such magnitude—at least eighty feet high—that people would come and visit it in awe. The tree was older than the house itself, and the most beautiful, majestic thing I had ever seen. Draped in swathes of gorgeous Spanish moss, it seemed like some elegant grand dame in her finest clothes, or a wild Medusa standing proud, guarding Distant Sands—her very own Greek Revival mansion—garlanded and festooned with streamers in her leafy hair.
The minute I arrived, Distant Island gave me a feeling that I was on a remote, going-back-in-time, Carolina sea island. I felt a little isolated.
The mansion is perched on just a little bit of a slope. The façade of the house faces a lagoon surrounded by a meandering web of creeks and inlets teeming with oystercatchers and winding salt rivers and coastal marshland buffering the land from the great Atlantic. Distant Island, on Lady’s Island, neighbors hundreds of other sea islands, most of the inhabited ones connected by a bridge. Bays, rivers and sounds meander their way around them, like arteries flowing between the Intracoastal Waterway and the Atlantic Ocean.
When the tide is low the salty marsh exposes itself with all its secrets and God’s little inhabitants amidst the wild sea grass shimmering in the breeze: the marsh birds, blue herons and egrets, crabs and crayfish, and silver oysters wedged in the sand.
And when the tide is high you can dangle your legs in the water, perched on the house’s private deep-water dock that stretches wide across the marshy creek. You can watch pelicans dive-bombing for fish and sometimes spot bottlenose dolphins flitting across its smooth waters, pewter at dawn, and copper at sunset. Of course, there can be riptides that sneak into these waters and wild storms sometimes, even hurricanes, although, so far, I hadn’t experienced any crazy weather. I have made Distant Island sound as if it’s in the middle of nowhere, which isn’t quite true, because it’s only fifteen minutes from Beaufort, a beautiful little town set between Savannah and Charleston. Beaufort’s downtown district was designated as historic by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
Still, even with the town close by, I felt out on a limb.
I couldn’t help sense that I was a visitor. A ship passing in the night. A shooting star exploding into dust. I knew from the outset I’d have to start counting my memories—the good ones—because they’d be fleeting. Call it premonition or sure-fire knowledge, it didn’t matter. My days at Distant Sands were numbered.
I was still trying to acclimatize myself to married life with Ashton. A Yankee as I pretty much considered myself, the South Carolinian ways were new to me: the food, the polite, unsaid rules, the unhurried gaiety and social norms that spoke a new language I hadn’t yet mastered. I’d heard some of their jokes, told with a grin: “Yankees are like hemorrhoids. Pain in the butt when they come down and always a relief when they go back up.”
I longed to fit in, to be accepted. I had yet to find out that cruelty would be wrapped in lace, and that if anyone said “Bless your heart,” you knew that heart was damned.
I often wondered if confidence is something you’re born with or something you acquire. I mean, real gut confidence, not the bravado kind or the fake veneer. I’d certainly had to acquire bucketloads of confidence since I’d been married to Ashton. The way you pick seashells from the shore, I had to collect confidence amidst the grains of sand, make myself sparkle, ease myself into feeling at home in a foreign world. Because the Lowcountry was foreign to me. Everyone was more than welcoming, but I wanted to be the perfect wife, to look as if Ashton and I matched, and that we had been made for each other, belonged together.
But being perfect doesn’t come easy; you have to work at it, and work at it I did. The understated clothing, but always quality brands. Never flashy, never brash, but effortlessly well-turned out. My dark hair long enough to be sexy but always styled and cut so it was neat. Makeup applied with such precision that it looked as if I hardly wore any. A touch of mascara, maybe a dash of brown eyeliner to bring out the blue of my eyes, a dab of rouge or lip gloss. Natural was the byword, the key. Shoes: low heels or pristine sneakers. I favored pearl stud earrings. The only thing that drew attention was my