The Castaways

PHOEBE

Phoebe envied Delilah for many reasons, and today another reason was added to that list: Delilah was able to express her grief fully and plainly, like a child. She was in her bed, curled in the fetal position, crying like a baby, sobbing, hiccupping, catching her breath, wiping her nose and face, and then collapsing all over again. She was hysterical, nothing would stop her, and that had to feel good.

Phoebe lay on the other side of Delilah’s bed. She stretched out and covered Delilah’s body with her own. She made a shushing sound as she might for a baby. These gestures didn’t seem to be making any difference to Delilah, but Phoebe stayed there. She felt, as ever, that she was watching the rest of the world from behind frosted glass; there was a barrier between her and everyone else. That barrier had come down for the first time in eight years today, when she had gone to find Addison. She had lost it. The news of Greg and Tess dead-delivered by Sophie from her Pilates class, whose husband served in the Coast Guard-had shattered the frosted window, and Phoebe had found herself face-to-face with horror.

Phoebe had been through it all before.

Reed!

Her twin brother had been… how to explain? The dearest person in her life. He had always been there. Since Phoebe was conceived, since the womb, since her first day on earth, the two of them had been a pair, pink and blue, a matched set, meant to be together. The twin relationship sometimes backfired; Phoebe had heard all kinds of weird, twisted stories. When Phoebe was in her twenties, she finally heard her parents speak of the concerns they had had when Phoebe and Reed were young. You were too close-you spoke only to each other. We wanted to take you to see a therapist. Phoebe and Reed had developed their own language, which their mother feared was meant to keep the rest of the world at a distance. But when Phoebe thought back to her childhood, there was only peace, comfort, and constant, safe companionship. She and Reed liked each other, they were considerate of each other-even as teenagers. They realized that hurting each other would be akin to hurting themselves. Reed was handsome and popular and smart; he played soccer, basketball, lacrosse. Phoebe was beautiful and popular and smart; she was editor of the year-book and she was a cheerleader.

Reed helped Phoebe with her trig; she helped him with his paper for American lit. He was math and science, she was English and history. Reed could draw; Phoebe could sing. They both sucked at French. Phoebe called him Reedy, Reeder, Free-bird, Sweet Reedy Bird. He in turn called her Twist, short for Twister, short for “twin sister.”

Did people tease them? It was possible, behind their backs. They were too good, too cute and perfect, too close. One night after basketball practice, Reed came home with a swollen eye. Something had happened, a fight with Todd Carrell, a boy Phoebe had broken up with before Christmas. In the locker room, Todd had said something crass about Reed and Phoebe, and Reed had gone wild. Todd Carrell had been sent to the hospital with a broken arm. Rather than being upset, Phoebe was dismissive.

The rest of the world doesn’t understand, she said.

Later that year Phoebe and Reed were in danger of being voted homecoming king and queen. They both won, but after the Todd Carrell incident, Phoebe understood that the student body wouldn’t be able to handle it. Since Phoebe was on the homecoming committee, she fixed the vote so that Shelby Duncan, who was Reed’s girlfriend and had come in second place, was named the winner.

Phoebe and Reed went to college at the University of Wisconsin. They led separate lives in a natural way. Reed played varsity soccer, majored in business admin, and pledged TKE. Phoebe majored in communications and pledged Alpha Kappa Delta. They spoke on the phone daily and met for lunch at the Dairy every Wednesday, just the two of them. After college, they both moved to New York City. Phoebe lived in Chelsea and slugged it out as a catalogue model for nearly a year before she got a job with Elderhostel. Reed lived on the Upper East Side. He worked for Goldman Sachs first, then went to Columbia Business School, then got a job with Cantor Fitzgerald. They still talked on the phone every day (and with the convenience of cell phones, it was usually two and three times a day), and they had lunch every Wednesday at Pastis. Their grandfather died; they drove back to Wisconsin for the funeral together. Reed went through a bad breakup with a woman ten years older than he who happened to be number three on the masthead at Vogue; Phoebe met him at McSorley’s, and they got wickedly drunk and hung out on the swings at the Bleecker Street playground until four in the morning.

Phoebe could go on and on explaining and still not quite capture what she was trying to get across. She did not fight with Reed. When they disagreed, they did so nicely. They knew each other too well to fight; they understood each other completely. The bottom line was: Phoebe had never in her life felt lonely. Because she always had Reed. Her best friend. Her double. He was she, she was he, they were pink and blue, two halves of a whole.

