The reality was that I couldn’t even handle my own love life, much less hers. So I sat on the front porch, beside my mother, the person who made me feel perhaps the most complicated emotions of all, the one who, though I knew she loved me unconditionally, never felt the way about me that I do about my girls, never felt the need to change it or fix it.
She took a sip of her wine, and while she looked out over the water, the sunset making it nearly the same shade as her dark rosé, I looked at her. I wondered what was happening in her mind, what complicated firing of synapses was taking place to make her a little different these days.
But breaking me out of my thoughts, she said, “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight.”
It’s something she had said to me countless times throughout my life, but this time I felt slow tears rolling down my cheeks. Adam loved to fish, and this red sky would have meant that, in the morning, offshore conditions would be perfect.
It was an ordinary phrase, yet for my daughter, nothing was ordinary, nothing was right. Sloane’s entire life had been turned upside down in one moment. I thought, unfairly, cruelly, that this was Adam’s fault. He had always wanted to be more than a husband and a father. Why couldn’t that be enough for him? Why couldn’t he have a normal job, with regular hours that let him get back home to his young family?
Mom squeezed the top of my arm but didn’t say a word. What was there to say?
“What do I do?” I whispered.
She shook her head. “You can’t fix this for her, Ansley.”
I shrugged. “I know that, but I can’t even get her out of bed.” I paused and took a deep breath. I didn’t want to say it out loud. But I had to. “It has been almost three weeks, Mom. I’m afraid if she doesn’t get out of that bed now, she never will.”
I had spent countless hours Googling depression, calling doctor friends, and buying books that, due to my status as grandmother-turned-primary-caregiver for two toddlers, had sat practically untouched on my bedside table. But the reality remained. I had already learned about depression in the worst way, which might also be the best way: firsthand experience. I knew what it was like to find out your husband was dead, that you were the only one left to fight for your family. But Sloane wasn’t there. Not yet. She needed help. But how could I help someone who didn’t want it?
Caroline, Emerson, and I had been entertaining Sloane’s boys constantly, trying to distract them from the fact that the only time they saw their mother was when they crawled into bed with her. She would smile at them blankly, without even seeing them, and stare back at the TV screen where home videos of her and Adam with the boys were playing on a continuous loop, night and day. We were doing the best we could, but they wanted their mother. Taylor cried for her five or six times a day, and it broke my heart. AJ was acting out. Throwing toys and tantrums over nothing, pinching Taylor. We were doing all we could for them, but I felt fairly certain these boys had lost their father. They couldn’t lose their mother, too.
My mom shook her head again. “I’m proud of you,” she said. “I’m proud of how you’ve stepped up.”
Though she had said nothing that could possibly help me in this impossible situation, as she took my hand, I felt calmer. It was, as it always had been, my mother who gave me this incredible strength and inner peace, my mother who lent me fortitude when I needed it most. It was then that I realized it. Sometimes, being a mother isn’t about having to fix it. Sometimes, the best thing a mother can be is there at all.
THREE
the light
sloane
June 16, 2010
Dear Sloane,
I will be home in ten days. Ten days until I get to hold you and kiss you and make you my wife, ten days until we get to stand in front of our family and friends and say how much we love each other, how we fell in love in this most unusual way that we will both cherish for the rest of our lives. I don’t know how you’ve done all this while I was away, planned this entire wedding for me, for us. I am so grateful to you, my beautiful girl. And I am the luckiest man alive that I get to spend the rest of my life proving it to you.
All my love,
Adam
june 16, 2017
“GET UP.” I VAGUELY heard Caroline’s voice breaking through my dream, where Adam and I were driving down the road, singing to the radio on the way to our favorite hotel in the North Carolina mountains, a small bed-and-breakfast in downtown Blowing Rock that had a fireplace in every room and amazingly reasonable off-season rates. His parents knew how much we loved it and every Christmas, they gave us a gift certificate for two nights at the hotel—and two nights of their expert child-care services. It was my favorite gift. “You’ve been wallowing in here for thirty-four days,” Caroline said. “And you kind of stink.”
Ah, yes, Caroline. Always the tactful one.
I opened one eye, and it all came flooding back to me. Adam wasn’t in the car beside me. Adam wasn’t in the North Carolina mountains. Adam was gone. Adam was lost somewhere in the Middle East, somewhere I couldn’t find him. My heart began to race with panic.
My sister threw open the curtains, and I thought I might go blind from the harsh brightness. How had I ever relished the feel of the
