Portion of the Sea

by Christine Lemmon

  “Do you cook often?” I asked him.

  “Every night. I’ve done it since I was a kid. I love it.”

  Wow, I thought. A male who cooks is a good thing, another trait added to our list of good-man qualities. I’m sure Abigail would have agreed.

  “How’s your father?” he asked seriously.

  “You tell me,” I said. “Sounds like you two had a talk. I don’t know what he said, but …”

  “He said that if you and I spend any more time together, he’d take away your finances for college.”

  I felt like I was drowning as I gasped for air. “Is that what he told you? Is that why you haven’t come looking for me?”

  “I’m not getting in the way of your plans. I know how important they are to you.”

  It was then that I broke every etiquette rule in the book “What are you doing tomorrow night at around ten o’clock?”

  “Are you asking me out?” He looked at his sister and smiled. “Do women do that?” She shrugged her shoulders. “Ten o’clock is a late start for a date, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but my father falls asleep at nine-thirty.”

  “I’m asleep too at nine-thirty,” he said rolling his eyes. “I do get up to fish at sunrise, you know.”

  “Do you want to or not?”

  “I do,” he said. “But I’m not crazy about being your little nighttime secret. Maybe for a short while, I can play along sneaking out at night to meet up with you, but sooner or later you’re going to have to tell your father. Is that something you’re willing to do?”

  “Of course,” I said. “Just give me a little time.”

  “I can do that. Now which window is yours? What side does it face?”

  “The west.”

  “Leave your bedroom light on, and I’ll come knocking tomorrow night at ten o’clock. It’s a date.”

  “I look forward to it.”

  “So do I. I’ll see you then.”

  XXII

  I WAS IN A carnival-of-a-mood when I started knocking on Marlena’s door. It was July and one of those mornings where the sun coats the clouds with pink, blue and streaks of purple, turning them into puffs of tasty-looking cotton candy. My knocking turned into a song, and I actually enjoyed standing out there thinking about the times Josh and I had been enjoying.

  As I crawled out my window each night, I entered a whole other world, a simple one I never knew existed. We’d walk beneath the moonlight to the dock behind his house, our hands interlocked like the roots of a mangrove, and from there we’d leave on his boat. Some nights we fished and other nights we sat quietly in each other’s arms until the gentle laps of water would rock us to sleep. He always had me back through that window by sunrise, although a couple of times we came close to getting caught with the sun at our heels, and those were the mornings he introduced me to the herons, ibis, and other characters nesting along the coast.

  When staying out all night started making us both tired out during the days, we changed our routine and started meeting up in the early evenings, just after I finished dinner with my father. We spent the month of June bike riding through the refuge and swimming in the Gulf. I shuffled my feet, paranoid at times that my father might be lurking nearby, and if he found out what I had been up to, he might sting. It would be a nasty sting. I couldn’t imagine not going to school in the fall just as I could hardly think about leaving Josh. Running off with him was like leaving all my worries behind and entering a sanctuary where there was nothing but peace and beauty.

  When my knocking song on Marlena’s door ended, I pounded a few times more with all my force, as if I were playing to win the stuffed-animal prize at the carnival. It hurt my knuckles, but the door opened and there appeared a sad, sick creature peering out. Her poodle cut, glamorous two weeks ago, now looked a wild mess and in need of grooming. Her eyes were red and puffy.

  “Is this a bad time?” I asked, wondering whether I should have given up my knocking and moved on ten minutes ago.

  “It’s fine,” she said.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Fine. Why?” She looked at me as if she was a blue crab and I had trapped her.

  “I don’t know. You look tired today.”

  “I’m fine,” she said in a monotone. It sounded nothing like her typical dramatic tone, the one of an actor.

  “Is now a good time for me to read more pages? I can come back.”

  “It’s fine. You know where I keep them.”

  “Thank you,” I said, walking toward the yellow room. Her home smelled like the interior of a seashell might if the mollusk inside dies without draining out. “It’s dark in here,” I said, turning to look at her. She was still standing in the doorway. “Were you sleeping? Did I wake you?”

  “No. I’ve been up. Make yourself comfortable.”

  “Thank you,” I said, looking around the yellow room for a lamp. The shades were down and the house was dark and Marlena looked like she was sickened and dying. I opened the window, hoping the life outside might fly in. I then pulled out the pages from the top right drawer and stared at them, but I was too concerned about Marlena to start reading.

  “Marlena,” I called out. She didn’t answer. I stood up and glanced down the hall. “Marlena?” Again there was no answer. I quietly crept back into the great room and there she was, sitting on the couch with a martini in hand, her eyes open but looking full of debris like the gulf does after a windy storm. I tried looking deeper, but I couldn’t get past the surface layer. I wanted to scrape the soot away and see the color once more but I didn’t know how.

  It spooked me, so I tiptoed back into the yellow room and sat down, hoping that Ava might provide some insight into all of this.

  I began to read:

  SANIBEL ISLAND

  1894

  Ava

  There are those times when a woman fears that she is on the brink of extinction or that the dreams and wants she had for her life are endangered. It is then that she must declare herself a refuge and take whatever measures to preserve her natural elements.

