“Do you have to?” he replied without skipping a beat.
I laughed. He’d caught me off guard. “I mean, no. I don’t have to, but it seems like a good idea.” I paused. “Right?”
“You could move back to Palm Beach,” he said teasingly.
“And do what?”
He pulled me closer and said in my ear, “Whatever you want.”
If I thought my heart was racing before, now I was certain. Whatever I wanted. Did I want to be with Parker? Why, when I pictured a life with Parker, did it all seem so clear? What about his perfect, untainted memory of Greer? I could never compete with that. I was alive and imperfect. We would fight. We would be messy. We would have a real life together, and she would always be there in the background. Things with Harris were just simpler. They were grown-up. They were uncomplicated.
Before I could respond, Elayna, this nightmare of a girl I went to high school with, danced up beside us with Ray, her high school boyfriend-turned-husband. “Hey, girl,” she said, elbowing me, “I hear this one’s straight. You might want to hold on to him.”
I knew she was trying to be funny. Probably. And it was clear she was a little drunk. But, as okay as I had been seconds earlier, that didn’t sit well with me. Parker must have sensed it, because he took my hand and led me off the dance floor. Suddenly, all those warm and fuzzy hometown feelings were gone. Now I wanted to be anywhere but here. Sure, Elayna might have been the only person tacky enough to actually say that to my face, but that didn’t mean everyone else in the brightly lit town square wasn’t thinking or saying the same thing. I looked around for my mom and, when I didn’t see her, said, “Park, could you take me home?”
“Sure,” he said. He hadn’t let go of my hand, and no, I hadn’t made an attempt to get him to do so. I would grapple with that later. For now, instead of making me feel loved and a part of a community, the music filling the air and the sounds of chatter and laughter were making me feel even more alone.
It wasn’t until Parker and I were in his car, by ourselves, that I began to feel, once again, like all was right with the world.
Parker
STUCK
NEEDLESS TO SAY, I COULDN’T sleep. If Elayna hadn’t interrupted, what would Amelia have said? Would she have wanted to give us a shot? Could we have finally broken through this gray area to the truth?
I knew that Amelia saw the loss of the babies as a failure, could tell that it was weighing on her. And I was now more convinced than ever that I wanted to be a dad. Sometimes I still considered hiring a surrogate for the last two embryos. But what had seemed like such a great plan months ago, now only made me feel lonely.
I finally got up and went to the window, opening the drawn curtains and looking out onto the water. I wondered where Greer was now, what she could see, if heaven was as beautiful as this part of earth.
And then I saw her. Not Greer. Amelia. I couldn’t help but smile. How many times had I watched her out this window? How many nights had she taken to her kayak with nothing more than the light of the moon as her guide? I double-checked to make sure she was alone, that Harris was nowhere in sight, then I opened the door of the octagon house we had shared only a few months ago, and made my way down to the Saxtons’ dock, where their kayaks were in racks.
I pulled one by its top handle. She had been able to lift this by herself? The stillness and cool of the night was refreshing, the way the moon painted a trail onto the water hypnotic. I watched as Amelia paddled lazily, turning left into the “maze,” as we used to call it, into a tall patch of marsh grass. The path through it changed often. It was one of our favorite parts of childhood to try to navigate it in a new way, sometimes successfully, sometimes getting stuck in the oyster beds below.
The kayak made a small splash as I dropped it into the water and slid in myself, holding a paddle in my left hand. I pushed away from the dock, realizing that there was almost no current tonight, and made the box with my arms that Mason had taught me almost thirty years ago. I slid the paddle in smooth, nearly silent strokes, marveling at how it could seem so dark and then—once your eyes adjusted to the brightness of the moon on the water, to the vividness of the stars—so incredibly light.
I reached the entrance of the maze quickly, expecting to paddle furiously to catch up to Amelia. But when I turned, she was sitting right at the edge, as though she was waiting for me.
I was behind her, and even though she couldn’t have seen me, she said, “I didn’t want to get stuck out here alone.”
The weight of her words struck me, heavy and poignant. What did she not want stuck, her kayak? Herself? Maybe both. And what about me? Did I feel stuck? I decided, as I paddled right up beside her, yes. These past three years I had been a kind of stuck I never could have imagined. Everything that used to be in color seemed gray. My job. My house. My life. Even my friends in Palm Beach. Everything around me was covered with the scent of Greer, the feel of Greer, the memory of Greer. It was only now that I realized that while, yes, it had helped me remember her, maybe some things are meant to fade, maybe some things have to fade in order for us to quit feeling trapped. Because that’s what I was. But the thought of moving out of that house, of resigning from my position at her company, made me feel light-headed. It was too hard. It was too much. And, yeah, I guessed I knew she was never coming back for me. I had known that the entire time. And that made letting go of the life we had shared that much harder.
But then Amelia came back into my life, and everything seemed light again. At first, it was the prospect of having the babies, of having a piece of Greer back. But then I realized that it wasn’t about Greer. It was about Amelia, about the way she made me laugh, the way my heart sped up when she smiled at me, the way she made me realize that my ability to love didn’t die with Greer.
I turned my head to look at Amelia, shifting slightly in my kayak. She turned, and her eyes met mine. We were so close. “I was okay with being stuck out here alone,” I said. “I’d made my peace with it.”
She nodded.
I looked down at my hands, afraid of what I would find in her face when I confessed, “But I’d rather be with you.”
And suddenly, the silence, which had been so peaceful, became deafening.
When Amelia pushed away from me and started paddling, I knew I had blown it. I shouldn’t have said all that, shouldn’t have put her on the spot. She had a boyfriend; she was planning a future. But how could I not say it? How could I continue to live a life where she didn’t know? I sighed, paddling behind her. There was nothing else to do. I wanted to hang back, but my desire to help her get her kayak up on the dock was even stronger than my desire to save face.
I paddled up ahead of her and jumped out, pulling my boat out of the water. She bumped the dock, and I leaned down to take her paddle and then her hands. I pulled her up, my fingers on her skin feeling electric and jolting. Just as I noticed the way the moon glowed on her beautiful face, she wrapped her arms around my neck. I leaned down, pausing to take it in, the flowery smell of Amelia and the earthy smell of the marsh, the sounds of the night making this patch of earth feel alive and thrumming, the moon bathing us in its light, the stars conspiring to give us this swept away feeling. My lips met hers, slightly salty from the air and the water and, as I kissed her and kept kissing her, never wanting to stop, as I pulled her in tighter and closer to me like I would never let her go again, the bullfrogs silenced, the cicadas stopped singing, the world quit spinning. Everything faded away except for Amelia, me, and this one moment that was so perfect, so right, I knew for sure that neither of us could ever deny it again.