Ashton had brought everything back to its former glory. The French windows, the library with mahogany woodwork with top to bottom judge’s paneling. The heart pine and cherry wood inlay parquet floors, the windows—which didn’t look remade at all, of course, but as if they had been there forever.
There were two parlors, one a drawing room with Chippendale settees, where men once drank cognac and smoked cigars, the other where the ladies would “retire” after a formal dinner or sip iced tea and catch up with gossip. The house still retained the air of bygone days, with its Queen Anne wingback chairs, needlepoint and tapestry footstools, and silver tea sets displayed on mahogany or cherry wood sideboards and eighteenth-century cabinets. It was almost as if you could hear their chatter in the walls, the hazy, heated summer days. Ladies with fans sipping long, cool glasses of iced lemonade. I couldn’t help but feel this place would always haunt me—it wasn’t me; I would never fit in, never feel at home here, no matter what I did. Distant Sands. Its name spoke volumes to me. Distant. So true.
Distant Sands maintained its classic, Deep-South antebellum design, with wide wood plantation shutters and upper and lower front porches. The back porch overlooked shaded green wooded land, and the front of the mansion faced the water and a live oak tree of such magnitude—at least eighty feet high—that people would come and visit it in awe. The tree was older than the house itself, and the most beautiful, majestic thing I had ever seen. Draped in swathes of gorgeous Spanish moss, it seemed like some elegant grand dame in her finest clothes, or a wild Medusa standing proud, guarding Distant Sands—her very own Greek Revival mansion—garlanded and festooned with streamers in her leafy hair.
The minute I arrived, Distant Island gave me a feeling that I was on a remote, going-back-in-time, Carolina sea island. I felt a little isolated.
The mansion is perched on just a little bit of a slope. The façade of the house faces a lagoon surrounded by a meandering web of creeks and inlets teeming with oystercatchers and winding salt rivers and coastal marshland buffering the land from the great Atlantic. Distant Island, on Lady’s Island, neighbors hundreds of other sea islands, most of the inhabited ones connected by a bridge. Bays, rivers and sounds meander their way around them, like arteries flowing between the Intracoastal Waterway and the Atlantic Ocean.
When the tide is low the salty marsh exposes itself with all its secrets and God’s little inhabitants amidst the wild sea grass shimmering in the breeze: the marsh birds, blue herons and egrets, crabs and crayfish, and silver oysters wedged in the sand.
And when the tide is high you can dangle your legs in the water, perched on the house’s private deep-water dock that stretches wide across the marshy creek. You can watch pelicans dive-bombing for fish and sometimes spot bottlenose dolphins flitting across its smooth waters, pewter at dawn, and copper at sunset. Of course, there can be riptides that sneak into these waters and wild storms sometimes, even hurricanes, although, so far, I hadn’t experienced any crazy weather. I have made Distant Island sound as if it’s in the middle of nowhere, which isn’t quite true, because it’s only fifteen minutes from Beaufort, a beautiful little town set between Savannah and Charleston. Beaufort’s downtown district was designated as historic by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
Still, even with the town close by, I felt out on a limb.
I couldn’t help sense that I was a visitor. A ship passing in the night. A shooting star exploding into dust. I knew from the outset I’d have to start counting my memories—the good ones—because they’d be fleeting. Call it premonition or sure-fire knowledge, it didn’t matter. My days at Distant Sands were numbered.
I was still trying to acclimatize myself to married life with Ashton. A Yankee as I pretty much considered myself, the South Carolinian ways were new to me: the food, the polite, unsaid rules, the unhurried gaiety and social norms that spoke a new language I hadn’t yet mastered. I’d heard some of their jokes, told with a grin: “Yankees are like hemorrhoids. Pain in the butt when they come down and always a relief when they go back up.”
I longed to fit in, to be accepted. I had yet to find out that cruelty would be wrapped in lace, and that if anyone said “Bless your heart,” you knew that heart was damned.
I often wondered if confidence is something you’re born with or something you acquire. I mean, real gut confidence, not the bravado kind or the fake veneer. I’d certainly had to acquire bucketloads of confidence since I’d been married to Ashton. The way you pick seashells from the shore, I had to collect confidence amidst the grains of sand, make myself sparkle, ease myself into feeling at home in a foreign world. Because the Lowcountry was foreign to me. Everyone was more than welcoming, but I wanted to be the perfect wife, to look as if Ashton and I matched, and that we had been made for each other, belonged together.
But being perfect doesn’t come easy; you have to work at it, and work at it I did. The understated clothing, but always quality brands. Never flashy, never brash, but effortlessly well-turned out. My dark hair long enough to be sexy but always styled and cut so it was neat. Makeup applied with such precision that it looked as if I hardly wore any. A touch of mascara, maybe a dash of brown eyeliner to bring out the blue of my eyes, a dab of rouge or lip gloss. Natural was the byword, the key. Shoes: low heels or pristine sneakers. I favored pearl stud earrings. The only thing that drew attention was my solitaire diamond engagement ring that Ashton had had made especially for me. I tried so hard to be one of them.
I watched my diet, too. Salads and low carbs, no red meat, and rarely dessert. I drove an electric Volvo. Safe, expensive and top-of-the-range, but not ostentatious. I exuded class, or at least that’s what I was aiming for. Ashton may have been a Southern boy at heart, a shrimper’s son and a dab hand at the barbecue, but he was ambitious and a hard worker and had made himself a pillar of the community. It wasn’t that he asked me to do these things or behave in any particular way, like going to the gym or practicing tennis till I could slam a backhand and challenge anyone to a decent game, but I knew it was part and parcel of my marriage, and I had to keep up. This marriage was everything to me. Without parents to call my own I clung to it like a lifeline, and I needed to make it work. And the truth was, Ashton was the only man I had ever loved. The only one I could ever imagine being with.
I didn’t make friends easily but Lindy, the wife of the owner of the Sea Oats Country Club we frequented—where Ashton played golf—had taken me under her wing and we soon became fast friends. Not best friends, though. I needed to keep her curiosity at arm’s length. Trust is not something gained overnight. There were secrets I would always leave unwrapped. Skeletons that could stay right there in their creaky old closets. But Lindy was kind, and kindness is a gift. I knew only too well about life’s blows and switchback bends. Grateful was a word I cherished. I reminded myself every day how grateful I was for my marriage with Ashton and the chance to make things right again.
As well as keeping up with our social life at the country club, I worked long hours at a local foundation, Community Promise. We provided safe, temporary shelter and meals for those in need. Transportation to employment interviews, or medical appointments, or school. It gave women and youngsters a chance in life, to learn skillsets that would offer them jobs, or places at college. Our life skills program provided assistance in securing employment, access to medical care, school placement and, ultimately, help in locating affordable housing. We helped kids who had been abandoned by their parents, steered them away from temptations of drugs or crime. We also offered shelter from family abuse, or to runaway kids who had been molested. Troublemakers who were doing badly at school. Give a troublemaker responsibility and those troubles can melt away. So many kids are just not given a chance. It was a way of giving back, and my job meant the world to me. Our music classes in particular were transformative. With some youngsters it had been like watching the morning break, seeing the sun’s orb rise from a dark horizon, and then shine slowly, brighter and brighter, lighting up the sky, making everything gleam in its wake. Some of these teenagers had made one hundred and eighty degree turns. Nothing gave me more pleasure than being part of their journey, a key element to their healing process. Ashton loved what I did because, being a doctor—a surgeon, no less—mending people (and cutting out the bad parts) was in his DNA.