Reed met a girl and got married. Moved to Connecticut. Phoebe loved her sister-in-law, Ellen Paige, and helped her organize Junior League luncheons in New Canaan. Phoebe then met Addison and moved to Nantucket. The Wednesday lunches became a thing of the past, but Phoebe and Reed still talked on the phone two or three times a day. They spent a week together in Wisconsin at Christmas. Reed and Ellen Paige came to Nantucket for a week in June; Phoebe and Addison went to Connecticut for a week in October.

Ellen Paige got pregnant and had a baby boy. His name was Domino, but Phoebe called him Sweet Reedy Junior. She spoiled him rotten, sending him a monogrammed bathrobe, a full Brio train set, a four-foot stuffed giraffe from FAO Schwarz. I’m an auntie! The auntie. Reed’s baby was her baby.

In my will, Phoebe said, everything goes to him.

What could Phoebe say about September 11 that hadn’t already been said in sixty languages? It was a beautiful day. Addison got up early to go shark fishing with Bobby D. Phoebe was headed to the gym, but she gagged and spit in the kitchen sink over the smell of her usual espresso. She was grossed out, but she was happy, too.

She was pregnant! She, Phoebe Wheeler, was going to have a baby!

Phoebe hadn’t even realized she wanted a baby. In fact, when asked, she was adamant that she didn’t want a baby. She didn’t want to ruin her body, she didn’t want to cramp the lifestyle that she and Addison had cultivated, she didn’t want to deal with poop or vomit or her own filled-to-bursting milkmaid breasts, which would undoubtedly leak all over her Elie Tahari camisole tops. But since Domino had come into the world, Phoebe had softened toward the idea. She would have a baby girl, and her daughter and Domino would be Reed and Phoebe, the next generation. On September 11, she was eleven weeks and four days along. She and Addison had gone for an amniocentesis and found out that the baby was perfectly healthy, and yes, it was a girl.

There was no reason Phoebe couldn’t exercise, the doctor said. In fact, she should exercise. Just don’t overdo it, and be sure to eat! (Phoebe blanched; she was not a big eater. She feared calories as if they were poisonous spiders, and now, with the nausea, even her usual diet of espresso, celery sticks, and fat-free yogurt dip wouldn’t stay down.)

At the gym, Phoebe got on the treadmill. Only three days until her first trimester was over and she could tell people she was pregnant. She had told her parents, of course, and Reed and Ellen Paige, and Delilah and Jeffrey and Tess and Greg and Andrea and the Chief. But, for example, Jeremy, the adorable boy who checked IDs at the front desk of the gym, didn’t know. He must have looked at the slight swell of Phoebe’s belly and thought she was eating too much banana pudding, complete with Nilla Wafers and whipped cream. (This was Phoebe’s favorite dessert, but she didn’t let herself get within a hundred yards of it.) Phoebe wanted to stick by the first-trimester rule, because she felt that the only thing worse than miscarrying would be people pitying her for miscarrying. Phoebe had always been lucky and blessed; her life had been happy. Pity was foreign and horrible to her; she feared it more than calories or poisonous spiders.

As Phoebe ran, she watched the Today show. It was eight-thirty. There was a half-hour limit on the machines at the gym, but if there wasn’t a line (which there wouldn’t be, now that all of the summer people had gone home), she could push it to sixty minutes. At five minutes to nine, Phoebe was hitting a wall. She was feeling worn down, shaky, short of breath. The doctor had told her not to overdo it. She should stop. She had a Pilates class at four, anyway. But she put on her headphones and kept going.

She was listening to Taylor Dayne sing “Tell It to My Heart,” and her feet were moving now. She had her second wind; she was feeling better than she had all summer. And this was what all the pregnancy books said: the day will come when the nausea and fatigue will end and the pregnant woman will feel good. Phoebe was thinking about this, wondering if it was okay to believe that her turning point had arrived today, Tuesday, September something, when she noticed something happening on TV. The Today show was cut short; they had Tom Brokaw on, looking very serious. Then there was footage-a plane flying into the side of a tall building. People crowded in among the treadmills, trying to see the TV. Jeremy from the desk was among them.

Phoebe was hesitant to slow down or stop; her pace was perfect. She was having that experience when her body and the machine were working optimally together.

She kept going. Again they showed the plane flying into the building. More people crowded in. They didn’t want to use the treadmill, they just wanted to watch the news. Phoebe removed her right earbud and said to Jeremy, “What’s going on?”

