I shook my head almost violently. “Can’t you see, Jack? That’s what I’m afraid of. What they know and when they know it has to be on my terms. Your being here puts my entire life at risk.”
The hurt in his face was so pronounced I had to look away. He shocked me by saying, “You’re right.”
“What?”
“You’re right. It does. It puts your whole life at risk.” He took my hand. “But it puts my whole life at risk, too. If I told them, if they found out and it wasn’t the right time in the right way, I’m out. It’s over. If it doesn’t go well then I never even have the chance to get to know them. No matter what, I would never ever risk that.”
“How can I really know that?”
“You can’t. You just have to trust me. I would think that now, forty-three years in, you’d be able to do that.” He looked down and licked his lips. “I couldn’t stand it,” he said. “After I knew that Caroline was born, I couldn’t stand it, knowing that out there somewhere, I had a child. And that the woman I loved and this child of mine were with this other man.”
I could feel the tears running down my cheeks, but by this point, I wasn’t sure what they were for. This was an awful story, sure. But it paled in comparison with what my daughter was going through right upstairs. “I’m sorry,” was all I could squeak out. It was woefully inadequate but yet, at the same time, all I could truly offer him.
He crossed his arms and leaned back on the couch cushions, pushing his hair back with both hands in a way that, to anyone else, might have seemed like nothing but to me seemed like utter agony. “I came to New York,” he said.
My heart was beating in time to his words, a metronome keeping rhythm to a song I wished I didn’t have to hear. Simply knowing where this story could go, what a nightmarish disaster could have transpired, put the fear of God in me for what could happen in the future. And I understood what he was saying about it being a risk for him, too. But it wasn’t the same thing. Not even close.
“I don’t know what I thought I was going to do. Talk to you, work things out in private, lay eyes on Caroline.” He looked so pitiful that I could feel my heart breaking for maybe the hundredth time that day. “I was going to come to your apartment, assuming that Carter would be at work. But while I was thinking about what I would say to you, I took a walk through Central Park. It was cold that day, and I remember stuffing my hands into my pockets, blowing out my breath, wondering if you were really happy, allowing myself to envision the possibility that maybe you would choose me, that you would take me over him.”
“Jack, I—”
He cut me off, but I could barely hear him, my heart was banging so loudly in my ears, the tears choking me.
“As luck, or what I believed at the moment to be fate, would have it, I saw you. In this city of millions of people, I saw you and Caroline and Carter. You were pushing the stroller, and he was holding her, and you were all laughing. He had his arm around you, and you looked like a postcard or a movie or something. It was all so perfect. And I knew you were happy. I knew you had what you wanted. And so I walked away, not for the first time and certainly not for the last. But once Carter died, and certainly by now, I can’t see why you keep pushing me away. So I have to assume that you don’t love me. Plain and simple.”
I could tell that in the midst of this monologue, Jack’s sadness had switched to something more akin to rage. So I softened my tone and said, “Can’t you understand—”
But he cut me off again. “What I understand,” he said, “is that I’ve been waiting for you for a lifetime, Ansley. I’ve been there for you at every turn. I have pined and prayed and hoped.” He was so worked up he had to catch his breath. “I only assumed that our being thrown back together like this was the sign I had wished for. I want to be here for you, but you won’t let me. You’re always going to see me in the same way.”
I could feel tears in my eyes. But really, this was so far from the most important thing going on in my life. My daughter was in tatters. That was all that truly mattered.
But it didn’t keep it from feeling like I was in tatters, too, when he said, “I’m done, Ansley. I’m gone. I won’t be here waiting anymore. I have nothing more to give you. You have taken it all.”
He stood up to walk away, and everything in me wanted to follow him, call him back, something.
I understood how horrible this moment with Jack was; it registered with me that my life had just crumbled around me again. But when your children are in pain, that’s all you can think about. And the difference between Jack and me was that this was a sensation he’d never know. And I realized that it might be too steep a barrier to cross.
* * *
SAVING SEA TURTLES MIGHT be all the rage in coastal towns now, but in Peachtree Bluff, we’ve been doing that for well more than a century. My grandmother still had dusty photos of men and women, dressed in full wool outfits that looked anything but beachlike, building barriers around turtle nests as early as 1905. The Turtle Brigade, as they called themselves, would walk right over the bridge to where the landscape changed from sound to beach and go to work.
Back then, I didn’t realize the value of what they were doing or the sanctity of these little lives. I used to wonder if all of that was necessary. Did the sea turtles need barriers around their nests? Was this something that we should even be doing? Or were the turtles perfectly capable of taking care of themselves?
I remember asking my brother why people were interrupting the circle of life, why they were changing biology. He explained to me how people help the turtles. And then Scott said, “But Ansley, you’ll learn that humans don’t think they are a part of biology. They think they are above it.”
I never forgot that night, sitting beside him on the beach, watching the Turtle Brigade go to work. I never forgot what he said. And I realized when Caroline was born that I thought I was above biology.
The day Caroline was born, everything changed. Everything always changes, of course, when a new life comes into the world. But for me, it was more than that. Because I knew the moment I held her in my arms that it wasn’t only my life that was changing. It was my marriage, too.
We never talked about it. That was the deal. But I could see the way Carter studied her, the way he examined her features, looking for something, anything, that would prove that maybe it had been a miracle, maybe Caroline was his after all. Those first few months, when she had those big blue eyes, people would say, “She looks exactly like her daddy.”