The Castaways

DELILAH

T houghts of escape occupied her at all times, the way some people, she supposed, fantasized about sex with Robert Downey Jr., or winning the lottery and buying a power yacht, or being selected for American Idol . Freedom had always been Delilah’s drug of choice, and now, who could blame her? Tess and Greg were dead, everything was painful; even breathing hurt. Delilah dreamed about living alone in the South of France, riding a funny European bicycle down a path cut between fields of lavender toward a charming village where she would buy a baguette and runny Camembert and a bottle of wine that would aid her quest to block out everything that came before—her life on Nantucket, her friends, her husband, her children.

She used to love a crowd, she used to demand the company of others, but now she wanted only to be alone.

And even that wasn’t quite true. She couldn’t stand herself. She wanted to unzip her body and step out of it. She wanted to be attached to a machine that would erase her memory, obliterate her guilt, wipe her clean.

She had run away once before, in high school. There had been no reason for it other than boredom, a standard-issue teenage restlessness, and a desire to see what other possibilities the world contained. Delilah had had a pleasant childhood and a less-pleasant-but-still-okay adolescence, growing up in South Haven, on the shores of Lake Michigan. Delilah’s father, Nico Ashby, was a real estate developer, responsible for the burgeoning suburban sprawl in the acreage just off the lake. He brought South Haven Taco Bell, Blockbuster, I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt, Lucky Nail Salon, Subway, Stride Rite Shoes, and Mailboxes, Etc. He also had his hand in the bigger, uglier, more egregious development along Route 31 toward St. Joe’s—the Wal-Mart with its attendant Big Boy Diner, the Staples, the eighteen-theater Cineplex, the Applebee’s, the Borders. Nico Ashby and his wife and two daughters lived in a stunning Victorian house on the bluff that overlooked the town harbor and the South Haven Yacht Club (where Nico had been president for nine years). Nico was a local hero—a successful businessman, a philanthropist, a member of Rotary and the Lions Club, a model husband and father, a big, good-looking guy with a full head of dark hair, a bronze tan in three seasons, and a booming laugh. Nico Ashby—everyone knew him, everyone liked him.

Delilah’s mother, Connie Ashby, nee Albertson, was short, dark-haired, trim, pretty, and obsessed with the following things: her person (exercising, hair, skin, nails, and clothes, clothes, clothes), her daughters (bake sales, Girl Scouts, summer camp, decorating for school dances), and her husband. She met Nico at Michigan State; he was a starting linebacker, she was a cheerleader, petite enough to serve as the top of the human pyramid, the cherry on the ice-cream sundae. And yes, these people really got married. They were beautiful and blessed, they were successful, they had gorgeous, healthy daughters.

Delilah was loved and encouraged. She was brilliant in school, a fact that made her parents proud, but Delilah’s precocity also allowed her the time and leeway to goof off. Delilah, as a teenager, was not beautiful. Her hair was too wild and curly; she wore braces for years. She had huge breasts and the rear end to counterbalance it. She was voluptuous, her mother said, but Connie Ashby weighed ninety pounds soaking wet (as did Delilah’s sister, Caitlin), and it was clear that having a voluptuous daughter perplexed her.

Boys did not love Delilah, but they liked her. Her best friends were all boys, the best-looking boys in her class—the athletes, the dope smokers, the clowns. They liked her whip-smart sense of humor, her sense of freedom. Delilah Ashby was not afraid of anyone.

She ran away in early May, when the periphery of the lake was blooming with dogwoods and azaleas. The Ashby family had just gotten back from a week in Fort Lauderdale, where Delilah had looked upon the university students on spring break with envy. Freedom! She dreamed of a highway with no one on it, a deserted stretch of beach, an endless ribbon of blue sea, a grid of city blocks where no one knew her name and no one expected her to show up for lacrosse practice or memorize theorems or sit down to dinner at six and contribute to the conversation. Delilah itched, she could not sleep, the house was suffocating her. School and the kids in it—even Dean Markbury, whom she loved with the ferocity of a lion—were slowly killing her with their predictable sameness. She had to get out.

She needed money. She had saved seven hundred dollars from baby-sitting, and over the course of four days she stole. She stole from her father’s wallet, from her mother’s stash for tipping the manicurist, from petty cash in the kitchen drawer where the family grabbed five or ten dollars for the offering basket at church. She stockpiled a thousand dollars. She estimated it would last her three weeks.

