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.”
I could feel Carter’s eyes on me and then on Jack. When he dropped my hand, I felt my heart race again. When Carter started walking toward the other end of the boardwalk, I knew he knew. I wasn’t sure what to do. Run after him? Give him time?
It was the one thing that Carter made me promise, that he would never know who Sloane and Caroline’s fathers were. I couldn’t imagine it, couldn’t wrap my mind around the idea that he could live his life never knowing. As I suspected, it began to weigh on him. Yet he didn’t want to know who the man was. Even before we married, we never talked about past relationships, where we’d come from, who had shaped that path. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that we had found each other, that our future was the two of us.
And so we compromised. I told Carter that the father was someone from my past, someone I had once loved, someone who never wanted children of his own but had agreed to give me, give us, the one thing that we wanted so badly. Carter was angry at first, said that I had been irresponsible, that I had risked our family by letting the other man know he had children. I didn’t argue. He could never understand.
But now he understood. In an instant, Carter understood that Jack was the father of his other two daughters. He knew who their brown eyes and dimples belonged to.
“I’m sorry,” Jack said. “I’m so sorry. But you should have told me. How did you think I would react?”
“I didn’t think I’d see you,” I responded, anger in my voice. But it wasn’t Jack’s fault. I knew it even then. This was a situation I had created.
“I know you don’t really owe me an explanation, but—”
“Of course I owe you an explanation, Jack,” I said. “After all these years, Carter and I are having our own baby.”
There was a thinly veiled sadness in Jack’s eyes, and I could feel him thinking about what might have been. I would be lying if I said I didn’t think about it, too. But I was old enough to know that what might have been was never as good as what was. It just wasn’t. I had moved on. I didn’t fantasize anymore about what would happen if Jack had decided he did want children, that we did want the same things in life. Because I knew that Carter was the man I was supposed to marry, raise a family with, be with forever.
But I loved Jack, of course. Always. And I don’t know what it was about that moment, when I should have been running after my husband, that made me say, “You have given me everything I ever dreamed of. I will love you until the day I die.”
“I will love you even longer than that, Ansley.”
I nodded and headed down the dock, into that cotton-candy-colored sky. I knew that Carter and I would carry on. We would get through this. It had been naive of either of us to think we could make it through an entire lifetime and never run into the true father of our children. It had been ludicrous to think it was a secret we could keep, even from ourselves.
Dockmaster Dan didn’t speak to me that morning, simply tipped his hat, his eyes viewing me like he knew I needed to be alone with a secret, a secret that, I had to consider, maybe wasn’t as secret as I believed it to be.
But Peachtree Bluff was a town of hidden truths, of stolen moments, a town that had borne the clandestine, the furtive, the surreptitious tales of the sea since well before the Revolution.
I knew, as the wind caught my hair just so, making me feel like that little girl who had come here when her heart was so innocent and her future so wide, that this town, with all its gossip and chatter and crazy characters, might thrive on a little good-natured fun. But when it mattered, when it was important, this place, this corner of the world that time seemed to have forgotten, would bear the big secrets, the earth-shattering ones, until the tide washed it over and, like time itself, it existed no more.
WHEN I LOOK BACK on my life, I know that I will remember my summers in Peachtree Bluff with the most fondness. Bringing my girls when they were tiny to visit my grandmother. Driving Boston Whalers over to Starlite Island, collecting shells, admiring the wild horses from the widow’s walk, playing tag in the front yard, having water-balloon wars. And my childhood summers here, when the world was so pure, nothing was scary, and I was so full of innocence, were the closest, I think, that one could ever get to heaven on earth.
Those were the good times, the times that would always fill my heart with the most gladness. In some ways, this year, even with all of its troubles, would be one of those times. No matter how difficult it had been, whether Adam was lost or found, we were a family again. We were together. We had always loved one another; we had always held one another in our hearts. But something deeper had happened over these past few months. We had become family in the way we were when Carter was still alive, in the way we were always meant to be. And I knew that all of us would treasure this time for the rest of our lives.
My heart felt so heavy that chilly night, as I sat wrapped in a blanket on the outdoor sofa, looking out over the water, at the way the moon reflected and danced and spun, the way the stars glowed here in a way I couldn’t remember seeing anywhere else in the world. A part of me knew that this was wrong, that I should be watching these stars with Jack. A part of me knew that I was protecting myself from something I didn’t need to be protected from. And that I was protecting my daughters from a threat that wasn’t a threat at all. But opening your heart after it has been closed for so many years is hard. It’s unthinkable at moments, actually. Right now, my plate was full. So if my heart was a little less full than it could be, that was something I was going to have to be OK with. It seemed that night that Jack had closed the door on a possible future for us. That hurt. But I knew it was nothing compared with the hurt I had caused him in our life together—or lack thereof.
Taylor and Adam burst through the front door, an ecstatic Biscuit running behind them. None of Mr. Solomon’s family wanted his little dog, and when I heard that she had been taken to the shelter, I couldn’t stand the thought. She had spent her entire life on this street. I would make sure she spent the rest of it here, too. It was my final mea culpa to Mr. Solomon, and I hoped that he would rest easily knowing that his best companion was royally taken care of.
Biscuit had been a terrific distraction for the boys, who didn’t understand, thank goodness, what was happening.
“Is Mommy still sick?” Adam asked, crawling up beside me. Taylor followed suit and scampered onto my lap, resting his head on my chest, that thumb popping right into his mouth.
I kissed the top of his head. “Mommy is still sick,” I said, trying to hold back tears.
“Will she still be sick tomorrow?” Adam asked.
I nodded. “Mommy might be sick for a while. But she’s going to get better,” I said. Then I whispered, “I know she will,” more for my benefit than for his.
“Mommy sick,” Taylor repeated.
“Taylor was sick one time,” Adam announced, and Taylor turned his head to look at his big brother with curiosity. “He threw up all over the car.”
Biscuit wiggled and squirmed, gathering all of her strength in her hind legs until she popped up onto the couch, covering Adam’s face with doggy kisses.
Adam burst into giggles, and Taylor followed suit.
You couldn’t help but join them, no matter how hard your heart felt. It was too much joy not to take part in. The moments that sneak up on you, the little surprises that keep you guessing, make life so worth exploring, even when the unthinkable happens.
I barely realized that hot, angry tears were flowing again.
Adam patted my arm. “It’s OK, Gwansley. I love you.”
Nothing is better than having one of the smallest loves of your life say that.
But the hardest thing about being a mother is the uncertainty. Not knowing. Not being able to fix it. As the breeze blew warm and I caught a whiff of salt, I realized that there were a whole lot of things that I didn’t know. But there were two that I did. One, I would love those girls with every cell in my body until my heart stopped beating. Two, as sure as one season is here, the next is right on its tail, about to arrive with a vengeance any day.
As I sat on the front porch, Adam under one arm, Taylor on my lap, I could feel it coming. With Sloane a heap of devastation in the upstairs bedroom and Adam God only knew where, our house felt as icy cold as the depths of winter. But, if you closed your eyes and listened, you could almost hear it. No matter how bad things seemed right now, it wouldn’t be long until a gentle breeze carried in the sweet serenade of summer.