“A plane hit the World Trade Center,” he said.

Phoebe gagged. Okay, wait. Wait! She punched the correct sequence of buttons on the treadmill to make it slow down, then stop. Her insides were a brewing storm; she was going to lose her bowels right there on the treadmill in front of everyone. Another indignity of the pregnant body. She could not get her breath. She had that shaky, hot, diarrhea feeling. She was afraid to move for fear of erupting. There was a word on her tongue, one word, but she had to deal with her personal emergency first. Get out of the gym! She had to get her bag, her phone, she had to get to her car. Before leaving the gym, she checked the TV screen again. The World Trade Center? In New York City? Of course that’s what the building was. She had been watching the screen just like everybody else, she had seen the plane fly into the building-through the building-just like everybody else, but she had been so inward-looking, so consumed with the cardiovascular and reproductive systems of her own body, that she had not thought to wonder where the building was. If pressed, she would have said Jerusalem or Lebanon, or some other part of the world where planes flew into buildings, either because political strife was a part of the everyday or because they just weren’t as careful as Americans. But New York City? The World Trade Center?

She was holding the word in her mouth like a piece of hard candy. She spit it out.

Reed!

She ran down the stairs to her car, dialing. Number one on her speed dial, before Addison even, was Reed at work. Cantor Fitzgerald, hundred and first floor, the World Trade Center, Tower One.

She got his voicemail.

“Jesus, Reed, call me!” she screamed.

Two women Phoebe knew vaguely were getting out of their cars in the parking lot. One of them, Jamie, said, “Hey, Phoebe! Are you okay?”

Phoebe waved, got into her car. Call Addison! The receptionist at Addison’s office, Florabel, answered the phone. Phoebe detested Florabel and suspected the feeling was mutual.

Phoebe said, “Addison, please?”

Florabel didn’t recognize Phoebe’s voice, because Phoebe’s voice was held hostage by panic. Florabel said, “Mr. Wheeler is out of the office today. Would you like his voicemail?”

Shit! Addison was fishing! Phoebe hung up. She tried Addison’s cell phone and got his voicemail. He was so far offshore, he would never have reception.

She called Reed back. It was five after nine.

“Hey, Twist,” he said. His voice was calm, but in the background Phoebe could hear shouting, which seemed more frenzied than the usual Cantor shouting. “You would not believe what is happening here. Have you seen the news?”

“Sort of,” she said. “Are you okay?”

“Well, I just threw up in my trash can,” he said. “Because I tell you what, people are dead over in that other building. You should see the smoke. It stinks, even in here.”

“What are they… are they saying anything?”

“We’re supposed to sit tight. Some of the guys-Ernie, Jake, you know-they want to go to the ground to watch, but there’s debris falling. It’s safer, I think, to stay put.”

“You think?”

“That’s what…”

“What?” Phoebe said. She couldn’t hear.

“I’ll call you back when the dust settles, okay? I love you. I’m going to be fine, I promise.”

“Okay,” Phoebe said.

“I have to call Ellen Paige. She’s at play group with Domino, but when she hears about this, she’s going to freak.”

“Okay. I love you,” Phoebe said.

“Hey,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

“Me?” Phoebe said. “I feel fine.”

There was a noise. Honestly, it sounded like a lion roaring, or a wave crashing over her head. The line went dead. Phoebe nearly sideswiped the mailman, who was filling boxes on Old South Road.

She watched footage of the plane hitting the second tower on Addison’s sixty-inch plasma TV, in the closed-up, air-conditioned, professionally decorated comfort of her own home. Outside, the day shimmered. Nantucket was as tranquil and lovely as it had ever been. Phoebe turned her stare outside, in a daze. According to Tom Brokaw, America was under attack. Phoebe waited for the planes to come screaming over the ocean. Nothing. A monarch butterfly settled momentarily on the picnic table, then flew away.

On the TV a plane hit the second tower, which was Tower One. Again and again. Phoebe was riveted. Show it again! She was counting floors and dialing Reed from her landline.

“Pick up!” she screamed into the phone. No one was around, no one could hear her. Their neighbors on both sides had left after Labor Day.

Her call went to Reed’s voicemail. “Call me!” she screamed.

It looked like the plane had hit the second tower, Tower One, about two thirds of the way up. Definitely lower than the hundred and first floor. Were there a hundred and five floors or a hundred and ten? She couldn’t remember.

