“Is that your nice way of saying that we’re baggage?”
“We are, aren’t we?”
“Maybe you are,” I said under my breath.
It was a perfect eighty-three degrees, the sun was shining, the birds were chirping, newborn foals were roaming Starlite Island, and I was in such a foul mood I couldn’t enjoy any of it. The logical, adult part of me knew that it was stupid to feel like Sloane and Caroline had gotten a replacement father while mine was still dead. But the silly, childish part of me felt like I was an outsider in the real family that Mom, Jack, Sloane, and Caroline had found. Like I was a goose being raised by a family of swans.
When I’d said that to Mark, he had said, “Em, trust me. If anyone’s the swan, it’s you.” It was the perfect thing to say. I was lucky I was marrying him, despite the fact that his mother refused to leave the living room because the humidity outside “absolutely ruined” her hair. People would kill to spend one day in a place like Peachtree Bluff, and she and her martini wouldn’t get off the damn couch.
The day before, I had tried to talk to her, had tried to have a civil moment in time with her, make some small talk. In the midst of my telling her all the details about the cast of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, she had looked at me, as if we had been talking about it the entire time, and said, “Are you pregnant?”
I’m sure I looked at her like she was insane, because she was insane. “Um, no. Definitely not.”
“Oh, OK,” she said, the feathers on today’s pale-pink caftan blowing as she whisked her arm like c’est la vie.
“Why?” I asked.
“I suppose I assumed that’s why you and Mark were getting married.”
Fortunately, Mark came in to intervene. “Mom, you should get out of the house today. Go take a walk. Call a friend for lunch. Anything.”
She gave him a death stare. “I am absolutely exhausted from my trip. I’ll do no such thing.”
“A little fresh air might make you feel better,” I chimed in.
She looked at me with daggers in her eyes and said, “Is that why you insist on going back to LA? For the fresh air?”
At that point, I stood up, saluted to Mark, and mouthed, I’m out. Godspeed.
Just thinking about it now irritated me all over again, making me even more unpleasant on my walk with Caroline.
She broke me out of my thoughts, saying, “We’re still sisters, Em. We’re still family. Nothing has changed between us.”
“Maybe not for you,” I practically spat.
“We have got to get you acting again,” she said. “Give you somewhere to channel all this energy.”
I stopped and crossed my arms. Caroline walked a few more paces before she even noticed. Then she turned and crossed her arms back at me.
“What? I’m not being a bitch. You need your creative outlet. It’s not a bad thing. It’s just reality.”
“First,” I said, not caring about all the tourists walking down the street, whispering and pointing. They knew who I was, so I definitely should have been behaving better. But sometimes I get to this point where I don’t care, and I can’t control it. “You are always being a bitch, so that’s not true. And second, you have been so incredibly insensitive to me about this whole thing. You sit up there on your high horse with your perfect self and your perfect life and look down and judge us all and deem our little problems insignificant. My problems are real, and they are significant.”
I stormed off, and after a few minutes, I finally got the nerve to turn around. Caroline wasn’t following me. Instead, she was continuing to walk ahead without me. Sisters are important to Caroline, but steps are more important. My anger at her was already burning off. It had been a stupid thing to say. Her life was far from perfect.
But it probably was true that she couldn’t understand what I was feeling right now. I had always been the little sister, always been the one who wasn’t big enough, wasn’t old enough. The one who didn’t understand the inside jokes and was left out of the talks about boys. And now I was left out in the worst possible way.
By the time I got home, I had cooled down. I had talked myself down off the ledge. I saw AJ and Taylor out on the dock, in their tiny life jackets, fishing. They were both blond from all the sun and so tan. If anything could make me feel better, it was those two.
“What you doing, dudes?” I asked.
Taylor was scooping minnows with a tiny net and putting them into a bucket. Poor minnows.
“Just fishin’,” AJ said. He looked up at me, and I realized he had his goggles on. I made my most serious face to keep from laughing. “Aunt Emmy,” he said, as I sat down on the dock, cross-legged. “Do fish love one another?”
