Portion of the Sea

by Christine Lemmon

  “I will, I will!” I said as I started walking briskly down the beach and a second later I thought I heard her say, “Go, you little feathery gold plume! Protect your destiny and don’t breathe a word of this to anyone.”

  II

  I HAD NEVER LOOKED into anyone else’s journal before, and I could hardly wait to, hopefully discover it full of secret treasures. But dusk was quickly turning to dark, so I continued briskly down the shell-strewn beach. I didn’t feel like facing Lloyd’s wrath for getting back late.

  As I rounded the large screened porch on the side of the cottage we had rented for the week, I spotted my father standing in the driveway. His right arm was bent stiffly near his face, and he was watching the hands on his wristwatch make their rounds. I stopped to decipher whether he looked worried or mad.

  “Damn. Where is she? I don’t have time for this,” he muttered to his watch.

  “Sorry, sir,” I said, walking over and putting my arm on his and lowering it gently from his face.

  “Where have you been, young lady?”

  “I can explain,” I said. “I met a very nice woman on the beach, and we were chatting. She said she got a nose job, and I felt too stupid asking her what that was. Do you know? What kind of work does she do? Smell things?”

  “You’re kidding, I hope.”

  I wasn’t, but when he didn’t look amused, I told him what he wanted to hear. “Of course. But I can still explain why I’m late.”

  “Never mind. I don’t have time for any more stories. Save them for your journals,” he scolded. “We’re leaving the island.”

  “What? We can’t possibly be leaving. We still have several more days left.”

  “Plans change. We’re leaving. Haven’t you noticed all our suitcases piled around me? I had to pack all of your stuff. Yours and mine.”

  I hadn’t noticed them, but now I did, and mine were busting at the zipper lines. “Why?” I asked.

  Lloyd took in a deep breath, and by the way he let it all out I knew something bad had happened. “It’s my partner, Mr. Ashton. He’s suffered a stroke and we’ve got to get back to Chicago immediately. I’ve arranged for a car to take us to the marina so we can catch a private charter out tonight. We’ll be staying in Fort Myers, then flying out first thing in the morning.”

  “Is Mr. Ashton okay? Is he alive?”

  “I don’t know at this moment. But the bank can’t run without him. They need me there right away.”

  “But can’t we just stay until morning?” I looked to make sure the journal was concealed in my bag. It was.

  “Sorry, dear. We’re leaving immediately. If the driver ever gets here, that is.”

  “Why not one more night?” I pleaded.

  He looked at me like he wanted to fire me as his daughter, or worse, hang me. And he was the type to do it. I knew he wanted to get back because a promotion was on his mind. “Lydia, a man is on his deathbed, and all you can think about is staying on the island? There are decisions to be made at the bank, and I don’t want any of them made without me there,” he said. “It’s not fair for you to whine about your vacation at a time like this.”

  I wanted to tell him all about what the lady on the beach had given to me, and how I promised I would return it before leaving, but then I remembered that I swore on my mother’s grave I wouldn’t tell a soul about it. I didn’t know what might happen to me for having sworn on someone’s grave, and then not following through with my promise.

  “Daddy, have you ever wanted to become famous?”

  “Never, just wealthy and important and to play a man’s part in the world.”

  I hadn’t ever given it any consideration, either, but after hearing Marlena dangle it before me like she did, I now liked the thought of it. As I stood beside my father waiting for the driver to show, I no longer wanted to one day become the wife of someone important, but instead to be someone important myself. I felt selfish as a pirate for thinking the new way in which I was, but I’m sure pirates felt no guilt for wanting merry old lives for themselves. And all I really wanted was a life I liked. Marlena said I could do anything, and I believed her. She wasn’t hired by my father to be nice to me.

  “For Christ’s sake, where is this guy?” Lloyd was starting to scare me. He was looking like he wanted the driver dead or alive.

