The Southern Side of Paradise Read online

  But this was an incredible feeling, too. Thinking about spending my life with Mark, waking up with him every morning and going to sleep with him every night. It was all I had wanted as a girl.

  “Mark, I . . .” I started, but I didn’t know how to finish.

  He was looking at me now, his green eyes so full of anticipation and hope, his hair mussed from the day on the farm. He was so handsome, but he didn’t know it, preppy in that good Southern way where he could put on a tux and take you to the ballet, pull on a pair of work boots and plow a field, or don camo all day in a deer stand and bring home dinner. My heart swelled so full of love for him that I leaned over and kissed him.

  “Is that a yes?” he said, pulling back from me.

  Damn. I knew I shouldn’t have kissed him.

  I bit the inside of my cheek. “It’s a let me think about it for a minute.”

  “A minute?”

  I shrugged. “A day?”

  “Oh,” he said sadly, looking down at his feet.

  I had ruined everything. Again. I had ruined it when I left for LA and Mark left for college, when he had pursued the plan, taken the basketball scholarship, and I, instead of choosing electives and picking out a roommate, had hopped on an airplane, found a waitressing job and an agent. And now I had done it again. Tears of guilt puddled in my eyes as Mark stood up, looking so forlorn that I wanted to pull him back down and say, Just kidding! Of course I’ll marry you! Then we could revisit the skinny-dipping plan I had formulated earlier.

  But he was already walking away. If I had to guess, I would bet tears were puddling in his eyes, too, and he didn’t want me to see.

  The moments that followed felt like something out of one of the movies I’d shot. With the sun high in the sky over the water and the farm grass up well past my ankles, this place seemed so foreign yet so familiar, this landscape such a piece of my past yet so unimaginable in my future. I could hear children’s laughter reverberating across the acres. I couldn’t help but smile, despite the tears coming down my cheeks.

  I thought back to earlier that week, when my sisters and I had been talking about my future with Mark. I’d been sitting quietly with them on Caroline’s front lawn, arms wrapped around my bent knees, neither of them saying anything. That’s the thing about my sisters. Caroline has a big, giant mouth, and sometimes you think she’ll never shut up, but she also knows when to just sit with you and rub your back. In the world’s grandest ironies, she’s quite nurturing.

  With tears coming down my cheeks, I choked out, “I don’t know what to do. Whatever choice I make, I’m giving up something I love.” I had thought I was upset then, and the proposal hadn’t even happened yet. It wasn’t even real.

  “I just don’t understand.” Sloane had finally piped up. “This isn’t the 1950s. Relationships aren’t cookie-cutter. If Mark doesn’t want to live in LA, then fine, but I feel like there has to be some way to travel back and forth and work this whole thing out.”

  Caroline slid her arm through mine and rested her head on my shoulder. “Mark wants a really traditional relationship. If you don’t, that’s fine, but pretending you can gloss over that is kind of naive and silly.”

  I thought of my sisters that day as I trailed behind a very upset Mark, the wildflowers almost up to my knees. Life holds no guarantees, as my sister Sloane well knew after the hell she had been through these past few months.

  Love was rarely easy, and sometimes it meant sacrificing something, even a piece of yourself. My sister Caroline could tell you that after the months she had spent trying to repair her relationship with her cheating husband. As the sun hit my eyes, making me squint, I realized that life was never going to be perfect. Not even mine.

  I thought of my mom, of Jack, the man she had loved so much but given up in favor of my father, of us, really, since Jack never wanted children. I wondered if she regretted that decision, if she wished she had chosen him first instead, if she wished she had compromised more for love.

  I thought of Mark, of how wonderful he had been these past few weeks as I dealt with doctor appointments and blood work to figure out why I was so tired and dizzy and why I seemed to bruise like a peach. He knew I might have aplastic anemia, that bone-marrow transplants and blood transfusions might be a reality of my future, and that children—as much as it broke my heart to think so—might not. I thought of how he’d stood by my side through all of that, how he’d come through for me while Grammy was dying.