Her phone rang. Delilah. Phoebe let it go. She could not talk to Delilah.

She counted floors down from the top. They flashed back to Tom Brokaw.

“Show the building!” she screamed. No one on TV could hear her.

Another channel, CNN, showed the towers smoking, blazing. This channel showed people hanging out their windows. Hanging out their windows so far up? What if they fell? They were waiting for the helicopters to come. Where were the helicopters? Was the National Guard going to send in helicopters for the people who were trapped above the flames? Phoebe had seen it countless times in the movies. This was the United States. The government, the military, the people in fucking charge would use their expensive, cutting-edge technology to rescue the people hanging from their windows.

“Send the helicopters!” she screamed. Where were the fucking helicopters?

At some point it hit her. This was real. Reed was in that building, he was clinging to that office window-the very same window that for years had afforded him what he called the billion-dollar view-because the temperature inside, they said, was three thousand degrees. Was that correct? Was there even such a thing as three thousand degrees?

Phoebe was on her knees. She was freezing, shivering, convulsing. The TV showed people jumping. Jumping from the hundred and first floor? Was there a team of firemen on the ground holding one of those inflatable parachutes that would catch these people, that would make their landing marshmallow-soft?

No. The TV said the jumpers most likely would suffer a heart attack on the way down. They were dead on arrival. They splattered like a watermelon falling off the back of the farm truck. The jumpers had so much velocity, the TV said, that they were killing bystanders at the bottom.

At that moment, or a moment later, Reed jumped.

Phoebe felt it. She, too, was falling.

In high school, in the French class that Phoebe and Reed detested, both of them barely hanging on to a B minus, their teacher showed a film called The Corsican Brothers. About twins who felt each other’s pain. One breaks his arm, the other screams. Reed and Phoebe developed a Corsican Brother shtick for a while-Reed would bump his shin, Phoebe would howl.

You’re a regular vaudeville act, their father said.

Was there a spiritual connection between them? Did they feel each other’s pain? Sometimes people asked this. (Just as people always asked if they were fraternal or identical. Hello! World’s dumbest question!)

No, they said.

And yet there was something.

A few years earlier, Reed had gone skiing in Telluride with Cantor clients and something went wrong on one of the runs. There was an avalanche of sorts, leaving Reed buried to his waist, unable to move or even reach his cell phone, for ninety minutes. Phoebe, who was on Paradise Island in the Bahamas with Addison, felt her feet go numb. She could not feel her feet, not even when she grabbed her toes or walked over the scorching tiles around the swimming pool.

Something’s wrong with Reed, she said. She called him, and his cell phone rang and rang. She made Addison go to the concierge desk to track down the number of the mountain in Telluride.

Later, when Reed was nursing his frostbite, wrapped in blankets in front of the lodge fire with a hot toddy, they laughed over the phone and said, “Corsican Brothers.”

So, yes, there was something.

But never anything as powerful as the feeling that overcame Phoebe at that moment on September 11. She had leaped out into the billion-dollar view. She was floating. And then there was a rush, friction like she was being sucked through a tunnel. The air was devouring her. She tried to fight back but couldn’t move her arms. Her arms were pinned to her side, and then suddenly her arms were over her head, she was upside down, she was going off the high dive at the Whitefish Bay pool club, she was going to hit any second, break the surface with a resounding splash, and have a strawberry back from the impact. But there was no impact. She was still falling, keening, the air ripped her hair out, her teeth out, she was blind, she was deaf. There was so much air, she couldn’t breathe. The wind ripped her up. It rubbed against her like flint and she ignited. She burst into flame, like a star.

Reed was gone. And so was she.

She did not cry. She curled up on the sofa and shivered. The phone rang. At first she checked the display in case it was Reed, in case he had decided in a rush of fraternity-brother camaraderie to go downstairs with Ernie and Jake to watch from the ground, but it was everyone else calling. Delilah again. Ellen Paige. The Chief. Andrea. Tess. Phoebe’s mother. Ellen Paige. And finally Addison. She did not answer. These people left messages on her machine. She sensed concern (the Chief), she sensed hysteria (Ellen Paige, her mother), but she could not hear anything clearly. She was deaf from the wind in her ears.

