The Southern Side of Paradise

by Kristy Woodson Harvey

  “We’ll know tomorrow,” Caroline said. “And once we know what we’re fighting, we can win.”

  That was the difference between us. As long as I didn’t know what I was fighting, I could pretend it didn’t exist. Once we named it, I had to admit that it was happening. That was the part I liked the very least. Denial had always been my best friend. Honest to God, there was a part of me that still expected my dad to show up one day. They’d never found his body or his personal effects, like so many of the victims of the 9/11 tragedies. So in my mind, that meant that maybe he wasn’t really dead. Maybe he had been in a coma for sixteen long-lost years, unidentifiable, and now he had made a miraculous recovery and would come walking through the front door one day like nothing had happened at all.

  I heard a truck pulling into the gravel driveway, and Mom groaned. “What on earth are we going to do with all of Grammy’s stuff?”

  Seeing the havoc that had been wreaked when her own mother had left Mom the house in Peachtree Bluff, Grammy had made precise, painstaking notes about who would be receiving each of her possessions—down to the contents of her fridge. Just as Grammy would have wanted it, the reading of her will had been an absolute riot.

  We had all gone to the lawyer’s office, weepy and dejected and—around the time he said, “Contents of my bathroom medicine cabinet I bequeath to my son Scott,” and John piped up, “Are you kidding me? I wanted all those half-empty milk of magnesia bottles”—things had gotten pretty funny. I had seen the way death and dividing up possessions tore families apart. Mom and her brothers were lucky it hadn’t happened to them—at least, not yet.

  Our dad had died unexpectedly, of course, and I had always wondered if his affairs were in order when he went. He had always told my sisters and me that we would be taken care of, that he was leaving us a big enough nest egg that we would never have to worry. Honestly, it was one of the things that allowed me to be so brave, to take a chance on my acting. I knew I had something to fall back on.

  “I’ll go down and help unload,” I said.

  Before I could stand up, Mom and Caroline both shouted, “No!”

  I rolled my eyes. “I feel wonderful today. I even went for a run this morning. Quit treating me like a patient.” That wasn’t totally true. It was more like a slow walk around the block, but I had kept up the running charade so Mom wouldn’t get suspicious. Even Mark was in on it.

  “You will rest and take care of yourself until tomorrow, when we know what this is,” Mom said.

  “Fine,” I groaned. But I was secretly pleased. I hated manual labor, so I’d ride this illness out for another day.

  Third children aren’t made to be supervisors. They are made to be told what to do by their big sisters. Or I guess big brothers, maybe, but I can’t really speak to that. So I didn’t even try to stand out in the backyard by the truck. I went out to the front porch. Alone. Where I had plenty of space and time and quiet to think about all the things I didn’t want to think about. Like the fact that I had to go to the doctor tomorrow and what that could mean. And the fact that Grammy’s stuff coming back from Florida meant that she was really gone. And that I was getting married in a matter of weeks. And that I had to make some pretty big decisions between now and then.

  Before I could ruminate too much, I heard the door open and Uncle Scott’s voice saying, “I’m free!”

  “Already? No way Mom let you out of her clutches that easily.”

  “It’s amazing how when you aren’t doing everything exactly how she wants it, you get finished much more quickly. She got some of her guys from the store to meet her at the rental storage place.” He paused and handed me something. “Besides, I found something I thought my favorite niece would like.”

  I gasped. “I knew I was your favorite!”

  We both laughed as I turned over the tarnished picture frame in my hand. It was a cheap birthday gift I had given Grammy during my first year in LA, when the only things that kept me from starving were big tips and a generous sister. Inside it was a picture of me in a Jaguar convertible, which, let’s face it, was kind of an old-lady car but was perfect for feeling the LA sun on your face and letting it streak your long blond hair.

  In our family, we didn’t get cars when we were sixteen. We got cars when we got accepted to college. Well, Sloane did. Caroline refused to drive, and I refused to go to college. I don’t know how I thought I was going to get to California with no car, but I trusted that the universe had laid this path out in front of me and that it would produce a way for me to get there. And produce it did.