She left in the middle of the night on her bike. In her backpack was the money, two bottles of water, an extra pair of jeans, a bra, five pairs of underwear, three tissue-thin T-shirts, her lacrosse workout clothes, sunglasses, flip-flops, and a box of Pop-Tarts. It was all she could ever imagine needing.

She had left a note on the kitchen table in the spot where members of her family normally left notes for one another. She had given the note careful thought. It said, See ya! Delilah wanted her parents to know that a) she had not been abducted, but rather was walking away from this nice life of her own volition, and b) she was not leaving in anger, but rather in the spirit of self-discovery. “See ya!” would also, hopefully, keep her mother from completely losing her mind, implying as it did that mother and daughter would set eyes on each other again. Delilah, although self-centered and self-absorbed, realized that what she was doing would destroy her parents as well as thirteen-year-old Caitlin, who worshipped her. (Delilah had peeked in on Caitlin before she left. Caitlin was breathing heavily through her orthodontic headgear. The sight of her and the knowledge of Caitlin’s deep impending sorrow almost kept Delilah from going.) But Delilah was infected with the desire to be FREE , and once she was biking along the Blue Star Highway, her spirit soared. She was headed to Saugatuck, where she would catch a bus to Grand Rapids, and in Grand Rapids she would catch the bus to New York, where she would catch the Chinatown bus to Boston, and in Boston she would take the Plymouth she was her own person. Forget the edicts of home and school, the din of the hallways and the obligation she felt when Dean Markbury handed her a joint. (She had to take a toke to be socially acceptable.) She was free of that now.

Sing it: Free!

The bus stopped just before crossing the George Washington Bridge. Delilah had had a seatmate since they stopped in Williamsport, Pennsylvania—a brown-skinned man of indeterminate ethnicity (Salvadoran? Thai? Lebanese?). The man was about fifty and stunningly handsome. He had bulging arms, he wore a tight black T-shirt and jeans, he wore a diamond stud in his left ear and a pair of Ray-Ban Wayfarers. He had nice feathery black hair, and he wore what looked to be an expensive watch. But what was riveting about this man was that he held a pack of cigarettes in his hands the entire time he was on the bus. He opened the pack, inspected the filter ends, counted them perhaps, shut the pack. Opened the pack, pulled a cigarette halfway out, dreamed about lighting up right there on the bus, the inhale, the burn, the satisfaction, the high. The addiction met. Delilah was fascinated with watching his struggle. The want, the can’t-have. The need, denied, minute after minute. It was almost sexual, watching this handsome, tough-seeming man, older perhaps than her father, want it want it want it. It was transferable. Delilah wanted a cigarette, too, and she wanted this man. The boys Delilah had known at school had wanted only one thing: to touch her breasts, to ogle them, bare. Would this man also want that? Did he notice her breasts? She breathed deeply, squared her shoulders, tried to edge her breasts into his field of vision. He wanted only the cigarettes.

The bus stopped; the mighty bridge loomed in the windshield. The man stood up, collected his backpack. Delilah was heart-broken. No! He could not leave! Was this even his stop, or was he getting off the bus solely so he could smoke? She wanted to follow him. Who was he, what was his name, where did he live, what country was he from, where was he going, what had he been doing in Williamsport, Pennsylvania (“Home of the Little League World Series,” the sign said). There were a thousand stories contained within this man, a thousand stories in Delilah herself and everyone else on this bus, not to mention the thousand stories of the 8 million residents of the city on the other side of the bridge. Delilah watched this man’s back—she would never see him again, of this she was sure—and then she eyed the cherry-red cover of the Cheever. It was a grain of sand. The stories that made up the world were infinite, like the stars.

New York to Boston, Boston to Hyannis. Out the window, Delilah saw the ocean. On the ferry to Nantucket, she scanned the local paper and found several ads for rooms to rent. She craved a small space of her own, a hole in the wall, a hiding place like Anne Frank’s where the Nazis wouldn’t find her. She was very far away from home, and yet she felt exposed and obvious, as though she had a camera trained on her. She disembarked from the ferry. There were people waiting on the dock, but none of the people was waiting for her. She was a sixteen-year-old girl who had traveled twelve hundred miles to get here, to Nantucket Island, her newly discovered spiritual home.

