Portion of the Sea

by Christine Lemmon

  “Freedom,” I said as I opened my window. “I want the freedom to make my own choices, Josh.” I climbed through and into my bed and rolled to my side so I could still safely talk to Josh as we had done so many nights before.

  He didn’t balance himself halfway in and out the window like usual, and his whisper was different, too. “I respect how you feel,” he said. “When you make your choice regarding me, let me know. Until then, maybe I’ll see you around.” He started to close the window.

  “Wait,” I said, jumping up and putting my hands on the window to stop it. “What do you mean?”

  “You know exactly what I mean. You’re the one with choices to make.” He was talking louder than usual.

  “Shhh,” I insisted. “My father will hear you.”

  “Good,” he said. “I’m sick of sneaking around. I don’t like being your little secret anymore; so, until you feel sure of yourself, there’s not much I can do but continue as I do and as I did before we met.”

  Both my hands and his were on the window, and he was ready to close it while I was keeping it open. When it closed, I grabbed my pillow off my bed and whipped it at the window. He left.

  As much as I wanted them, I also hated having choices because there was nothing easy about them. I laid back down again and let my mind drift down a potential road where I saw myself watching the sunrise every morning with Josh, and it was good, but then, I wondered what might happen if we ever chose to have a baby. I couldn’t stand to think about what happened to my mother, the depression and all after she gave birth to me, and I wondered whether I had any choice with regard to that or not.

  I thought of Ava. Her mother also had a form of depression. I wondered whether that might stop her from moving forward with Jaden. When I couldn’t turn the thoughts off in my mind, I turned on the light and reached under my bed for Ava’s journal pages. I began to read.

  XXIV

  AVA

  I STOPPED RUNNING TO Say a quick prayer to God, that he might heal Dahlia’s wound, and just as soon as I said, “Amen,” I took off running once more, this time, smooth and relaxed as an osprey flies in the direction of our tree. But when I arrived, Jaden wasn’t there, so I hovered around a moment, unsure whether I should continue on to school without him or wait. I had been coming to this tree now year after year, and it was comfortable as a nest, I thought as I leaned against the tree and let my mind wander.

  My thoughts soared off to a world in which I wanted to live, one where Jaden and I would anchor our boat out in the bay before sunrise each day. His line would already be cast by the time the sun peeked over the horizon, and my mind would be conjuring what it wanted to write. With the first beams of light, I would enter my thoughts on paper, and he would reel in his fish. And soon babies, then children would join us in the boat, and probably, I thought with a chuckle, replace my writing. It didn’t matter. We’d live, “Happily ever after,” I declared out loud.

  “Whom?” A nearby voice asked.

  It startled me, and I jumped away from the tree with a quick scream, ready to attack an intruder, but then I spotted his shadow and knew it was only Jaden.

  “You scared me to death,” I said, kicking him in his shin. “I thought you were an owl. What were you doing?”

  “Waiting for you,” he said. “I waited so long that when I heard you coming, I thought I’d hide behind the tree and make you wait for me. Then I heard you say, ‘happily ever after.’ Whom were you talking about?”

  “Us,” I said with a smile.

  He laughed. “Does that mean you’ve told your family that you love me?”

  I couldn’t answer him, so I turned my head and let my eyes travel far off across the Gulf of Mexico. Other than her strangeness that day in the periwinkles, Jaden knew nothing about my mama’s bouts of sadness. I couldn’t possibly tell him how she sank into the ground all the time and that according to the stories, my granddaddy Milton experienced the same. What would it say about me and who I might become? According to Dahlia, I was at risk. She says these sorts of conditions are often passed down through families, and I feared she might be right. I hadn’t fully sunk, but there were days here and there where like a sand dollar I wanted to partially bury myself beneath the sand, and it confused me because I wasn’t shy by nature. But this wasn’t the sort of thing I could tell the man I loved. I didn’t want it interfering with the way he loved me.

  He gently took hold of my face and turned it toward him. As I looked him in the eyes, I could think of nothing worse in life than losing my zest and joy and freedom to love him the way I wanted to love him.

  “You look off to sea,” he said. “Did you tell your family about us?”

  “No, but I’m closer than you think,” I said. “Do you know anything about mother turtles?”

  He smirked and walked off. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said. “What are you trying to do? You think you can just keep me hanging and then just switch the topic over to turtles when you know there’s only one thing on my mind and it’s us? Why the hell would I care about mother turtles at a time like this?”

  “Because I do,” I said, following after him. “There’s a reason for it. I was wondering if you knew why they come to shore to lay their eggs and then return to sea. Isn’t that abandonment?”

  He stopped walking and I bumped right into him, annoying him more than ever. “Of course not,” he said, looking at me as if I were stupid. “It’s the opposite. It’s not safe for them on land. They follow the light of the moon as it shines down on the water and they go out to sea to survive. They’re doing what they must to survive.”

  “Oh,” I answered just as the sun reached through the branches of a tree and touched me on my cheek. “That makes sense.”