  Mom had been absolutely livid when Grammy gave me her car. That was actually the maddest I’d ever seen Mom be at Grammy—and she hadn’t let us come live with her after Dad died, so that’s really saying something. I think she honestly thought that if I couldn’t get to California, I couldn’t leave Peachtree. Then she’d have more time to talk me into the life she wanted for me.

  I had overheard them arguing later about it. Mom had said, “I don’t want her there. I don’t want her jaded or corrupted or hurt. Can’t you see that?”

  Grammy had simply responded, “We all get hurt, darling. May as well get it over with, if you ask me.” Then she paused. “And who knows? Maybe she’ll be a star.”

  “Oh, I have no doubt she’ll be a star,” Mom had said. “That’s exactly what I’m worried about.”

  She had never said anything like that to me, and although my mom never knew I’d overheard that conversation, it was actually that very statement that kept me going through many a long, painful casting call and rejection after rejection after rejection.

  “She was a crazy old bird, wasn’t she?” I said now to my uncle, returning to the present.

  Scott nodded. “When I remember her now, it’s always with her Virginia Slims in her two-piece, flirting with the waiters at the club pool,” Scott said. “And thank God. I was so afraid I’d only remember her dying.”

  I smiled, because I had been afraid of that, too. “She was so proud of you, you know.”

  My stomach tightened when I said it. Had she been proud of me? In the end, I mean? Had I been what she needed when times got tough, when the chips were down, when push came to shove? I’d like to think so. I’d never know for sure, of course. And I’d never forget. I’d never get over what had transpired during her last days.

  Scott shook his head. “I don’t know if I believe in heaven and eternal knowledge and all that, but if it exists and she gets there, she might not be too proud when she realizes what I really did.”

  “You saved Adam. What more could she want from you?”

  Scott shook his head.

  I was confused. “Am I wrong? Did you not rescue Adam?”

  “Maybe. But at what cost?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Scott put his head in his hands. “I have to get something off my chest, Emerson,” he said. “It has been eating me alive.”

  I knew what that felt like. I had bite marks, too.

  I could see his eyes welling as he sucked his breath through his teeth. “I got a kid killed over there,” he said. “I saved Adam, but I killed a kid.”

  I felt my eyes widen, but I was trying not to react too strongly. I didn’t want to make him feel worse. “What do you mean?” I whispered.

  “The man in the video? The one who fell? He wasn’t a man. He was just a seventeen-year-old kid.”

  I cringed as I remembered that day, sitting in Caroline’s beautiful, serene house in the Hamptons when I got the text from Kyle. He sent me a harrowing YouTube video of leaked drone footage. Logic told me that if the footage was current and it was legit, one of the men in that video was my brother-in-law. And I was going to have to be the one to show it to my sister.

  “So what did that have to do with you?”

  “He was the one who told me where Adam was. He was the one who helped him escape.”

  I gasped and put my hand to my mouth. “How did he know?”

  S
cott bit his lip. “He was one of the insurgent’s sons. I appealed to him, made him feel guilty so that maybe he would tell me where Adam was. But I never thought I would have made him feel guilty enough that he would try to help Adam and his unit escape. I would never have done that.”

  I closed my eyes, knowing how this must weigh on Scott. In some ways, it put what I had done into perspective.

  “I’m sorry, Scott,” I said. “I really am. But it’s not your fault. You didn’t point the gun. You didn’t pull the trigger.”

  I couldn’t imagine a father killing his son, no matter what had happened, and I said so.

  Scott shook his head. “His son had betrayed him in the worst possible way. He was dead to him anyway, I guess.”

  I nodded. “While we’re airing our dirty laundry, I have something that I would love to get off my chest, too.”

  “Hit me with your best shot, kiddo,” Scott said, leaning back in his chair.

