phoebe going over to Tess’s house or leaving home at all for any other reason. But Addison was having a hard time remembering that Sunday night in any detail. What had happened? Where had he been? Then he recalled the deal, the big deal, $9.2 million on Polpis Harbor, and he realized that he and Phoebe had eaten takeout Greek salads and then Addison had gone back into town to his office to write up the purchase-and-sale agreement. Furthermore, he remembered seeing both Greg’s car and Delilah’s car outside the Begonia, and he considered stopping in for a presigning, anticipatory celebratory drink, but he’d decided against it because he didn’t want to jinx himself. So Phoebe must have gone to Tess’s house while Addison was at the office.

He couldn’t keep himself from asking Phoebe about it. But he had to be casual. He did not want to raise any red flags. (Though really, he thought, it was impossible to raise any red flags with Phoebe. It was impossible to make her curious or suspicious. She simply did not care.)

He said, “Did you see Tess the night before she died?”

Phoebe was lying by the pool with a wet washcloth over her eyes. She kept half a dozen washcloths in a bucket of ice water by the side of her chaise.

She said, “I did.”

“Did you go to her house?”

“I did.”

He did not think she was being coy. She simply could not, in her drug-muddled state, bring herself to wonder why he was asking.

“What for?”

She sighed. “I needed to drop something off.”

“Oh, really?” Addison said. “What?”

“An anniversary present.” She removed the washcloth and squinted at him. “Do you think we should get a dog?”

“A dog?”

Washcloth discarded. There was a pile of warm, soggy wash-cloths by the side of the pool, which unsettled Addison in the way that used tissues or soiled sanitary napkins would. Phoebe wrung out a new icy cold washcloth and secured it over her eyes, just so.

“I wouldn’t be able to take care of it,” she said. “Maybe I’ll buy a dog for Domino. Do you think Ellen Paige would throw a fit?”

Addison was dying to revisit the anniversary present. Anniversary present? That didn’t sound right. Between the eight of them there was a rule about no gifts; they all strictly adhered to it.

“What was the present?” Addison asked.

Phoebe said, “She probably would. A dog is so much work. Maybe next year.”

Also in Tess’s text messages was the message she had sent him at 8:45 A.M. I’m afraid.

Addison only checked Tess’s outbox as a lark. Because what moldered in one’s outbox? Texts that were unfinished or unable to be sent. But Addison checked anyway, to be thorough—and there was a text that Tess had tried to send Addison three times. Eleven-oh-five, eleven forty-three, twelve-ten. During the sail. Before they capsized.

The text said, I’m afraid you won’t get it.

She was afraid he wouldn’t get what? She was afraid he wouldn’t get something, as in an object she had left behind for him? Or she was afraid he wouldn’t understand. Get what? Why she was going on this sail in the first place? (He in fact didn’t get it, though he pretended he did.) Or why she couldn’t tell Greg that she was in love with Addison? Or something else entirely? Wondering about this would drive him mad. He put the phone in his pocket with the two pieces of his felt heart.

The job of executor was overwhelming. Addison had to dismantle two lives, four lives, really, a family’s life, a home. He had the keys to the house; he could go over there anytime. But he made excuses. He wasn’t ready.

The Chief stopped into Addison’s office. This wasn’t exactly a big deal, because Wheeler Realty and the police station were only a block and a half away from each other.

The Chief said, “How’s it coming with the house?”

Addison fell back in his swivel chair. “It isn’t coming. I’ve been so busy.”

The Chief said, “That may be. But you have to think of the kids. They need closure.”

The Saturday after the Fourth of July, Phoebe announced she was going on a day sail with Swede and Jennifer on Hank’s boat. She had seen them at Caroline Masters’s party and they had invited her, as predicted. She accepted, she wanted to go, she knew Addison felt differently, she knew Addison didn’t want to sail again as long as he lived. So she was going alone.