  And as if the breeze had carried in my answer on its wings, I knew exactly what I had to do.

  “Mark!” I called, running behind him, the grass and dirt on my bare feet cool and soothing. He didn’t turn. “Mark!” I called, feeling myself get out of breath, reminding me that just because we hadn’t named it, that didn’t mean I wasn’t sick.

  He finally stopped and turned to look at me, and I could see the pain in his face. But even still, when I reached him, he couldn’t help but wrap his arms around my waist.

  “Mark,” I said softly, smiling up at him. “I think I’ve had enough time.”

  “What if I’ve changed my mind now?” he asked, grinning boyishly down at me.

  “You can’t change your mind.” I shook my head. “There’s no turning back now.”

  “There’s not?”

  I shook my head again, trying to be myself, trying not to slip into the character of a bride saying yes. I kissed him softly. “Mark, I love you. And I know you love me, too. And there are some things—some big things—for us to work out. But I believe that the two of us can get through whatever life throws at us.”

  Mark picked me up and spun me around in the air and kissed me again. “We can make it through anything,” he said, setting me down and sliding the ring onto my finger.

  I nodded and grinned. And I hoped like hell that it was true.

  THREE

  ansley: chopped liver

  Thirty seconds earlier, all I had been able to think about was the email I found when I inadvertently opened my daughter Emerson’s MacBook Pro instead of mine. The email on the screen from Park Avenue Hematology and Oncology that said my daughter’s test results were back. It had made my blood run cold. Something might be wrong with my daughter. I stared at the screen. I tried to convince myself that it was nothing more than run-of-the-mill anemia like I had in my twenties. But as a mother, I’d become an expert at having thoughts that spiraled completely out of control. That part of me was certain it was terminal cancer.

  Moments later, when I heard Emerson calling “Mom!” from the front porch, I ran out to confront her, to find out what she had been keeping from me, with my little dog, Biscuit, in my arms. But when I saw the look on her face and Mark standing beside her, when I heard her calling her sisters, too, I realized this was not my moment.

  When she squealed, “We’re engaged!,” her blue eyes flashing, an entirely new set of worries flooded in.

  Now, twenty minutes later, I sat stock-still while Jack paced nervously around the living room. I wasn’t sure exactly why he was nervous. It was sweet that he was so concerned for Emerson even though, unlike Caroline and Sloane, she wasn’t even biologically his. But this reaction seemed disproportionate. If someone was going to be nervous, shouldn’t it be me, the mother of the bride?

  I took a sip of the champagne that Caroline had poured for all of us before my girls left to tell their friends the good news.

  I sighed. “He didn’t ask me for permission, Jack. What does that say about him? I mean, sure, he couldn’t ask Carter. But what am I? Chopped liver?”

  Jack stopped pacing. “I thought you loved Mark. I thought he was your dream husband for Emerson.”

  “Well, he is,” I said, setting my glass on the marble-top coffee table. “But my concern is that he’s my dream for Emerson, not Emerson’s dream for Emerson.”

  I started crying, realizing that my child might be sick, that all her dreams might be put on hold. “Whether she decides to marry Mark might be the least of our w
orries,” I said, wiping my eyes and clearing my throat.

  “Why?” Jack asked, jerking his head in my direction, a look of terror on his face.

  “Jack, what is going on with you?” The Emerson situation was worrisome, sure. But I couldn’t help but think Jack’s nerves were coming from another place.

  He shook his head and sat down beside me on the couch, squeezing my knee. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m just anxious.”

  “I can see that. But why?”

  He didn’t say anything, and it hit me. I laughed out loud. “Oh, Jack, I know,” I said.

  “Know what?” he asked, a little too quickly.

  The poor man. “You’re afraid that Emerson getting married means it will be a terribly long time before we can.”

  He leaned back against the couch and exhaled, long and slow. “Oh, um, right,” he fumbled. “You know me too well. Does that make me selfish?”

