Amelia RIPTIDE

AFTER THAT SOFTBALL GAME, I couldn’t have eaten dinner if my life depended on it. And not because I ate too many lemon squares.

I made certain my sister-in-law, Trina, was sitting beside me at family dinner, where I had to break the news about Thad and Chase. I loved Trina. She was pretty and sweet and the most involved mother I knew. Bless her precious, manicured, highlighted heart, no matter what storm was brewing in our family, she was as steady as the tide.

I hoped she wouldn’t be worried for me, that she would just give me that sweet smile of hers and say something optimistic. Because this was going to be ugly. I felt so sick I hadn’t even touched the pimento cheese and crackers Mom put out before dinner, which was really saying something because her pimento cheese was the best in the world. I swallowed a sip of chardonnay from a crystal goblet, which I also worried contained lead, for courage. If I didn’t get this over with, I was going to be too sick for dessert, too. And that would really be bad.

“Mom, Dad, Aunt Tilley, I have something to say.”

“Oh my Lord, you are finally pregnant!” Aunt Tilley exclaimed.

Trina gasped excitedly beside me, but a quick shake of my head told her that this wasn’t good news. She made a pouty face and took my hand. I instantly felt better. This was why I loved Trina.

“Tilley, you know she can’t get pregnant,” Daddy had scolded.

“I know you don’t want to imagine all that, but just because her daddy doesn’t think she can doesn’t mean a girl can’t get pregnant.”

“Oh, good Lord, Tilley,” Daddy replied.

I had taken a deep breath and said, “It’s okay, Daddy.”

Mom interjected, “Why didn’t Thad come with you, anyway? Darlin’, that article you wrote about him…” She clutched her napkin to her chest, and I noticed a small hole in it. Certainly a hole in a hundred-year-old napkin was to be expected, but it bothered me that Mom hadn’t noticed it. “It was just the most beautiful thing I’ve ever read.”

“And the New York Times,” Tilley said proudly. “Girly, you have made it.”

“Well, that’s sort of what I need to talk to you about.”

Trina hit Robby with her napkin. “Why don’t you write things like that about me? Does Amelia love Thad more than you love me?”

She stuck her lower lip out, and Tilley said, “She doesn’t love Robby more than I do.”

Mom rolled her eyes. Tilley’s boyfriend, who had died in a freak farming accident, had been named Robert. “Why in the world would you name your child Robby, Mother? It’s too confusing for her,” I’d scolded years ago.

“He’s my son, I named him after my father, and I can call him whatever the hell I want,” she’d retorted.

I had never heard my mother say “hell,” so, suffice it to say, I never brought it up again.

As I was readying myself to get this ship back on course, though, my nephews came tearing into the dining room, one of them hollering, “I did not take the last chicken leg!”

“Did too!”

“Did not!”

As Momma was saying, “Now, boys,” and Trina was saying, “William James, did you hide chicken legs in your pockets again so your brother couldn’t have any?” I decided I couldn’t take it a minute longer.

I cleared my throat and shouted, “I’m getting a divorce!”

The room was suddenly silent. Even the little boys knew this was more important than chicken. They ran back into the kitchen, the door between the two rooms swinging behind them.

“A divorce?” my mother said in a high, raised, outraged voice. I loved her, but she had this propensity to act so damn scandalized by every little thing. I mean, people got divorced. Constantly. Half the time. She acted like this was the first time she had ever heard the word. “A divorce?”

It was out now, and I couldn’t take it back. I almost took joy in saying, “Yes, Mom. Turns out Thad is a little more interested in men.”

Her jaw dropped, and Daddy slammed his napkin down on the table. “No one disrespects my little girl,” he said. “I am outraged by this.”

Aunt Tilley was uncharacteristically silent. Then she almost whispered, “So what now, darlin’?”

Robby mouthed Sorry to me across the table, as well he should have. He had been giving me so much crap earlier about registering to vote in Florida. But I’d lived there for thirteen years. It was a little impractical to fly home to vote. But he planned on running for mayor, and now mine was one less vote he would get. I wanted to point out that it didn’t much matter. He was a Saxton. He would win the election.

My dad was stepping down as mayor of Cape Carolina. His sister, the first female mayor, held the position for sixteen years. And their daddy was mayor before that, their granddaddy before that, and so on and so forth. If your last name wasn’t Saxton, you didn’t have much of a prayer in the mayoral race. We joked that people thought great-great-granddaddy Saxton was still mayor. In a world where politics were often dirty and self-interested, I was proud to have a family who stood steadfastly on the side of inclusion and doing what was right.