He looked at her. She was in a swimsuit and a matching coverup, she had a bag packed, she was eating a bagel with cream cheese. A bagel with cream cheese? Was that actually a wheel of carbohydrate slathered with fat going into her body, or was it an illusion? Who was this woman? Was it Phoebe Jurgen, the twenty-six-year-old hotshot whom Addison had seen for the first time sunning herself in Bryant Park? It was —he could see her, his wife, the woman he had been waiting so long for. But honestly, he could barely bring himself to care. This would be one of those tragic/ironic love stories where they missed each other coming and going.

“Okay,” he said. “Have fun.”

He went over to the MacAvoy house with his list. Where to begin?

I’m afraid you won’t get it.

Are you going to tell him? Are you going to tell him you love me?

You have to think of the kids. They need closure.

He had brought a bottle of Jack Daniels.

He would write the book. How to Be the Executor of a Will, Even When One of the Deceased Was Your Lover.

It was ten-fifteen in the morning. He poured himself a drink and got to work.

He was a real estate agent. Houses and the things in them were his area of expertise. Greg and Tess’s house was small, but it was cute, in a garage-sale-find sort of way. He did not mean to sound condescending. He would gladly have lived in this house with Tess; he would have lived with Tess in a shack with papier-mache walls and a corrugated tin roof.

He finished his first drink by ten-thirty, then vowed to slow down.

The fireplace was the house’s best feature; it was made of stacked fieldstone. The furniture in the living room, Addison knew, was a combination of purchases from Pottery Barn (Addison loathed Pottery Barn and the resulting homogenization of American interiors) and pieces Tess had salvaged from the take-it-or-leave-it pile at the dump: a tall cabinet that held her candles and her table linens, a pine bar that she had painstakingly stripped and refinished. Tess had a touch of Charlie-Brown-Christmas-tree syndrome. If she saw something pathetic or abandoned, she brought it home. Stray animals, friends of Chloe’s and Finn’s from dysfunctional families, pieces of crap furniture from the dump—and Addison.

He would save nothing from the living room, he decided, except for the pine bar.

He felt much the same way about the rest of the house. There were no treasures, nothing that Addison could present to the experts on Antiques Roadshow, only to discover that it was worth tens of thousands of dollars. Tess had been a big fan of inexpensive embellishments—candles, throw pillows, paper lanterns, glass vases, seashell collections, houseplants (all of these were dead from lack of water, except the cactus), handmade curtains, her children’s artwork, and photographs. Tess and Greg had poured much of their disposable income into sitting for Cary Hazlegrove every year and then having the prints enlarged and lavishly framed. There were black-and-whites of the twins, together and separately, and of the whole family spanning the course of seven years. Tess and Greg hugging, the whole family in a pig pile, smiling, gorgeous, happy.

Addison finished his second drink. Eleven-ten.

There were photographs of the group, too. The entire surface of another take-it-or-leave-it table was dedicated to displaying framed pictures of the eight of them on vacation—in Las Vegas, in London, on Saranac Lake, in Sayulita, Mexico, in South Beach, in Stowe. Addison stacked these pictures and carried them to the slipcovered sofa. He meant to savor these photographs as if each one were a novel.

And indeed, each one was.

In his edition of Executoring for Dummies, Addison would warn about getting too caught up in your own role in the life of the deceased.