The best thing about Nantucket was that it fulfilled its promises. It looked exactly as it did in the magazine. If anything, the air was more rarefied than Delilah expected—it was fresh, and filled with salt spray, evergreen scent, and fog. Delilah found a pay phone on the wharf and started dialing numbers from the ads in the newspaper. The first place she called had already filled the room, the second place ditto. The third place ditto, and this worried Delilah, because everyone knew the third time was a charm. At the fourth number, no one answered. Delilah filled with a hot, prickly panic. This was an island—she had to find a place to stay. It wasn’t like she could just move a town over. The fifth place had to work (there were only five ads), but the man who answered the telephone asked Delilah how old she was (she said nineteen) and then what she looked like. Delilah had heard all the requisite warnings about people who didn’t have her best interest at heart. She hung up. It was four-thirty in the afternoon. She was dangerously close to screaming out, What have I done?

Deep breath. She called the fourth place back, let the phone ring fifteen times, and after the sixteenth time someone answered. A little old lady. Yes, the room was still available. The room was free of charge. The woman—Tennie Gulliver, her name was—just wanted someone else in the house, someone to take out the trash, which she could no longer do, someone to be around in case the unthinkable happened. Delilah would be responsible for paying a quarter of the electric bill in addition to her phone charges. Okay?

“Okay,” Delilah said.

Tennie Gulliver gave Delilah directions; she could walk from the wharf. Delilah slung her bag over her shoulder and walked through Nantucket town. The houses were dignified and old-fashioned; they had window boxes planted with geraniums and majestic front doors. There were lights coming on and cooking smells. Delilah crossed the cobblestones, she walked up brick sidewalks past galleries and restaurants and antique shops, an ice-cream parlor, a jewelry store.

Tennie Gulliver’s house was on Pine Street, just off Main. It was an ancient among the elderly; the plaque on the front of the house said it had been built in 1704. The house stooped and sagged. The shingles were mildewed and the white paint of the trim was flaking away.

Delilah dropped the big brass knocker and waited a long time, long enough that she began to wonder if the unthinkable had happened to Tennie Gulliver between the time she had hung up the phone and now. But finally there was the sound of the lock being undone and the door swung open and there was Tennie Gulliver, all eighty-five pounds of her, with her white, cottony hair and her shrunken apple face and her cane. Tennie Gulliver looked exactly as Delilah had expected (a bit of a disappointment, since Delilah loved to be taken by surprise)—like the old woman who lived in a shoe.

It was as though Delilah had not only traveled twelve hundred miles across the country but also a hundred and twenty years back in time. Tennie Gulliver lit her main room with candles and the kitchen with a dim overhead bulb. (“I need proper light when I’m cooking!” Tennie said.) There was radio, but no TV. A rotary phone, but no answering machine. A gas stove, but no microwave. Delilah’s room would be upstairs; there were in fact five bedrooms upstairs, and Delilah could have any one of them, Tennie said. Tennie’s bedroom was on the first floor; it was the den, converted, because Tennie could no longer negotiate the stairs.

“Okay!” Delilah said. She liked the idea of having her choice of five bedrooms, of inhabiting all five on successive nights, like a girl who lived in a castle.

Actually, there was something about being here on Nantucket on her own, in this old, old house with this old, old woman, that made Delilah feel not like an adult but like a child.

As if reading her mind, Tennie said, “How old are you?”

Delilah lied. “Nineteen.”

Tennie said, “Do you need a job?”

Delilah paused, thinking about her eight hundred and eighty-five remaining dollars. Despite her free rent, she would have to work. She had not thought about any particular job beyond her job of living deliberately. But she would have to make money deliberately.

She said, “I baby-sit.”

Tennie stared. Could she hear? Her ears were like small white shells, but they were unencumbered by the beige hearing aids that Delilah’s grandparents wore.

Delilah said, “Do you have grandchildren?”

Tennie said, “Vern’s last name is Snow. He’s the son I had with my first husband. The son I had with my second husband, Mr. Gulliver, Gully, lives in Sconset. He chops firewood for a living and should be avoided.”

Delilah nodded. Everybody had a thousand stories.

“I’m going to heat up a lobster pie. You’ll eat?”