  I didn’t want to add to his frustration, but I had to somehow think of a way I might return the journal to Marlena’s mailbox before we left. “While we’re waiting for him, sir, can I run back to the beach? I think one of the starfish in my pail is still moving. It’s unethical to take a live shell.”

  “Lydia, you’re making me question the progress I thought I’ve made in raising you. No! You cannot go to the beach—not at a time like this. Don’t leave my side!”

  When I heard a car round the bend of the road, I considered burying the journal in the dirt, anything so I wouldn’t have to leave the island with a beach basket full of booty. But the men loaded the suitcases in the trunk so fast that I could hardly think. I only knew I never intended to loot Marlena like I was, and as I climbed into the backseat of the car, I felt more alone than I ever had before, even on the holidays when Lloyd worked and the nannies had gone home to their families and it was back before we had bought our first television.

  As I watched the cottage shrink out the back window, I thought about what I was getting away with, both the journal and newfound belief that I had choices in life and I could be whatever I wanted to be.

  “Daddy,” I said as the car turned onto Periwinkle and headed east. “Did my mother ever want to be anything other than a homemaker?”

  “No, darling. Your mother put in a good sixty to eighty hours per week working around the house. She was committed to that, and she didn’t have any leisure time to sit around thinking about much else. Why do you ask?”

  “I’ve been thinking,” I said. “I’d like to be a journalist. Do you think I could be one day?”

  He glanced back and looked at me like I was some feverish sailor losing her mind. Then he gave the driver one of those male camaraderie glances.

  “I want a job outside of the house,” I continued. “I want to write for a newspaper.”

  “Sir, if you don’t mind my saying,” the driver said. “There are female journalists, you know. It does exist.”

  “There may be a few, I suppose. I’m not familiar with any. I don’t read the recipe and household cleaning sections,” said Lloyd. “I do know there’s a hell of a lot more women nurses. Nursing and teaching are suitable jobs for women who insist on working, Lydia. And secretaries are good. I appreciate all of mine. But if you’re still set on working in five years, consider nursing or teaching. We’ll discuss it then, dear. Could you go faster, please?”

  A few minutes later the car pulled up to the marina. “I don’t want to be a nurse or a teacher,” I dared to say when my father opened the back door for me. “I want to be a journalist.”

  “It doesn’t matter what you want, angel,” he said. “No little girl of mine is going to work around a bunch of men someday.”

  “I’m not a little girl,” I mumbled once he was ahead of me on the dock. “I’m fifteen.”

  The driver had already removed our luggage from the trunk and was handing it to the boat captain. I walked grudgingly toward the boat, listening as my father gave orders to the boat captain.

  “Get us across this bay as fast as you can,” he stated. “I’ve got innumerable phone calls to make tonight and we’ve already lost time waiting for that guy to pick us up.”

  My mind felt frazzled. I didn’t want to leave the island with the journal. I wanted to read and return it to Marlena who had been so nice tolend it to me in the first place. As I staggered along, I feared the only fame I might own one day would be that of a notorious pirate captain who plundered a priceless, timeless treasure from a nice lady living on a barrier island in Florida. The driver must have thought I was trailing behind, moping for the way my father had talk
ed to me.

  “A couple of years back,” he whispered to me, “some female war correspondent won a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting, you know.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  He raised an eyebrow at me. “Yeah, she reported from Korea, the first woman to win the award and shared it with five male war correspondents. You can do whatever you want.”

  “Thank you,” I said, vigorously shaking his hand like a man.

  He nodded and walked into the darkness and for a quick moment I thought about running after him and asking whether he’d do me a favor and return the journal to “Bougainvillea.” But that was too risky. He was a man, and Marlena especially instructed that no man ought to ever lay eyes on the inside of this girl’s journal. I could trust no one. And I had no choice but to step onto that boat with my treasure, hoping after all of this, that it would turn out to be filled with golden jewelry, silver coins, and bits of shining, priceless womanly wisdom.

  III

  AS THE BOAT PULLED away from the island, I told myself things would be different had I a mother. Maybe I wouldn’t be telling lies or swearing on graves or embarrassing my father or turning to a life of piracy had I a mother to keep me in line.

