No, it hadn’t been perfect. I would never fully understand her decision when Carter died, and sometimes she wasn’t as touchy-feely a mother as I really wanted her to be. Still, although she may not always have been what I wanted, I had to consider that she had always, always been what I needed.
I felt the lump in my throat growing, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to control it much longer. As everyone chattered around me like this was another ordinary day on the island, I turned and walked as quickly as I could without arousing suspicion into the luxurious interior of the boat and into Jack’s room. I closed the door behind me and sat on the end of his unmade bed, the same unmade bed I had not only picked the linens for but also made love to him in. Then I started to cry. I knew I had to get it over with. I would never get through this day without at least a few tears.
When I heard footsteps and a hand on the doorknob, I tried to gather myself and wiped my eyes. But when I saw Jack’s face coming through the door, I lost it again.
As he came closer, I expected him to wrap me in a hug, rub my back, tell me it would be OK or anything soothing that would calm my nerves and dry my tears.
But he didn’t do any of that. Instead, he put his hands on my cheeks and kissed me so passionately that I truly felt like I was living that night by the lighthouse all over again. Only, this time, the only thing making me feel giddy and free was Jack.
We looked at each other for a long moment after that kiss, neither of us daring to speak. “You have six months,” he said. “Six months to get your shit together, to get over your excuses and your fears, whatever they are.”
He’d never spoken to me so firmly or so intensely. “Let’s face it, Ansley. Your life is a disaster zone. No one, and I meanno one, in his right mind would want to get mixed up with you. But I do. I want you.” He paused. “I won’t say it again. Six months from today, a ‘For Sale’ sign will go up in my yard. I will leave. I will wish you well and be on my way. I am too old to play these games.”
He turned and, with his hand on the doorknob, repeated, “Six months.”
I knew I’d never make it that long.
I WHOLEHEARTEDLY BELIEVE SEEINGyour husband become a father can only make you love him more. That had certainly been the case with Carter. Bringing Caroline into our world changed him completely, and I was in love with how in love Carter was with baby Caroline.
If seeing Carter with his daughter made me love him more, if watching him change diapers and get up for middle-of-the-night feedings and take her off on errands so I could get some sleep had compounded my love for Carter, then seeing her eyes change into Jack’s, watching the way her lips curled when she smiled and the color of her hair darken into his made it impossible for me to forget about him. That was perhaps the unexpected consequence.
It shouldn’t have been unexpected, of course. I should have prepared myself for that, closed the wind shutters, battened the hatches. But I hadn’t known yet how spending those weeks with Jack and giving birth to his baby would cause a deep longing for what we could have had to take permanent residence inside my chest and remove the light from my eyes.
I never talked to Jack. Never called him. Never visited or wrote a letter. But it was no consolation. No salve existed for the pain of being apart from him, yet I knew instinctively that the anguish I felt over losing him was nothing compared to what it would be if I left Carter and chose Jack like he had asked.
So the night Carter had come to me and said, “I think we should start trying again,” I held myself back, but I wanted to run upstairs, tie my shoes, and hop the first plane to Atlanta. I was like an addict who had spent years without a fix, still craving it with every ounce of her being. I was going to give in to my primal need for it again. In the back of my mind, I knew it would only make things worse and prolong this profound loss I felt in every cell.
Time would never erase the memory of Jack and what we shared, would never allow me to get past what I felt for him. And so, seeing him again, asking him this unaskable favor for a second time, might be, as my father would say, a temporary solution to a permanent problem.
If I wanted another baby, which I did, desperately, this was how I would get one. I knew already without hashing it out with Carter again.
At the time, it didn’t seem odd to me that he was so against people delving into our personal and financial lives. He had always been private. He had convinced me that if we let an adoption agency dig around, they might find out that Caroline wasn’t really his. I could never let that happen.
I realize now that was just a cover. He wasn’t worried about them finding out about Caroline; he was worried about me discovering what a disaster he had made of our finances. As soon as he died and I found out about the debt, it all made perfect sense. I should have been angry at him for leaving me out in the cold, for not telling me the truth. But I knew even then that, in his own way, he was trying to protect me. Plus, there was no sense in holding grudges—especially against a dead man.
