Surviving Savannah

by Patti Callahan Henry

Mom loved the stories as much as we did; I could feel it in her gaze, but she was tired of feeling things, even the goodness of a story.

Tourists might hear brief remnants of the tales but they’d never know the full truth—whose son had been lost to drugs and alcohol; whose fortunes had dissolved in gambling losses; whose husbands had philandered their way to divorce and financial ruin.

“If one wants to move beyond the past, one must not delve into the past,” some out-of-date advice book once told me. But no one, even if they believe they have, moves past the past. It follows; it shadows; it breathes quietly in the dark corners. Ask me, I know.

The Southern Titanic. What I’m looking for is someone who understands that what we bring up from below changes things above. I’m looking for someone who can help me show that the past and its stories are important even now.”

“You know,” he said finally, “not everyone who survives trauma becomes a better person. The idea that surviving brings everyone to a new and better place is a lie told by people who need the world to make sense.”

Family had always possessed a gravitational force field, part love, part obligation, mixed with the usual petty irritations and the bonds of an intimately shared history.

“I don’t know how. Tragedy—it can come from anywhere at any time. How do we go through life knowing that? How did we ever not know it? And yet we pretend we’re safe. It’s absurd.”

The buying and selling of human “property,” which she had questioned only superficially, now seemed both horrific and inexcusable. All to maintain that lifestyle?

“Only five percent of the ocean has ever been explored,” Maddox said. “No matter how long I live I won’t be able to see even another five percent. It’s a mystery. And it’s in trouble. I have no idea why anyone can’t see what the sea means to us, what its depths contain, and how we’re abusing it.”

As he left me and I heard the door close, I sent the love I felt for him, for life, for choices made under the waves, out the door with him.

‘What can anyone give you greater than now, starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?’”

Not everyone who survives trauma becomes a better person. The idea that surviving brings everyone to a new and better place is a lie told by people who need the world to make sense.

I wanted her to show me that there is a pattern or reason—a way to live when you’re the one who survived.”

Oliver drew closer. “Everly, yes, there is something special about surviving. But after that, it’s up to you. This Red Devil, he squandered his survival. We don’t. We won’t.”

Charles’s pain and cruelty burst forth in a sentence that would haunt Augusta for the rest of her life. He turned to her and said in a voice so low it sounded like a threat, “If you had saved Eliza instead of Thomas, we would at least have one more.”

Charles’s cheeks flamed as red as his hair and he spat the next words with an anger that frightened Augusta. “You . . . wish Thomas had lived and I had died.”

As Pat Conroy once said, “‘Tell me a story’ are the most powerful words in the English language.” I was using them now.