Chapter 1
**Remember, readers. You receive my roughest draft to determine if my stories are worth editing. With that note, I hope you enjoy my newest tale!***
Lizzy
There are moments in childhood that crystallize in memory like insects trapped in amber. Meaning, they are perfect, preserved, and untouchable. I hold mine close, turning them over in my mind when my own reality becomes too much, too real... When I need to remember what it felt like to be loved unconditionally and without complication.
My father’s laugh is the first thing I remember. Not his face, nor his words; just the sound of his deep rumbling laughter echoing through the halls of the Carter Estate, rich and warm like honey poured over gravel. It fills every corner of our home, seeping into the mahogany paneling and the Persian rugs, becoming part of the foundation itself. Even now, years later, I swear I can still hear it in the walls.
I am five years old, maybe six, and I’m hiding behind the velvet curtains in the drawing room. My small hands clutch the heavy fabric, and dust motes dance in the afternoon sunlight streaming through the tall windows. Outside, Jamestown stretches out in all its colonial glory, with its brick buildings and cobblestoned streets; history pressed into every surface. But I don’t care about history yet. I only care about the game.
“Where could she be?” My father’s voice booms, theatrical, and exaggerated. His footsteps are deliberately heavy on the hardwood floor. “I’ve looked everywhere for my little Lizzy. Perhaps she’s vanished into thin air!” I press my hand over my mouth to muffle my giggles. My heart pounds with the delicious thrill of almost being caught.
“Have you checked behind the curtains, darling?” My mother’s voice is softer and amused as she suggests this. I can picture her sitting on the settee, her long black hair falling over one shoulder, light brown eyes sparkling with shared conspiracy.
“The curtains? Why, I hadn’t thought of that!” Dad exclaims and then I hear footsteps growing closer to my hiding spot. I squeeze my eyes shut, as if not seeing him means he can’t see me, and then the curtain is swept aside, and my father scoops me up in one fluid motion. I shriek with laughter as he lifts me high, spinning me around until the room blurs into streaks of gold and burgundy. “Found you!” he declares triumphantly. “And now, the punishment for hiding from the king of the castle!”
The punishment is kisses; dozens of them, planted on my cheeks, my forehead, the tip of my nose. I squirm and laugh, my small hands pushing weakly at his chest, not really wanting him to stop.
“Luke, you’ll make her dizzy,” my mother chides in a laughing tone, as she smiles. She’s always smiling in these memories.
“Nonsense,” he says, finally setting me down on the sofa beside her. “Carter women are made of stronger stuff than that. Isn’t that right, Lizzy?” I nod enthusiastically, even though the room tilts slightly. My mother reaches out and smooths my hair; the same silky black as hers, though mine is wild from spinning.
“You have your father’s eyes,” she says in a soft voice, not for the first time. “Those beautiful green eyes.” I look up at my father, and he winks at me. His eyes are the color of spring grass, of new leaves, of life itself. I don’t understand yet how rare they are, how much I’ll treasure this one piece of him I get to keep.
“The only thing she got from me,” he says, settling into his leather armchair with a satisfied sigh. “Everything else is pure Maria. She’ll be breaking hearts all over Virginia one day,” he adds with a shake of his head.
“Luke,” my mother says, but there’s no real reproach in it. I don’t know what breaking hearts means, so I ignore it. Instead, I climb into my father’s lap, curling against his chest. He smells like cedar and tobacco and something else; something that’s simply just him that I’ll never be able to name. His arms come around me automatically, securely. “Tell me a story,” I demand.
“What kind of story?”
“A princess story.”
He groans dramatically. “Again? Don’t you want to hear about the brave knights or the fearsome dragons?”
“The princess can fight the dragon herself,” I inform him seriously. “She doesn’t need a knight.”
My mother laughs; that sounds like wind chimes. “I wonder where she learned that.”
“Can’t imagine,” my father says dryly, but his chest rumbles with suppressed laughter beneath my ear. “All right, little one. Once upon a time, in a castle much like this one, there lived a princess with hair as black as midnight and eyes as green as emeralds...” I close my eyes and listen, safe and warm and completely certain that this is how life will always be.
***
The piano arrives on a Tuesday. I’m finally seven (a big girl), and I’ve been begging for lessons for months. My mother plays beautifully. I’ve watched her fingers dance across the keys of the old upright in the music room, coaxing out melodies that make my chest ache in ways I don’t have words for yet.
But this isn’t the old upright. This is a baby grand piano, gleaming black lacquer that reflects the chandelier above it like a dark mirror. Men in work clothes maneuver it carefully through the front door, and I watch from the stairs, gripping the bannister with both hands. “Careful,” my father directs, hovering anxiously. “That’s a Steinway. Cost more than most people’s houses.”
“Luke,” my mother murmurs, touching his arm. “They know what they’re doing.” But he doesn’t relax until the piano is settled in the music room, positioned perfectly beneath the window where the light will fall just right.
He turns to me, and his smile is wide and incandescent. “Come here, Lizzy,” dad motions me forward with his index finger. I descend the stairs slowly, trying to match my mother’s grace and failing. I’m too small, too eager, too much of everything and not enough all at once. But when I reach the music room and see the piano up close, all self-consciousness evaporates because it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. “Go on,” my father urges. “Try it.”
I approach reverently, reaching out to touch the keys. They’re cool and smooth beneath my fingertips. I press one experimentally, and a single note rings out, pure and clear. “Your mother will teach you,” my father says, crouching beside me so we’re eye level. “But I want you to promise me something.”