Much like that rainy night in Peachtree Bluff when I boarded a plane into a great, wide unknown expanse of which I could never have predicted the consequences, that morning, I kissed my husband, stroked my sleeping baby’s forehead, and left for what I’d told Carter was a girls’ trip. He didn’t delve deeper. He knew better.
My stomach was in knots the entire flight, a mix of anxiety and unadulterated, nearly maddening excitement. What if he was involved with someone else? What if he wouldn’t agree to this again?
Soon after I landed, I was swigging Pepto-Bismol in the back of the cab on the way to his house. It felt riskier this time, showing up unannounced. By the time I had arrived at Jack’s small but charming Buckhead home, admiring the ivy that grew over the trellis around the front door, I was so worked up I had almost convinced myself to go back home.
But the need for his lips to be on mine felt stronger than my need to make the safe choice.
It was a Tuesday evening, so I figured he would be home. Only, when I knocked, there was no answer. I knew immediately I should have called. What if he was away on a trip? What if, even worse, he came home with a woman? I had to be prepared for that scenario, didn’t I? I had no claim to him whatsoever, except for, I had to consider, his heart. A hot flash of jealousy ran through me at the thought that someone else might have his heart now and he hadn’t given me a second thought.
I walked around the side of the house and into the backyard, the high heels I had laboriously picked sinking into the grass. I leaned to the left to compensate for the weight of the heavy duffle bag on my right shoulder. I smelled the grill before I saw him. I stood quietly at the edge of the patio, on the small pathway surrounded by mature bushes that were probably eight feet tall. I watched the way his mouth curved as he sipped his beer, the way that vein on his forearm I had always loved running my finger down became more pronounced as he flipped the steak, the way his eyes crinkled when he smiled to himself. I took a step forward, into the safety of the bushes and, as if I had triggered some silent alarm that only he could hear, Jack turned. Our eyes met. I smiled.
I expected him to run to me and scoop me up in his arms, or at least walk casually toward me in his completely charming and irresistible way.
But he did neither. Instead, he sat down in a black wrought-iron chair behind him and put his head in his hands. I had the sinking feeling that I had made a huge mistake, that this was going to be nothing like what I had envisioned and I had ruined Jack’s life. I had caused him the same pain and anguish I had caused myself.
I dropped my duffle on the edge of the patio, and even in his distress, even though I wasn’t sure it was the right thing, I went to him. I had to at least try to ease the pain I had caused. Jack’s head was still in his hands, and as I kneeled to look at him, I realized he was crying. I knew then I shouldn’t have come. But he looked up at me, put his hands on my cheeks, and said, “Oh, thank God.”
I realized his weren’t tears of distress. They were tears of relief. All those months that Jack had been the insistent tick-tock in the back of my mind, the beat so persistent and rhythmic that you incorporate it into your life, learn to coexist with it, that the things he had said, the way he smelled, the feel of his lips on mine had been running through my mind on an endless loop, he had felt the same. And now I was here. In that way I had felt like I couldn’t live one more moment without a fix, he couldn’t either.
He didn’t say any of that, of course. But those three words told me more than any long, convoluted monologue could have, because those three words perfectly expressed what I had felt all that time. He pulled me onto his lap and kissed me not with passion but with ferocity, as though he could make us one, make it so I could never leave again. In that moment, as I felt myself ripping the T-shirt over his head, I thought that was what I wanted too, to be with him, to never leave, to be one with him like I had dreamed of since we were children.
Never before and never since have I completely lost myself like that. I’ve never felt as though I had disappeared into another person and that time and space and direction no longer existed. It was only Jack and me in that private backyard paradise that, in the coming months, would become a place I would lie in to feel the sun on my skin, a place where I would pretend for hours on end that I was going to bring Caroline and never leave, a place where I would experience emotions so complicated, so convoluted, and so intense that I was certain I would completely lose my mind.
