TWENTY-FOUR
six months
ansley
I was already crying when I woke up. I knew my mother wouldn’t die as long as she had this trip to Starlite Island to look forward to. After that, I wasn’t sure what would happen.
Sandra and Emily were already sitting in my kitchen when I padded in. When I saw them, the waterworks started again, and they both stood to hug me, one on each side.
“She’s going to be gone,” I sobbed. “Then I’m not going to have anyone.”
“Oh, honey, no,” Sandra said. “You have us; you have the girls.”
Biscuit let out a little yip as if to say, “You have me, too!”
But surely they knew what I meant. That had been the hardest thing about losing Carter, the thing I hadn’t expected. When the initial shock and horror of his death had worn off a bit, there were still months and months of realizing how much I depended on him. For far longer than I would like to admit, I would think, “Oh, Carter will do that,” before I would take out the trash or change a lightbulb.
It still crossed my mind to ask my husband for directions, for advice about what to do with the girls, what brand of wine to buy . . . The list went on and on. Not two years later, I went through the same thing with my dad. Now, my mother would be gone. Friends were wonderful and children were terrific, but they were not replacements for your spouse or your parents. A deep sense of vulnerability washed over me, as though, suddenly, I was open to whatever the world wanted to throw at me. I had no one left to protect me, though, frankly, I couldn’t imagine what other horrors we could possibly endure. I tried to take that thought back, as though I was tempting fate.
But Jack was right. My mother was going to die. It was always going to be hard. We would grieve, we would heal, and life would go on. The children were healthy, and while, yes, it would have been great for Adam to come home, for today, we had to be grateful for what we had.
Emily handed me a cup of coffee, and I followed my friends into the living room, to sit down in one of the comfortable, patterned chairs.
“I just can’t believe she’s going to be gone,” I said.
Sandra and Emily still had both of their parents, which was quite a feat at our age. “But she’s not gone now,” Emily said. “And we’re going to give her one hell of a going-away party.”
We all laughed. That was a good way to think of it. A going-away party. Only, it was one thing to give someone a goingaway party when you could hop on a plane to Paris to see her again. But she wasn’t going to be in Paris. And I wasn’t going to see her again.
“You’ll get to be together again one day,” Sandra said.
I rolled my eyes. My two best friends were completely undone by the abdication of my faith. In a town like Peachtree Bluff, or a lot of small Southern towns, really, saying you were ambivalent at best about God was like saying you didn’t believe in sweet tea.
I stood up. “We need to get ready.”
“Is it black tie?” Emily quipped.
“Black suit,” I said. “Bathing suit.”
We all managed a small smile, and I heard AJ’s tiny voice calling, “Gransley.” I saw him at the top of the stairs.
“Hi, my big boy! Come down here and see me!”
This time I really smiled. I was grateful I had my grandchildren with me during this tough time. They were such a beautiful reminder that life did, indeed, go on. There was more. And it was wonderful.
AJ was wearing green-and-white-striped pajamas, sucking his thumb, and clutching his blankie. Before I turned around he would be twenty-one. I wanted to freeze time and keep him at this sweet and innocent age when life is full of possibility.
He climbed up into my lap as Sandra said, “We’ll see you in a couple hours.”
They made their way out the front door as AJ rested his head on my chest. “You’re the best snuggler I know.”
He looked up at me and smiled. “I love to snuggle.”
“I know you do. Will you still snuggle me when you’re eight?”
He thought for a moment. “No, Gransley. But maybe when I’m six.”
I laughed. “Sounds fair.” It broke my heart that in this short couple of months my grandson had started calling me “Gransley,” not “Gwansley.” He was growing up too quickly. They all did.
I heard voices on the landing. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but Sloane and Emerson sounded like they were deep in conversation.
The back door flung open, and Caroline called, “Who’s ready to party?” Mom’s weak voice called back, “I am!”
I rushed into her room. It was dark, the blinds were closed, and she seemed so small in the king bed that she was barely detectable. I leaned down and kissed her. “Good morning, Mom. Do you feel like you can get up today?”
“Yes,” she said in her small voice. “I have to get up. I have a party to get ready for, for heaven’s sake.”
Her spirit hadn’t waned. Emerson helped me lead Mom, very slowly, into the bathroom to complete her morning routine.
I knew she would be exhausted by the time we were finished. It would take all the energy she had to simply complete her everyday tasks.
“I’m going to get this hair looking good,” Emerson said.