“What, daddy?” I ask with child-like intrigue
“Promise me you’ll play because you love it, not because anyone expects you to. Not because it’s what Carter women do, or because it looks good at parties. Only because it makes you happy.”
I don’t fully understand the distinction he’s making, but I nod anyway. “I promise.”
He cups my face in his hands; they’re large and warm, slightly rough. “That’s my girl.” My mother joins us, settling onto the bench and patting the space beside her. I scramble up, and she guides my small hands to the proper position.
“Like this,” she says softly. “Curved, as if you’re holding a ball. Yes, just like that.” Daddy watches from the doorway, leaning against the frame with his arms crossed. There’s something in his expression I can’t quite read; pride, certainly, but something else too. Something that looks almost like sadness.
But then my mother plays a simple scale, and I try to copy her, and the moment passes. My father applauds as if I’ve just performed at Carnegie Hall, and I beam at him, and everything feels absolutely perfect!
Summer in Jamestown is thick and heavy, the air so humid it feels like breathing through wet cotton. I’m eight now, and I spend my days in the garden behind the estate, where my mother has cultivated roses that bloom in impossible shades of red and pink and white.
Dad, on the other hand, has been tired a lot lately. He naps more, works less. Sometimes I catch my mother watching him with an expression I’m starting to recognize as worry, though she always smiles when she notices me looking at her.
Today, he’s lying in the hammock strung between two old oak trees, and I’m sprawling in the grass beside him, making chains out of clover flowers. The sun filters through the leaves above us, dappling everything in shifting patterns of light and shadow. “Lizzy,” he says suddenly. “Come here.”
I abandon my clover chain and climb into the hammock beside him. It sways dangerously, and he steadies it with one hand, pulling me close against him with the other. “I want to tell you something important,” he says.
My stomach tightens. I don’t know why, but something in his tone scares me. “You’re going to grow up to be an extraordinary woman,” he continues. “You’re already so smart, so talented. So kind. Do you know that?”
I shake my head against his chest. “Well, you are. And I need you to remember something, all right? No matter what happens, no matter how hard things get... you’re stronger than you think. You’re a Carter. We’re survivors.”
“Why are you talking like this?” I ask, my voice sounding small and hesitant.
“No reason,” he says, too quickly. “Just... a father’s prerogative to get sentimental sometimes.” But I can feel his heart beating beneath my ear, faster than it should. I can feel the way his hand trembles slightly as he strokes my hair. I don’t say anything. I just hold him tighter. Above us, the leaves whisper secrets to each other, and somewhere in the distance, my mother calls us in for dinner. My father doesn’t move immediately. He just holds me there in the hammock, in the fading golden light, as if he’s trying to memorize the moment. As if he already knows he’s running out of them.
***
The last perfect day comes in October. I don’t know it’s to be the last perfect day. No. That’s not how these things work. You don’t get a warning, or a chance to pay extra close attention, to commit every detail to memory. You only realize it after the fact; looking back, when you understand what came after.
We drive out to one of the old plantations on the James River; not ours, but one owned by family friends. There’s a harvest festival, the kind of genteel affair that Virginia’s First Families excel at: apple cider and pumpkin patches, hayrides and folk music played by people who learned it from their grandparents.
My father seems better today. There’s color in his cheeks, energy in his steps. He holds my mother’s hand as we walk through the rows of pumpkins, and she leans into him, her head on his shoulder. “Pick any one you want,” he tells me. “The biggest, most ridiculous pumpkin you can find.”
I take the challenge seriously, wandering through the patch with the gravity of a general surveying a battlefield. Finally, I find it! A massive, lopsided thing that’s more orange than any pumpkin has a right to be. “That one,” I declare, pointing excitedly.
My father laughs. “Of course. Why am I not surprised?” He hoists it up with a grunt, staggering slightly under the weight. My mother reaches out to steady him, and for a moment, they’re frozen there, him holding the pumpkin, her holding him, me watching both of them. “We’ll carve it together,” he promises. “The three of us. We’ll make it the best jack-o’-lantern Jamestown has ever seen.”
We never do carve that pumpkin. It will sit on our front porch, slowly rotting away, as my father lies in a hospital bed, and my mother tries to hold our world together with sheer force of will. But I don’t know that yet. Right now, in this moment, we’re just a family at a harvest festival. My father is laughing, my mother is smiling, and I’m running ahead of them toward the hayride, my black hair streaming behind me like a banner. Right now, everything is still perfect. Right now, I still believe that perfect things can last forever.
Now though, I’m old enough to know better, old enough to understand that memory is unreliable, that nostalgia gilds everything in false gold. Maybe my father’s laugh wasn’t quite as warm as I remember. Maybe those perfect days had cracks I was too young to see. But I don’t think so. I think they were exactly as I remember them... bright and whole and real. I think my father loved me with the kind of uncomplicated devotion that only exists between parents and young children, before life gets messy, before people become complicated and I was happy.
And I think, even then, some part of me knew it couldn’t last. Some part of me was already holding on too tight, already afraid of losing what I had. Some part of me was already learning that the people you love most are the ones who can hurt you the worst; not through cruelty though, but through the simple, inevitable act of leaving this world behind.
Even when they don’t want to. Even when they fight with everything they have to stay. Even when their last words are “I love you,” and their last gift is a pair of green eyes that will stare back at you from the mirror every morning for the rest of your life, a reminder of everything you had and everything you lost. But that comes later.
For now, in these memories, my father is alive and laughing and spinning me in circles until the world blurs into gold. For now, I’m still his little Lizzy, and he’s still my hero, and nothing bad has happened yet.
