“A mother knows things,” she would tell her daughter. “A mother doesn’t really have eyes on the back of her head, but she has something more. She has intuition, and you too will have it soon.”
Rosario quickly tucked the clothes back into the bag. Her husband hugged her. He had used his entire holiday bonus from the post office so that his wife could buy these baby clothes for their daughter. They both knew that screaming and yelling wouldn’t solve anything, nor would silence and shunning. They would accept their daughter’s decision, and the man she chose, and they would look forward to the arrival of Isabella’s baby. Together they walked into the kitchen to meet their daughter and to tell her they already knew and had known for quite some time, and together they would then celebrate the New Year.
Dense crowds filled Puerta del Sol as midnight approached. With each stroke of the clock, the Spaniards would swallow a grape, a tradition bringing good luck for the rest of the year. Nacho didn’t need luck. He was reunited with the love of his life, his music. He would be performing with Madrid’s symphony and had been practicing continuously until his friends from childhood urged him to take a break and welcome in the New Year in this popular square, the heart of Madrid.
Dressed in a red-and-black-checkered flannel nightgown, Evelyn peeked out the window of her trailer home near the beach. There wasn’t a view of the Gulf of Mexico like she once had on the island; the view that one day frightened her and the next day inspired her to change her life. She never took swimming lessons in the literal sense, but instead, the water, which once reminded her how minute and insecure she felt in her overwhelmingly large world of abuse, began showing her something different. Maybe it was simply her perspective that had changed. As she stared out that window her last few days on the island, she saw opportunity and a larger life for herself, something she had never seen before.
God showed her something new out that window.
“Goodie. The moon is just about in its midnight position,” she said out loud to the brown, stale plants sitting around in their pots. They had suffered and died in captivity and were now the framework of a spider’s mansion.
“Lord, give me strength to make these changes,” she said, looking around at the fist holes that provided rude peepholes into her bathroom. Cheerios added design to the coffee-stained fabric table booths.
Just outside, the man who had beaten her many times walked up the pathway and pounded on the door. “Open up. I know you’re in there. I brought you some good stuff. Let’s party like it’s the millennium,” he shouted.
She opened the door, hoping he wouldn’t break it down again, but this time he knocked her down, laughing as she crashed into the table, bruising her knee.
“Don’t lay another hand on me,” she screamed.
“You know you deserve it.”
She didn’t say a thing because she knew this man was dangerous. Inside, she knew now that she did not deserve it, that no creation of God deserved this kind of treatment. As she picked herself up from the floor and stood up, she continued to pray, this time from the Lord’s Prayer. “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” she whispered.
Then she picked up her Bible, tossed it in her bag, and said, “I’ll go get us beer, and I’ll be right back, babe.”
She knew exactly where she was going. She had read about the woman’s shelter a few weeks ago, and all she had to do was get to a pay phone and make the call. Yes, she deserved better than this. She had waited for years for the cards to tell her to leave this crazy man. They never did, so she stayed. Now, she had made the decision on her own, and with the strength of God she would enter a New Year and a new life, both at the same time. She would run and not look back, and this time she would make it on her own.
She would start small at first, setting the basic boundaries, laying a few bricks at a time. Soon she would set more limits, pouring concrete over the brick. Eventually, she would live within a fortress bigger, better, and more beautiful than anything she ever dreamt of as a little girl. Nothing would penetrate the walls of her fortress, the walls made of boundaries and limits.
“There’s room for two more,” Denver shouted as he waved people onto his houseboat. “Okay. I’ll come back for the rest of you in a half hour.”
“Happy New Year,” shouted the voices in line. “Happy New Year, and thank you for helping us.”
“But O the ship, the immortal ship! O ship aboard the ship!” Denver shouted out a famous quotation from Walt Whitman. “Ship of the body, ship of the soul, voyaging, voyaging, voyaging.”
He left with his group of fifteen people down the Sacramento River. Television crews swarmed the area, but he refused interviews. He didn’t want publicity. He simply wanted to carry out his plan. He wanted to make the most of his second chance, to spend every penny his brother had given him in the most meaningful manner. Each time he took a group of fifteen homeless people down the Sacramento River, he offered them hot cider, cheese and bread, fruit, and a pep talk.
“You’re all vessels,” he told them. “You’re all vessels in need of repair, and believe me, you can repair yourself.”
He had been doing this for months now, and cameras had been following him ever since. “I’m going to sing you all a song that I think you can relate to. It’s called, ‘Life is so sad, life is so sad.’ Then, I’m gonna lend y’all some twigs, some twigs to start repairing yourselves again.”
The homeless appeared to be interested in his message, and often times Denver had them join hands and close their eyes. “Give us today, our daily bread,” he would often say, reciting the Lord’s Prayer.
“And forgive us our debts as we also forgive our debtors,” whispered Howard. A nurse entered his room and handed him a party favor, but he felt too weak to blow. He glanced at the clock on the white wall and counted down, as he did all night, not for the New Year, but for when his brother would be finished with the boat rides and would stop in to visit him. He knew he wouldn’t see another year, and perhaps not another night. It didn’t matter now. All that mattered to him was that his money had gone to a good cause and that Denver had repaired himself. He could rest in peace now.