I looked down at my watch. It was nearly eight thirty. I heard a light rap on the door. I was still in my robe with no makeup and hair pulled back into the squatty ponytail that was all my shoulder-length hair could manage. “Sloane,” I half-yelled, half-whispered. “Get the door and take Jack into the kitchen.”
If he was safely stowed away there, I could sneak upstairs and get presentable.
“Where’s your mom?” I heard Jack ask.
“Oh, she’s hiding in Grammy’s room so you won’t see her without her makeup.”
She would pay for this. I had brought her into this world, and I could take her out of it. Emerson was still with Mom in the bathroom, and Jack peeked his head in. I pretended that I was making the bed, not hiding.
“Hey,” he said, winking.
I threw a pillow at him and put another one up to my face. “I will be ready in ten minutes. I promise.”
“I think you look great now.”
I couldn’t see his face because mine was covered with a pillow. On the one hand, it was silly. The man and I had been through everything together, and he had certainly seen me without my makeup before. But I was young then. Fresh. Wrinkle-free. Now I had to keep up appearances, and as much as I didn’t want to admit it to myself, keep him interested. You know, just in case.
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, JACK and I were standing on the teak deck of his beautiful boat. It felt so rewarding to see one of my completed projects. “So,” he said, “brought back a lot of memories getting high with you last night. Good times.”
I swatted him playfully. “It was only once, Jack,” I said, remembering as clearly as if it had happened the day before sitting in the cabin of Bobby Franklin’s boat with Jack, Sandra, Emily, Bobby, and their friend Craig, passing around an ill-rolled joint, feeling very, very rebellious.
“Twice,” he said.
“That must have been another girl.” It was silly, but I felt jealous, thinking of Georgia. Her car had been at Jack’s house for quite some time the day before, much longer than your general Realtor check-in. But this was what I deserved. I had told him we couldn’t be together. What did I expect?
“It was not another girl,” he said. “It was you and me over by the lighthouse. And then we . . .” He wiggled his eyebrows.
I put my hand over my mouth and could feel the blush coming up my cheeks. “Jack!” I scolded. But then I said, “How could I have forgotten that night?”
He smiled up at me, and our eyes met for a bit too long. I couldn’t help but think of how something similar had transpired between us in this very boat a couple months earlier. If I was honest with myself, I wanted it to happen again. We were standing so close together, the energy between us so thick you could almost see it. I wondered, briefly, what would happen if I leaned over and kissed him. Just this once. What could it possibly hurt?
Jack clapped his hands as if to snap us both out of it. “OK,” he said, leaning down and picking up the big bag from my store I had dropped on the deck.
“Jack,” I said.
He looked up at me again, and said, “I can’t, Ansley. I can’t even think about the start of this road when I know where it ends.”
The impulsive part of me, the part that still loved that boy as much as I had that night on the beach by the lighthouse, wanted to tell him the road didn’t have to end, that I had been stupid and made a snap decision. But then I thought of all the people getting ready to get on this boat and how much they needed me. My mother was dying, for heaven’s sake. This was not the time to be kissing high school crushes on their beautiful yachts. Before I could say anything, Jack handed me a pillow. I had covered the banquette around the dining table in blue-and-white-striped Sunbrella, and combined with these pillows, it would be a plush and comfy place for Mom to hang out.
I turned around to see them all. My mother, frail and tiny wrapped in a blanket despite the heat, James on one side, Hippie Hal on the other. Coffee Kyle was carrying Preston, which struck me as immensely funny. Sloane was holding Taylor, who was already in his life jacket, and AJ was swinging between Emerson and Mark.
Kimmy ran onto the dock. When she reached us, she stopped, her hands on her knees, panting. “Phew!” she said. “I was afraid I was going to miss the boat.”
“Me too,” Jack said. To everyone else I’m sure it seemed like nothing. But, to me, his words felt heavy, laced with longing and what’s more, anticipation.
“I sure am glad you didn’t,” Hal said. “How would you have ever gotten all the way over to Starlite?”
We all turned our heads and laughed. It was a laughably short distance. With all the preparation, the food, the tents, the lights, the massive amount of planning crammed into a very short window, all of us gathering on this huge boat as though we were off on a grand voyage, we had forgotten this was a journey we could have taken via kayak, or, had we been strong swimmers, no vessel at all.
“More importantly,” Mom said, “who would have brought my pot brownies?”
That set everyone off again. It was a good start. I was afraid this would feel like a funeral, somber and heavy. But it didn’t. It was a party for sure.
