Portion of the Sea

by Christine Lemmon

  It all began our second afternoon on the island with a little white lie. I told them I had enough of the sun for one day and that I was going to run to the store for something, and insisted they all stay on the beach and have fun without worrying about me. And then I did my probing and found him. We didn’t talk long, but I invited him over to the inn that night, way past any hours that might interfere with my family, and he accepted. We spent that night sitting on the verandah overlooking the water, reminiscing and sharing stories and gaps in our lives until sunrise.

  But now wasn’t the time to tell my children about it. As the sky turned a deep pink, the color of a more mature Roseate Spoonbill, I knew I first had a decision to make before telling them anything. I glanced down the beach at my grown sons, who had been getting antsy to return to their lives back home. They were wrestling in the sand like little boys.

  Good, I thought, just as I did when they were babies. Tire them out so they’ll fall fast asleep early tonight and I’ll have some time to myself. And I knew exactly what I’d be doing with my time. Jaden would show, and we’d pick up where we left off in conversation from the night before and from the five nights before that, and we’d talk and laugh until the morning sun came peeking through, urging us to say good-bye. It was yesterday’s sun that meant something special. Our night of getting to know one another all over again had been so pleasant that we weren’t expecting the sun so soon, and when we saw it, we quickly kissed, our first kiss in how many years?

  I couldn’t possibly tell my kids. I was still surprised myself by the way things progressed so quickly in just one week of meeting up and spending the entire night talking to the sound of the waves gently reaching the shore before us. But I shouldn’t be surprised. Like my mother once said, a boy who helps hurting animals turns into a kind and gentle man. A boy who prays as a child grows into a God-fearing and respectable adult. And a boy with wide-set, clear eyes and a square jaw only gets better with age. I was surprised that a boy who wanted to marry me some thirty years before still wanted to today. It made me tingle back then and tremble now. And I was glad when Marlena put her little arm around me. Without her knowing, it comforted me. As the sun sank into the horizon I knew I had a decision to make and that I’d have to make it soon.

  “Don’t you love it here?” I asked her. “Couldn’t you stay here forever?”

  “Yes, but not with them,” she said, pointing to her brothers who were still wrestling in the sand. “I don’t think men and women should be on the same island. They belong on an island all their own,” she said. “Especially when they drink giggle water. They’re drinking it now, aren’t they?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “What’s giggle water?”

  Marlena looked around the beach, and then whispered in my ear. “Booze.”

  “Of course not,” I insisted. But I knew they were. I knew it this morning when Jaden and I were sitting on the verandah and Henry came sauntering across the lawn, carrying a bucket and not noticing us, that he had been toting more than bait in there. And later that morning, I overheard his brothers ask him where he got the “bait” and he told them it came from deep within the mangroves and that he paid an arm and a leg for it. Then he snapped his fingers together, which I’ve come to learn over the years means, “you two owe me big time for this one.”

  Jaden had assured me that the Coast Guard cutter patrols all night in search of rumrunners but seldom do they catch any. I didn’t want them catching my sons, just as I didn’t want my sons catching me. We all had our secrets, I suppose. But soon I might have to tell them, for we were set to be leaving the island in the morning, and tonight would be my last night of reuniting with Jaden. The decision as to what to do next was up to me, just as it had been many years ago. Together we cried in each other’s arms with regret over the decision I made back then. He had the hardest time understanding why I took off and married someone without first returning to Florida to hunt him down. I tried telling him that hunting a man down isn’t something a proper lady does.

  “Don’t give me that crap,” he had said to me our first night together, when we were revisiting the details of that time. “You’ve never had a ladylike bone in your body.”

  At first I was offended, but then I laughed, and so did he. But now I wondered whether marrying a man and moving my daughter to a new place is something a proper mother does, especially one of my age.

  “Couldn’t you see a sunset like this every night?” I asked Marlena.

  “Yes. I like it better than any shows you’ve ever taken me to back in New York.”

  It was the answer I wanted to hear. I had just started her with drama and voice coaches back home because she loved theater, but now she was showing signs of loving something else. Maybe theater was a silly little stage she was going through, one that would pass. Maybe she wouldn’t hate me if I told her I was in love with a man from long ago and we were going to get married, and she and I were going to stay here forever and she would grow up right here, not in New York where she had her brand-new drama and voice coaches and Broadway and all that she loved. They loved her too. They said she was a natural, born to be on stage, destined to go far. I’ve tried to forget that. I don’t like anyone telling my daughter what she is destined to do. Destiny is her choice.

  I had choices too. I could choose matters of my heart and stay put right here, where there would be new things for Marlena to love. “Why don’t you go find one special seashell to bring home with you,” I said to her. “That way, even when you’re away, you’ll have a part of the sea with you.”

  She jumped up in her jersey bathing suit, one that I would have loved to wear at her age and one that would have my mother gasping, and she walked toward the shore. It’s hard being a mother. One moment I feel I should announce that we are staying, that a woman loving a man is more important than ambition. The next moment I wonder whether we should return so I can teach her that nothing is more important than the dreams a girl has for her life. Then again, maybe I’m giving it too much thought and looking too deeply into it. Maybe a mother doesn’t have such an impact on her daughter’s life and it’s no big deal what I choose to do. Maybe I ought to teach her that there comes a time in life when a mother must do something for herself because if a mother sacrifices everything, including romantic love, for her children, they might grow up thinking that adult relationships aren’t important, that nothing is as important as a woman pursuing her dreams or a career.

