“Well, I’m sorry your marriage didn’t work out.” I was. Kind of. But really, Jack was mine. He had always been mine. He would always be mine. And that was how I had seen it from that very first night on that sandbar. Not that I was interested in him in that way now. But still. It was the principle.
As the tide began to rise, the parents had fled, leaving just the teenagers splashing around. That was when the sandbar was the most magical, if you asked me. You couldn’t see the ground we were standing on, and all around us was deep, dark water. I imagined from the mermansions it must have looked as though we could walk on it. It made me feel timeless, weightless, fearless. The lukewarm beer we sipped out of Solo cups didn’t hurt, either. I remember the way Jack flirted with me that night, the way I knew already that he wasn’t scared of anything, not like I was. But it was more than that. The molecules in the air rearranged themselves when Jack and I were together. Anyone around us could feel it, knew from that first night that no matter what the future held, in some small way, the stars aligned for us, the moon rose for us, pulling the tide higher and higher until we were forced back onto our boats. Jack kissed me that night, standing in his fifteen-foot Boston Whaler, our hearts thumping in time, the mosquitoes circling around our bug-bitten ankles under the sweet, sweet full moon of summer.
“Want to tell me why your marriage didn’t work?” I asked him.
He gestured around with his beer bottle. “I told you already. The boat.”
I rolled my eyes. “It was not the boat.”
He nodded. “Before we got married, she didn’t want children. After we got married, she decided she did.”
“And you didn’t?” I said. But I already knew the answer. Jack had never wanted children. And it had broken my heart. Because as much as I had loved him, I knew I was meant to be a mother.
“It seemed . . .” He trailed off, fiddling with his beer bottle. “Complicated.”
I swallowed a lump in my throat. “Yeah.” I paused. My phone beeped. Caroline. I held it up. “Kids complicate things. That’s for sure.”
“Actually, by then, I realized that I would kind of like to have kids.” He cleared his throat and looked out over the water. “And I loved her and she made me happy in a lot of ways. But I also knew that she wasn’t who I wanted to have children with.” He smiled, but I could see the sadness behind his eyes. That’s how it is with people you’ve known since you were teenagers at the sandbar party. “I’ve never admitted that before, not even to myself.”
He finally looked at me again, and I looked back. I didn’t say anything, but he could read my face.
“It’s not your fault, Ans.” He said it, but as the words tumbled out, there was an edge to his tone. One that made me uneasy. One that made me know that despite how cool he seemed, despite how nonchalant he was trying to be, he thought a lot of things were my fault.
I looked down into my wine. He couldn’t have blamed me for his unhappiness any more than I blamed myself. I always felt that if I had compromised, if we had been together, his life would have been better. But mine, I knew, would have been unspeakably incomplete.
He reached over and lifted my chin toward him, softening. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I really mean that. It’s not your fault.”
I could feel the tears in my eyes. I was suddenly aware that I’d had too much wine and too much heat for one day. I wiped my cheeks quickly. “I need to go home,” I said.
“Want some company?” he asked. And he was back to normal, back to the easy Jack I knew.
Everything inside me wanted to say yes. Everything inside me wanted not to be alone. I wanted to pretend that we were teenagers again. That the world was fresh and new. That we were standing on the edge of everything, that life was out there waiting for us to grab it. But we weren’t. And it wasn’t.
And he knew it, too. That’s how he knew I meant it when I said, “No.”
TEN
fairy stones
caroline
Everyone used to call Sloane and me either two peas in a pod or trouble. Both were equally accurate. When we were younger, Sloane was fearless. As free-spirited and wide open as she was, her big sister was the complete opposite. I’ve always been by-the-book, structured, regimented. I knew from the time I was small that I wanted to grow up and marry New York City royalty, have his babies, raise them, volunteer, and maybe get invited to the Met Ball one day. That was really it. I mean, yeah, I went to college because that’s what you did. But I was there to meet a man, plain and simple. If that didn’t work out, I’d have some cool job in the meantime.
The weird thing was that when our dad died, Sloane and I sort of flipped. Where I had been so uptight, I suddenly realized that today was all we had and that I had to take every chance while the chances were around for the taking. She, on the other hand, became more fearful. It evened the score for us a bit, his death.
I begged Sloane to come to NYU. But she said she didn’t think she’d ever be able to go back to Manhattan. True to her word, she hadn’t. Since she’d set foot on Georgia soil, the only relocating she’d done was to North Carolina, where Adam was stationed. And let’s face it, it’s the same place.
It made me sort of sad that our lives had diverged on such different paths. We weren’t as close as we once were. I mean, we were still sisters, sure. But in a lot of ways, we simply could not relate to each other.
Like when she pulled into the back driveway in her—wait for it—minivan. I about fell over. Because, you see, although I concede that they are quite convenient, I would never be caught dead in a minivan. But Sloane doesn’t think like that. She thinks about what is economical and what is practical. And yeah, sometimes I envy her that.
When she pulled into her spot beside Mom’s car in the driveway, we all made a mad dash for the van. The doors automatically opened to reveal my two nephews in their car seats, Goldfish crumbs everywhere, TVs in the headrests playing PAW Patrol. The interior smelled vaguely of sour milk.
That was the moment it really sank in. These vermin were going to have their mitts all over my fresh, pure, un-germed baby. My throat constricted.
But then Adam said, “Carowine,” with those sticky hands reached out to me, and he couldn’t help but melt your heart. He had Sloane’s big brown eyes, but everything else was Adam’s. It made complete sense for him to be Adam’s namesake, because he could have spit him out.
I reached in and pulled him out of the car seat, resting him above my protruding belly.
Sloane got out and said, “Caroline! He’s too big for you to hold now!”
I tried not to let my disapproval of her outfit choice show on my face. She had on these dumpy, flare-legged, faded black yoga crops that no one should ever wear and a too-tight T-shirt that made it very evident she hadn’t lost the last ten pounds of baby weight.
“Sorry for the outfit,” she said, as if she knew what I was thinking. “Taylor peed on me at about mile three-fifty.”
Gross. I had forgotten about all of that. Maybe this baby wouldn’t do that.