She couldn’t watch the TV anymore, but she couldn’t stop watching. The plane hit the building; it pushed right through it like a poison dart through the wall of a straw hut. She thought of people jumping. It was jump or melt, and Reed, whose life had been just as blessed as Phoebe’s until this very morning, would have weighed two impossible options and decided to jump. Would his red cape work? He chose to believe it would-for Domino’s sake, Ellen Paige’s sake, their mother’s sake, Phoebe’s sake.

Freebird. Sweet Reedy Bird.

I’ll call you back when the dust settles here.

When the dust settles.

On TV, the buildings collapsed like a house of cards.

By the time Addison got home, sunburned and smelling strongly of fish, Phoebe had vomited all over their seventeen-thousand-dollar silk Oriental rug, hand-knotted in Tehran, and she had wet herself. Her gym shorts were soaked. She didn’t care. Nothing mattered anymore, not even when Addison gasped and said, “Jesus, Phoebe!” And she realized that she had not wet herself. She was sitting in a pool of her own blood.

It was now eight years later, and everyone had healed and moved on. Phoebe’s parents had started a scholarship at Reed and Phoebe’s high school in Reed’s name. It was a large scholarship with elaborate requirements, and they spent many of their postretirement hours administering it.

Keeps me busy, Phoebe’s father said.

Domino was in fourth grade, living with Ellen Paige and her new husband, Randy, whose wife had been a restaurant manager at Windows on the World. They met at a support group.

It was only Phoebe who was stuck in an acrylic box. She could see out, but she was alone. Untouchable.

It was the drugs. Phoebe was on antidepressants, pain medication, and sleep aides. She had the drugs that Dr. Field liberally prescribed, and she had black-market drugs that she got from Brandon Callahan, Reed’s roommate at Wisconsin, who was a drug rep with-well, Phoebe was hesitant to name the company that Brandon worked for. It was a big company; the drugs were good.

There were those people-Addison, Phoebe’s mother, and to some extent Delilah-who felt that the drugs were harming Phoebe, killing her even. Look what they had stolen from her already-her consulting business had gone under; her body, once fit and toned, was now a bunch of twigs with skin hanging off them like cobwebs. And her personality had vanished. She smiled once a month, she never cried, she never laughed. She had, however, become an excellent listener. Listening was something she could do; many times the drugs made her feel lofty, like she was floating on air above everyone else, a Buddha on a pedestal, a deity calling in from the clouds. She gave sage advice now, everyone (meaning Delilah) said so, because she had no ego. She spoke only the truth because she no longer cared.

Addison and Dr. Field had tried to get her off the drugs. They wanted her to cut back with the eventual goal of quitting altogether. She could see their point. They would wean her off a little at a time, the way one treated frostbite. You warm the feet gradually by rubbing, and the blood returns, the tissue pinkens and comes back to life. This was how it would work with Phoebe. She would go off the drugs and things would come back into focus. She would get an appetite back, she would return to the gym, she would take on a small consulting project or agree to chair a brunch for donors to the Atheneum, she would agree to take tennis lessons with Delilah, she would shop for a dress or a belt, she would be able to watch TV, make love to her husband, bite into a peach, take a swim on a hot day, read a magazine-and enjoy it.

Life is out there waiting for you, Addison said, with Dr. Field nodding beside him. Addison sounded like a TV evangelist, a motivational speaker with a best-selling book. Phoebe understood that Addison was right. Life was waiting for her, she could see it through the clear walls of her box. But she didn’t want to give up the drugs. The drugs were Phoebe’s life support, they were the bubble wrap that kept her from breaking. Reed was dead, he was never coming back; she would never see him again. Even now, eight years later, that fact took her breath away. It was the vertigo. She was falling!

Life was out there waiting for Phoebe, but it was not waiting for Reed, and therefore Phoebe would not, could not, take advantage of it. This seemed childish to the rest of the world, but that was because the rest of the world did not understand what it was like to have a twin like Reed.

Phoebe remained locked in her museum case.

Labeled “Twin sister of September 11 victim.”

Phoebe lay against Delilah, absorbing her sadness. Delilah was rocking and rolling with it; she was hot and heaving. Her grief was pornographic. She was showing Phoebe the raw, pink, gaping, oozing parts of herself.

Tess and Greg were dead. Phoebe had taken four Ativans between the time Sophie had told her the news and the time she reached the Galley to tell Addison. The drugs were clothing her now, covering her like a protective suit. The fascinating thing had been her exhibition in the restaurant parking lot. She had emoted like a regular person-screaming, yelling, crying.

She had been convincing, even to herself.