Daddy’s friends and political colleagues had asked him to run for higher office when he decided to step down. But he wouldn’t hear of it. His life, his obligation, and most of all, his true love—bless his heart—my mom, were in Cape Carolina. He didn’t want to be anywhere else. Even still, Mom and Daddy had driven the almost twelve hours to see me every other month since I’d moved to Palm Beach. They were proud of me. Well, they had been proud of me before this. But pride isn’t as pressing as plain, old-fashioned wanting your daughter home, where you can keep an eye on her.

“ ‘What now?’ ” I responded to Aunt Tilley, “is the big question, isn’t it?”

I set my napkin on the table, tears springing to my eyes, the weight of my situation hitting me. Now that I didn’t have to worry about telling my family, I had to worry about what came next. I had no husband. No house. But I did have a home. And as inhospitable as it was feeling at this current moment, it was here.

Mom and Tilley shared a look. I felt badly for Daddy. I honestly did. It was like he had married two of them. And they were two peas in a pod, two forces to be reckoned with.

Mom put her head in her hands, and Tilley patted her back and tsked supportively. “At least she isn’t pregnant,” Trina trilled.

I gestured at her. “Exactly. Silver lining.”

Everyone was talking all at once again, and I felt like I needed to escape.

Over the din, I could make out Mom saying, “There has never been a divorce in the Saxton family,” as I slipped out from the table. I couldn’t do anything about that now. I walked out the back door and down the dock, avoiding the planks that were sitting a little too high and needed repair. Even in my sorrow, I made a mental note to fix them and the pickets on the front porch the next day. I sat down, legs crossed, and took a deep breath. Out here, all you could see was water, with little islands of marsh grass interspersed. It was the place I had always felt the most alive, the freest. There is peace in the calm and quiet of the sound. And peace was what I needed more than anything right now. Tears rolled down my cheeks.

I imagined that, in some ways, having seen Chase with Thad would make my divorce easier. When I thought about the good times with Thad, I realized they had all been a lie. Our life and our love had been a total sham.

Why couldn’t life be like journalism? The story could take you anywhere, but the formula was tried and true. If you did the research, if you conducted the interviews, if you put in the work, the story would come. Why hadn’t my marriage followed that same pattern?

I wiped my eyes, and when I looked over to my left, I could see someone else sitting on the end of the Thaysdens’ dock next door, not twenty feet away.

“Is it done?” Parker asked.

The way the moon reflected on the water was so beautiful here. “Oh yeah. It’s done. I’m done. Everything’s done.”

“You are not done,” Parker said. “You’re just getting started.”

I nodded, even though, in that moment, I didn’t believe it. Not even a little.

“Hey, Park?”

“Yeah.”

“So are you.”

He nodded.

He didn’t say anything else, and neither did I. We just sat there, the silence washing over us. How had we gotten so far off course? I wished that, just for a minute, we could go back to being those same kids on these same docks, fishing with cane poles and swimming every chance we got. I knew I had to move forward. And Parker did, too. But sometimes in order to do that, you have to go back first. And I think that’s what scared us most of all.


The first time I saw Parker, he was eighteen years old. Well, the first time I actually laid eyes on him, I was three and he was three days old, and my mom and I had taken a chicken potpie to his mom, as if crust and a little gravy could cure her split-open insides. Even then, I was leery of childbirth. Maybe my body knew already it was something that would never happen for me.

His mom had this frilly bassinet set up in their living room, and I peeked in to look at him. I wasn’t sure what all the fuss was about. My baby dolls were so pretty. He just looked kind of red to me.

Our parents were best friends, which meant Parker and I necessarily saw each other. Labor Day picnics, Christmas Eve get-togethers, lemonade on the lawn at church, that type of forced family fun, so I saw him all the time. But the first time I really saw him was the summer before my junior year of college.

As the friend who lived at the beach, I was pretty popular in the summer. And I always had my friends down for at least a week or two. The summer we all turned twenty-one, Dogwood resembled a sorority house. The girls were always impressed that I could drive the boat over to the beach myself, so I took every opportunity to wow them.

One day, we all walked out onto the sand, feeling cool and invincible in a way that only twenty-one-year-olds can, and saw Parker throwing a Frisbee with some of his friends. He waved at me. Well, less a wave and more that two-fingered salute thing guys did to acknowledge you without really acknowledging you. He was heading off to Princeton at the end of the summer, which didn’t surprise me much. He had always been smart—and obnoxious.

