“Thanks,” I said. “She’s a tough one, but once you wear her down, once you get inside, no one will ever love you more.” Then I whispered, “If you can bear it, give her one more chance.”
My eyes welled as I said it, realizing what my poor mother had gone through these past few months, what she had sacrificed. She was barely working, every time she went to the grocery store she had to buy four different kinds of string cheese and eleven brands of fruit snacks, we were constantly drinking all of her favorite coffee without replacing it, and quite often she was the one who ended up doing all six loads of laundry per day that this family produced. And she never complained. At least, not to us. I’m sure Sandra and Emily got an earful. But she never let us know if she was unhappy. Which made me think that maybe she wasn’t.
As I walked up the front path, I turned to look back over the water. The beauty of it was a surprise every time. The marsh grass growing on the islands, the ancient cedar trees that formed paths and trails that we spent hours traveling on when we were young. I couldn’t explain why, but somehow, in that perfect evening moment, I knew that Adam was going to be OK. They were going to find him. They were going to bring him home. I had no basis for this thought at all. It was just that when you were in Peachtree, it simply felt like everything would be all right.
THIRTY-FIVE
serenade of summer
ansley
Carter, Caroline, Sloane, and I had gone to visit my grandmother in Peachtree Bluff when I was six months pregnant with Emerson. Grandmother’s health had been slowly fading for years. Like an oil painting left too close to a window, you weren’t sure it was less vibrant. It was only in looking back that you realized how vivid it had once been.
Carter and I were in a wonderful place in our marriage, which was a good thing, since the realization that I was pregnant had not gone like I had imagined. When I told him, ecstatic tears streaming down my face, the first thing he said, as icily as I’ve ever heard him, was, “How could you?”
I remember how alone I felt then, how the breath caught in my throat. But I went to him, sat on his lap, and said, “Carter, it’s your baby. It’s our baby. After all these years, it’s our miracle.”
I remember wrapping my arms around him and how he didn’t wrap his back. And I realized in that moment, with horror, that he didn’t believe me. The pain of that pierced through me, and my first reaction, as it often is in these situations, was anger.
I jumped up off his lap, crossed my arms, and said, “Are you serious right now? You think I went out and got pregnant by someone else without telling you? Do you know how this has weighed on me, how the life we have lived has nearly torn me apart? Do you honestly know me so little that you believe that about me?”
I turned to walk out the door. I had no plan, really. Sloane and Caroline were both spending the night at friends’ houses, and I knew that I could leave tonight, check into a hotel, and worry about tomorrow tomorrow.
But mercifully, Carter grabbed my hand. He looked at me warily. “Ansley . . .”
“Carter . . .”
He took a deep breath. “Is this even possible? Are you sure?”
I grinned. He was getting it now. “Carter, I swear to you on our children’s lives.”
It was the fourth time I had seen him cry in all our years together. I wanted to wait to tell people, but Carter just couldn’t. I didn’t stop him from calling friends and family. I knew this pregnancy was different for him. Of course, it meant more. I knew instinctively that Carter would be more attached to this third baby than our first two. I prayed that it was a boy, so that if the girls noticed a difference, they would always believe it was because of the baby’s sex, not because it was the only one that was biologically their father’s.
We had celebrated straight on through, and by this sixth month of pregnancy, it felt like we had been on some sort of extended honeymoon. Carter couldn’t stay away from me, couldn’t get enough of me. He worked less, stayed home later in the mornings, took the girls to school, made sure my every craving, need, and want were met. I was the queen. It was magic.
Being pregnant with Emerson had restored something in our marriage, something that, like a perfect accessory that completes a room, I hadn’t even known was missing until I got it back.
Caroline and Sloane had gone over to Starlite Island with their grandparents, who were also visiting for the long weekend. I remember the sky that morning when I woke, how it was a baby blue, the way it mingled with the rising sun, tinting the clouds perfectly pink, swirled together like cotton candy on a stick. It had made me smile, that baby pink and blue, like God had colored the sky for me that morning, for this baby I was growing inside me. Carter and I had laughed about it. It would be, unbeknownst to me, the last time we laughed on that trip.
An hour later, we were walking down the boardwalk, toward our favorite breakfast spot on the water. I was already tasting pancakes. Carter was pointing out boats that belonged to friends or famous people he knew, marveling that this little map dot had become such a yachting destination.
I saw him from the other end of the boardwalk, like a blurry apparition, but I knew Jack was in Atlanta, had moved there. I hadn’t seen him since after the night I told him I was pregnant with Sloane, told him that I couldn’t talk to him or see him anymore. It was too hard. There were too many feelings, too much at stake, so very much for me to lose. And I could feel him wanting more. Jack had tasted what it was to have me, had decided that the life he never wanted, the life that he and I would never have, was maybe what he wanted after all.
It was the last time I had seen him. Of course, I couldn’t come to Peachtree Bluff without thinking of the man I first fell in love with all those years ago on that sandbar a couple of miles across the horizon. But as we got closer, I knew it was him. I could feel my heart pounding, and everything in me wished that I had broken my vow and called him just once. I should have told him that I was pregnant.
He smiled and waved. I was still fairly small, and if you saw me straight on or from behind, you might not even notice. Carter reached his hand out to Jack.
“Good to see you,” Jack said.
I felt his eyes travel to my stomach, and that sick feeling set in. He was studying it like a hidden picture, searching for the clue that would complete the puzzle.
And then he said, “Oh, my God. You’re pregnant.”
Our eyes met, and in that moment, I knew he knew he had done the wrong thing. I laughed lightly and said, “Well, geez, Jack. I’m not that old!”
He laughed, too. “Of course not. Congratulations. I know you two are absolutely thrilled.”