The Castaways

JEFFREY

P hoebe was the star of the evening, and it was good to see. She was glowing like her old self. She caught Jeffrey’s eye, pulled away from a group of people he didn’t know, and glided over to him. Her dress was silver, and her eyes picked up some of the sparkle.

“Where is your wife?” she said.

Jeffrey checked his watch. “Her plane gets in at nine-fifteen.”

“Her plane?” Phoebe said.

“She took the kids to the movies,” Jeffrey said.

“The movies? ” Phoebe said. “Why tonight?”

Jeffrey shrugged. It was hard to explain to someone who didn’t have kids. “Tonight was the night. Anyway, I’m going to get her at the airport. I’ll be back with her in half an hour.”

“You’d better be,” Phoebe said. “The band is playing until midnight.”

Jeffrey got to the airport at ten minutes past nine. It was a Friday night in August and the place was abuzz—planeloads of businessmen from New York, Boston, Washington, walked into the terminal and were greeted by pretty wives, shouting children, frenzied golden retrievers on leashes. Jeffrey had had two cocktails at the party, which had affected him oddly. He was unaccountably anxious. He wanted to see his wife come off the plane with the four kids. There had been moments today when he had questioned his own good judgment about letting Delilah go in the first place. Was she mentally stable enough to travel with four kids? She had seemed better the night before. She had cooked, they had made love, eaten the pie. It had been fine, it would be fine; Jeffrey had no reason to worry, but he wished he’d stuck to beer.

He sat and sat. The stream of businessmen slowed to a trickle, then stopped. Jeffrey looked at the clock; it was quarter to ten. He checked at both airlines. Any more planes coming?

No, sir, that was the last section.

Jeffrey called Delilah’s cell phone. The call went straight to voicemail.

He called their house. No answer. Then, he called the Kapenash house. Kacy answered the phone.

“Kacy?” Jeffrey said. “Is Delilah there? Are the kids there?”

“No,” she said. “They’re not home yet.”

“Has Delilah called you?”

“No,” Kacy said. “She said they’d be on the nine o’clock flight.”

“I’m at the airport,” Jeffrey said. “I’ve been here forty minutes. They weren’t on any of the planes.”

“And you called Delilah?”

“Got her voicemail,” Jeffrey said. He hadn’t talked to her since that morning. “Okay, let me try to find her.”

Jeffrey called Delilah’s phone again and again was shuttled to voicemail. “Goddamn it, Delilah, call me!” he said.

He couldn’t go back to the party without her—Phoebe would be angry, the lovely balance she’d achieved would, possibly, collapse in a lopsided heap of unnecessary worry and upset—and so he went home. He hated drama; that was the farmer in him. He liked things that were steady and reliable: the seasons, weather that fell into patterns that could be predicted, cycles of the earth. Plant a seed, watch it grow and bear fruit, harvest the fruit, allow the plant to wither, die, and nourish the soil for the next planted seed.

Of course, there would be a reasonable explanation: they had missed the showing of the movie they were supposed to see so they had to wait for the next showing; Delilah got stuck in traffic on the way home, or they got sidetracked by a Chuck E. Cheese or a roadside fair and missed the last flight. And Delilah, as usual, did not make sure her cell phone was charged and it ran out of power. Fine.

But he did not feel fine. What he felt was a gnawing sense of unrest. Since Tess and Greg had died, their home life had been a brewing storm. Jeffrey knew this, but he was busy at the farm. It was August. Jeffrey had always maintained that there was no difference between July and August other than that July was corn and August was tomatoes, but every day the farm market proved him wrong. The place was packed. The line at the deli was a dozen people long, Joanna, the baker, was making five dozen triple-berry pies a day, and the corn bin was filled with three hundred fresh-picked ears one minute and empty an hour later. Jeffrey couldn’t focus on anything but survival. Pick the corn, the herbs, the flowers, the beets and cucumbers and summer squash and zucchini and carrots, the lettuce and kale and turnips. Tend to the gourds and the pumpkins, the dahlias and chrysanthemums. Water, reap, sow. Pray that Delilah would hang in there until January, when Jeffrey took four weeks off and could give proper attention to her emotional crisis. But he wasn’t an idiot. He had sensed that things were about to break. He was watching out of the corner of his eye. Delilah was a pendulum. Manic and hyperalert one minute, weepy and despondent the next. Why on earth had he let her take the kids off the island?

At home the house was quiet. He opened the fridge and found it clean and stacked with food. Was Delilah planning a party? Had she meant to have people over here, after the event? There was a case of cold Heineken lined up like green glass soldiers in the bottom drawer, and Jeffrey grabbed one.

There was a note on the kitchen counter, which he hadn’t seen when he’d rushed in at six-thirty to get dressed. A note? It was a regular white index card. Written in black Sharpie, it said, This does not mean I don’t love you, I do, that’s forever. Yes and for always. He read the index card again. It was a lyric from “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.” Greg used to sing the song all the damn time and Delilah sang along in harmony. The first third of the suite was, in Delilah’s estimation, the most perfect song ever written.

Was this note meant for him? It was in Delilah’s handwriting. Was it old, or had she meant for him to find it tonight? He tried her cell phone again.

You have to go, no matter what. Promise me.

The back of his throat ached. He went upstairs to the boys’ rooms. In both rooms, the beds looked like they had been made up by chambermaids at the Ritz-Carlton. The dressers were tidy, drawers pushed all the way closed. He opened the drawers. Were there clothes missing? The drawers did look emptyish, as they tended to when Delilah let the laundry slide.

Jeffrey took a deep breath.

He did not like drama, nor did he like to jump to conclusions. But he didn’t like the way things were stacking up: a fridge full of food, the clean house, pretty beds, neat dressers, the note. He had thought things were getting better . He had congratulated himself; he had waited out Delilah’s instability and the storm had cleared. Delilah was correcting. But no.