TWO
red sky at night
ansley
The sun had nearly set when I sank into the plush cushion of the outdoor sofa on my front porch in Peachtree Bluff. Despite my exhaustion, anxiety, and sorrow, there was something about this porch and this particular sunset, a burning red and hot orange, that always soothed my mind.
My grandson Taylor’s fever from the day before seemed to have finally broken, and I hoped beyond hope that AJ, snuggled safely in my bed instead of his own, wouldn’t be woken again by nightmares.
I looked down at the piles of sand on the front porch, the clumps that had fallen out when AJ decided to strip off his bathing suit and run naked through the sprinklers. That little rascal. I smiled. That was the thing about children. All day, the stinkers can drive you nuts, but the minute they’re asleep, you want to gaze at them, drink them in, suppress the urge to wake them for one more cuddle, one more giggle, one more moment in time.
“Do you think I should wake Taylor to give him more Tylenol before I go to bed?” I asked my mom. The thought made me cringe. There would be bribing, bargaining, and selling my soul. Taylor would whine and wriggle until I thought I would lose my mind and promise candy, a trip to the toy store, a pony—anything to make this stop. Then he would finally let me shoot the Tylenol in his mouth, take a sip of water, and reach out for the Popsicle I would have ready to take the edge off the taste. I didn’t want to do it. But I loved those grandbabies more than life.
I looked beside me at Mom, awaiting her sage answer, and almost laughed. She could have been on a greeting card, dressed as she was in a floral, zip-front housecoat, her hair tightly wrapped in the curlers she would sleep in, her pink satin bedroom slippers hugging her slender feet. Although the frequent Botox and touch-up sessions from her dermatologist in Florida would have indicated otherwise, Mom had been a fixture on this wide front porch, which originally belonged to her parents, for more than eighty years.
I had replaced my grandmother’s matching rockers with cozy teak chairs and a couch, small white Saarinen end tables, and a teak dining table and chairs on the opposite end. It was the best porch in the world, and I never wanted to leave. Maybe this was why my grandmother had left the house to me in her will. She knew how much I adored this home, that I was the only one capable of loving it as much as she did.
“Darling,” Mom said, pulling one of the sea-blue Serena and Lily herringbone throws off the back of the sofa and wrapping it around her shoulders, “if the child’s fever spikes in the night, he will wake up. Good heavens, what do you think the pioneers did?”
I laughed, sinking back into one of the new Dalmatian-print throw pillows I had just gotten. They accentuated this sweeping white clapboard home, situated on the water a block from downtown, with the black shutters I had added after much ado—and digging up a photo from the late 1800s that proved to the historical association that there had once been shutters on the house and, as such, if I could copy them exactly, I could replace them.
I could hear Emerson’s and Caroline’s voices wafting down from the uncovered, upstairs porch with its six outdoor loungers perfect for sunbathing. My friend and handyman Hippie Hal had added a platform for yoga at the end of the porch, outside the bay window of my bedroom, the largest of the five in the main house.
I shook my head. “I don’t know, Mom. I would have made a very poor pioneer.”
She looked at me seriously. “That you would, darling.”
In contrast to my mother, I was still wearing the tailored tan-and-white-striped shirtdress I’d had on since I showered from my day at the beach with my rambunctious grandsons. Caroline had picked out this dress for me, and I absolutely loved it. It hit right at the knee and was cinched at the waist. It reminded me of an updated 1950s housewife frock, which, with the cooking, cleaning, and child rearing, I basically was—minus the husband, of course.
I wished I could be a little more like my mother, comfortable enough to be on my front porch in my bathrobe. But the tourists walking by from downtown deterred me. Had I said that to my mother, she would have replied, “It’s your damn front porch. If you want to sit out here stark naked, you should.”
I pulled the cork out of the open bottle of rosé and poured “just a splash,” as Mom would say, into each of our oversized Riedel wineglasses. Her splash was more like a third of the bottle, but who was I to judge? The woman was old enough to make her own decisions. And she would.
I took a sip, trying to dull the pain that, while Emerson and Caroline were up there sharing the secrets of sisters, Sloane, my little wounded bird, was entrenched in the darkness of her room, in the pitch black of her new reality. I took a deep breath and felt a sob welling up within me, but I suppressed it.
