The Castaways

ANDREA

T he only time she felt like a human being was when she was up in the farm office with Jeffrey. It felt secret, illicit, affair-like, even though they never got close enough to each other to touch. But there was warmth, a connection, energy. They were on a mission: to remember everything they could about Tess DiRosa MacAvoy.

They had made it all the way to modern times. Tess and Greg were married, they were teaching, taking modest vacations, fixing up their house. They were getting ready for the next step.

“It’s time,” Andrea said, “to talk about the pregnancies.”

Jeffrey paused. He looked squeamish. He didn’t want to go there. He was a typical man; he couldn’t do trimesters or blood, separated placenta or gushing miscarriage. It was feminine territory, like tampons and waxing. He wanted to skip it. He wanted, perhaps, to say, It was a tough road, but eventually Chloe and Finn were born.

Well, too bad! He had taken Andrea places during these conversations that she hadn’t wanted to go. There were hours, for example, when they had to talk about Greg. So, yes, they were going to do the pregnancies; they couldn’t talk about Tess without talking about her pregnancies.

Tess got pregnant for the first time in January of 2000; she and Greg conceived, most likely, in the high-gloss luxury of Room 1910 in Caesars Palace, Las Vegas. They had only just started trying to get pregnant, and voila—pink stick. Tess jumped for joy; she had been put on earth to be a mother, she felt. She embraced her pregnancy. She talked about her sore breasts, her incessant nausea, her cravings (grilled cheese sandwiches, tomato soup), her complete and total exhaustion (she fell asleep with her head on her desk while her class was at music). In week eight, she announced to everyone, including the school custodian, that she was pregnant. There was no reason not to shout it from the mountaintops—pregnant! due September 30!—because Tess’s life had been easy and blessed. She was secure and smug. She had been put on earth to be a mother.

The call came at four in the morning. Andrea picked it up thinking that it was a call for Ed, a police emergency, something bad happening to some poor nameless, faceless soul.

But it was Greg. It was dark and still and silent at four in the morning at the Kapenash house, but on Blueberry Lane, where Greg and Tess lived, all the lights were on and Greg was shouting.

“She’s bleeding, Andrea! She’s really fucking bleeding! There is blood everywhere .”

Andrea’s heart fell through a hole and disappeared. Tess was losing the baby. She crossed herself and said to Greg, “I’ll be right there.”

“I’ve called 911. An ambulance is coming!”

“Okay, I’ll meet you at the hospital.” She hung up. Ed rolled over and said, “What’s happening?”

“She’s miscarrying,” Andrea said.

“Shit,” he said.

Ed and Andrea had two healthy kids asleep upstairs, ages seven and five and a half. They had been parents long enough to know how nature worked: one out of every five pregnancies terminated spontaneously in the first trimester. This didn’t mean the woman wasn’t healthy or couldn’t go on to have six future children, all of them perfect and beautiful and headed to Ivy League colleges. It just meant that this one particular pregnancy wasn’t meant to be.

Andrea tried this reasoning as she sat by Tess’s bedside in the hospital. The ultrasound showed that the miscarriage had been complete and clean; there was no need for a D there was no reason, these things just happened. It wasn’t Tess’s fault. It wasn’t anybody’s fault.

Tess got pregnant again two months later. She told only Andrea and the Chief. She was going to keep it a secret until she had her ultrasound at seventeen weeks. She did not talk about her nausea or her exhaustion or her leaden breasts; she wore smock tops over her swelling midsection. She looked positively morose and at times frightened, as though there were a man with a gun in her house, holding her hostage.

She and Greg heard the baby’s heartbeat at each of their prenatal appointments, but Tess would not crack a smile. She would not relax. She said to Andrea, “I am not going to let myself love this baby until he or she is born.”

Andrea said, “Honey, everything is going to be fine.”

And in fact, at the seventeen-week ultrasound, everything did look fine. Wonderful, even. The baby was a week ahead in its development. It was a little boy.

Everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Tess was able to tell everybody: it’s a little boy, due the week before Christmas.

By then it was summer. School was out. Tess was feeling magnificent and happy, healthy and hungry. She power walked in the mornings, then ate scrambled eggs and a bran muffin with homemade peach jam. She would pack herself a lunch of tuna with pickles and a juicy plum and she would ride her bike to the beach, where she let her swollen belly absorb a moderate amount of sunshine before she carved a wide, shallow hole in the sand and turned over.

She was twenty-one weeks and four days along when she fell off her bike. Nothing happened—there was no oncoming car filled with hooting teenagers, no clap of lightning to startle her—she simply lost her balance, wobbled, and fell, just as she had years earlier when she broke her arm. She fell with a thud onto her side, crushing her swollen belly. She would later say that she knew instantly her baby was dead. There was blood everywhere and pain that made her knuckles turn white as she clenched her hands into fists and screamed without making a sound. Oncoming bikers called 911, the ambulance came, Tess was put on a jet and flown to Boston, and yes, the news was bad—the baby was dead—but it could have been worse. Tess could have died, too, from the hemorrhage.