I smiled. Taylor was looking at me now, too, rapt with attention.
“Well, sure,” I said. “Why do you ask?”
He shrugged.
“Do you love someone?” I asked, putting the pieces together.
Taylor threw his arms around my neck and said, “I love you!” giving me a slobbery kiss right on the lips. I pulled him into my lap and wrapped my arms around him, resting my head on his. He was so adorable.
“I love Caitlyn in my class,” AJ said.
I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing. “Why do you love her?”
He cast his line again, thinking, and said, “I love her because she always runs as fast as she can.”
“That is a great reason, bud,” a deep voice from underneath me said.
“Oh, my gosh!” I gasped. “Adam, you scared me to death.”
I looked down and saw that he was sitting in the kayak, almost under the dock because the tide was so low. “I wondered why the boys were out here alone.”
“Oh, you know,” he said, “they’re two and four now, so we just slap a life jacket on them and let them have at it.”
We both laughed.
I fished with the boys for a little longer and then walked straight to the guesthouse to avoid seeing Mom. But as I turned down the street, I saw someone even worse walking toward me: Jack. I had been avoiding him, too, because heaven knew he wasn’t going to know what to say to me. I thought about turning around, but after a few seconds of rationality, it seemed immature.
I waved and kept looking straight ahead as I passed him.
“Emerson,” he said softly.
I had to stop, didn’t I?
“I just can’t,” I said.
He nodded. “I understand. You don’t have to do anything. I don’t want anything from you.”
Well, that sounded nice. Everyone always wanted something from me: to put in a good word with my agent, to critique their audition tape, to appear at their fund-raiser, to endorse their product. The only people who never really wanted anything from me were my sisters and my mom. They let me be myself, and they loved me anyway. And I was shutting them out and acting like an infant because of some perceived slight that, really, none of them could help. I bit my lip to keep from crying. Not because I was sad but because, suddenly, I was all filled up. I wasn’t half of Caroline or Sloane’s sister. I wasn’t less of Mom’s child. I wasn’t less a part of my own family.
Jack said, “Well, maybe you could come find me when you are ready?”
He was walking away when I said, “Say what you need to say, Jack.”
He turned and smiled at me. “Oh, God. I didn’t expect that. I have nothing prepared.”
I couldn’t help but half-smile.
He put his hands in his pockets, jangling his change nervously. “I guess I just need you to know that I wanted to be in their lives, Emerson. I wanted to know my daughters.”
If this was supposed to make me feel better, it didn’t. It was only accentuating the fact that they were his daughters. I was not.
“I approached your mom one day on Starlite Island, when you and your sisters were little. I had planned it all out. But that day, when I approached your mom, I saw you. And I realized that by being a part of their lives, I would mess up yours.”
&
nbsp; I bit my lip. It was hard to explain how I felt, how this was such a slap in the face, like I was on the outside looking in. I wanted Jack to understand that, but for once, I found myself at a total loss for words.
Jack put his hand on my arm. “This is an impossible situation for me, Em. I don’t know how to act or what to do. I know it’s too much too soon, but I love you just as much as your sisters, Emerson. In my heart, you have always been a little bit mine because you are your mother’s. And in my heart, she has always been all mine. That’s how I’ve always seen it.”
It seemed ridiculous when he said it, but to stand there and look at his face, to see in his eyes how fervently he meant what he said, changed something in me that day. I didn’t just see Jack, the man in the yard, the one who was marrying my mom. I saw the Jack from thirty-five years ago, the one who sacrificed the most important part of himself for the woman he loved, even though he would never get anything in return.
I’ve always known in my heart that what makes me a good actress is my empathy, my ability to feel other people’s pain and to internalize it. I didn’t want to feel Jack’s pain right now. I couldn’t, and yet I couldn’t not. His whole life had been defined by this one big loss. But we both knew that Ansley Murphy chose her daughters over all else. If I didn’t get on board, he was in danger of losing everything he almost had all over again. He knew it, I knew it, the trees rustling in the yard knew it. And I had borne enough burdens this summer. I had taken responsibility for one huge thing I could never take back. Was I willing to do that again?
