We would have picnics with our children, tell them delightful stories, and tuck them into bed to dream beautiful dreams. How I looked forward to finding this man with whom I would birth wonder and love.
Despite my father’s apparent self-confidence, he secretly depended on my mother for his security. When she became sick with pneumonia and died, part of my father died with her. We all mourned her loss, but Father came unglued. He barricaded himself in his room for nearly a week. When he finally came out, he emerged with a new vision for his life.
During that week of solitude, weeping for his loss, Father fell under the deepest conviction that he had to have a grandson. He called together his three daughters—Patrice, Martha, and me—and begged us to consider him in his last days. He would soon follow our mother to the grave, he said, he could feel it in his bones.
He instructed each of us to marry swiftly, keep our maiden name, and produce a son to whom all the wealth and prestige of the family could pass. After all, Father had no brothers.
Perhaps it was his way of making good. Having been dealt such a blow, he wanted a second chance at love, and for him that meant having a son, which he could only have through one of his daughters now. My only true value to him seemed to be my potential to give him a son.
“Keep our maiden name?” Patrice objected. She was already married and had moved to Houston, where her husband, Henry Cartwright, managed Father’s oil wells. “I’m already married. Besides, I was under the distinct impression that you wanted me to keep an eye on Henry, not raise a family.”
“And you should keep an eye on that parasite, before he sucks me dry!” Father rasped, pointing a crooked finger at her. “But you have to change your name back to Carter. Give me a son. A good-looking boy who has the Carter blood in him. It’s the least you can do after all I’ve sacrificed for you.”
Having made his plea with Patrice, Father turned his desperate eyes on me. I was twenty-four at the time and had no lasting love interest.
“Please, Julian, have mercy on your father and give me a grandson. I’m dying, for heaven’s sake.”
“I’m not even married,” I protested.
“But you could be! Like that.” He snapped his fingers. “We have to find you a man. Someone with looks and brains, not like the dolt Patrice got.”
We all knew there was at least some truth in his words.
“And you, dear,” Father said, turning to Martha, who was only nineteen. “You’re the spitting image of your mother. You have to bear me a grandson. Soon. Before I die. Promise me.” His eyes begged us all. “Promise me this one dying request.”
“I don’t think you’ll die anytime soon,” I said.
“I’m half-dead already! Promise me this one thing. It’s all I will ask.”
For a moment no one spoke; he had us all under his spell. I had been very particular about whom I would eventually marry, looking as I was for the perfect man, you see? But it struck me then that my expectations had failed to bring me any satisfaction.
And I had always dreamed of having a son or a daughter who might finally correct what was wrong with my life. Perhaps I should honor my father. Really, any fine man could make a good husband or give me a beautiful child.
“I promise,” I said.
He fixed his look on me. “That you’ll quit being so picky and find a man.”
“I’m sure—”
“That you’ll keep my name,” he pressed.
“Maybe I could—”
“And give me a baby boy. A grandson. To carry on my name and my legacy.”
The idea began to blossom in my mind.
“Yes, Father.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise.”
He threw himself at me and hugged me tight, thanking me as if I had just given him his only reason to live. And I had, I think.
But I knew that marrying wasn’t like snapping fingers.
“If I can,” I said.
“I’ll help you, my dear little songbird.”
He never called me his songbird, even though he said that I was the one who’d inherited Mother’s beautiful voice. She and I often sang duets at the First Baptist Church, where we attended Sunday morning services.
I married Neil Roberts a year later, when I was twenty-five.
He died when I was twenty-six.
If I had known Neil’s true nature I never would have allowed myself to be impressed by his charming smile when my father invited him to our estate as a potential suitor. Many said that I was a fool for marrying him, but he gave me Stephen, and for that alone I am eternally grateful.
I can’t remember exactly when I began to dislike my husband—perhaps when he began refusing to come out of his room, cowering under deep depression less than four months after we married. He was a tortured soul. I suffered as well, but not as deeply as he did. Despite his mistreatment of me, I had compassion for his misery.
He often sank to the bottom of emotion’s darkest well, particularly when he drank too much. At times he would stare at the horizon for hours on end, as if he were hardly more than a corpse. At other times he ignored me for days, refusing to acknowledge me even when I spoke to him.
On one occasion, when I spilled flaming oil on the stove and nearly burned down the house, he refused to acknowledge my cries for help, and I became so frustrated that I threw a frying pan at him. It struck his shoulder, but he hardly gave me a glance.
Honestly, I don’t know how he became this way—he wouldn’t speak about it. Even worse, I don’t know how he managed to hide his true character from me until after we were married. He was a master of the shift, as I called it. Put him with men discussing an oil deal in South America, and he could shift into smooth talk on the fly. But at home he had few words for me, even on the best of days.
At times I wondered if my father had paid my husband to court me, marry me, and offer his seed for a son. Once that job was done there would have been nothing left of the arrangement to interest Neil. Father would never confess to such a thing, naturally, and I never wanted to burden him with the question.
Within six months of our wedding, I woke up realizing that I despised my marriage. Despite my family’s disapproval of divorce, I think I might have left Neil in the first year if I hadn’t learned that I was with child.
The change in me was nothing short of a radical conversion. As soon as I grasped the notion that a baby with fingers and toes and a tiny nose was growing inside my womb, I became obsessed with love for the child. Nothing else really mattered to me, only the life that moved in my belly. I dreamed only of my healthy baby cooing up at me with round eyes, suckling at my swollen breasts before falling into sweet sleep.
The day Stephen came into the world, a part of me found heaven.
And it was on that same night, while I was still in the hospital, that I first had the dream that would change the course of my life forever—the same dream that landed me on the white sailboat in the middle of the raging sea.
I wasn’t one who normally remembered her dreams, but the next morning the details of the jungle I’d seen while sleeping were still so vivid that I forgot I was in a hospital.
In the dream I was looking down at a large valley filled with a tangle of trees and vines the thickness of my forearms running all the way to the ground. Flocks of red-and-blue parrots took flight and flapped over an endless swamp at the valley’s far end. The landscape was both savage and idyllic at once.