The flowers didn’t need a calendar telling them when to blossom. As Connie walked across the carefully laid stones leading to her garden, grape hyacinth spread itself like a royal velvet carpet, welcoming its queen. Purple wisteria sprayed her with its sweet perfume, and when she walked a few feet further, she stopped to hear the soft waterfall drips of a fountain where cardinals and bluebirds were bathing together. The birds took flight as she splashed her hands in the cold, clear water, then rinsed her face, refreshed.
She could smell fresh grass, the kind as safe as what she once could smell as a child, so she skipped forward and sat down Indian-style, surrounded by rows and rows of pink, yellow and red rosebuds, resting snugly as long as they liked, perhaps only minutes or hours away from blossoming, maybe tomorrow morning. There was no hurry. They were counting down for nothing. She sat there often, whenever she wanted, and sometimes it felt like hours before she continued on in the garden.
When she felt the warmth of the morning sun, she stood up and walked toward the flowering crabapple tree and sat on the white wooden chair made for one, just below the pink flowers, scented tissues for the taking. Often, she reached up, pulling some off, then wiped her tears. They were magical tears, the kind that made her rose petals unfurl.
When she felt ready, she walked toward the west end of her garden, glancing at her reflection in the pond. When she had first started coming to the garden, she didn’t like what she saw. Now, beautiful green foliage, mosses, and grass pushed up from the pond like mini-skyscrapers, and baby ducks knew her voice and came waddling over to greet her. She would bend down to their level and hold her hands out to them and offer them breadcrumbs. She enjoyed nurturing them, and she enjoyed how much they loved her. Her reflection in the pond was always changing as the baby feet of the ducklings would speed it up.
Sometimes, when the ducks weren’t around, it was hauntingly clear and still.
Some days she could see so much work that needed to be done in the garden while other days she felt content with her progress. A garden is a lot of work, she would tell herself, but it brings much joy.
“Mommy, I want Cheerios,” cried one of the baby ducklings. “I want Cheerios.”
Connie opened her eyes. The sun was rising, and her children were waking. Her husband would want his coffee soon, and her babes needed diaper changes and breakfast. She would return to the garden tomorrow morning, as she did every day, same time, waking just one hour before the rest of her house and sitting with her eyes closed and her imagination wide open near the large window on the east side of her home, the side that welcomes the waking sun, the start of a new and glorious day and year. She had no real garden. It didn’t matter. She created a place she could go to, a place in her mind.
At twenty minutes before midnight, Captain Porter Smith watched the moon overhead and the stars that dropped more magnificently than the ball in Times Square. He had recently made the local news for catching a one-hundred-and-thirty-pound tarpon near Sarasota, Florida, and in the New Year, he would catch an even bigger one. Apparently, the man he had taken fishing that night had published a novel and then had become a state senator and the father of quadruplets shortly thereafter. It must have been a very motivating battle.
As she carefully lifted the third snowball and set it atop the two larger mounds of packed snow, shortly before midnight, Vicki wore only the warmest wool mittens while playing outdoors with Michigan’s wintry elements. She quickly opened the box full of her grandmother’s belongings and reached inside for the straw beach hat that once served its purpose on Sanibel Island. It instantly brought character to her snow lady. She then added her grandmother’s dark sunglasses and placed the purple scarf around its neck.
She reached deep into her own coat pocket and pulled out her list of New Year’s resolutions. She liked the simplicity of this year’s list: build a snow lady; plant seeds; play hopscotch; cook with fresh garlic and basil; sit in the grass; make a baby laugh; and tell Mr. Right how much you love him and how badly you want to spend your life with him.
And this she would do within the hour. She would show him this exact list, and he would read it himself. She hung her list on the branch, her snow lady’s arm, then hurriedly headed over to start her car and scrape its windows.
She wrapped her scarf around her face to shield her skin from the winter wind as she hurried across the airport parking lot at ten minutes until midnight. What a place to celebrate the New Year, she thought as she ran up the elevators and to the terminal, rubbing her fingers together to warm away the numbness. She could hardly wait to see him. It didn’t matter that their New Year’s kiss would happen in the airport and that her teeth would be chattering from the cold. She had it all planned. She would toss her arms tightly around him and tell him how much she missed him, and then, back at the house, she would introduce him to her snow lady and show him her New Year’s list. She didn’t quite know what sort of arrangements she would need to make after that, nor did she care. She would graduate, and then do whatever was necessary, and he would wait for her. He always said he would wait for her to do the things she had to do.
As the plane landed at five minutes till midnight, crazy passengers passed around paper party hats and noisemakers. Ben didn’t feel like celebrating. He felt so sure of his decision to take the one-year assignment in Brazil, helping to save the world’s largest rain forest where every year an area the size of Belgium was being lost or badly damaged. At first, the opportunity hit him in the head like a cold water balloon. After all, he had declared his days of exotic travel a thing of the past. But then, more balloons kept coming his way. His passion for faraway places had simply been dormant. Man has a right to change his mind with time.