“Yes,” Delilah said. “Thank you.” She lugged her backpack up the steep, narrow staircase. The five bedrooms upstairs were prim, spare, spinsterish, as appealing as five bedrooms in a convent or a nursing home. They were much alike, but Delilah claimed the only one with a double bed. The bed was about five feet off the ground; it was a bed for a giant. Delilah would need to stand on a chair just to climb up on top of its white chenille spread and lay her head on the stiff pillows. There was a nightstand with a dainty lamp made of milk glass wearing a fringed shade that looked like an old lady’s church hat. There was a bureau that had twenty-seven drawers, and next to the bureau was a dressing table that supported a triptych mirror, open like a book. Delilah sat at the dressing table and looked at herself in the triptych mirror. She looked at herself deliberately.

She was safe here.

Delilah woke up the next morning in a fresh mood. It was the first day of her new life.

She could do whatever she wanted. So this, she thought, was freedom. What did she want to do? What did she want to do, really? Go for a walk? Spend money on a restaurant breakfast? Lie in bed for an hour and read Cheever? She descended the stairs to find Tennie making buttermilk biscuits and bacon and brewing some wicked-smelling coffee.

Tennie said, “You’ll eat?”

Delilah breathed in, breathed out. It was amazing the obligation she felt, even to this woman whom she’d known only half a day. Did she want to eat breakfast with Tennie? She meant to stick to her guns, hold sacred her duty to herself. The bacon was crisp, the biscuits looked fluffy, and Tennie set out a pot of softened butter. There was cream for the coffee—real cream! Delilah’s mother bought only fat-free lightener, and hence Delilah had never learned to like coffee. And Delilah’s mother never cooked bacon. Full of nitrites, she said.

“Yes,” Delilah said.

From now on Delilah’s life would include bacon, and coffee with real cream and two teaspoons of sugar. And Delilah would get the biscuit recipe.

“You’ll go see Vern about the job?” Tennie said.

Delilah was confused. What job?

“Where?” she said.

“Lobster restaurant,” Tennie said. “In town. You can’t miss it.”

Delilah did not want to work in a restaurant. Dean Markbury waited tables at Denny’s, plunking down Grand Slam breakfasts and club sandwiches for two dollars an hour. He had to wear polyester pants. But what if Delilah had no choice?

She pulled apart her biscuit; the flaky layers were like the pages of a book. She wanted to learn to cook. She wanted to meet the black sheep woodcutting son, who in Delilah’s mind looked exactly like the man on the bus, and get married.

Or not. She would see.

Nantucket town on a mellow spring morning: no tourists to speak of, shopkeepers sweeping geranium petals off the brick sidewalk. They smiled at Delilah, and stared at her a few extra seconds, trying to place her. Is that so-and-so’s daughter? No, no, it’s someone else, I don’t know who that is. It was liberating to be a stranger.

She found Vern’s on her own. It was impossible to miss, at the base of Main Street. The sign in front said “Vern’s” and another sign said “Lobster.” Delilah wandered in. Well, it wasn’t Denny’s. There was a dark wood bar lined with tall stools, the seats of which were made from upside-down lobster pots. There were scarred wooden tables and hanging fishing nets and brass portholes fixed into the wall and green and red port and starboard lights. The door had been left wide open; a sweating glass of water and a bowl of lemons were on the bar. Delilah thought maybe the place was open for lunch, but it was empty.

“Hello?” she called out.

A muted TV was on over the bar—it was the midday news—and Delilah filled with dread. She did not want to think about the outside world, about Michigan or her weeping family. She watched the screen for a second—bad house fire in a place called Dedham. There were hundreds of millions of people in this country; Delilah Ashby gone missing would not register beyond the limits of the South Haven School District. Right?

A man came out of the kitchen wearing brown rubber pants held up by suspenders.

“Hi,” he said. “You’re the girl living with Ma?”

This was Vern. He had thinning blond hair and a permanent sunburn and a thick New England accent. He said he would hire her even though she had no experience, because she could stay the whole season, right? She wasn’t going to leave him in the lurch in the middle of August like Little Miss Smarty-Pants from Radcliffe, right? Right, Delilah said. He told her she could expect to make a hundred dollars in tips a night. The lobster dinner was $29.95 and included baked potato, corn on the cob, homemade coleslaw, and a dinner roll. Most people liked to start with a bowl of chowder or a plate of steamers, and most people liked a glass of chardonnay or an ice-cold beer, sometimes two or three of these, and then most people could not turn down the homemade pies, all in season—this week was lemon meringue—and hence the average bill was up there.

“Come Friday at three and I’ll train you,” Vern said. “Bring your working papers.”