  I knew he was expecting something shiny and millennial, a fight with a friend, a social-media scandal. So maybe that was why such vast horror crossed his face when I said what I said.

  “I killed Grammy.”

  End scene.

  THIRTEEN

  ansley: a wonderful surprise

  Maybe I’d picked the fight with Jack. I couldn’t really be sure. I mean, I was as on edge as I had ever been. We had Emerson’s doctor’s appointment, and, Caroline’s surprise aside, any fool could see that coming back to Manhattan was beyond painful for me. I don’t know why I had tried to dump this on top of everything else we had going on.

  As we sat quietly in the back of the cab after having dropped the rest of the family off at Caroline’s, I said, unable to let it go, “I still think it would be the perfect time.”

  I looked out the window, admiring the Fifth Avenue view. This had been my world. This had been my life. My life with Carter. It was impossible to come to Manhattan and not feel an ache for my husband. Because while, yes, things had been complicated, we had had years of unadulterated joy together.

  I looked at Jack. Maybe now, sixteen years later, I was getting a second chance at life. I was ruining it with this fight.

  “I’ve always wanted to stay at the Viceroy,” I said, changing the subject.

  “I’m not ready to tell them,” Jack said. “I’m sorry. I know this is your decision, and this was why you didn’t want to be with me, but I want a little bit of time for them to get to know me, so maybe they won’t cut me out of their lives when they do find out.”

  I took his hand, softening. “I don’t think they’ll cut you out of their lives, Jack.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “And they might already know,” I added.

  “That is vastly different from knowing knowing,” he said.

  The thought made my blood run cold.

  The cab turned down Fifty-Eighth.

  “Sir,” I said, “you’re going the wrong way.”

  “No, no,” he replied in broken English. “Plaza is on corner.”

  “But we’re not—”

  “She’s confused,” Jack said.

  I looked at him, and he winked at me, finally acquiescing. “I’ve wanted to stay with you at the Plaza ever since that night.”

  I smiled, remembering. “That was an amazing night.”

  “What if you hadn’t gotten married that day?”

  I shook my head. “It wouldn’t have happened. I’ve thought about it a lot, but there is nothing you could have said that night that would have made me change my mind about Carter. When I saw you, I knew I still loved you, sure. But I also knew we wanted different things, and as much as I had always loved you, I wouldn’t sacrifice the life I had dreamed of for so long.”

  “What if I had told you I wanted to have children?”

  “I would have known you were lying.”

  I looked to my left, and there it was, the Manhattan icon, the home of Eloise, the place where I’d spent the night before my wedding, where I had taken my girls for birthday slumber parties when they were small. I had never felt like a New Yorker. Not really. So it surprised me when I got the slightest pang for my old life. We had had so many good times in this city; I had grown and changed so much here, had all of my children here. It was good to be back.

  As Jack paid for the cab and got out our suitcases, I walked over and kissed him gently.

  “You’re right. This isn’t the right time to tell them,” I said, closing the wound from earlier. “But do you understand now why I never told them before?”

  He nodded. He dropped the suitcases, and there we were, like we had been all those years ago, locked in an embrace in front of one of the world’s most famous hotels. As we crowded into our bay of that revolving door with the double Ps and entered the gilded lobby of the Plaza with its palm trees and beautiful sofas, I paused and kissed him again.

  “This was a wonderful surprise,” I said.

  He rested his forehead on mine and said, “I know you have a lot of memories in this city, some good, some bad. I was hoping that maybe we could make a new one this weekend, a really good one.”

  All I could hope was that Jack’s best attempts at a happy memory weren’t thwarted by the results of Emerson’s doctor appointment. There was no fancy hotel, no kiss, no memory, that could be strong enough, better enough, to heal the utter agony of my child being sick.

  FOURTEEN

  emerson: any excuse to eat a cheeseburger

  I’m the only one in this family who has ever been able to keep a secret. My sisters and my mom think they can. But the thing about being the littlest sister is you learn at an early age that if you ever want to know anything, you have to sneak around to learn it.