He took special interest in the photograph of them (well, all of them except Phoebe) in London. London had, hands down, been the worst of the six vacations. Andrea had picked it. She had never been to London, but it topped her list of places to see before she died. They went in March of 2002. Phoebe was still so raw from September 11 that taking her to a major metropolis with traffic and skyscrapers and mandatory sights that attracted crowds and long lines was a terrible idea. Andrea had booked them into an adequate hotel near Selfridges, and when Phoebe checked into their room and saw the chintz polyester spread and smelled room freshener over cigarettes, she cried. Of course, she had been crying for six months, but this crying had seemed to be caused by something Addison could fix. And so he picked up the phone and booked a room at the Connaught. When he told the rest of the group that he and Phoebe were moving to the Connaught, they were thunderstruck. The hotel Andrea had booked was expensive already, considering the price was in sterling. None of them could afford the Connaught. Tess tried to talk Addison out of moving, because this was a group vacation and the whole point was to be together. He remembered Tess pleading, Don’t go! We have to stay together! But Addison’s first priority was Phoebe. They made a deal: they would all move to the Connaught, and Addison, who had plenty of money, who had nothing but money, would pay the difference. The Connaught was the ultimate in luxury, it was the best of London all by itself, and yet once they were all settled in, Phoebe cried harder. The vacation to London was hallmarked by this realization: Addison could not make Phoebe happy. He could not do anything, say anything, spend anything. He tried, but he could not break through. Phoebe spent the week alternately soaking in the clawfoot tub, sleeping facedown in bed, and staring dumbly at the comedies on the BBC , whose humor was inscrutable to Americans. She was on her pills; she was at all times stoned.

Addison joined the rest of the group as they trudged dutifully to St. Paul’s, Westminster Abbey, the Tate, and Buckingham Palace for the godforsaken changing of the guard in sideways sleet. They went to the British Museum, where Greg spent the whole time ogling the handwritten lyrics of John Lennon and Paul McCartney. They went to Madame Tussaud’s and Churchill’s War Rooms, they rode a double-decker bus in thirty-mile-an-hour wind. They ate shepherd’s pie and Welsh rarebit lunches in pubs. They got half-price tickets to a mediocre production of The Bald Soprano . They went to Harrods, where Tess bought an electric tea kettle like the one in her hotel room and a tin of Indian curry powder that set her back nine pounds sterling. They went to a dance club in Covent Garden where the band played really good covers of U2 and the Police and AC/DC and they danced with punkish teenagers from the East End, and Greg glowered from a solitary spot at the bar because the lead singer wouldn’t let him sit in. When they stumbled out onto the street, they found that the tube had long since stopped running, so Addison called the Connaught and had it send a couple of cars. Right before he unlocked the door to his hotel room, feeling sweaty and tired and good for the first time since they had boarded the plane, he became convinced that he was going to open the door and find Phoebe dead. ODed like a rock star. He nearly turned around and retreated to the lobby. He nearly cried. It had been six whole months; he couldn’t do this anymore. Was she ever going to snap out of it? Get better?

He opened the door and found Phoebe asleep facedown on the bed, right where he’d left her that evening at seven. And whereas he was relieved, he also wasn’t.

Addison finished another drink. Nearly noon. And that, he thought, was London.

The other picture that grabbed him, of course, was the photograph taken in Stowe. Taken on the last day, out in front of Jack-the-client’s condo.

In this picture, he and Tess were newly and tenderly a couple. They had only shared the kisses in the parking lot at Nous Deux and then a lot of long, meaningful looks, a few hand squeezes, and innuendo.

How was your day, you two? Greg had asked upon his return from the slopes. He was so high from his own experience of skiing and the demonstration of his prowess that he wasn’t really listening for an answer. He didn’t care how their day had been.

It was heaven, Tess said.

And Addison’s heart floated.

They belonged to each other in that picture. Addison was standing behind Tess, his hand resting lightly on her shoulder. If a stranger looked at that photograph, he would think Addison and Tess were husband and wife.

It is important not to get too caught up in your role in the lives of the deceased.

But come on! That was all Addison cared about! The house and its furnishings were boring (he would list the house at $750,000; he would get rid of everything except the pine bar and the photographs). He wanted to find himself in this house, proof of his relationship with Tess, of her love for him. Where was the proof, the evidence only he would recognize? He was drunk enough now to admit that the Tess-and-Greg-ness of this house was gut-wrenching: the photographs of them smiling, Greg’s piano, a framed copy of their wedding invitation. Addison couldn’t take any more. He wanted to find Addison and Tess. Where was Addison? Where was he?

