The Castaways

JEFFREY

As he stood on the wharf waiting for the ferry to dock, he could have had any number of thoughts, but for whatever reason, he found himself remembering the afternoon he had been shot.

It had been seventeen years earlier, in the frantic but emotionally dry period of his life after Andrea left him but before he met Delilah. He was a one-man show at the farm at that point; he did everything himself.

In the late fall he was turning over the land where he had harvested pumpkins. The furrows were scattered with busted-open pumpkins like split skulls, spilling out seeds and pulp. The pumpkin patch was in the southwestern corner of the farm, bordering the thick pines along Hummock Pond Road. Jeffrey was on the plow, watching as the pumpkin remains were turned over, back into the soil to nurture it. He heard a noise and thought the plow had encountered a rock-and the next thing he knew, he was falling off the plow into the dirt. He groaned. There was an incredible searing pain in his side; he felt as though his shirt had caught fire. What the hell? He felt like his mind was being sucked through a tunnel at warp speed. He touched his side where the pain was and lifted his hand. Blood. His shirt was soaked with it. What the hell? He had no idea. He blacked out.

A passerby called 911 and Jeffrey woke up to a couple of female EMTs lifting him onto a stretcher and sliding him, like a loaf of bread into an oven, into the back of an ambulance.

“You’ve been shot,” one of the EMTs said. She had cut away his flannel work shirt and was inspecting his wound. “Someone was after a deer.”

He tried to lift his head but found he could not.

He stayed at the hospital for three days. Three days that he couldn’t afford to lose, but what could he do? He’d been shot, as surely as if he’d served in the Gulf War or been caught in the crossfire in Morningside Heights.

The day after he’d been shot, a policeman walked into his hospital room. This seemed unremarkable at first; someone had mentioned that the police wanted to talk to him. What ended up being remarkable was that the policeman was Edward Kapenash, the new chief. They were short-staffed at the station, so the Chief was handling this himself.

“Besides,” the Chief said to Jeffrey, “it’s not every day that someone on Nantucket gets shot.”

Jeffrey took an instant dislike to the guy, not only because of that comment but because he realized that this guy, Ed Kapenash, was Andrea’s boyfriend.

Jeffrey said, “You’re Andrea’s boyfriend?”

“Fiancé,” he said. “I asked her to marry me two weeks ago.” He took a small notebook out of his breast pocket, eager to get down to business. “Do you know Andrea?”

“I’m Jeffrey Drake,” Jeffrey said, though he would have figured the Chief already knew his name.

The Chief lowered his notebook and said in a tone of voice that could only be described as warily interested, “Oh, I see.”

The two men took stock of each other in the deadly silent moment that followed. Jeffrey lamented how unfair it was that he was lying prostrate in bed with a gunshot wound while the Chief stood by the bed in his starched uniform with his gleaming badge.

“Well, anyway, congratulations. Andrea is a wonderful girl.”

“Yes,” the Chief said. “She sure is.”

Another moment of silence followed, during which Jeffrey thought, You’d better take good care of her.

The Chief said, “So! Tell me what happened.”

The ferry sluiced through the green water of Nantucket Harbor. It was a beautiful, bright, still afternoon and Jeffrey had to squint, but he picked out Delilah and the kids on the foredeck. His heart settled. Thank God.

When Delilah had called from her cell phone at eight-thirty that morning, Jeffrey had barely been able to contain his rage. “Where are you?” he said.

“Cobleskill, New York.”

He ground his back molars together to keep from shouting. He said, “What are you doing in Cobleskill, New York?”

She said, “We took a little detour. But don’t worry, we’re coming home.”

This does not mean I don’t love you, I do, that’s forever.

He said, “When?”

She said, “We’ll be on the three o’clock ferry.”

“The ferry?” he said. “Why don’t you just fly home?”

She proceeded to tell him about the time she ran away in high school. It was a story he’d heard numerous times before-she realized this, right?-and he was about to interrupt her when she said, “The one thing I think about, even now, is how I wished back then that someone were standing on the dock waiting for me.”

Delilah and the kids waved from the bow of the boat. Jeffrey waved back. Delilah always said that people were predictable, that they could be counted on to act exactly like themselves. She wanted someone standing on the dock waiting for her.

And here he was.