  Whoever says there are no seasons in Florida? There are, they’re just subtler, and there are moods to go along with those seasons. When the shorebirds returned, I felt like cheering and clapping my hands at this year’s opening sight of spring, but instead I hopped out of bed and went for a walk.

  How could I not go out and greet the return of the migratory birds? But as I stepped outside to welcome them back, I wondered where Abigail had gone. Back in Kentucky spring was the season that sent my mama blooming again after her long winter doldrums. Here on the island, she remained full of color all winter along, but in recent days she started pulling a disappearing act. Sometimes I found her still in bed, like yesterday, and other days sitting on the wooden floor of the kitchen. And when she finally did stand up or speak, let’s just say she wasn’t trying to please or entertain any audience. I was as worried as a ringleader when he suspects his top lady of deserting the act.

  But the others on the island were performing fine, I noticed as I walked toward the shore. Talented herons were perching themselves on thin branches like circus performers while brown pelicans were doing acrobatics, starting thirty feet in the air and then diving headlong into the ocean in search of fish. Their fuzzy newborn chicks appeared magically out of thin air, flaunting around without any feathers. And those shorebirds, how they dazzled us all, dressed in their fresh molted plumage and adding festivity to the mudflats.

  Despite its beauty, this spring morning didn’t smell right and it smelled as bad as a heronry. When I didn’t see Abigail swirling the spoons, kneading the bread, or twirling the mop in the kitchen this morning, I feared the worst—she was sinking like a grunt worm into the ground. As I sat down with my back against a tree, I feared my faith was sinking too. All of us were believers that Abigail had been reborn that first month we arrived here and that the climate had healed her fits of sorrow. Faith had us believing she would live happily ever after on Sanibel, but
since early May when she no longer joyfully buzzed around her chores, I began to privately question my faith.

  I closed my eyes and buried my head in my hands and mourned for Abigail and the joy dancing in her eyes and for the part of her that so rigorously tried churning me into a lady and cared for the details of our home. It was as if my mama had a costume change and the new her couldn’t perform a single act, not even crack a smile. It was like curtains were closed across her eyes and I couldn’t see in.

  And as I watched Abigail in her new dark, drab costume, I tried tapering down my own brightness. If anyone asked what my favorite color was, I’d no longer say pink. I had moved on from that. I was no longer a child. My mama doesn’t know this, but it was this missing Abigail that taught me most how to be a woman. Not a lady, but a woman. I sprouted forth from my girlhood that spring when I watched the Abigail who loved me disappearing into the ground.

  If there were questions I could have asked her, I would have. If there were cheerful quotes or versus that might have made her smile, I’d have recited them. If there were dances I could have danced to keep her from slipping further, I’d have danced them. If there was a magic word I might say to make her reappear, I’d have said it. I would have stood center stage and done just about anything to make her laugh and clap and jump up and down with joy.

  There had been many acts. It wasn’t like all of a sudden she’d just disappear on me. And on this fine spring morning, she was at the part where she still answered my questions. But she was entering that stage where her answers weren’t making sense. Next would come the silence. As in a circus, the silence makes me nervous.

  Lydia

  My eyes slipped off the journal like toes from a trapeze. I put my elbows on the desk and let my head fall into my hands, and there I cried. I cried not for Abigail, but for my own mother. I was just a baby when she pulled the disappearing act. There was nothing I could have done to help, and it made me sad. I needed her then like I do now. I didn’t want to think about it; sometime, maybe, but not now.

  Now I thought of Marlena. She wasn’t herself today, and there was an uncanny similarity to the way Ava had described Abigail’s appearance. I wiped my eyes and nervously stood up and went to find her sitting in the same position she was in before I started reading.

  “Did you see the I Love Lucy episode where Lucy impersonates some Hollywood notables to impress her nearsighted girlfriend visiting from New York?” I asked as I sat down on the armchair across from her.

  “No.”

  “It was the funniest thing. Lucy impersonates Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Marlon Brando, and Jimmy Durante, and then Harpo Marx just as the real Harpo arrives at the apartment with Ricky. It was the funniest thing in the world!”

  Marlena didn’t crack a smile, and I stopped my humor there. “You look tired today,” I said. “Why don’t you go rest in your room? You might be more comfortable in there.”

  “I’m fine,” she answered.

  “Are you sure? Are you sick?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “Then what’s wrong? Why are you sad?”

  She turned and looked at me for the first time. “Are you writing a book?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Then stop with all the questions, please!”

  “I’m sorry. Maybe I should come back another time.” I started to stand up.

  “Remember the day we first met and we made that snowwoman?”

  “Yes,” I said, sitting back down again.

  “Did I ever tell you it was destroyed by some boy a few days later?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Trampled it to nothing,” she said. “Do you know what that means?”

  “No,” I answered. “What?”

  “It means that sometimes the dreams we have for our lives make it no further than a dream.”

  “What are you trying to say, Marlena? I’m not following you.”