  I know he was hurt that I hadn’t yet told my family about us, but I could hardly keep from smiling as I took his hand in mine and we walked the rest of the way to school. I felt peace just thinking about the glistening pathway atop the water, for it had represented survival, not abandonment. Jaden didn’t know it, but as we walked, I silently vowed that if ever I felt down to where I could hardly get out of bed, I would force myself to think of the glistening pathway that the moon by night, and perhaps more so the sun by day, creates atop the water, and it would prompt me to get up and take my own glistening steps to survival, whatever those steps might be. I’d have to determine when and if the time should ever come.

  Just before I stepped foot into school, I glanced back out at the sky with its spring thunderstorm brewing and gave a silent thanks to the Creator for giving us an intricate and infinite world, one that if we look closely enough only leads to a respect for life and healing, not destruction. And there’s wisdom in it, too.

  Lydia

  I stopped reading. It pained me to think what my mother had done. Taking one’s own life is so unnatural, a thing to do it defies the laws of nature and she abandoned me in the act. I set the journal down, held my left hand up and closed my eyes. “I am with you once more, Ava,” I declared out loud. “If ever the time comes, I, too, will take whatever glistening steps are necessary for the sake of my survival.”

  When I opened my eyes, I noticed the most colorful-headed bird sitting on a branch of the banyan tree outside the window, and I thought about God. I wondered if maybe Ava’s belief were true, that a supreme being was indeed the creator of Heaven and Earth. Just in case, I closed my eyes once more and muttered, “Dear God, thank you for such beauty.” I opened my eyes, not sure whether He heard me, but it felt nice having someone to thank.

  I continued my reading:

  Ava

  When the doors of the school house opened, and I stepped out, I felt like losing my temper at the rain, not that I had anything against the rain, but I had to get mad at something, for I had sat all through school feeling angry with my family for not wanting me to fall in love.

  “We can wait over there, under the canopy of that tree,” Jaden said, taking my books and shoving them under his shirt so
they wouldn’t get wet.

  “To hell with the rain,” I said, the first to step outside. “It can do to me whatever it likes.” I started walking with an attitude as if I wanted to prove that rain could do me no harm. I knew Jaden was following close behind. He was a nature boy, and nature boys love getting wet and dirty and all that good stuff. But then once lightning struck probably five feet away from us, I stopped my tough-woman act and let myself run straight into his arms. We stood there a moment, unsure whether we should outrun the future strikes or lie down and pretend we were just two innocent sticks tossed to the ground. I never saw such fear in Jaden’s eyes before, but I wasn’t sure whether it was fear of lightning or fear of what might happen between the two of us.

  “Ava,” he declared, once we decided to take a few steps. “The time has come. You’ve got to tell your daddy that you love me and I love you and we’ve loved each other for a long, long time now.”

  I looked up and let the rain slap me across the face. “I can’t,” I said. “You just don’t know. You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Understand what?”

  “Everything,” I shouted and took off running through the mudflats.

  Jaden would never understand. A man can’t feel what a woman feels when she’s worried about her mama. I could hear him running behind me and knew he was probably creating tracks that resembled a squirrel bounding over the ground, leaving marks that were wide apart with the foot flared. Wide apart always meant running. My hind feet were also paired and placed ahead of the marks left by my front feet. Tracks such as the ones we were leaving might make someone wonder who was chasing whom, and with what result?

  I probably could have outrun any other boy in the world, but not Jaden. He followed me through the mudflats, and when he caught up with me, he grabbed onto my waist, and we both went smacking down into the shallow marshy water. I looked as bad as I looked the very first time we ever walked to school together, after he startled me and I fell.

  “This is what I’m going to do,” he said, pulling me off the ground.

  For a moment, he searched my eyes, and I wondered whether we were both thinking the same thing. I wondered whether he wanted to risk everything and kiss me in broad daylight.

  “I’m going to give you space,” he said instead.

  “What kind of space?”

  “Just space. I’m not going to show up outside your bedroom window, knocking in the middle of the night.”

  “You’re not?”

  “Nope,” he said. “I’m not that nutty. And, believe me, I was thinking of it. I was planning to take you out to that beach, to let you observe for yourself those turtles, but not now.”

  “When am I going to see you again?”

  “You’re not, at least not until you’re ready to tell your parents everything and to marry me.”

  “Wait a minute. What did you just say?”

  “You heard me. I’m not going to repeat it.”

  I laughed like I did the first night at the shack when he told me he’d one day marry me. But then he reached deep into his pocket and started fishing around for something.

  “My God,” I said, expecting to see a diamond, my first diamond.

  “It’s not what you think,” he said, pulling out a shell with brown squares all over it. “It’s a Junonia shell.”

  “It’s beautiful,” I said, taking it from his hand. “It’s better than any diamond. Where’d you find it?”

  “A trip to Captiva the other day. I thought you’d love it. Keep it as a reminder and a promise that I plan to marry you and that I’m waiting around. It’s all up to you right now. I don’t know what else to do.”

  “It’s not up to me,” I said, softly. “I don’t know what to do. It’s impossible to know.”

  “What is? What’s impossible?”