One of my friends was like, “Who’s the hottie?”

I had rolled my eyes and said, “Ew. That’s Parker Thaysden, and he just graduated high school.”

“So he’s legal?” another friend chimed in, and we all laughed in the way of people who have another year of zero responsibilities, a rocking bikini body, and fewer than zero cares in the world.

We all made our way to the ocean. It seemed calmer than usual as we swam out past the breakers. I remember diving over one of them, loving the way it felt for my entire person to be submerged in the salty sea, certainly one of God’s finest creations. As the water reached my chest, I had the unsettling feeling that maybe we were out too far, that we should come back in, and just as I turned to tell my friends, I felt something I had never felt in my twenty-one years of communing with this particular spot of ocean on this exact stretch of sand: a riptide. I tried to swim in, but no matter how hard I fought, the sea kept pulling me out.

I had heard my entire life that you never fight the riptide, you don’t swim against it. You swim to the side to get out of it.

That advice was completely useless in the moment as the raging sea kept pulling me under for longer and longer stretches. I would emerge, gasping, long enough to uselessly attempt to cough out the saltwater filling my mouth and nose. My friends were waving their arms at the shore, I saw as I attempted to keep my eyes open despite their intense burning. But who could help me now? There were no lifeguards on this part of the beach. I started to panic, the worst thing you can do when caught in a riptide. I was going to die, I realized, as it pulled me under again, this time for longer. With a sudden surge of adrenaline, I tried again to swim to my right to get out of this thing. I could just make out someone running toward me.

A minute later, when I felt an arm loop around my waist, I wasn’t sure if it was real or my imagination. But when I looked into the face that had come to rescue me, it was the same one I had known since he was three days old. It was Parker. “Put your arms around my neck and kick if you can,” he shouted breathlessly.

As we got to the shallows, I wrapped my legs around his waist and he carried me piggyback to shore like we were back at one of those picnics, doing a partner race.

As we reached the sand, he dropped me, and I lay on my back, panting. He was crouched over me, his face near mine, hands on either side of me. And he was saying, “You’re okay, Amelia. I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”

As my friends ran up beside us, and Parker still looked down at me, I saw him for the first time. I mean, I really saw him. His words, the bulk and shape of his upper body, and the way we were both panting made me envision, just for a second, that this moment was something entirely different, something much less pure.

All at once, he wasn’t just the annoying kid who used to hide out in the branches of the trees in our yard and jump down to scare me, or the one Mom made me drive to school when he was a freshman, who clearly only listened to music that his friends thought was cool. He was a man. Or, at least, he was on the verge of becoming one. He had saved me. He had protected me. We were connected by more than just the gate between our yards and the cigarettes that we’d occasionally shared at high school parties.

I bought Parker and his friends beer all summer. It was a paltry gift in exchange for my life, but it was what I had to give, despite my friends’ insistence that beer was not what Parker wanted from me. I mostly ignored it.

But every time I had seen Parker since, I hugged him a little longer, I mentally thanked him a little more. Because he had truly saved my life. Later, a part of me believed he could save Greer, too, just through sheer force of will. I had hoped he could, had wanted him to. But no such luck.

Fourteen years later, back in Cape Carolina, I looked at him across the marsh, sitting on his dock. Even in the dark, I could see the dimple in his chin that came out when he grinned, the way that, even though he could laugh again now, really laugh, something around his edges seemed to sag a little, sad and defeated and lost.

Talking about those babies made him so happy. Anyone in his right mind would know having those babies was the craziest idea of all time. Some men might be capable of picking a surrogate and being a single dad to their dead wife’s babies. I mean, I didn’t know any of those men, but they did probably exist.

I thought back to the last time I had seen Greer alive, how even that close to death, Parker had made her laugh, how he had kept the trauma he was facing zipped up inside himself and dedicated everything to her, given her his all. Hell, maybe he could do it. Maybe he was that man. Maybe I had stumbled into that clinic and seen that record and made that phone call because Parker was supposed to be a single dad.

I had been thinking for years that I wanted to do something important with my life. I had been thinking for years that I wanted to repay Parker for saving me.

All those years ago, Parker Thaysden had given me life. As his eyes caught mine across the water, I had the odd, tingling sensation that maybe the right thing to do was to give it right back to him.