SIXTEEN
life
ansley
I don’t think I’ve ever been as shocked as I was when my husband, Carter, came to me and said he thought we should start trying for another baby. Because I saw the way he watched Caroline, the way he studied her. I saw the way he hoped she would develop some feature or mannerism that would indicate she was really his. It had all been a bad dream, what he had asked me to do. I knew he wanted to believe that we had defied what the doctors told us, that we had created this beautiful miracle all on our own.
I had also known, from that very first rainy night I ventured back to Peachtree Bluff, back to Jack, back to try to get the one thing Carter and I wanted that we couldn’t have on our own, that it was a bad idea. Jack and I had loved each other. We had shared so many of our teenaged summers, stealing kisses on the boardwalk, spending lazy days holding hands in the sand, throwing footballs with our friends, sneaking beer at the pier at night. The only thing that had eventually torn us apart was his proclamation that he didn’t want children and my insistence that I would have them. Our life together had been so carefree, so much fun—except when the summers were over and we had to leave each other, of course. But, no matter how happy you are in your marriage—and, believe me, I was—marriage is real life and it’s real work. There are bills to pay, taxes to figure, laundry to be done, decisions to make. The love is real, but the stress is real, too. While I was deeply happy in my life with Carter, there was no doubt that my mind wandered every now and then to that simpler time.
I understand with every ounce of my being that this is why people have affairs; this is how they convince themselves that they are in love with someone else. It’s easy to resurrect that forgotten feeling when you have no responsibilities.
I knew this. Logically.
But it had taken me five months to get pregnant with Caroline. That was five sections of time carved out for Jack and me. Five stints of seventy-two hours that weren’t only about making this baby. They were about spending time together, reliving the past, and, in some ways, getting a glimpse into what might have been if I had never met Carter that summer before my senior year of college. If, instead, I had spent that summer with Jack.
I knew in my heart of hearts that what I had with Carter was a once-in-a-lifetime love. But it had been tainted by the day-to-day of marriage. What I had with Jack hadn’t. Even though my head knew this, my heart still felt that dangerous pitter-pat whenever I was in his presence, which is why I realized, after I became pregnant with Caroline, that I couldn’t see Jack anymore.
So, no, technically, I didn’t need to fly to Peachtree Bluff to tell Jack that I was pregnant. But, for heaven’s sake, I owed the man that much, didn’t I? He had been the one to create this child with me. Didn’t he have a right to know?
I was sitting in Jack’s living room when he walked in from work. His face lit up. I had promised myself that I wouldn’t have any physical contact with him. I was already pregnant. It had to go back to friendship. But I stood when he walked into the room, and he rushed to me, kissing me with that intensity I had come to know so well.
“Hi,” he said, a smile playing on his lips. “We have to stop meeting like this.”
I kissed him again. He was so close, so warm. I couldn’t help it. “Well,” I said, hearing a hint of sadness in my voice, “I think we’re going to.”
He pulled away from me, and his face fell. “Oh. Right.” His posture shifted from confident and happy to distraught. “So that’s it, then? I’ve done my duty, and now we’re over.”
“Jack,” I whispered.
He shook his head and ventured a smile. “I’m not angry,” he said. “I knew this was the deal. I knew you would get pregnant and you would be gone.”
I had planned to go back home to New York, tell Carter I was pregnant, and have the celebration to end all celebrations. We were going to have the life we had always dreamed of: strolling through Central Park with our baby, holding hands walking to preschool, Carter parading his son or daughter around his office.
“Maybe we have this one last weekend?” I whispered. “Maybe we can pretend we don’t know.”
“Know what?” he asked, winking at me.
My head was screaming that this was wrong. But, hell, the whole thing had been wrong, hadn’t it? Of course it had. I knew that. It’s amazing how convoluted your thoughts can become, how a seemingly reasonable mind can convince itself that the worst things are right, that, in between the very clearly black and white, there might be shades of gray.
But even I couldn’t convince myself there were shades of gray in what I was doing now. The baby was made. This was cheating on my husband. Yet, I couldn’t break away from Jack’s arms. Not yet.
As day turned to night, the light drifting away, slipping from the sky like this love from our fingers, the sadness started to creep in between us. Our banter shifted to serious conversation about what the future could hold. But I never expected Jack to say, “Stay.”
“What do you mean?”
I rolled over on my side, suddenly chilled, covering myself with a sheet, our faces inches from each other. “You know what I mean, Ansley. Leave Carter. Leave New York. Come home. We’ll get married and raise our baby together.”
I shook my head. “You never wanted children, Jack.”
He shook his head. “I know what I said, but if it’s you and me and the baby, I think it could be kind of great.” He paused and looked at me again. “Stay, Ansley.”