Working papers? Delilah fretted. She stood up to leave. What would she do about working papers?

“Before you go,” Vern said. He nodded her back to the kitchen, and a warning bell went off in Delilah’s head. Was this where he tried to have his way with her? And if he did try to have his way with her, might he forgive the fact that she didn’t have working papers?

She followed Vern into the kitchen. It was immaculate—shiny countertops, sparkling stainless steel. In the sink was a wire bucket of clams. Vern took a shell out and pried it open with a short, dull knife.

“Cherrystones,” he said. “Went out this morning myself and got ‘em.”

Delilah peered at the snotlike globule attached to its home shell.

“Mmmm-hmm,” she said.

“Go ahead,” Vern said.

Go ahead what? she thought. Touch it? Take it home? She smiled, sort of.

“Eat it,” he said.

Eat it? She tried not to make a face. She breathed. If she ate this phlegmy-looking raw mollusk, would he forgive her the lack of working papers? She reached out two pincer fingers; he pried the clam loose with his knife. He was keen for her to taste it, not in a little-boy go-ahead-I-dare-you way, but in an avuncular, professorial way. She held the shell. Was she really going to eat it? She was from the Midwest, where there weren’t even any sushi restaurants. Delilah was pretty sure, however, that Thoreau would have eaten the clam; he would have sucked it down for his own edification. Delilah would do the same.

At first it was foreign in her mouth. Slippery, chewy. Then it burst with sweetness. Sugar from saltwater. She swallowed.

Vern said, “Food doesn’t get any fresher than that.”

Delilah headed back to Tennie’s at four o’clock. She chewed on the concrete problem of working papers; it was a relief, actually, to have a concrete problem rather than the abstract ones of whether she would be discovered and whether she was living deliberately or simply falling into another routine.

She opened the door to Tennie’s house—she had been given her own key, which she kept clipped to her belt loop—and she heard a man inside. Her heart tripped up a second as she thought of the black sheep son, the woodcutter. She saw a man’s head, black hair, visible even over the high-backed chair. A big man.

Tennie said, “Well, hello!” in a tone of voice Delilah had not heard her use before. A saved-for-company voice, or maybe an I’m-in-danger voice. Was Tennie being held captive?

“Hi,” Delilah said. She stepped into the living room. The man turned.

It was her father.

One evening after a particularly difficult day, Delilah left the boys with Jeffrey and walked into town. She sat on the curb opposite Tennie Gulliver’s house on Pine Street.

Had that story really been true?

Yes, every word, or approximately so, since that was what memory, or memoir, was: an approximation of the truth. Certain things were crystal-clear—eating the raw clam, seeing her father’s face—but other things were hazy. Like what she and her father had said to each other on the way home. Or how Nico had actually found her. (When she’d asked him, he said, I followed your breadcrumbs .) Or what had made her give up her Thoreau dreams and do what was expected of her: finish high school, attend the University of Michigan, graduate in four years, pack up her room, kiss her parents, and then at the age of twenty-two return to Nantucket, where she was able to secure a job at Vern’s as if no time had passed at all. And then she fell in love with the farmer who delivered Vern’s corn on the cob and salad greens. She fell in love with Jeffrey Drake, even though he was not the black sheep woodcutter son, Gully, but rather a man just like her father.

Predictable.

Tennie Gulliver had been dead for years, and Vern had sold both Tennie’s house and his restaurant, taken the money, and bought a place in Florida. Delilah pictured him now as an older man, eating Grand Slam breakfasts at Denny’s. Was he happy?

She fantasized about running away again. Her anger at Andrea Kapenash was a tumor in her lung that was keeping her from breathing properly. Her secret knowledge of Greg’s continuing affair with April Peck was an ulcer in her gut, and the guilt of her silence on that final morning was meningitis, inflaming her brain. Her bones ached with regular old sad sadness. She felt strapped to this island like a crazy person to a bed. If she stayed, she was sure she would die.

Delilah stood up from the curb. A family by the name of Hebner had bought Tennie Gulliver’s house, and it looked a lot better now. The Hebners had jacked up the house and squared the foundation; they had replaced windows and painted the trim and replaced the old door knocker with a brass clamshell. Still, it was Tennie’s house, the very same house where Delilah had spent exactly one night the May she was sixteen. She had been so brave and so stupid. Delilah was older now by more than double; her own life’s circumstances had been squared and given a new coat of paint. But really, nothing had changed.