Jack cleared his throat. “I will never be your father. Carter is your father. Carter is Caroline and Sloane’s father. I’m just the guy marrying your mom. If you want me to be more, I can. If you don’t, I won’t.”
I nodded. I knew in that moment that I would always, in some ways, feel like a stranger in my own family now that I knew the truth. But this was the hand I had been dealt, and I had to choose how to play it. Did I want to be the one responsible for taking happiness away from Jack, for denying my mother the future that she so desperately wanted, even knowing that neither of them would ever do the same to me?
I cleared my throat and swallowed my tears, making a decision. It was one I knew I would have to continue to make over and over again, every day, until it really felt like it stuck. “Jack,” I said quietly. I looked up at him, that face so full of anticipation and worry. I could almost feel how badly he wanted to please me, to make something right that never could be.
“Yes?” he replied.
“Do you think you could walk me down the aisle?”
He put his hand over his heart, and I could see his eyes pooling with tears as he said, “Emerson, it would be the thrill of my lifetime.”
I hugged him, and he hugged me back, and I felt his worry dissipate. I felt him relax in the knowledge that he was going to get this second chance after all. I had granted him that. I had given him life when I didn’t have to. And I wondered if maybe that would be enough to atone for the death I had caused not twenty feet from the spot where we were standing.
I wondered if when Caroline and Sloane were close to him, Jack smelled like their father, if his scent, that of coffee and Brooks Brothers aftershave, made them feel some certain way, like they shared DNA, like he was half the reason they were on the earth. When I pulled away and saw how he was looking at me, like I was all he had ever wanted in all the world, I wondered if maybe it was possible that one day, Jack would smell like my father, too.
* * *
IN SOME WAYS, IT wasn’t the perfect time for the dresses to arrive. In other ways, it was the absolute perfect time. Sloane and Caroline were waiting for me in the guesthouse when I’d finished talking to Jack, wearing their beautiful couture gowns, standing at full attention on either side of the bed, holding pale-blue hydrangeas cut from Jack’s yard that matched the dresses perfectly. They were the same blue hydrangeas from the same bush that Mr. Solomon, Mom’s former neighbor, had left for her on the back porch as a peace offering.
In some ways, they were a peace offering now, too.
I smiled when I saw them. I knew they were trying to cheer me up. I put my hand on my heart. “You two look absolutely beautiful.”
That wasn’t exactly true. Sloane had no makeup on, and Caroline’s hair was in this slouchy, messy bun she wore when she hadn’t had time to do her hair yet that day. And they were both barefoot, not exactly ready to walk down the aisle. But the dresses were exquisite. They were the perfect shade of pale blue, with the tiniest hint of aqua that would mimic the water without making the whole effect go green.
“Try yours on!” Sloane said enthusiastically. She pointed to my closet, where the gown was hanging in a garment bag. It felt really, really wrong to try on my wedding gown without my mom. But then again, I remembered, I was mad at my mom. Why wait?
Plus, Caroline had already made the decision and started unzipping the garment bag.
“Be careful,” Sloane said. “Don’t snag the lace.”
Mom’s dress was hanging conspicuously beside mine. I wanted to see it, but I also wasn’t quite ready to part with my anger.
My sisters helped me step into the gown. Sloane zipped me up, and we all stood back from the mirror and admired it. It was made completely of lace and fit my body perfectly. It flowed out starting at about my knees so that I could walk, and it had a small train—which was impractical for a beach wedding, I had to admit. But I didn’t care. This was my one wedding, and I wanted a train.
I heard a gasp from behind me, and I turned to see my mom staring at me, her hand over her mouth. When I saw the tears in her eyes, my own started flowing silently down my cheeks like they hadn’t since I was a child. She walked toward me and, cautiously, took my hands in hers like Mark would do in just a few weeks.