  I squeezed his hand. We had talked about getting married, eventually. I could see now that Jack’s eventually was sooner than mine. “It makes both of us selfish, because I’m thinking the same thing.”

  This would be Emerson’s first and—I hoped—only marriage. I didn’t want anything to steal her thunder.

  “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” I said.

  He shrugged again. “It’s OK. I just want her to be happy.”

  I leaned over and kissed him. He was the best man in the entire world. He was the one who got away, the one who came back, the one who had given me so many of the things I had wanted for my life. He had never asked me for anything in return. And now I got to have this man who had sacrificed so much for me, forever and for always.

  Jack took my hand in his. “Let’s pretend, just for a minute, that we were the engaged ones. What would we want for our wedding?”

  I looked into his handsome face, the lines around his eyes that made him seem kinder yet also more distinguished, the gray around his temples where time had replaced the brown hair that the sun used to bleach lighter in the summer. “I want what you want,” I said, smiling.

  “I have an idea,” Jack said, “but it might be crazy. In fact, I’m positive it’s crazy. But I want to do it anyway.”

  I laughed at his enthusiasm. It was like we had switched roles: he was the effusive bride; I was the apathetic groom. “Then please, by all means, let me in on the idea.”

  “Well, I’ve been thinking about this a lot, of course.” He cleared his throat. “In fact, I’ve been thinking about it for thirty years or so.”

  I wanted to say, Spit it out, Jack. For heaven’s sake. But I didn’t, of course. What I said was, “Right. So have I.”

  “So I’m thinking we should do it on the sandbar.”

  I almost spit out my champagne. The sandbar was a special spot for us. It was where Jack and I first met, where we shared our first kiss, where we danced as teenagers until the tide rose to our knees, and maybe most important of all, the place where we were forced to realize that all these years later, maybe nothing had changed, not really.

  “So is that a no?” he asked.

  I laughed. The sandbar came and went with the tide. It wasn’t a permanent fixture. “Jack, it’s preposterous. How would that even work?”

  He put his arm around me and pulled me in close. “It will be exactly like the sandbar parties we had as kids. We’ll time it with the tide and go from there.”

  I laughed. “But Jack, that was a few cases of beer and some chips. This is our wedding.”

  He put his hand up, painting the picture for me. “Moon tide, stars glowing, breeze blowing, bare feet in the sand, all our friends gathered around as the priest pronounces us husband and wife. Then we can move over to a real venue for the reception.”

  Now I was getting into the spirit. “Forget a real venue,” I said. “Let’s do the reception on Starlite Island.”

  He shook his head and kissed me. “Now you’re getting the picture.”

  “Totally unique.” I smiled. “Totally us.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So it’s settled. We’ll get married on the sandbar and have our reception on Starlite Island.” I sighed. “Someday.”

  He nodded and smiled at me. “Someday, Ans.”

  I kissed Jack again, this time deeper, this time letting myself really feel it, that overwhelming joy that here was this man I had loved for a lifetime who would be my happily ever after. He pulled me closer, and it was only then that I felt it in the very marrow of my being, knew once and for all that his nerves and his jumpiness weren’t about the timing of our wedding. I had known this man since I was fifteen years old, and I could tell he was keeping something from me.

  I knew all about keeping secrets, had kept the secret that Jack was the biological father of my eldest two daughters since the day they were born. When we discovered my husband Carter’s infertility, when a rare infection from a routine intrauterine insemination had almost killed me, when Carter and I made the life-altering pact to get these children in a very unconventional way, and when I promised him that he would never have to know who the real father was, I had known about keeping secrets then, too.

  Carter had eventually discovered that Jack, my first love, was the father of our first two girls. It had broken something inside him, made the pain run deeper, despite the fact that it had soothed me for my babies to be made out of love. I had wondered ever since if the truth had set either of us free. It had felt, instead, like the truth only complicated things, only put a gray haze over our marriage during one of its best times, when Carter and I had conceived our miracle baby, Emerson, all on our own.

