My dad was stepping down as mayor of Cape Carolina. His sister, the first female mayor, held the position for sixteen years. And their daddy was mayor before that, their granddaddy before that, and so on and so forth. If your last name wasn’t Saxton, you didn’t have much of a prayer in the mayoral race. We joked that people thought great-great-granddaddy Saxton was still mayor. In a world where politics were often dirty and self-interested, I was proud to have a family who stood steadfastly on the side of inclusion and doing what was right.
Daddy’s friends and political colleagues had asked him to run for higher office when he decided to step down. But he wouldn’t hear of it. His life, his obligation, and most of all, his true love—bless his heart—my mom, were in Cape Carolina. He didn’t want to be anywhere else. Even still, Mom and Daddy had driven the almost twelve hours to see me every other month since I’d moved to Palm Beach. They were proud of me. Well, they had been proud of me before this. But pride isn’t as pressing as plain, old-fashioned wanting your daughter home, where you can keep an eye on her.
“ ‘What now?’ ” I responded to Aunt Tilley, “is the big question, isn’t it?”
I set my napkin on the table, tears springing to my eyes, the weight of my situation hitting me. Now that I didn’t have to worry about telling my family, I had to worry about what came next. I had no husband. No house. But I did have a home. And as inhospitable as it was feeling at this current moment, it was here.
Mom and Tilley shared a look. I felt badly for Daddy. I honestly did. It was like he had married two of them. And they were two peas in a pod, two forces to be reckoned with.
Mom put her head in her hands, and Tilley patted her back and tsked supportively. “At least she isn’t pregnant,” Trina trilled.
I gestured at her. “Exactly. Silver lining.”
Everyone was talking all at once again, and I felt like I needed to escape.
Over the din, I could make out Mom saying, “There has never been a divorce in the Saxton family,” as I slipped out from the table. I couldn’t do anything about that now. I walked out the back door and down the dock, avoiding the planks that were sitting a little too high and needed repair. Even in my sorrow, I made a mental note to fix them and the pickets on the front porch the next day. I sat down, legs crossed, and took a deep breath. Out here, all you could see was water, with little islands of marsh grass interspersed. It was the place I had always felt the most alive, the freest. There is peace in the calm and quiet of the sound. And peace was what I needed more than anything right now. Tears rolled down my cheeks.
I imagined that, in some ways, having seen Chase with Thad would make my divorce easier. When I thought about the good times with Thad, I realized they had all been a lie. Our life and our love had been a total sham.
Why couldn’t life be like journalism? The story could take you anywhere, but the formula was tried and true. If you did the research, if you conducted the interviews, if you put in the work, the story would come. Why hadn’t my marriage followed that same pattern?
I wiped my eyes, and when I looked over to my left, I could see someone else sitting on the end of the Thaysdens’ dock next door, not twenty feet away.
“Is it done?” Parker asked.
The way the moon reflected on the water was so beautiful here. “Oh yeah. It’s done. I’m done. Everything’s done.”
“You are not done,” Parker said. “You’re just getting started.”
I nodded, even though, in that moment, I didn’t believe it. Not even a little.
“Hey, Park?”
“Yeah.”
“So are you.”
He nodded.
He didn’t say anything else, and neither did I. We just sat there, the silence washing over us. How had we gotten so far off course? I wished that, just for a minute, we could go back to being those same kids on these same docks, fishing with cane poles and swimming every chance we got. I knew I had to move forward. And Parker did, too. But sometimes in order to do that, you have to go back first. And I think that’s what scared us most of all.
* * *
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 I necessarily 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 I really saw 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 diving over 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.