He knew that by taking the assignment he would not be able to see Vicki this summer, and that might alter their future together. He didn’t know if it was the sort of place Vicki would like. She had mentioned that she wanted to travel and had seemed disappointed when he had once said he was done with traveling. Maybe she would go with him, and together they could build their home, their floating Amazon hut, whatever, or at least she might wait for him to return. He wanted her for a wife. He could hardly wait. He had gone over the proposal a million times in his mind and shared the idea with a woman sitting next to him on the plane.
“We’ll get out of the car, and I’ll mention that I haven’t seen snow in years. Then, as I struggle to carry the luggage toward her place, I’ll slip and crash in the snow.”
“Don’t lose the ring,” replied the woman.
“Then, she’ll run over to help me, and she’ll probably be laughing. Instead of getting up, I’ll get on my hands and knees.”
“Will she be on the ground with you?”
“No, of course not. I hope not. She’ll be standing next to this crazy snow person she keeps talking about.”
“A what?”
“A snow man of some sort. She called me on my cell phone and said something about it reminding her of her grandmother. She gets a bit eccentric at times.”
“I guess so. Will this snow creature intervene in any way?”
“Let’s hope not.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
THE SUN ROSE AND SET some 365 times, over and over again. Fridays arrived, but Mondays crept quickly around the corner every time. Vicki reached the end of her journal, her letters to Grandma, and saw time flipping by like the pages of a book. She wanted to read life slowly, paying attention to the details. Sometimes she read the same sentence twice. She couldn’t ask summer to take its time. There would be too much ice cream consumed. Winter arrived when it liked, and with it, she imagined shark’s eyes, fighting conchs, and other seashells crawling around Sanibel sandbars at low tide, attacking each other for dinner, leaving the empty shells to wash onto shore. Fall had much to do in such little time. She would never be able to control the timing of the leaves turning orange or crisp, or falling to the ground, or the time it took people to rake them into piles and burn them before the snow. She could only control her own pace, and she wanted to walk through life, slowly, as a conductor who had once wanted the piece played only loudly but now interpreted it differently and decided when the volume should change.
Once in awhile her breathing troubles still haunted her, and she continued writing about the episodes, allowing her fears to be expressed through the writing. Often she prayed. Sometimes she would close her eyes and visualize herself on the dock of Tarpon Key or in the park outside the Prado Museum in Madrid. She no longer feared death. That fear and its ridiculous obsession belonged to her dark days, or, in Picasso’s language, her “blue period” of madness. She painted with a rose palette now.
As her days grew busy from the demands of practicing psychology, she handled things well and simply remembered there was a time for everything. She cried at the thought of the cold, dead ground where the tulips once stood. She smiled when she thought of spring and the ducks arriving from the south. She closed her eyes and laughed at summer and the people lining up to buy ice cream. She went through the motions of the backward good-bye wave just thinking about fall and the ducks heading south again. Yes, there was a season for everything, and this God knew.
Her patients each had a unique story to tell, and she cherished listening to them. She had put much time into her thesis and had felt proud turning it in. Using Denver’s analogy, she classified personality types and diagnostic states as vessels. Some ships anchored at a specific point for quite some time. Others just needed to refuel for a brief period. Her paper went more in depth than that and triggered significant debate and discussion in the psychology department. Now, in her practice, she specialized in anxiety disorders and in helping her patients through their dark days of life.
On February 14, at four o’clock in the morning, the phone rang, waking her. She had progra
mmed her phone to only ring once, so almost instantly a voice came on the answering machine, a familiar voice from her past shouting, “Victoria, Victoria!”
As if riding on the wings of a butterfly, Vicki flew to the phone so quickly she could hardly catch her breath. “Hola?” she said as she held the receiver tightly to her face.
The man on the other end of the line said he couldn’t refuse the wrinkled piece of paper that Triste had one day waved before him. He had tucked it away for quite some time; then, with the help of an interpreter, he had called the school and tracked her down. Her home phone number was unlisted so she knew he had gone to great investigative lengths to reach her.
They both had much to say, and several times they both talked at once, and then laughed. His voice came like an echo across an ocean, and she tried hard to picture his face, but the waves were too high. She had no photographs of him, only those in her mind. Still, they had faded with time. As he spoke of his life in recent years, she stared at the silk tulips standing proudly in a vase on her desk. The voice on the phone said he had spotted her standing tall on her first day of classes and that he had picked her, of all people, to ask for directions.
“You spoke funny Spanish,” he said in a strange English accent, “but you stood tall and proud, like a flower.”
“Rafael,” she said, smiling. “You’ve been learning English. I’m proud of you.”
“Tell me, Victoria, have you been changing with time?”
“Wiser and better, and you?”
They talked long enough to generate a phone bill that could have paid for an expensive four-course, or as Rafael would say, “five fork” dinner. Neither knew how to say good-bye, so Rafael finally took charge.
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