He went into their bedroom. Which was dangerous, he knew. It was a bad neighborhood where his feelings would likely get mugged. He armed himself with a stiff drink.

He ransacked the place. First her dresser. In her top drawer, he recognized her underwear, the bras, the belts, the bathing suits. But there was other lingerie in there that he’d never seen before. Lingerie she wore for Greg. There were pajamas and nighties that he’d never seen because he and Tess had never spent the night together.

In the other drawers were shirts, shorts and skirts, pants and jeans. No Addison. Her side of the closet? Dresses, sweaters, shoes. No Addison.

Her bedside table. A book called Exploring Nature on Nantucket, with pages folded down and passages highlighted. A copy of Olivia Forms a Band . A novel called The Good Wife. Addison scanned the back. The title to this one was too rich to ignore. But Addison was too drunk to make sense of the jacket copy. And, too, he was distracted by the fact that he was sitting on Tess and Greg’s bed. He had never sat on this bed. He had not ever realized that Tess and Greg slept in a regular double bed. They must have slept on top of each other, or at the very least in each other’s arms. A demoralizing thought. He abandoned the bedside table for the desks. There was Greg’s desk, with the laptop computer, which contained, Addison knew, a music library of over fifty thousand songs. And then there was Tess’s desk and Tess’s computer. He turned her computer on.

He was shaking. The desk drawers were right there at his fingertips; he could open them. He would have to open them and decide what to do with the contents—he was the executor! He opened the drawer at the bottom. Hanging folders held… ABCs, counting, colors, shapes: kindergarten lesson plans. He shut this drawer. The other side contained more hanging folders—the twins’ birth certificates, the paperwork for the house, their medical insurance, car insurance, her diploma from Boston College, her Massachusetts teaching certificate… but no certificate of Being in Love with Addison. No Appeal to the Commonwealth for a Divorce from Greg MacAvoy.

He moved up a drawer. It was stuffed with kids’ drawings, snapshots, birthday cards, Mother’s Day cards, end-of-the-year-you’re-a-great-teacher cards. In the opposite drawer, Addison found a stack of journals. Pay dirt! With Parkinson hands, Addison lifted the journal that was on top. Open it? He did not have to open it as executor. In fact, he was pretty sure that as the sage author of Executoring for Dummies he should advise readers not to open it. It was an invasion of privacy. He should give the journals to the next of kin, unread.

Addison opened the journal. Where was he?

The handwriting was odd. It was different. It was, he realized after wiping his glasses on his shirt (as if it were his smudged lenses and not half a bottle of Jack Daniels that was keeping him from understanding just what was going on here), a child’s handwriting. And then Addison saw the date: May 1981. Tess wrote about her first communion. The wafer, she wrote, tasted like cardboard, when all along she had thought it would taste like peppermint.

He riffled through the other journals. All from her life Before. Tess’s youth and adolescence had been well documented. She despised her mother, worshipped her father, her grandmother was sick, the priest came to the house to administer last rites, her grandmother died. She loved her mother again; she did not want her mother to die! She was in love with a boy named Tanner who played kick ball at recess. In 1987 she wrote: When I grow up I want to be a teacher. Kindergarten or first grade. I want two kids, a boy and a girl.

Check, check. Did she want a husband who would lie to her? Did she want a bald, bespectacled lover with his own business and a heart full of love and generosity, who would worship at her feet? She did not specify.

In 1990 she wrote: This summer I want to go visit Andrea on Nantucket.

Check.

Okay, he’d had enough. The top drawers of the desk revealed compact disks, a calculator, stationery, paper clips, string, a high-lighter, index cards, some of which had grocery lists scribbled on them. He, Addison, was nowhere.

But it was impossible, right, to have been involved in a love affair as intense and consuming as theirs was and not discover a trace of it somewhere?

The computer booted. The screensaver was a picture of Greg and the kids on a bench on Main Street, the three of them blowing pink Bazooka bubbles.

Pop. There went his heart.

I’m afraid you won’t get it.