“I recognize this,” she whispered.
“You should,” I said, not bothering to wipe my eyes. “It’s yours.”
Mom’s wedding gown had been simple and beautiful but too full for my tastes. Caroline, Sloane, and I had agreed that Mom wouldn’t mind if I had her dress remade. It would make her happy that one of her girls wore it, and knowing what I knew now, it actually made the most sense that I would be the one, since she had worn it in her wedding to my father.
“I hope it’s OK that I had it remade,” I said.
She smiled. “It’s perfect, Emerson. You look beautiful.” She took a deep breath and said, “I know you’re upset, and I understand why. I honestly, truly do.”
“Mom, it’s fine,” I said. “Let’s please not do this in front of the dress.”
She rolled her eyes and kept talking. “I’m not saying I made the right decision or that I did the right thing. But one day, you might feel like you’re backed into a corner and that no decision is the right one, that you just have to do the best you can. And on that day, maybe you’ll think of me. And maybe you’ll try to understand why I did what I did.”
I saw Caroline and Sloane exchange a glance in the mirror.
It was like Grammy came to me in that moment. I was back in her bedroom with her that day when she asked me to do the unthinkable. My heart was racing, sweat gathering on my brow. Because I didn’t want to have any part in my grandmother’s death. But if I didn’t have a part in her death, wasn’t I playing a role in her suffering? And wasn’t that worse? I knew what Mom meant. I knew what it felt like for your back to be up against the wall, because mine certainly had been that day. I hadn’t had any good options. So I chose as best I could and hoped against hope that if there were a God, he would understand, that he wouldn’t punish me for choosing my grandmother’s comfort, her desire to leave a world that held nothing else for her but pain.
Mom took me away from my thoughts as she continued. “I swear with everything in me, I did it out of love. I didn’t even know or have any of you yet, and I already loved you more than anything else in the world. I loved you so much that I was willing to risk everything I had—my marriage, my family
, my life, and my world as I knew it—to get you.”
“I just want to point out,” Caroline interrupted, “that Emerson gets this sweet, mushy talk, and I was snarkily asked what the world would revolve around if I weren’t here.”
I couldn’t help but smile, and Mom smiled back at me.
“I asked Jack to walk me down the aisle,” I said. It wasn’t forgiving her, exactly. But it was a start.
“I know,” Mom said, tears in her eyes again. “I don’t think anything has ever meant more to anyone.”
I finally dropped her hands. “Well, do you want to see your dress?”
When Caroline unzipped the garment bag, Mom gasped for the second time in only a few minutes. She ran one finger along the lace. “How did you do this?” she whispered.
“It was all Ramon’s idea. I took him Grammy’s wedding dress, and he said he couldn’t make the aged lace white again but that he could dye it and use the best pieces to make your dress. So my lace is old, my dress is new, the family veil is my something borrowed, and you’re my something blue,” I said.
Mom was crying in earnest now. “Sloane, get me a tissue. I don’t want to get makeup on Grammy’s dress.”
She slipped it on. She looked perfect. Elegant, beautiful. She looked like the mother of the bride. My mother. The one who hadn’t always been honest with me, who hadn’t always told the truth, but who had loved us before she even knew us. I thought of Grammy again, of how she told me that her biggest regret was the time she’d spent fighting with Mom. “Life is too short to fight with family,” she’d said. “Because no matter what happens between you, you will always come back to one another; like the tide returns to the shore. It is the same blood running through your veins. You were chosen to be together.”
She didn’t know yet that this was going to happen. Or, I had to think, maybe she did know. And maybe that was why this was one of the last pearls of wisdom that she gave me as she got closer to the end. “I’m not the kind of woman to have regrets,” she had said, “but I have the gift of perspective. Life is so short, Emerson. It’s so very short. Don’t waste any of it fretting over things you can’t change.”
The Southern Side of Paradise Page 18