Emerson had done wonders with Mom’s hair. She looked lovely in her knit pantsuit. I smiled, but then it hit me what we were here for: her literal going-away party. I was going to wake up one morning, probably soon enough that I could count the days on my fingers and toes, and she was going to be gone. I would never again see her face. Never hear her laughter. Never call her on the phone to ask her opinion.
No, it hadn’t been perfect. I would never fully understand her decision when Carter died, and sometimes she wasn’t as touchy-feely a mother as I really wanted her to be. Still, although she may not always have been what I wanted, I had to consider that she had always, always been what I needed.
I felt the lump in my throat growing, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to control it much longer. As everyone chattered around me like this was another ordinary day on the island, I turned and walked as quickly as I could without arousing suspicion into the luxurious interior of the boat and into Jack’s room. I closed the door behind me and sat on the end of his unmade bed, the same unmade bed I had not only picked the linens for but also made love to him in. Then I started to cry. I knew I had to get it over with. I would never get through this day without at least a few tears.
When I heard footsteps and a hand on the doorknob, I tried to gather myself and wiped my eyes. But when I saw Jack’s face coming through the door, I lost it again.
As he came closer, I expected him to wrap me in a hug, rub my back, tell me it would be OK or anything soothing that would calm my nerves and dry my tears.
But he didn’t do any of that. Instead, he put his hands on my cheeks and kissed me so passionately that I truly felt like I was living that night by the lighthouse all over again. Only, this time, the only thing making me feel giddy and free was Jack.
We looked at each other for a long moment after that kiss, neither of us daring to speak. “You have six months,” he said. “Six months to get your shit together, to get over your excuses and your fears, whatever they are.”
He’d never spoken to me so firmly or so intensely. “Let’s face it, Ansley. Your life is a disaster zone. No one, and I mean no one, in his right mind would want to get mixed up with you. But I do. I want you.” He paused. “I won’t say it again. Six months from today, a ‘For Sale’ sign will go up in my yard. I will leave. I will wish you well and be on my way. I am too old to play these games.”
He turned and, with his hand on the doorknob, repeated, “Six months.”
I knew I’d never make it that long.
I WHOLEHEARTEDLY BELIEVE SEEING your husband become a father can only make you love him more. That had certainly been the case with Carter. Bringing Caroline into our world changed him completely, and I was in love with how in love Carter was with baby Caroline.
If seeing Carter with his daughter made me love him more, if watching him change diapers and get up for middle-of-the-night feedings and take her off on errands so I could get some sleep had compounded my love for Carter, then seeing her eyes change into Jack’s, watching the way her lips curled when she smiled and the color of her hair darken into his made it impossible for me to forget about him. That was perhaps the unexpected consequence.
It shouldn’t have been unexpected, of course. I should have prepared myself for that, closed the wind shutters, battened the hatches. But I hadn’t known yet how spending those weeks with Jack and giving birth to his baby would cause a deep longing for what we could have had to take permanent residence inside my chest and remove the light from my eyes.
I never talked to Jack. Never called him. Never visited or wrote a letter. But it was no consolation. No salve existed for the pain of being apart from him, yet I knew instinctively that the anguish I felt over losing him was nothing compared to what it would be if I left Carter and chose Jack like he had asked.
So the night Carter had come to me and said, “I think we should start trying again,” I held myself back, but I wanted to run upstairs, tie my shoes, and hop the first plane to Atlanta. I was like an addict who had spent years without a fix, still craving it with every ounce of her being. I was going to give in to my primal need for it again. In the back of my mind, I knew it would only make things worse and prolong this profound loss I felt in every cell.
Time would never erase the memory of Jack and what we shared, would never allow me to get past what I felt for him. And so, seeing him again, asking him this unaskable favor for a second time, might be, as my father would say, a temporary solution to a permanent problem.
If I wanted another baby, which I did, desperately, this was how I would get one. I knew already without hashing it out with Carter again.
At the time, it didn’t seem odd to me that he was so against people delving into our personal and financial lives. He had always been private. He had convinced me that if we let an adoption agency dig around, they might find out that Caroline wasn’t really his. I could never let that happen.
I realize now that was just a cover. He wasn’t worried about them finding out about Caroline; he was worried about me discovering what a disaster he had made of our finances. As soon as he died and I found out about the debt, it all made perfect sense. I should have been angry at him for leaving me out in the cold, for not telling me the truth. But I knew even then that, in his own way, he was trying to protect me. Plus, there was no sense in holding grudges—especially against a dead man.