  And I would no longer look with envy and insecurity at girls who had mothers, if I had one of my own. I always wondered whether the girls with mothers knew more than I about the world or the handling or perceiving of situations. They looked so sure of themselves, as if they were wearing beautiful pearls of wisdom handed down to them from their mothers, who inherited the pearls from their mothers and so on throughout the generations of women in their ancestry. But a motherless girl like myself would have to figure the world out on her own, raiding others for scraps of knowledge and information.

  As the boat entered the bay, I could feel the balmy air closing in around me like the walls of a jail, and I felt like I had already stood trial for piracy and was soon going to be made to walk the plank. That’s when Lloyd tried talking to me.

  “I’m sorry it was cut short, but did you like our little getaway, Lydia?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good because I was thinking we could start a tradition, you and I taking a leisure trip once a year. It doesn’t have to be Sanibel. There’s New York City, Martha’s Vineyard, Lake Tahoe, San Francisco, Paris—You name it, darling, anywhere in the world and we’ll go there.”

  “Sanibel,” I muttered.

  Returning there would be my only chance at returning to my life before pirating, for I could hand the journal back to Marlena and explain everything, setting my conscience free. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. “I don’t want to go anywhere else,” I stated. “I want to return to Sanibel.”

  “Did I ever tell you that you sound like your mother?”

  I made a mental note to enter that new information about my mother into my diary once we got to the hotel. “But my mother never returned to Sanibel,” I said.

  “I know darling, but you will.”

  “Do you swear? Do you swear on my mother’s grave that I’ll return?”

  “No. I don’t like to swear on anyone’s grave like that.”

  “Oh,” I said. “So it’s true.”

  “What?”

  “A boy at school swore on his uncle’s grave, and the next day his aunt died. And the friend of a second cousin of my best friend’s second-removed aunt once stepped on a crack and a couple hours later, my best friend’s second-removed aunt’s second-cousin’s mother fell down the stairs and broke her back. I never met the woman with the broken back, but my friend told me all about it. Is it true? Would I be cursed if I swear on someone’s grave, and don’t stick to what I swore?”

  “Never swear on anyone’s grave,” he said. “And never swear. It’s not proper.”

  I glanced back at the utopia that earlier had birds under a pink sky and saw nothing but a lump in the darkness. I felt a burden within, one heavy enough to sink the boat that was now speeding toward Fort Myers as I put my hand over my mouth, ready to vomit over the side of the boat for having sworn I would return the journal before leaving the island.

  “Mind if I borrow your flashlight?” I asked the captain as soon as my queasiness subsided. “I’ve got some reading I’d like to do.”

  I pulled the girl’s journal from my pail and as soon as I opened it I felt my father’s eyes aiming over my shoulder.

  “J.D. Salinger,” I told him before he asked. “I’m reading Catcher in theRye, a novel.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard of it. A couple of the young interns at the bank were reading it just last week. Isn’t it a bit boyish for you, Lydia?”

  I turned the flashlight off and closed the journal so he wouldn’t give it a closer look. “No, sir,” I replied. “I don’t think so at all.”

  “I don’t know that I want my daughter reading a novel about a school-boy at odds with society.”

  “Better a boy than a girl at odds with society, don’t you think, Daddy?”

  We both laughed, and I knew I was free to read. I opened the journal once more, feeling guilty for what I was about to do and wondering whether there were laws against this sort of thing, of reading another girl’s diary. I had never been a law-breaking person and actually believed there should be more laws—against touching the wings of butterflies and feeding alligators and wild birds and taking live shells from the beach. Maybe there were laws for all of these things. I didn’t know for sure. I only knew I felt like a criminal as I aimed the flashlight at the top of the page and let my eyes begin feasting off the handwritten words.

  IV

  SANIBEL ISLAND

  1890

  Ava

  There is a beginning, middle and end to every woman’s life. But once a woman arrives at what she thinks might be her end, all she must do is reach deep down into her innermost depths and there she will find a new beginning. A woman is as hardy as any perennial flower and deep as the sea.

