We didn’t understand yet what had really happened. At least, Sloane, Emmy, and I didn’t. I brushed it off, like Oh, that’s weird. How would a plane hit the World Trade Center? It must have been flying too low. I remember my mom calling the airline and learning that all flights going in and out were canceled. I know now that she had a bad feeling and she wanted to get us all out of the city. But when she found out that she couldn’t, she took my hand and Sloane’s, something she hadn’t done in years. I was still holding Emerson, who was a good fifty-five pounds by then. At my barely 110, I can’t explain how I carried her, with the blush on those tiny cheeks, for the five blocks from school to home.
I remember the astonishment in her big blue eyes. Even back then, you could tell that she was the most beautiful one. As vain as I was, it didn’t bother me. She was my pet. I was proud that she was beautiful. I felt like somehow, when people stopped on the street to comment about how stunning she was, it was as though I had done something good.
We didn’t know what was going to happen. In fact, looking back now, I wish we could have stayed on that sidewalk, me holding Emmy, Mom holding our hands, forever. We could have stayed in that moment and never gotten to the next one. Our lives would never be shattered. Our daddy would get to come home. And Emmy, my little Emmy, could stay that sheet-and-tinsel-clad angel for the rest of her life.
FIVE
miss fancy pants
ansley
Every Wednesday since what must be the beginning of time itself, Peachtreeans have gathered in the parish hall of St. Timothy’s church for the town meeting. But the year when Jackson Thompson was mayor—note how I say year, singular—he decided that a parish hall was too religious a place to hold a town meeting. It conflicted with the idea of separation of church and state.
The only problem was that Peachtree Bluff was a tiny place. There weren’t many buildings that could hold so many of us. So Jackson decided to start holding the meetings in the park downtown. Everyone would bring his or her own lounge chair and enjoy the beautiful weather. The day of the first meeting, it rained, so everyone had to sit under umbrellas. For the second meeting, there were so many mosquitoes that everyone left looking like he or she had the measles. We all joked that God was mad that we had moved from St. Timothy’s and sent a modern-day swarm of locusts. By the third meeting, it had turned chilly. That was when Jackson Thompson decided that maybe the parish hall wasn’t so bad after all. You see, holding weekly meetings outside with no backup plan for weather or other unforeseen situations is not a good idea.
It’s also not a good idea to make a giant scene when you are solidly middle-aged if you would rather not obsess about said scene for days. Unable to sleep, I got up at five a.m. It was a chilly morning, so I put on the leggings and long-sleeved tee I paddled in when it was too cold for a swimsuit.
The quiet, still water eased my mind. This was what I loved most about the winter in Peachtree Bluff. The water was so clear and slick it looked almost like a painting. At night, if you didn’t know it was there, you might walk right into it thinking it was a continuation of the street. Usually, when I wanted to do my morning yoga outdoors I paddled over to Starlite Island, right across from my house. But I needed to go farther this morning, clear my mind, let the tide carry my troubles away, transform my thoughts from a roaring bundle of waves into a slick, crestless calm.
I looked at my watch. The tide should be low enough now that I would have hours. The tide always lent me serenity. It was constant, changeless. Every day it had its highs and its lows, but, like clockwork, it continued on. That was how I needed to be too. Sometimes low, sometimes high, but always steady. Always there for my children. Always there for my friends. The constant in other people’s lives. That was my role. I knew how to play it well.
As the sun began to rise I bumped my paddleboard into the sandbar. I knew I could kiss my little board goodbye because as soon as the girls got here . . . Well, no matter. I’d rather have them than the paddleboard—or the defined arms and core it had lent me. It crossed my mind that this sandbar was where I’d first met Jack. But this sandbar held a million good memories, past and present. And it would hold a million more. I convinced myself that it wasn’t Jack that had led me there that morning, that it wasn’t thoughts of how much he loved to fish here at sunrise that had beckoned me.
Saluting the sun as the sun rose was perhaps the most cleansed a human could get. Inhale, rise up, exhale, swan dive forward, inhale, plank, exhale, chaturanga, inhale, up dog, exhale, down dog. And so on and so forth, as if I was the one helping the sun to chart its course into the sky. I have always been able to lose myself in that combination of body and breath. And I have always been able to find myself once again along a stretch of sand surrounded by water.
The puttering of a small engine didn’t cause my thoughts to wander. I simply incorporated it into my motion and my mantra. It was as natural a sound as the birds calling or the waves crashing, as much a part of life on the water as any other.
I looked up to see a small craft coming toward my sandbar that was quite unlike any I had ever seen before. It was the size and shape of a paddleboard, but with shallow sides, a tiny engine, a Carolina blue Yeti cooler for a seat, a lovely teak steering wheel and rod holders behind the cooler. It was small and functional, but even I knew it was very, very expensive.
As the boat came closer, I started to wonder . . . It couldn’t be. Certainly not.
Only, it was. Jack didn’t notice me. I considered slipping away unseen, paddling silently home. I was mortified over how I had acted when I had seen him last. But I found myself watching as he opened his cooler, removed a fish, baited his hook, and cast. It was a gentle motion, a smooth one, a rhythmic one, with as much finesse as my own yoga flow. I remembered the days that I spent baiting hooks with Jack, offshore or in. I never cared much for fishing. But I did care for Jack. And there was a time when I would have done most anything to be close to him.
As I remembered, he turned and, finally, saw me. He laughed. What else could you do, really? But he stopped before the sound fully escaped, reeling it back into his mouth. He didn’t say anything and neither did I. We both just looked. It should have felt incredibly odd, standing there in the silence. But there was something about the stillness of that morning that you couldn’t bear to interrupt, something that felt natural about our quiet.
“I swear I won’t try to talk to you,” he said finally. “You can go. I’ll pretend like I didn’t even see you.”
I looked for the sarcasm, but found none. That wasn’t Jack. Not now. Not ever. There had been times I wanted him to be angry with me, times he certainly should have been. But, mostly, to a fault, he was kind. My face flushed with the memory of my running away. Coming face to face with the man that featured so prominently in the highlight reel of my past had caught me so off guard, so unprepared. I had imagined seeing him again for years, what that moment would be like. I never would have anticipated acting that way. I noticed that my heart was beating only a little wildly now, which was growth. Yoga must have calmed me.
“I’m sorry I acted like that,” I said. “It was awful of me. I was just so surprised.”
He ventured a small smile. “You and me both.”