Much like that rainy night in Peachtree Bluff when I boarded a plane into a great, wide unknown expanse of which I could never have predicted the consequences, that morning, I kissed my husband, stroked my sleeping baby’s forehead, and left for what I’d told Carter was a girls’ trip. He didn’t delve deeper. He knew better.
My stomach was in knots the entire flight, a mix of anxiety and unadulterated, nearly maddening excitement. What if he was involved with someone else? What if he wouldn’t agree to this again?
Soon after I landed, I was swigging Pepto-Bismol in the back of the cab on the way to his house. It felt riskier this time, showing up unannounced. By the time I had arrived at Jack’s small but charming Buckhead home, admiring the ivy that grew over the trellis around the front door, I was so worked up I had almost convinced myself to go back home.
But the need for his lips to be on mine felt stronger than my need to make the safe choice.
It was a Tuesday evening, so I figured he would be home. Only, when I knocked, there was no answer. I knew immediately I should have called. What if he was away on a trip? What if, even worse, he came home with a woman? I had to be prepared for that scenario, didn’t I? I had no claim to him whatsoever, except for, I had to consider, his heart. A hot flash of jealousy ran through me at the thought that someone else might have his heart now and he hadn’t given me a second thought.
I walked around the side of the house and into the backyard, the high heels I had laboriously picked sinking into the grass. I leaned to the left to compensate for the weight of the heavy duffle bag on my right shoulder. I smelled the grill before I saw him. I stood quietly at the edge of the patio, on the small pathway surrounded by mature bushes that were probably eight feet tall. I watched the way his mouth curved as he sipped his beer, the way that vein on his forearm I had always loved running my finger down became more pronounced as he flipped the steak, the way his eyes crinkled when he smiled to himself. I took a step forward, into the safety of the bushes and, as if I had triggered some silent alarm that only he could hear, Jack turned. Our eyes met. I smiled.
I expected him to run to me and scoop me up in his arms, or at least walk casually toward me in his completely charming and irresistible way.
But he did neither. Instead, he sat down in a black wrought-iron chair behind him and put his head in his hands. I had the sinking feeling that I had made a huge mistake, that this was going to be nothing like what I had envisioned and I had ruined Jack’s life. I had caused him the same pain and anguish I had caused myself.
I dropped my duffle on the edge of the patio, and even in his distress, even though I wasn’t sure it was the right thing, I went to him. I had to at least try to ease the pain I had caused. Jack’s head was still in his hands, and as I kneeled to look at him, I realized he was crying. I knew then I shouldn’t have come. But he looked up at me, put his hands on my cheeks, and said, “Oh, thank God.”
I realized his weren’t tears of distress. They were tears of relief. All those months that Jack had been the insistent tick-tock in the back of my mind, the beat so persistent and rhythmic that you incorporate it into your life, learn to coexist with it, that the things he had said, the way he smelled, the feel of his lips on mine had been running through my mind on an endless loop, he had felt the same. And now I was here. In that way I had felt like I couldn’t live one more moment without a fix, he couldn’t either.
He didn’t say any of that, of course. But those three words told me more than any long, convoluted monologue could have, because those three words perfectly expressed what I had felt all that time. He pulled me onto his lap and kissed me not with passion but with ferocity, as though he could make us one, make it so I could never leave again. In that moment, as I felt myself ripping the T-shirt over his head, I thought that was what I wanted too, to be with him, to never leave, to be one with him like I had dreamed of since we were children.
Never before and never since have I completely lost myself like that. I’ve never felt as though I had disappeared into another person and that time and space and direction no longer existed. It was only Jack and me in that private backyard paradise that, in the coming months, would become a place I would lie in to feel the sun on my skin, a place where I would pretend for hours on end that I was going to bring Caroline and never leave, a place where I would experience emotions so complicated, so convoluted, and so intense that I was certain I would completely lose my mind.
But then, it was just Jack and me and the love we’d had since we were teenagers in his Boston Whaler. Just Jack and me in the knowledge that sometimes love really isn’t enough.
Just Jack and me. And a horribly charred steak. And the realization that what we had done wasn’t making a baby. It was reigniting a flame, an old one, one too intense, perhaps, for either of us to stand. We wanted that fire. We never wanted it to go out. And, lost in Jack that night, I never could have predicted how irreparably we, like that steak, would burn.