Addison shut the computer off. He was forty-nine years old and had been classically educated—literature, painting, architecture, sculpture, music, history. The computer, however, was beyond him. At the office he had to ask Florabel for help with anything more involved than e-mail or a standard listing sheet. More to the point, he wanted Greg and the twins to stop ogling him. He was in crisis here! He had been madly, crazily, stupidly in love with a woman. That woman was now dead. He had been named executor of her will; he was in charge of all her earthly possessions. Among them he had expected to find proof, however well coded, that she had been madly, crazily, stupidly in love with him, too. Admit it! He had expected to find Tess’s heart in an envelope that was addressed to him.

Also on Tess’s desk was her engagement calendar. Okay! Maybe here…? Addison shoved aside the computer keyboard, nearly toppling his drink, and scooted the engagement calendar forward. It was open to the week of June 20, and there on the Monday square was a big heart and inside the heart it said: 12th anniversary! Also in this square it said Charlotte Inn and listed the phone number.

Which part of this was the poisoned tip of the arrow? The adorable hand-drawn heart? The exclamation point? Or the name of the charming inn where Tess was planning on making love to her husband?

Addison flipped back through the calendar to January 7, the day Addison had called Tess and told her to meet him at the cottage in Quaise. She had been anxious on the phone. She had said to him, Jesus, Add, I am so nervous.

And he had said, Just meet me. Nothing has to happen .

She showed up late. She had lost her way, she said. She missed the dirt road and had to double back, then she missed it again. When finally she found it, when she pulled the Kia into the driveway of the cottage, Addison understood what she meant by nervous. Whoa! He had been married twice, and he had bedded many other women in his lifetime, but when Tess stepped out of the car, Addison didn’t know what to do. He wanted to blink them back to the parking lot behind Nous Deux. He wanted to conjure the magic they had felt there. Could he do it?

He didn’t know what to say, so he reverted to real estate agent mode, which put both Tess and himself at ease.

Let me show you the house!

The cottage somehow did the trick. Addison had brought in small bouquets of hothouse flowers, put scented soap in the bathroom, put Vivaldi on the stereo. The cottage had pale pink walls and exposed beams and large windows looking out into the bare woods with a blue ribbon of the ocean beyond. The brass bed had forty pillows stacked up at either end. It was a love nest. Tess gasped, then cooed.

Is this yours?

Oh, you know, he said, and he laughed. It was a joke, especially after Stowe, how Addison could make a house appear anywhere in the world. It’s on loan.

There was silence between them. Awkward. God, what to say? What to do? The Four Seasons trilled along in the background. And then, just when Addison was afraid that he had made a monumental mistake (what had happened the week before in Stowe was a fluke, an illusion created by the circumstances), Tess ran toward him and jumped into his arms. She wrapped her legs around him.

Was it okay to call that the happiest moment of his life?

They had made love on top of the bed and it was… well, think about it! Addison had made love to his wife only a handful of times in the previous eight years, and even then the lovemaking fell somewhere between fair and marginal. To have a whole, happy, warm, responsive, physically delectable woman, a woman he liked, for the first magical and romantic time was… yeah.

Later, when they lay there, gazing out the window at the stark beauty of the daylight fading between the bare, slender trees, Tess admitted that she had not gotten lost at all. His directions had been perfect. She was late because she’d sat in her car at the end of the road, collecting her nerves, and checking in with Greg, who had the kids at the dentist.

It was a day he would never forget, January 7. On Tess’s calendar what it said was: Chloe + Finn, dentist, 3:30 P.M.

Dentist! Addison thought. There should be a hand-drawn heart that said Addison! The Day I Fell in Love!

Addison flipped forward. February. Valentine’s Day, another brutal holiday. Addison had bought Tess a book of love stories. He had driven to the elementary school and surreptitiously left the book on the driver’s seat of Tess’s Kia. Addison asked Tess if she would read the stories. She said she would, but to his knowledge, she hadn’t read a single one.