  I FEARED MY MOTHER had reached her end as the boat started across the wide bay on its trip over to the barrier island of Sanibel. The sun would soon be peeking out from the eastern horizon, and the island before us stood like a heaping black mound in the distance. The bay, having no natural light in these moments before sunrise, looked black as ink, and it made me want to dip my pen and start writing in my journal all that I was witnessing. But I knew this early in the morning my writing would only look like chicken scratch, and so my journal remained tightly in my hands. It was still too dark to write.

  We were used to seeing dark rather than light. The winter in Kentucky had been wet, dark, and bitter, and my mother’s eyes turned gray in the winter.

  “You know what maddens me most about winter?” My mother, Abigail, asked, her eyes staring outward at the black silhouette of the shrimp-shaped island in the distance.

  “No, what?”

  “It couldn’t care less about spring. Winter stomps right over spring. And poor little spring hardly gets noticed anymore. And do you know what I loathe most about fall?”

  “What, Mama?”

  “Fall is winter’s predecessor,” she said.

  My father and I hadn’t seen beauty in the changing seasons for some time. We only noticed Abigail’s eyes turn colorless as the weather turned cold. Her face wilted downward, and her body crumbled to the ground when the sun disappeared in the fall. And come winter, her spirit retreated, surviving deep down in an underground, and all we could see was her crown, until spring, when her eyes, blue like the petals of an iris, opened widely again, turning us all into happily chirping birds.

  I always paid close attention to my mother’s eyes. They told me more than her lips ever did. And so I grew accustomed to watching everyone’s eyes, for the eyes continue talking when the lips stop.

  When her eyes suddenly looked awestruck, as if they were looking at the Lord Himself, I turned my attention ahead, for the rising sun had painted the sky over Sanibel with strokes of orange and pink and the clouds were now lit and fl
oating before us like flames on candles. It was as if the old world I had known for all fourteen years of my life had passed away and a new world was appearing before me. There was now morning light and it was good.

  Then creatures with wings of at least fifteen feet came out of the sky and were heading at us with outstretched necks.

  “Flying beasts!” howled my grandmother Dahlia, seated on a bench at the front of the boat. “Woe, woe! They’re going to kill us!” Dahlia’s arms were stretched overhead in the form of a cross as if that alone might turn the things back to where they came from.

  As they glided straight toward us, I could see they were mammoth birds with black and white wings. “They’re only birds,” I declared. “Nothing like we have in Kentucky, but they’re birds.”

  I still jumped up from my seat, ready to take hold of a ribbon on Dahlia’s sleeve so they wouldn’t carry her off to where they might pick apart her elaborate dress and use its shreds for their nest and her soft, plump body for cushioning in that nest, but Dahlia dropped to the floor, and the birds soared by.

  “Angels,” I declared, shaking my head as they disappeared into the sky behind the boat. “They had the wings of angels, don’t you think?”

  “Pelicans,” the boat captain corrected.

  “Damn birds,” Dahlia hissed. “That’s what they were. Scared me to death. Now help me off this damn floor, someone.”

  “Mother!” scolded Abigail. “Watch how you speak in front of Ava.”

  I took my mother’s wrath as a good sign. Whenever Abigail was feeling herself, she cared about the world, about her husband, and most of all about raising me to become a lady. But when she was down, she could care less that Dahlia liked the word “damn.” And now her eyes watched me pull my grandmother up off the floor of the boat as if she knew she ought to be helping me. But I didn’t want her help. I wanted her preserving all her strength for the adventure that lay ahead of us. Besides, I didn’t mind pulling Grandmalia up by myself. I’d do anything for her. She had lived with us ever since I first learned to speak, and back then, I found it too difficult to say “Grandma Dahlia” and so I combined it into Grandmalia and everyone laughed and she liked it; so, it stuck and is what I call her to this very day.