Another chill ran through me, a dread that this was not what we had agreed to, a horror that I had made a colossal mistake. But, in that, I realized: I was thinking about it. And that was what scared me most of all.
It took only a few minutes of considering leaving Carter, bringing this baby back to Peachtree Bluff, and living with Jack for me to realize that if I was meant to be with Jack, I would have been. But I wasn’t. I was meant to be with Carter.
And now I felt like I was where I was meant to be once again. The girls were home. I was going to decorate Jack’s house. I wasn’t even nervous about leaving everyone for Mom’s doctor’s appointment. She had fought me tooth and nail on this for weeks. But after the episode a couple of days ago, that feeling in my gut that this was more than just normal, old-age forgetfulness kept nagging me. We were going to a neurologist in Athens late that afternoon, and I wouldn’t hear another word about it.
“Hey, Mom,” I said nonchalantly, walking into her room. She was making her bed. I had hated it when she arrived in Peachtree Bluff in that cast and was so reliant on us. Her independent streak was one of my favorite things about her, and even at eighty-three, she was going strong. That same independent streak was, of course, the thing that had driven this deep, seemingly impenetrable wedge between us. But so many of the things in our lives are a bit of a double-edged sword. The mere thought of her losing her mind was too much for me to take.
“Let’s go out to lunch,” I said.
She looked at me suspiciously. “Your three daughters just got home from six days at sea and you want to take me out to lunch?”
I shrugged. “Yeah.” Then I winked at her. “If I’m gone I don’t have to help with the laundry.” I paused. “Plus, we’ve had practically no quality time together since you got here.”
She perched herself at the end of her freshly made bed and said, “Speaking of, I wanted to talk to you about that. I’m as good as new, and I think it’s time for me to go home.”
I could feel the shock on my face, though I wasn’t sure why. Of course my mom was going to want to go back to Florida, to her friends and her life. But as my brother Scott and I had discussed many times, her age was starting to show, and she needed to be here where I could keep an eye on her. Scott’s travel reporting kept him on the road or in the sky all the time, and it wasn’t like my brother John even spoke to any of us. This was the only option. Only, none of us had had the nerve to break it to Mom yet. And, quite frankly, if I was going to play caregiver for the rest of her days, I didn’t feel like it was my responsibility to break that news to her.
I gave Mom my most pitiful look. “Couldn’t you stay a couple more weeks? Until I get Sloane back on her feet? There’s so much going on here, and I could really use your help.”
Mom took the two steps to her walker, patted my shoulder, and said, “Sure, sweetheart. Whatever you need.”
I couldn’t believe that worked.
I helped Mom into the car, and she said, “Why don’t we go to one of those divine waterfront restaurants? My treat.”
Eighty-three-year-olds and three-year-olds are essentially the same. Slow. Stubborn. Extremely opinionated. But eighty-three-year-olds generally have better table manners, so, overall, they’re better lunch companions.
Verbena was our favorite waterfront restaurant, but I hadn’t been there in a while. White tablecloths and two-hour lunches weren’t exactly my speed these days. Mom and I both ordered tea service instead of lunch. There was nothing better than those little sandwiches with the crusts removed and tiny brownies, lemon squares, and macarons.
“So how long do you think it will be?” Mom asked.
I knew without clarification that she meant until we heard about Adam. “I hope soon,” I said. “The waiting is the worst part.”
She nodded. “You know all about that.”
The waiting when Carter died had nearly killed me. And I was never one of the lucky ones who knew. I never had remains or a DNA sample; I had no wallet, no shoes. Nothing. I never had any real closure. Of course, I had known the entire time that he was gone. But there’s always that voice in the back of your head that tells you to keep hoping, keep searching, keep believing.
Mom smiled at the waitress as she served us. “Thank you.”
I placed my green tea bag in the white porcelain pot. Mom selected Earl Grey, as usual. She was kind of a tea purist, except when it came to Kyle. If Kyle fixed her anything at all, she would bat her eyelashes at him and tell him it was divine.
She took a bite of brownie first. I laughed.
“What? At my age, I’m not taking any chances.”
I took a bite of mine too. Why not? The desserts at Verbena were decadent, rich, delicious, award winning. But I would rather have had a Hershey’s bar, if I’m honest about the whole thing.
My mother and I always had a deep bond, which is why it had shocked me that she wouldn’t let the girls and me come home when I discovered Carter had left me not penniless, but in a cataclysmic hole of debt. I had tried so hard to move past it, but I think this period in my life now only served to intensify the wound because I knew for certain I would never leave my girls out in the cold when they needed me most.
