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 Inecessarily 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 Ireallysaw 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 divingover 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 thesame 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 togive, 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.
ElizabethSABOTAGE
“I KNEW HE WAS WRONGfor her,” Tilley hissed as I handed her dish after dish to dry. I scrubbed them a tad too hard, the dish gloves Olivia had given me for Christmas—the whimsical ones with the long red fingernails and the huge fake diamond painted on—filling with water when I dipped them too far into the bubbles.
“Well, we all knew it, Tilley. But I never thought he’d dothisto her.”
Deep down we’d both known this was exactly how this would end. But we were ladies, so we hadn’t said so.
Even in my anger at Thad, my hurt for my daughter, and my physical discomfort at having wet, soapy water sloshing around inside my gloves, I paused to be grateful. My sister was here tonight. She was herself. She was in this world, with me, where she belonged. I couldn’t count the numberof people who said I should put her somewhere where “they could take care of her.” How could they even say such a thing? Who could take care of her better than I could?
I prayed every day—every single day—that she’d pass on one day before I did. I couldn’t bear the thought of her being without me. Who would take care of her then? I didn’t want Amelia and Robby to feel burdened. And, really, after everything she had meant to me, everything she had done for me, it was the least I could do. I prayed for other things, too, but that one was the most persistent.
“Well, I blame Mason,” Tilley said, interrupting my thoughts.