The square for February 14 said: LoLa 41. 7 P.M.

Which was where she and Greg had gone to dinner.

On March 3, Addison had told Tess he loved her for the first time. They were in the cottage, listening to Billie Holiday. It was pouring rain outside. Addison lit a fire and made two mugs of coffee with Baileys. It was as perfect a scene as he could imagine. When he lay dying, this would be the moment he reflected on.

He set his mug down. He ran a fingertip along Tess’s jawline.

He said, “I love you, Tess.”

That day should have a hand-drawn heart!

Tess had said, “I love you, too.” Her eyes were clear and dry.

But the square for March 3 was empty.

Addison’s birthday, April 23, said: Addison b-day (49) . Greg had been at a singing competition in Lenox with the High Priorities and Tess had, as a surprise, called in sick to school so she could spend the day with Addison at the cottage.

Was it necessary to mention that this was the best present he had ever been given?

She had bagels and cream cheese waiting, and a steaming carafe of coffee, and his newspapers: the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and USA Today for the sports. She had ordered, online, the entire catalogue of the Rolling Stones and said they were going to listen to each of the albums all the way through, in order. They made love. They played chess in bed, then took a tiny nap. They had lunch: somehow she had gotten hold of two bottles of the impossible-to-procure Mersault, which they drank with croque-monsieurs that she whipped up at the stove. And real dill pickles, his favorite! They watched Casino Royale and she cried in his arms. They ate two brownie sundaes, one of which had a candle, and Tess sang “Happy Birthday” to him, and at the end she added on the kindergarten chant, Are you one? Are you two? Are you three? All the way to forty-nine.

Then she gave him his present: it was a heart cut out of red felt.

She said, “This is my heart.”

Now, he touched the pieces of the heart in his pocket. He had never been without it. He wished he had given her something like this instead of a hardback tome of fusty love stories she would never read. He should have given her a token of his love that she could hold on to, touch so much it fell apart. Why had he not done that?

May 10 was the day he first broached the topic of leaving their respective spouses. I can’t do this anymore , he’d said. I need to be with you. I can make anything happen. Just give me the okay.

She had bit her bottom lip. She was conflicted!

I know what you mean. I know. But…

But: the twins, their friends, their lives. She couldn’t pull the pin.

But: she agreed. She loved him. She would think about it.

On Tess’s calendar, it said: Meeting w/principal, 4 P.M.

Addison flipped back to the twentieth of June and the insidious heart. A slip of paper fell to the floor. He picked it up. It was a poem, ripped, not cut, from a magazine. From The New Yorker. He recognized the type.

The poem was by Michael Ryan, the title was “Sixtieth Birthday Dinner.” What interested Addison, of course, were the lines that Tess had underlined. Here it was—finally!—a message.

My life with you has been beyond beyond

And there’s nothing beyond it I’m seeking

...

I wouldn’t mind being dead

If I could still be with you.

Addison read the lines, then read them again. His heart floated. It was all he’d been looking for, a snippet like this. A love note.

He folded the poem and slid it into his front pocket. He looked at the heart, enthusiastically marking their twelfth anniversary. He pulled the poem back out. Had she clipped this for Greg? As an anniversary present? To write in his card? Or was it meant to be for Addison? Oh, please, he thought. It was a love poem, a beautiful sentiment, it was them . Their life together, short as it was, had been “beyond beyond.” There was nothing beyond it Addison was seeking.

I wouldn’t mind being dead/If I could still be with you.

He couldn’t process that, for the obvious reasons.

For Greg? For Addison? There was nothing else for him here—nothing else! And so, fuck it, Addison was going to claim the poem. Tess had read it and thought of him, she had impulsively torn it out of the magazine to give to him or recite to him over the phone. He was fooling himself, maybe, but he was keeping the poem.

He rinsed his glass and tucked the bottle of Jack under his arm. As he was walking out of the house, he realized he hadn’t found the present Phoebe had given to Tess.

What was it?