When Tess gained consciousness, this time in a bigger, whiter, more sophisticated hospital, the Chief and Andrea were there—and Delilah and Jeffrey and Phoebe and Addison. They stood in a semicircle around the foot of the bed. And Father Dominic, the priest from St. Mary’s, was there. Greg was there, too, looking baffled and helpless. He didn’t know what to do. In the minutes before Tess came to, Greg had sung “Puff the Magic Dragon” softly, almost to himself. The song was a lullaby of sorts, meant to comfort, but it was a song of loss, too. By the last verse they were all singing along, even the Chief, even Father Dominic.

Tess opened her eyes. She had perhaps caught the tail end of their singing, and didn’t understand it as a tribute. She ordered everyone out of the room except for Father Dominic.

“What about me?” Greg said, sounding like a jilted boyfriend.

“Go!” she screamed.

There was no consoling Tess this time. She was carrying sorrow and guilt. She had lost her balance and fallen off her bike. She had killed her son. She should never have been riding a bike, it was a lapse in judgment; she had been thinking of herself, the pleasures of a summer day, and not the baby. Her baby was dead, it was her fault, she would not hear otherwise.

There was a small graveside funeral, at which Tess and Greg buried a coffin the size of a shoebox. It was all too sad and too nebulous for anyone to handle; it was the loss of a life none of them had known, and yet this somehow made it worse. Or rather, what was worse was watching a part of their beloved Tess die, the part that was peppy and chipper, the part that was loving and kind and nurturing. She was sad now, unable to think or talk about anything but her loss; she was as crumpled and useless as wet tissue.

She saw a therapist. She went to a pregnancy loss group, where, she told Andrea, her story was by far the most gruesome. She quit attending the pregnancy loss group first, then she quit her therapist.

“Dr. Amlin keeps trying to tell me it was an accident, ” Tess said. “If I hear the word accident one more time, I’m going to cut my ears off.”

Andrea squandered her life savings taking Tess to Canyon Ranch in the Berkshires. Tess halfheartedly submitted to massage and facials while Andrea swam hundreds of laps in the pool. They ate poached salmon and lightly dressed greens in the dining room. When Andrea tried to start a conversation, Tess would shake her head. “I don’t want to talk.” As she and Andrea lay between 600-thread-count sheets in their beds, she said, “I’m not cut out for the whole maternal thing.”

Andrea said, “Like hell you’re not.”

Andrea was spending damn near a thousand dollars a day and getting nowhere.

On the final morning, she dragged Tess out for a sunrise hike to the top of what they would later refer to as the “godforsaken mountain.” All the swimming and weights and yoga and fresh fruit had worked on Andrea: she felt clean, light, and empowered. She basically dragged Tess up the damp, mossy trail, booby-trapped with tree roots and hidden rocks. They did not speak; the hike was too strenuous to spare the breath. It was still dark; they were making their way using a flashlight provided by the hotel. By the time they were a steep hundred yards from the peak (Andrea could spy the yellow banner flying from the pole that marked the top), Tess was bawling. She couldn’t get to the top, and if she did, she was going to be so depleted of resources that she would only have the energy to throw herself off the mountain into the abyss.

Andrea kept going. Tess followed like a dog Andrea was dragging on a leash. They reached the peak and they watched the color of the sky warm and lighten. It was a moment from a commercial or a tear-jerker chick flick. It was the moment when everything was supposed to change. They would stand side by side with their arms flung around each other, their faces bathed in the buttery light of a new day, and it would be an epiphany. Tess would be cured. The realization would hit: it was time to move on.

Instead Tess found that her legs were unable to support her, and she collapsed on a rock. She was howling like a trapped animal. Andrea thought, I have seriously fucked up. I made her hike up here, but she has no prayer of making it down. I am going to have to carry her. And though Andrea would have said that she would be willing to carry Tess anywhere, she could not realistically get Tess down the mountain.

Andrea had to call the front desk at Canyon Ranch and have them send a rescue team. Andrea had had a speech written in her head, words she had planned to deliver at the summit. Something like this: The baby is dead. It was not your fault—you have to deal with it like the reasonable, strong woman you are. You have to put the pieces back together and move forward. The delivery was supposed to be no-nonsense and tough—but Andrea couldn’t say the words to Tess in her current whimpering state. So they sat next to each other on the rock, waiting for nearly ninety minutes until two strapping men showed up with a stretcher, on which they carried Tess down the mountain.

The only thing Tess and Andrea talked about while they waited for the rescue team was what they would order for breakfast once they made it back to the dining room. Andrea was addicted to the Canyon Ranch granola (almonds, dried cherries, amber nuggets of dried apricots) with house-made yogurt.

Tess said she wanted four poached eggs with salt and pepper.

Which in itself felt like a victory.

In November, Tess got pregnant again and miscarried the day after she found out.

