A minute later, when I felt an arm loop around my waist, I wasn’t sure if it was real or my imagination. But when I looked into the face that had come to rescue me, it was the same one I had known since he was three days old. It was Parker. “Put your arms around my neck and kick if you can,” he shouted breathlessly.
As we got to the shallows, I wrapped my legs around his waist and he carried me piggyback to shore like we were back at one of those picnics, doing a partner race.
As we reached the sand, he dropped me, and I lay on my back, panting. He was crouched over me, his face near mine, hands on either side of me. And he was saying, “You’re okay, Amelia. I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”
As my friends ran up beside us, and Parker still looked down at me, I saw him for the first time. I mean, I really saw him. His words, the bulk and shape of his upper body, and the way we were both panting made me envision, just for a second, that this moment was something entirely different, something much less pure.
All at once, he wasn’t just the annoying kid who used to hide out in the branches of the trees in our yard and jump down to scare me, or the one Mom made me drive to school when he was a freshman, who clearly only listened to music that his friends thought was cool. He was a man. Or, at least, he was on the verge of becoming one. He had saved me. He had protected me. We were connected by more than just the gate between our yards and the cigarettes that we’d occasionally shared at high school parties.
I bought Parker and his friends beer all summer. It was a paltry gift in exchange for my life, but it was what I had to give, despite my friends’ insistence that beer was not what Parker wanted from me. I mostly ignored it.
But every time I had seen Parker since, I hugged him a little longer, I mentally thanked him a little more. Because he had truly saved my life. Later, a part of me believed he could save Greer, too, just through sheer force of will. I had hoped he could, had wanted him to. But no such luck.
Fourteen years later, back in Cape Carolina, I looked at him across the marsh, sitting on his dock. Even in the dark, I could see the dimple in his chin that came out when he grinned, the way that, even though he could laugh again now, really laugh, something around his edges seemed to sag a little, sad and defeated and lost.
Talking about those babies made him so happy. Anyone in his right mind would know having those babies was the craziest idea of all time. Some men might be capable of picking a surrogate and being a single dad to their dead wife’s babies. I mean, I didn’t know any of those men, but they did probably exist.
I thought back to the last time I had seen Greer alive, how even that close to death, Parker had made her laugh, how he had kept the trauma he was facing zipped up inside himself and dedicated everything to her, given her his all. Hell, maybe he could do it. Maybe he was that man. Maybe I had stumbled into that clinic and seen that record and made that phone call because Parker was supposed to be a single dad.
I had been thinking for years that I wanted to do something important with my life. I had been thinking for years that I wanted to repay Parker for saving me.
All those years ago, Parker Thaysden had given me life. As his eyes caught mine across the water, I had the odd, tingling sensation that maybe the right thing to do was to give it right back to him.
Elizabeth
SABOTAGE
“I KNEW HE WAS WRONG for her,” Tilley hissed as I handed her dish after dish to dry. I scrubbed them a tad too hard, the dish gloves Olivia had given me for Christmas—the whimsical ones with the long red fingernails and the huge fake diamond painted on—filling with water when I dipped them too far into the bubbles.
“Well, we all knew it, Tilley. But I never thought he’d do this to her.”
Deep down we’d both known this was exactly how this would end. But we were ladies, so we hadn’t said so.
Even in my anger at Thad, my hurt for my daughter, and my physical discomfort at having wet, soapy water sloshing around inside my gloves, I paused to be grateful. My sister was here tonight. She was herself. She was in this world, with me, where she belonged. I couldn’t count the number of people who said I should put her somewhere where “they could take care of her.” How could they even say such a thing? Who could take care of her better than I could?
I prayed every day—every single day—that she’d pass on one day before I did. I couldn’t bear the thought of her being without me. Who would take care of her then? I didn’t want Amelia and Robby to feel burdened. And, really, after everything she had meant to me, everything she had done for me, it was the least I could do. I prayed for other things, too, but that one was the most persistent.
“Well, I blame Mason,” Tilley said, interrupting my thoughts.
I rolled my eyes, pulling the plug inside the sink and taking my gloves off, hanging them inside out over the drying rack. I leaned on the counter’s chipped blue-and-white tiles. Make up your corner of the world neat and tidy and it will be enough. I said this to myself every day. Keeping Dogwood together was like squeezing sand as hard as you could inside your palm and wondering why it slipped through your fingers. But I would worry about that tomorrow.
Mason and Amelia had dated very briefly right before his accident. But their coming together had felt like kismet. Olivia and I had dreamed of it our entire lives. Anyone could see they were perfect for each other: the son and daughter of two best friends, the star pitcher and the valedictorian. And then, after it all fell apart for him, he just disappeared. He didn’t call her, didn’t write. I understood retreating. But without a word to my daughter? He had told her they were going to be together, had guaranteed her a future. No one knew better than I did that high school romances faded. But there are right ways to do things. And Olivia just let her son abandon Amelia. It was the biggest fight we’d ever had.
She said I didn’t understand, that she had a different relationship with her children than I did with mine. I should certainly hope so. I would never have let my children behave that way, and especially not at eighteen years old. I took a deep breath to keep myself from getting worked up, picked up another drying towel, and started in on the goblets. People with dishwashers didn’t have these conversations. They were missing out.
“She has sabotaged every relationship she has had since Mason,” I mused.
Tilley nodded. “You’re telling me.”
“But surely she didn’t know about Thad.”
“But we told her,” Tilley said, crossing her arms, all pretense of drying the dishes now over.
I rolled my eyes. “That girl just never listens.”
“Mother! Don’t say that!” Tilley snapped. “I’m standing right here!”
And, just like that, she was gone. My sister, who had been so lucid and clear a heartbeat ago was gone again. Thirty-seven years and it still broke my heart every time. Thirty-seven years of doctors telling me they couldn’t find a cure—or, even, a diagnosis. Thirty-seven years of answers like, Well, it seems akin to delusional disorder, but not quite consistent with that. And IT appears to be triggered by stress. The ones who made me the maddest were the doctors who said she was faking. Who would fake such a thing?
“Not you, darling,” I soothed. “You’re the best girl I know.”