  Part of me wanted to press Jack now, to push him further into telling me what was on his mind. But the part of me that knew that sometimes the truth does more harm than good just leaned into him, sighed, and remembered that even though I might want to, I would never truly know all of another person. Not my daughters. Not even Jack.

  To this day, Jack and I shared a monumental reality, the deep, dark truth that he was the father of my eldest two girls, who knew they were from a sperm donor but had no idea that their sperm donor was the man I almost married before their father. They had no idea that the sperm was donated not through a test tube but through real, true love, the kind that never ends. With that huge thing between us, I always felt I could tell Jack anything, that he could do the same.

  As he cleared his throat for no reason, always a dead giveaway that he was hiding something, it scared me to wonder what he felt he had to keep from me. It terrified me to think what in our present could possibly be bigger than the behemoth of our past.

  FOUR

  emerson: the indomitable murphy women

  After about twenty phone calls to Mark’s parents and our best friends and a feverish lovemaking session on the kitchen island, where I tried to ignore the fact that because of whatever mystery illness was haunting me, I would certainly have bruises the next day as a souvenir, I realized I had a wedding to plan. So I walked to my mother’s house, pushing away the doubts I’d had previously, flung the door open dramatically—I mean, I was an actress, after all—and exclaimed, “Get out Grammy’s veil!”

  If you ever need to know for sure how you are feeling, just look at your mother’s face. It’s like a mirror. Her mouth said, “Oh, yay! Honey, you are going to look gorgeous.” Her blue eyes, the ones that matched mine perfectly, said, Are you sure this is a good idea?

  She shot me the tight-lipped smile I knew well from days of bombed performances that she tried to put a positive spin on. “I am so happy for you, sweetheart, but I know you’ve had your concerns about Mark and the logistics of this relationship. Are you sure about this? Because you don’t have to rush into anything.” She ran her fingers through her layered, shoulder-length hair, and it occurred to me that it was significantly lighter than its usual chestnut. I wondered if it was summer sun or great highlights.

  “Really, really sure?” Jack reiterated.

  I rolled my eyes. Great. Just because I
didn’t have a dad, that didn’t mean I needed Jack interfering in my affairs. I felt guilty almost immediately. Jack was a very nice man. But I kind of wanted him to leave, and I didn’t really want his opinion.

  Before I could answer, my sister Sloane’s voice traveled from the kitchen and into the living room, calling, “Mom, do you have any mayonnaise?”

  As if my oldest sister, Caroline, could detect someone talking about a fat other than avocado and had to come save the day, she walked through the front door in a maxi dress cinched at her tiny waist, looking as if she’d stepped off the pages of a magazine. “I should certainly hope not,” she said by way of greeting. Her long hair was lighter, too, the exact same brown-but-sunkissed shade as Mom’s. That’s when I knew they had gotten their hair done together. I felt a little pang of jealousy that they hadn’t invited me.

  Caroline looked at Mom accusatorily. “Why would you have mayonnaise, Mom? Surely you know better than to have that artery-clogging excuse for a condiment.”

  Sloane, in a pair of faded sweatpants and one of Adam’s old T-shirts, her noncolored, regular brown hair in a messy bun on top of her head, crossed her arms. She had put back on a little bit of the weight she had lost while Adam was missing in action, and her face had regained that natural, Neutrogena glow it had always had. Having Adam back home had made her look so much healthier. It had also made her brave. Very brave. Brave enough that sometimes she even stood up to Caroline. “Adam and I have started buying the organic kind made with sunflower oil, and I think it’s a healthy fat that way, actually.”

  Caroline nodded knowingly, and for a second, I thought she was agreeing with Sloane. Instead, she said, “Ah, yes.” She gestured at Sloane. “I’ve found the person who actually started buying doughnuts when they”—she paused to make air quotes—“took out the trans fat.”