I looked into my mother’s blue eyes, the same eyes I saw each time I looked at my own face in the mirror, and I could feel her strength, the strength I had always borrowed during the toughest moments of my life.
These past few months with my girls back in Peachtree Bluff had been one of those hard times, one of those periods in their lives when, though I wanted to save them, protect them, shelter them, I couldn’t. Yet again, the universe had delivered challenges for my grown daughters whom I had loved and wanted so much, those children whom I had sacrificed for, crossed that line between right and wrong quite a few times for.
I could not erase the fact that Caroline’s husband, James, had cheated on her with a supermodel or that her son had been born in the midst of that, and I could not bring Sloane’s husband, who was missing in action in Iraq, home.
Quite a few times I had thought that at least Emerson, my youngest, was OK. But I sensed something was slightly askew with her, too. Maybe it was that, though she was filming her biggest movie to date, she hadn’t quite found the acting success she had dreamed of. Maybe it was that she hadn’t found the true love she dreamed of—or maybe, I had to consider, that was only my wish for her.
The reality was that I couldn’t even handle my own love life, much less hers. So I sat on the front porch, beside my mother, the person who made me feel perhaps the most complicated emotions of all, the one who, though I knew she loved me unconditionally, never felt the way about me that I do about my girls, never felt the need to change it or fix it.
She took a sip of her wine, and while she looked out over the water, the sunset making it nearly the same shade as her dark rosé, I looked at her. I wondered what was happening in her mind, what complicated firing of synapses was taking place to make her a little different these days.
But breaking me out of my thoughts, she said, “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight.”
It’s something she had said to me countless times throughout my life, but this time I felt slow tears rolling down my cheeks. Adam loved to fish, and this red sky would have meant that, in the morning, offshore conditions would be perfect.
It was an ordinary phrase, yet for my daughter, nothing was ordinary, nothing was right. Sloane’s entire life had been turned upside down in one moment. I thought, unfairly, cruelly, that this was Adam’s fault. He had always wanted to be more than a husband and a father. Why couldn’t that be enough for him? Why couldn’t he have a normal job, with regular hours that let him get back home to his young family?
Mom squeezed the top of my arm but didn’t say a word. What was there to say?
“What do I do?” I whispered.
She shook her head. “You can’t fix this for her, Ansley.”
I shrugged. “I know that, but I can’t even get her out of bed.” I paused and took a deep breath. I didn’t want to say it out loud. But I had to. “It has been almost three weeks, Mom. I’m afraid if she doesn’t get out of that bed now, she never will.”
I had spent countless hours Googling depression, calling doctor friends, and buying books that, due to my status as grandmother-turned-primary-caregiver for two toddlers, had sat practically untouched on my bedside table. But the reality remained. I had already learned about depression in the worst way, which might also be the best way: firsthand experience. I knew what it was like to find out your husband was dead, that you were the only one left to fight for your family. But Sloane wasn’t there. Not yet. She needed help. But how could I help someone who didn’t want it?
Caroline, Emerson, and I had been entertaining Sloane’s boys constantly, trying to distract them from the fact that the only time they saw their mother was when they crawled into bed with her. She would smile at them blankly, without even seeing them, and stare back at the TV screen where home videos of her and Adam with the boys were playing on a continuous loop, night and day. We were doing the best we could, but they wanted their mother. Taylor cried for her five or six times a day, and it broke my heart. AJ was acting out. Throwing toys and tantrums over nothing, pinching Taylor. We were doing all we could for them, but I felt fairly certain these boys had lost their father. They couldn’t lose their mother, too.
My mom shook her head again. “I’m proud of you,” she said. “I’m proud of how you’ve stepped up.”
Though she had said nothing that could possibly help me in this impossible situation, as she took my hand, I felt calmer. It was, as it always had been, my mother who gave me this incredible strength and inner peace, my mother who lent me fortitude when I needed it most. It was then that I realized it. Sometimes, being a mother isn’t about having to fix it. Sometimes, the best thing a mother can be is there at all.