She said to Andrea, “I can’t do this anymore. I’m going back to using my diaphragm.”

Andrea said, “Okay.”

Jeffrey jumped in here. He had been sitting quietly on his milk crate, but when Andrea reached this point, he sprang to life. Because wasn’t it the painful truth that in the harrowing aftermath of Tess’s second lost pregnancy, Delilah had gotten pregnant with Drew? The farmer and his wife were pregnant! It was happy news, except for the fact that they were intimate friends with a couple who had lost two, then three consecutive pregnancies. Delilah could not bring herself to tell Tess she was pregnant; and because she didn’t want Tess to find out from a third party, she didn’t tell anyone else, not even Phoebe. Jeffrey was angry about this. It was unfair that he and his wife could not celebrate their pregnancy because of Tess and Greg’s difficulties. Jeffrey said, “Greg and Tess are going to understand. They’re going to be happy for us.”

Delilah said, “If you believe that, then you do not understand anything about human nature. She is going to hate me. I am going to lose one of my best friends.”

Jeffrey and Delilah told Phoebe and Addison first, at a private dinner at 56 Union. Or rather, Phoebe guessed, because Delilah had ordered a club soda instead of her beloved espresso martini. Phoebe and Addison were happy for Jeffrey and Delilah. Phoebe had just watched her brother, Reed, and his wife go through the whole childbirth thing; she now had a nephew, and was enjoying being an auntie. And now Delilah! Phoebe couldn’t wait; she hoped Delilah had a girl; she wanted to buy tutus and glow-inthe-dark nail polish. Jeffrey and Delilah drove home from that dinner feeling good about the pregnancy. Of course Greg and Tess would offer their blessing! Delilah picked up the phone as soon as she got home; it was ten-thirty on a Saturday night, but Delilah didn’t care. The dread of telling Tess about the pregnancy was eating away at her; the anxiety had to be bad for the baby. Delilah was getting it over with now!

Greg picked up the phone.

Delilah said, “Greg, I’m pregnant.”

There was silence.

Delilah said, “Would you put Tess on the phone, please?”

Greg said, “No, no, no. I’ll tell her myself.”

Delilah said, “ I’ll tell her. Put her on.”

There was silence. A shuffling sound. Then Tess came on the phone, sounding very young and half asleep.

“Hello?”

“Tess? It’s Delilah.”

“Hi.”

“Hi.” Delilah swallowed. “Listen, I’m pregnant.”

Silence.

Then Tess said, “I bet it wasn’t easy for you to tell me that.”

And Delilah burst into in tears.

Drew was born by cesarean section after eighteen hours of labor. He weighed ten pounds. Delilah was exhausted and in extreme pain; they put her on a morphine drip. She was the only person in the maternity ward, so Jeffrey left her and baby Drew in the capable hands of the labor and delivery nurses and went to the Begonia to meet Tess and Greg, the Chief and Andrea, and Addison and Phoebe. They had all been at the Begonia since the news of Drew’s birth had reached them four hours earlier. They were in a festive mood, raising their glasses to toast Jeffrey as he walked in. Greg got up to play a set and started with “Danny’s Song,” dedicated to Andrew Jeffrey Drake, Nantucket’s newest native son. Jeffrey was attentive to Tess; he was concerned about her, but she looked great, she looked happy. She kissed Jeffrey full on the lips; he tasted the sweet tang of the champagne she was drinking.

That night, Tess got so drunk that she (famously) forgot to put in her diaphragm. Nine months later, the twins were born.

Andrea sighed. She was teary. She was always teary during her time in the farm attic with Jeffrey, because it was like reliving secret, stolen time with Tess, but this story made her teary for a different reason. This was the Greatest Story Ever Told—the story of a woman who deserved something good who hung in there and persevered and got something miraculous. Not one healthy baby, but two, a boy and a girl, a perfect matched set. Andrea could remember holding Finn in his bunting at the hospital, and Tess was glowing like the Virgin Mary (never mind that the conception had been less than immaculate, including as it had six glasses of Moet & Chandon). Tess asked Andrea at that moment if she would be Finn’s godmother and Andrea said, “Oh my God, I would be so honored.” As if she hadn’t been expecting it.

Tess said, “I’d like to thank you for not lecturing me when we were stuck on top of that godforsaken mountain at Canyon Ranch. I don’t think I could have handled it.”

Andrea said, “I had my speech all prepared.”

Tess said, “I did okay without the speech. I finally, finally did okay.”

Andrea said, “You did better than okay, honey. These children are beautiful.”

Tess said, “So I just have one other question.”

“Shoot.”

“Will you be Chloe’s godmother?”

“Oh my God,” Andrea said as she sank onto the side of the bed next to Tess, because this she had not been expecting, this was an embarrassment of riches, two darling babies to guide spiritually, the way she had been guided by her mother’s sister Katharine, the way Tess had been guided by her Aunt Agropina. They were, Andrea felt at that moment, all going to be okay. “I would be so honored.”