DAISYReturn Address
I will never be the woman who runs away, I reminded myself as I took my third sip of rosé and set the glass back down on the granite countertop at the breakfast bar in my small kitchen. In my list of life rules, that one could have been bolded, in red, right at the top. Because I knew what running away did to people. I knew what it had done to me.
I don’t drink on weeknights—a rule I was patently ignoring right now, on a Tuesday—was on there too, but it was more of a normal-text, black-font, way-down-the-list kind of rule that I could bend at my discretion, likeno crop topsandred lipstick washes you out.
“I am not running away,” I said, out loud, to no one. I looked down at my hands, which were still visibly shaking, and felt the weariness way deep down in my bones, the kind of tired that only happens when a good, long cry exhausts you in a way you think you’ll never recover from. Maybe I neverwouldrecover. Or, at least, I knew I’d never be the same.
I looked back at the computer screen, and, with a trembling finger, scrolled through the listings of open nursing positions. Here, in Charlotte, North Carolina, I had been a neonatal intensive care nurse formore than a decade. I had just been promoted at the Level 1 trauma center where I was working. The work was hard—and sometimes devastating—but rewarding. I loved my friends and fellow nurses. I had yet to have one single affair with a married doctor. My nose was clean, my head was down, and I was getting somewhere.
But after the last three days of experiencing the side of a Level 1 trauma center that wasn’t so rewarding, I wondered if what I thought I wanted was actually what I wanted after all. I had imagined myself bustling through the NICU, saving lives, making hard decisions. And, for ten years, I had. Every day—and more nights than I could count—I had risen to the challenge, I had taken care of the sickest of sick babies and, quite often, their parents too. But, over the past few days, I had hit a wall. Right now, everything inside my soul wanted sleepy, wanted easy. Could I take the pain of what I had just experienced ever again?
My finger stopped. I gasped when I saw it.Cape Carolina Regional Medical Center.This was like the flicker of a firefly, a shooting star, a job listing rare and fleeting, and so very special. A listing in the sleepy seaside town that I had so loved as a girl. It was owned by the same parent company as my hospital in Charlotte, so, in theory, were I to get the job, the transfer would be easy. I took a fortifying sip of rosé. I filled out the application, closed my eyes, and hit send.
Thiswas why I shouldn’t drink during the week. I couldn’t just upend my entire life.
I probably won’t get the job, I thought. But even then, something inside me whispered that I probably would. With my experience in the NICU, where places like Cape Carolina Regional transported their sick, preemie, and high-risk infants, I would be a shoo-in, way overqualified for this intermediate-level nursery job. I would be taking a pay cut. But, compared to what I faced on a daily basis now, this position would be sleepy, calm.
I looked around the apartment I had been renting for almost two years. I had yet to hang a single picture on the wall. Deep down, did I always suspect this situation would be temporary? Or was I just this burnt out?
A glimpse of a tiny face ran through my mind, and my breath caught. Yeah. If I got the job, I would probably take it. I needed a break. I mean, I also needed health insurance and a 401(k), so it wasn’t like I could escape to the islands.
Cape Carolina. My heart raced, and I scolded myself, because I knew why. I knew it was remembering a person Ineverlet myself think about, someone I pushed away at all costs, someone I didn’t even know for sure was still there.
I sat up straighter and cleared my throat, trying to imagine starting over, wondering if I would actually go through with it. I thought of the postcard in the box underneath my bed, the Cape Carolina return address from all those years ago, the address that might not even be valid anymore.
But it could be.
It was possible. And the mere idea made me consider something I’d never thought of before: It isn’t running away if you’re runningtosomething.
Or someone.
TILLEYA Feeling
Growing up, Tilley believed that Dogwood would always keep her safe. She had been brought home from the hospital to this stretch of land, the peninsula surrounded by the sea on one side, the Intracoastal Waterway on the other, with marsh in the middle, laid to sleep her first night in the same crib, in the same nursery as her father, her grandfather, and great-grandfather. Her family took pride in maintaining the sanctity of their “homeplace,” a word she and her sister Elizabeth once found terribly old-fashioned and even a little embarrassing. They were children of the ’60s, teenagers of the ’70s. There wasnothingold-fashioned about them back then.
Except, well, the fact that neither of them could bear to leave the acres on which they grew up, the sprawling historic home with the screened doors that creaked and slammed with summer freedom, the widow’s walk that had views all the way to the Cape Lookout lighthouse and, during the sunrise, seemed to reach all the way to heaven. She used to imagine herself as one of the barnacles on the pilings of the dock, the ones that grew coarse and that her daddy and uncles tried to pry off with shovels to attract the sheepshead while fishing.
Her sister Elizabeth married a farmer who wanted to stay right there on that land. But Robert, the man that Tilley loved, had loved since high school, had his own family land, his own vast acreage of cotton that ran as deep and thick in his veins as the saltwater outside Tilley’s door, the oysters she could harvest from her own shoreline.
Sometimes, in moments like now, all these years later when Tilley, nearly sixty years old and still inhabiting the east wing of Dogwood, haunting it like a ghost even though she was very much alive, she wonders if Robert’s death was her fault. Not in a physical way, of course. No, Tilley did not have the power to stop a cotton baler. But in a metaphysical way, did the wild incantations of her heart, the powerful wantings of things that marriage to him could never give her, kill him?
Sipping her tea, looking out over this same stretch of marsh she had seen her entire life, the sunrise growing orange and then pink and then, all at once, bursting into a sky of blue, Tilley whispered good morning to the love she lost. Tilley sat in the same family pew of the Episcopal church down the road every single Sunday morning. As such, she didnotbelieve in past lives or reincarnation. Even still, there was this certain egret that stood every morning, watchful and waiting, staring at her as she, as it felt sometimes, called the morning into being. She would never say it out loud. No. Everyone would only believe it to be another of her nonsensical musings. A spell. A delusion.Poor crazy Tilley believes the man who has been dead for decades is abird.
Shewasdelusional sometimes. She was well aware of that. She was finally, after all these years, trying to take control of that, to stay in the here and now. But as she stared down at that regal and elegant bird, as he lifted one leg and peered at her, his feathers fluttering inthe soft breeze, his long beak pointing up toward the balcony where she stood, she could swear, as she did every morning, that it was him. Her Robert.
Her three-year-old twin great-nephew and -niece, George and Greer, whom she lived with, raced out onto her balcony, calling, “Aunt Tilley! Aunt Tilley!” The brightness of the two of them was transforming her, little by little. She held out her arms and kissed two sandy-blond heads as she embraced them.
Her niece, Amelia, George and Greer’s mother, appeared on the balcony too. “Guys, let’s let Aunt Tilley have a little peace and quiet to start her day, please.”
Tilley shook her head. “No, no. I don’t need peace and quiet.”
She looked back toward the bird. He was gone. Her past had flown away; her present had sprinted in. Maybe this was the way it should be. “Can you take us to school, Aunt Tilley?” George asked, peering up at her.
“Please! Please!” Greer interjected, her tutu bouncing as she jumped up and down.
She took one of their hands in each of hers. “I can’t think of anything I’d like so much.”
The affection and attention of children was earned, and it flattered Tilley that George and Greer wanted to be with her.