  I thought of all the things I hated in the world, of our walks to school ending, of ironing and washing, of being too busy to read a fine novel or to write one myself, of winters back in Kentucky and how I hated them so and now of spring and my mother’s gloom. Then I thought of the two things I loved: Jaden and writing. Both felt impossible to me now, with my mother’s latest relapse and my taking on extra household chores in her place. I felt a chill, the kind that only comes in the winter. But this was spring, and it was Florida. “Impossible,” I stated.

  “Nothing is impossible,” Jaden said.

  “Oh yeah?” I said, searching in my mind for something that was indeed impossible, something he couldn’t argue with. “Snow on Sanibel. It’s impossible.”

  He shook his head. “You’ve got it wrong, Ava. Anything is possible. I’m sure of it.”

  I laughed. “Damn,” I said. “Why are you always so optimistic?”

  We walked arm-in-arm until the point where our paths usually went separate ways, but that day we continued hand-in-hand along my path, and then we kissed beneath the rain, and I was glad he couldn’t see the tears rolling down my cheeks at the same time. When the rain stopped, but my tears continued, I turned and walked toward my house, and headed back in the direction of his. I knew I wouldn’t see him for quite some time again.

  Lydia

  So that was that. I closed the journal, turned out the light, and got back into bed. If Ava could take time off from the boy she loved, then so could I—not that I wanted to be the sort to wear red or jump off a cliff just because my best friend was wearing red or jumping off a cliff, but in this case, I didn’t know what else to do. Taking time away from Josh suddenly made sense to me. And how difficult would that be?

  XXV

  LYDIA

  SOME THINGS IN LIFE are difficult, I realized as I faithfully studied the shore, hoping to spot a Junonia. It was late summer, and soon I’d be leaving without that one rare and special shell.

  I had been spending much of my time searching for shells, and I especially liked doing it an hour before or after low tide when everything was more exposed. The tides and the rain told me as much as any clock or calendar ever could, and they constantly reminded me that summer was progressing by the way the rain that once hit early was now coming later in the day. The seashells at low tide, the ninety-degree temps thanks to a sea breeze, and even the later afternoon thunderstorms that cooled things off and forced me to nap, were all simple. It was finding a Junonia that was difficult.

  My aching back from stooping, my devoted yet unfulfilled desire to spot a Junonia, and my decision to go without seeing Josh were not simple. They were difficult, and I floated aimlessly around like a spineless, brainless, heartless, bloodless blob, a jellyfish ready to sting anything or anyone that came too close.

  By late July Lloyd had fully regained his health. I had noticed him talking money more than golf and knew he was returning to his old self again. And I was glad for him when his one true love, the bank, called and welcomed him back. It had been simple for him to leave the island and return to work a couple of weeks earlier than we had planned, and it was simple for me to stay there on my own and finish up my summer on Sanibel before starting college.

  I left the beach, losing faith that I would ever spot a Junonia and doubting whether they existed on the beaches of Sanibel at all. Maybe it was all a hoax and they were occasionally planted out there by some tourism promoter. I was disappointed and wondered if this was how devoted people feel when they want a miracle so badly and don’t get one.

  When I got back to the cottage, I checked on my latest shells soaking in a solution of half bleach and half water. The bleach in no way altered their color, and I was glad. Then I reviewed my latest arts-and-crafts project—shells turned into twenty-five Santa Claus ducks lined up along my windowsill. They were dry, and that was good. I didn’t know whom I was going to give them to when the season finally rolled around, but I’d worry about that when the time came. I was ready to move onto something new, like a seashell mirror, maybe.

  Later that day, after the thunderstorm and my nap, I decided to go to the local seashell shop to buy a Junonia
. And I felt like I was buying myself a miracle as I handed the girl the money and she handed me the shell—that simple.

  “I know I get obsessive about things,” I muttered to myself as I walked out of the shop carrying a bag filled to the rim with every other type of seashell. It had been my fault that I couldn’t see over the tips of the lightning whelks and I bumped into someone, but I didn’t care. I was more worried about my shells crashing to the ground. I fell to my knees and started gathering them up.

  “Lydia refuses to tell father about the boy she loves,” a male voice said from above me.

  I don’t think that’s what he really said, but my mind sometimes heard things in the form of headlines only. “Josh?” I stood up, leaving a few of my purchased seashells in the gravel so someone else might experience what they consider a miracle to be. “Sorry for bumping into you. What did you just say?”

  “How are you and your father doing?”

  “Good. He’s back in Chicago.”

  “So you’re here alone?”

  “Yes, just for another few days,” I glanced down at the driveway and spotted my most precious of all purchased shells, the one with the brown squares all over it, still lying beside someone’s tire. “I wanted so darn bad to find a Junonia on the beach before I left,” I said, bending down to pick it up.

  “I bought one today. I guess I’ve given up.”

  “Don’t ever give up,” he said. “Why would you give up?”

  “On to new things, I guess. I’m headed back to the city and to school and finding a Junonia in the city is definitely impossible.”

  “Good point, but you’ll be back one day, won’t you?”

  “I hope. You think you’ll always be here?”