In the quiet, in the dark, in my most private thoughts, the ones I would never say out loud to anyone, I resented the fact that, though she hadn’t lifted a finger to help me when my life exploded, I would be the one taking my mother to doctors’ appointments, feeding her dinner, bathing her, taking care of her every need until the day she died. But, mostly, I felt lucky I could do it.
We’d never been best friends like some of my girlfriends had been with their mothers, and I was OK with that. I only hoped that, maybe, during this time in our lives, we could repair what was broken between us.
“Darling,” she said, taking a tiny sip of her tea, “I meant what I said the other day. Why do you push that divine man away? He’s totally in love with you. I’m totally in love with you, but even still, I recognize you are not perfect. He, on the other hand, does not.”
I laughed. Mom had always loved him. When I first started dating Carter, she kept asking what had ever happened to that darling Jack.
“Mom,” I said. “Carter was the one. If Jack had been the one, I would have married him. But he wasn’t.”
“I did love Carter. But you didn’t marry Jack because he didn’t want children. I assume you don’t want any more?” She raised her eyebrows.
We both laughed. I wiped my mouth and took a sip of cool water. “It’s not that simple, Mom. I loved him all those years ago, but we’re different people now.”
She looked at me like I was dense. “That’s why you give the man a chance. That’s why you try to get to know each other now.”
She made it sound so simple, but perhaps that’s because she didn’t understand the entire picture. When Jack came back to Peachtree Bluff, I was panicked that the girls would find out our secret, would find out that Jack was Caroline and Sloane’s father. Now I knew Jack would never let that happen. But, even still, how could I lie to my children like that? How could I be with Jack without telling them the truth? I wasn’t sure I could.
But that was all beside the point. Today, my mission was to get this woman to the doctor. I decided to level with her.
“Mom,” I said, taking a bite of egg salad for courage. “I’m taking you to the doctor today.”
She waved her hand. “Darling, my ankle is fine.”
“Not for your ankle,” I said. This was when it was going to get dicey. “For your brain.”
I expected her to freak out, but she barely reacted, still as a cat stalking its prey. That’s when I began to worry.
She took a sip of tea and cleared her throat. “There’s no need.”
I cut her off. “I know you’re going to say you’re fine, but you’re not fine, Mom. There’s something going on, and if we can catch it early, maybe get some treatment, it won’t progress.”
She took a deep breath and reached for my hand across the table.
I knew that she was going to argue with me, so I said, “Mom, you were out of your mind when Jack was there the other night. You didn’t recognize anything, didn’t know who he was . . .”
“Darling,” she said calmly. And that’s when I knew something was wrong. Something big. I knew that whatever she said next was going to change my life in ways I wasn’t ready for. “I don’t know how to tell you this, really,” she said. She paused and looked into my eyes as if she were memorizing them. “But, you’re right. I’m not fine.” She put her hands back in her lap, smoothing her napkin slowly. She took another sip of tea, cleared her throat, and looked up at me. “I have cancer, darling. I’ve had it for quite some time. It’s in my brain.”
I felt numb, frozen in my chair. She was so calm, so steady. I wanted to cry, but instead, I sprang into action. “We have to get you to a specialist. Are they going to operate, do chemo, radiation?”
She put her hand up to stop me, and I knew we were about to have the biggest fight of our lives. “We are not going to do any of that. I’m going to live out my days as I please. I will eat my dessert first and watch Mickey Mouse with my great-grandchildren. And when my time is through, it will be through.”
She was so stoic when she said it. I usually thought of this decision, of this state of mind in the face of death, as resigned. But Mom wasn’t resigned. She was almost joyous. And it hit me. My mother was dying. My mother was going to die. Soon. I felt tears well up and dabbed them away with my napkin.
“Sweetheart, let’s not make a scene, OK? I’m fine. I’m better than fine. I’m not losing my hair and vomiting. I’m not spending a year in the hospital to potentially buy me two more when I’ll never really be right. I’ve thought about this. I assure you this is the right decision.”
“For whom, Mother? Because it doesn’t feel like the right decision for me.”
She smiled at me sadly. “I will not have you spending your life caring for me and shuffling me back and forth to doctors’ appointments. I’m ready to be with your father, anyhow.” It wasn’t until she said, “You are all terribly boring,” that I finally saw emotion breaking through her placid expression.
“You will not go back to Florida. That’s it, and that’s final.”
She opened her mouth to argue, but I think she knew I needed this, in the way that mothers always do. She took a sip of tea and said, “I do so love that beautiful Emerson with that darling Mark. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if she married him, moved back to Peachtree, and gave up all that acting nonsense?”
Just like that, we were finished talking about dying. We were, instead, talking about life. While I wasn’t sure I agreed with her decision to forgo treatment, I did know one thing for sure: in the entire time I had known her, all my life, except for once, I had never known her to make the wrong decision. And that thought would carry me through until the very end.