  Maybe that was why Grammy chose me to carry out her final wishes. Maybe she saw something in me the others didn’t; maybe she was the only one who didn’t see me as the baby, who didn’t underestimate me.

  In retrospect, it was the right choice. Caroline is outwardly the toughest, but that toughness works against her, in that sometimes she fights too long; sometimes she doesn’t know when to leave well enough alone. Sloane is the sweetest. She has a quiet strength about her that allows her to persevere. She also has the strongest faith, which is terrific. But not for what Grammy needed.

  Mom had been through enough, quite frankly.

  Plus, they weren’t who she chose. Grammy chose me.

  We had all been out in the yard that day a few months earlier—Caroline, Sloane, Mom, and me. I was on the porch, telling Grammy a story about the worst first date I ever had in LA, about how this man was offensive and borderline sexist in every sense of the word. Determined to maintain my power and stand up for the good of the sisterhood, I had chewed him out and thrown the rest of my martini in his face. To be fair, it was only like two sips, so it wasn’t that big a deal. But still, I marched out of the restaurant with a dramatic flourish. I even woke up the next morning feeling proud and vindicated—until I walked into an audition. And found out the director was my date from the night before.

  “Oh, no!” Grammy said, laughing. “So you didn’t get the part?”

  I laughed then, too. “Oh, no. I got the part. In fact, I didn’t even have to audition.”

  “What?”

  I nodded. “As it turned out, the director had already told them about his lunatic date from the night before. And since the part was a crazy ex-girlfriend, they all knew I would be perfect for it.”

  That was when Grammy had lowered the boom. She had been fighting breast cancer, secretly, for more than a year. The treatments weren’t working. The cancer had spread. She was going to stay on hormonal therapies and treatments as long as they worked, but when they quit, she would be ready to live out her final days in peace, however she pleased, not chained to a bag of chemo.

  When the tears had subsided, when we had all agreed to Grammy’s wishes to be happy and carefree and alive for as long as she could and, to that end, were all getting ready for lunch to
gether, I walked into Grammy’s room to see if she needed help.

  She was sitting in a chair in the corner, looking at something in her hand. When I walked in, she smiled up at me. “Just the girl I wanted to see.”

  “Oh, yeah?” We all knew that Caroline was Grammy’s favorite.

  She put her hand in my hand, and I felt something in my palm.

  When I opened it, there were several small pills in it.

  “What is this?”

  She cleared her throat and said a word I had never heard but would roll around in my head forever after: “Secobarbital.” When no words escaped my suddenly dry mouth, she added, “I couldn’t tell them all yet, but I’m going to be honest with you. The doctors have done all they can do to treat the metastasis to my brain. It’s going to get ugly soon. And I’m afraid I won’t be aware enough to make the decision.”

  I could feel myself going pale. “Grammy,” I started, “what’s—”

  But she cut me off. “Darling,” she said, “all I’m asking is that when I ask for these, you give them to me.” She cleared her throat. “And if I can’t ask for them, that means I’m asking for them.”

  I shook my head, feeling my heart race. “Grammy, I can’t.”

  She cocked her head to the side. “Really? Because I think you can.”

  The way she looked at me was what convinced me. Because I knew she saw something in me that no one else did, that she believed in me in a way no one else ever had. But I still resisted. “What about Caroline? Or Mom?”

  She shook her head and smiled. “Under all that pretty, you, my dear, have a spine of steel. I think we both know it has to be you.”

  “Where did you even get them?” I whispered, awed and suddenly paranoid.

  She raised her eyebrow. “Do you really want to know?”

  I looked at her warily.

  “Mark,” she whispered back.

  I almost asked a follow-up question, but there was nothing to ask. Mark’s father was a surgeon. A great surgeon. A revered one. He had access to anything he wanted. And it warmed my heart to think that Mark and his father would do this for my grandmother, that they would take this chance.