“How’s Daniel?” I asked casually.
She looked at me, rolled her eyes, and took another sip. “Between you and me?” I nodded. “Daniel cheated on me with the bartender at HMF.”
HMF was one of the bars at the Breakers. “He did not.”
“Oh, I assure you, he did.”
“I’m assuming you haven’t told your mother? Because from the talk around the party, everyone is expecting a proposal any day now.”
She sighed, handed me the champagne, and lay down on her back on the still-warm sand, her arms behind her head. “Can I be honest with you?”
“Always.” I looked over at her. Her serene face, her hair spread in the sand, the way the moon shone on her blue eyes, making them vibrant even in the dark… I had dated my fair share of beautiful women, but for me, there would always be only one Amelia Saxton.
“I felt relieved.”
I laughed, looking out over the roaring ocean, raising the champagne to my mouth again.
“Why?”
“I didn’t love him. My father loved that he was a scratch golfer. My mother loved his family and his job and how handsome he was. I tried to love him. I swear I did. But when I found out he’d cheated, I kind of felt relieved. He was crying and begging for forgiveness, and it was so easy to walk away. I realized I didn’t even feel enough for him to shed a tear about it. Am I an awful person?”
I lay down beside her, twisting the base of the bottle in the sand so it wouldn’t spill. I turned my head toward her. “Amelia, you are a lot of things. Awful will never be one of them.”
She met my eyes and smiled, making my stomach do that thing again that I could no longer pretend was from the champagne. Was she sending me a signal here?
She pointed up to the sky and said, “Is that the Southern Cross?”
I laughed.
“What?”
“Amelia, you can’t see the Southern Cross from here. You have to be in the Southern Hemisphere. Occasionally you can catch it in Key West or maybe Texas, but never here.”
She laughed, too. “But doesn’t that look like a cross?”
I was pretty sure she had had too much champagne. “I’ve seen it,” I said. “On my semester at sea.”
“I’d like to see it,” she said.
“I’d like to show you,” I responded, feeling brave.
She turned toward me then, and the way she smiled, I knew what she said next was going to change my life. And it did. But not in the way I wanted. “Park, I have missed you. I don’t think I realized it, but I have.”
I couldn’t breathe. My heart was beating out of my chest. Is this actually happening?
“You are the little brother I never had.” She turned back toward the sky and said, “Is that the Big Dipper?” Then laughed. “Am I the worst amateur astronomer you’ve ever known?”
I tried to laugh, but the little brother I never had kept floating around in my head.
A decade later, as the Uber pulled into the driveway of my Palm Beach house, I realized that I had read that moment on that beach all wrong. So maybe tonight had just been in my head, too, something I had wanted to happen for so long that I believed things that weren’t reality.
“Thanks, man,” I said to the Uber driver, taking a moment to rate and tip him before I got inside and got distracted.
As I stepped in the back door, into the dark, quiet house, the smile left once and for all. Greer. What had I been thinking? I was Greer’s. Always and forever. Nothing could change that. No moment, no dance, no fun day.
No one would ever convince me to move on from what I had lost.
Not even Amelia Saxton.
Amelia
A GREATER-GOOD ENDEAVOR
I FOUND OUT I WOULD never be a mother on March 17, 1996. Back then, I got upset about girls being mean at school or making a bad grade on a test or generally feeling flustered and afraid about life. I was a teenage girl, ready to cry on my mother’s shoulder. But that’s the day everything changed. Because the minute I heard the news, I knew somehow that it was going to be more difficult for her than it was for me. In the most ironic way, the day I found out I couldn’t perform a core womanly biological function, I became a woman. I had to protect my mother. I would never cry on her shoulder again.
That moment split things open inside of me I didn’t know I had. It was a single lightning strike that sank an entire ship. Minutes earlier, I’d assumed I would grow up, fall in love, get married, have children.
From the time I was born, practically, I had dragged a baby doll around, and, as I got older, arranged my life around its fictional feeding times and diaper changes. I remember the doctor saying, “But with the advances in technology, you are perfectly capable of carrying a baby, Amelia. You’d just have to use someone else’s egg.”
I was fourteen years old, barely capable of understanding the reproductive process, and ignorant about anything related to sex. I had been horrified to even tell my mother that my period, which had arrived two years earlier, had suddenly stopped. And I was sitting in a paper gown in this cold exam room being talked to about things that I was entirely too young to process. Primary ovarian insufficiency. The word “insufficiency” bounced around in my head.
My mother could process these things that I couldn’t. And that, I think, was why I had to be strong for her. Because my mother had had real babies. She had given birth to Robby and me. Carried us. Raised us.
Studying me on the examining table from where she sat on the rolling stool, her purse on her lap, she wore a look on her face that I had never seen before. When one is fourteen years old, it is really something to see a brand-new look on one’s mother’s face. That blankness, I know now, is the expression she wears when she has so many emotions she doesn’t dare let a single one show. I give her credit for that. She was as strong as I had ever seen her. But that was because she didn’t know what I was thinking.
As we got in the car together that day, I thought about Sunday school. I thought about what Mrs. Applegate said about God’s will, about how he’s always telling us what we need to know if we’ll just be still and listen. God was sending me a message now.
“How about some ice cream?” Mom asked.
“Okay,” I said. I turned up the radio. I was trying to act nonchalant, like the news didn’t faze me.
Mom turned to me as she pulled out of the parking lot. “You can always adopt, you know.”
I looked at her then and, without so much as a crack in my voice, I let the dream—the certainty, the platitude—that I would have children one day fly out the sunroof as I opened it. “You know, Mom, I think maybe this is a sign. I’m just not meant to be a mother.”
I knew the look she gave me then. Shock. Dismay. Disappointment. Those were looks with which I was well acquainted. She patted my hand. “It has been a big day, darlin’. And you are only fourteen, after all. You have plenty of time to decide.”
The cold of a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Blizzard helped to numb my pain. When we got home, I walked straight upstairs, my mom calling, “I’m here if you need to talk.” But I didn’t need to talk. I needed to act. I needed to plot a new course. The first step? Pulling the giant Rubbermaid container of baby dolls, the Madame Alexanders and American Girls, the ones I’d been saving for my daughter, out from underneath the bed. I dragged them out, let the container drop, with a thud, step by step by step, down the stairs, and put them in the closet by the back door. That closet held all the things we never wanted to see again, which The Salvation Army dropped by four times a year to collect. By next month, all my dolls would be gone. I closed the door, brushed my hands off, and turned back upstairs.