  “I didn’t get the part. Any part. My agent says I’m not suitable for the screen. It got me to thinking. I had a great reputation for the stage so I could go back to that.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  She stared me in the eyes, and suddenly I felt as if I was on stage with a strong overhead light beaming into my eyes. I wanted to look away, but I didn’t dare. “The dreams we set for ourselves are like fingerprints,” she said rubbing her fingers together. “They make us unique, and they’re with us for life, whether they’re trampled on or not, they’re still embedded in us. I’m not ready to give up on mine, not yet.”

  “That’s motivating,” I said. “Then don’t give up. Keep trying.”

  “I have every intention of doing so, but there are things that keep getting in the way, things I can’t seem to control.”

  “Like what?”

  “Things,” she said. “At first I thought it was my nose, and then my weight, and then my age. But now I see there is something else going on, something I don’t know how to change.”

  “What?”

  “You couldn’t possibly understand,” she said. “And I don’t mean that rudely. It’s just that unless you go through it yourself …”

  “Go through what?”

  “Never mind. I don’t feel like talking. It’s not you. It’s me.”

  “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Why don’t you finish your reading?”

  “All right,” I said, standing up. “But please call me if there’s anything I can do to help.”

  As I returned to the yellow room and stared out the window at the green sea grape leaves, I wondered whether it was her not getting any roles that got her down. If so, then it was situational, and her getting a role would lift her up again. Abigail’s spirits, on the other hand, lowered for no apparent reason. At first it was triggered by winter, but then she started sinking in the spring as well. My mother, from what I gathered, fell into a state shortly after my birth. I don’t know the details surrounding it all; I only know it was bad, and from the moment I first overheard someone talking about it years later, I privately declared I would never have a baby of my own, for fear it might happen to me. Depression. Is it all the same? I don’t believe so. There are different classes of it just as there are different seashells on the shore, and each must be identified, and while some can be left alone, others must be spotted and treated and cared for properly.

  I sat down at the desk and continued to read:

  Ava

  A couple of weeks after spring’s opening act, I was sitting with my family at the breakfast table eating smoked mullet, biscuits, and sea grape jelly, and smiling at my father, who went to great lengths to lure my mother out of bed. It was the morning I picked to announce my love for Jaden, and I had prayed the night before that the news might miraculously bring a smile to my mama’s face.

  I had also prayed heartily for Dahlia, who was lying on her tummy in the bed I dragged out of our bedroom, down the hallway, and into the kitchen myself so she could join us for breakfast and hear my declaration of love. A stingray had stung her on the behind the evening before, and I stayed up all night, soaking her in a nearly boiling bath after the attack. I then pulled pieces of the stingray’s spine out of her wound and applied a cloth to stop Grandmalia from bleeding to death.

  “I don’t know if anyone else heard it, but I heard moaning last night,” Abigail muttered.

  “Maybe another woman was giving birth over at the lighthouse,” said Stewart. “Apparently this is the season. The midwives can hardly keep up.”

  “Impossible,” I said. “There’s no way we could hear the screams of a woman all the way over at the lighthouse.”

  “Oh yeah?” Abigail said, looking up from her plate at me. “Until you give birth one day, you’ll never have any idea how loud it makes a woman scream, Ava.”

  “Then I better start moving forward with securing a husband so I can endure all of that kind of torture while I’m still young and strong, don’
t you all think?” I asked, hoping to break into my news shortly thereafter.

  “You’re too young for boys,” Stewart said.

  “I’m eighteen.”

  “Yes, but your mother needs you still. Look at her.”

  “I see, but what’s that have to do with my …?”

  “Ava!”

  “Sorry, sir, but I could still be here for Mama and love a man, don’t you think?”

  I looked over at Dahlia, who was swigging from the medicinal whisky. “That depends, Ava,” she said. “If you get married, you’re going to have babies and you might be aware that a woman loses an ounce of sanity with each child she has. That’s why I stopped after the third, you know.”

  “Thank you for that explanation,” Stewart said. “Now I understand you better.”

  She flicked her fingers at him. “Is that any way to talk to a woman full of venom?”

  I pushed my chair away from the table, having lost my appetite, and I walked over to Dahlia’s bed and kneeled down to take a look at her wound. It hurt her horribly, I’m sure, but I was hurting, too. One would think it a good thing for a woman of eighteen to be in love, but not my parents. I think they were afraid that I might leave them, and then my mother would have no one to open up to anymore. As I dipped a clean cloth into water and gently scrubbed Grandmalia’s wound, I thought of Jaden who would soon be standing there by our tree, waiting for me. Today was the last day of school, and I could hardly stand to think that the walks we took together to and from school each day had reached their end.

  No one in my family knew that he was the reason I loved the sunrise and getting up in the morning and running out that door to start my day. I knew I had to tell them. I promised him I would in the spring. But spring’s opening act had come and gone, and still I hadn’t made any announcement. I hadn’t told the world that Ava Witherton loves a man and wants to get married and have his babies. I hadn’t told anyone and I didn’t know whether I could keep Jaden patiently waiting a minute longer.