  “Lord,” I prayed. “What do I teach my children? Tell me what to do, I beg for you to show me what to do!”

  The boys, they’d be fine going back without us. They had their careers waiting for them. Of course we’d visit regularly. Then again, New York was far away. Jaden’s boys were also grown but living just across the bay in Fort Myers, where the construction of homes was reaching nauseating proportions. Still, my boys would be able to afford whatever they wanted in the “City of Palms” if they chose to stay. It wouldn’t hurt to suggest it.

  But I know they wouldn’t consider it, and I would miss them horribly. But I would be with Jaden. He lost his wife five years ago. He had married her two years after searching for me in Kentucky, and they enjoyed a happy and peaceful marriage. He had always wanted a daughter but never had one. He and the boys farmed the land here as long as they could but when storms and hurricanes ruined conditions for good, they switched gears and lost a ton of money but got by fishing and selling their fish. They did all they could to keep their land, the same land Jaden’s father homesteaded back when we were here. And today he takes tourists out fishing and has high hopes for the future of tourism on the island. He swears that the future of Sanibel lies with its sun, sand, and shells, and no longer its soil.

  I told him the story of my life, even the sad spells that overtook my mother’s life and the ones that I had also been suffering through, especially in the dark winter months. He told me that living in a sunny place might be good, and maybe he was right. I had already felt b
etter being here. And, besides, there comes a time when a mother must return to her own likings and all the things she set aside when her children consumed her, the things she’d like to revisit now that they’re grown. I wondered whether that was selfish, but Jaden assured me it was natural instinct to think that way, and he went on to tell me something I never knew about those mother sea turtles.

  “Did you know,” he asked, “that after wintering hundreds of miles from her nesting beach, a mother sea turtle finds her way back to the exact beach and spot where she laid her eggs in the previous year?”

  “No. Impossible,” I said.

  “It’s true. She finds her way back to this exact spot season after season as long as she lives. And did you know that songbirds travel to far-off places seasonally, only to return to the same nest year after year?”

  I laughed. “You’re using every scrap of nature facts you can think of just to keep me here, aren’t you?” I asked him.

  “Nature is wise,” he said. “We can learn a thing or two from it.”

  When we returned to the inn for dinner, I knew I had a decision to make, and I wanted to make it decisively, to never look back and never regret. I listened through the door as my sons were busy getting all dollied up to go out. I touched the door with my fingers, ready to push it open and tell them my secret. But then I got mad at what they were saying in front of their little sister. Hanging out with them always gave her an earful.

  “And you saw the bubs on her. I think she’ll be there tonight,” Jonathon whispered and they all laughed, including Marlena.

  “Boys!” I said, barging in. “You’ve got to stop chatting idly about females in front of your little sister.”

  “Sorry, Mom,” they all said, still laughing.

  I was mad, and it wasn’t the time to tell them. Besides, I hadn’t yet made up my own mind as to what to do. If I chose what my heart was telling me, the boys would tell me I was crazy and try to stop Marlena and me from staying, but we could run from them, hide in the Everglades like some of the Seminoles did when they didn’t want to leave Florida during the third Seminole War. I was being illogical, I knew. I needed time to sort things out.

  I was glad when the boys went out and Marlena fell asleep, and I still had an hour before Jaden would come walking up the steps to the verandah. And he would have the same look on his face as he had years ago, when he proposed to me at the lighthouse and didn’t know whether I’d show up to marry him the next day or leave the island forever.

  I walked over to a bookshelf that covered the entire wall and pulled the history book I had been skimming all week off the shelf.

  History has a way of repeating itself. I wondered how cycles get broken.

  Lydia

  I wanted to wake Marlena up. I had to know. I couldn’t wait until sunrise to find out whether Ava stayed on the island for the sake of her heart or returned to New York for the sake of her children. But I had to wait. There were no more pages. I sat in the armchair of the great room thinking about life and praying like I had never prayed before until the sun rose before me, brighter than ever.

  “Where’d you grow up?” I blurted out as Marlena walked out of her bedroom.

  “Good morning to you, too.”

  “Did your mother take you back to New York or did the two of you stay here?”

  “Lydia,” she said. “My mother arranged for me to have the best of both worlds. Birds aren’t the only ones that fly back and forth, you know.”

  XLVI

  LYDIA

  AN HOUR LATER JACK and I sat down on the dock waiting for a boat to appear. I had done basic investigative work and learned from a few different sources that Josh had taken a couple fishing, dropped them off on Captiva and was now headed back alone.

  The sky in some areas looked dark, and the weatherman had said it would rain, but I didn’t believe him. I couldn’t think about rain. Two dolphins playfully burst forth from the water, but that thrill didn’t compare to the one I felt moments later when I spotted his boat coming toward us. I no longer watched the dolphins and instead studied the tall, broad-shouldered man wearing a baseball hat backward. I took Jack’s hand in mine and squeezed it tightly.

  “Is that the man?”

  “Yes, pumpkin,” I said, standing up. “That’s the man I need to talk to.”

  Jack went back to counting the dolphins, and I returned in my mind to the fears I had last night. I didn’t know whether he would want to see me, or if he’d accept what I had to say. It didn’t matter. I had to tell him.

  As he grew nearer, I wondered whether he was the same man; after all he had experienced the Peace Corp and then the war. Did he still play his music? Did he view the world as a good place? And I thought about how I had prayed for him and how praying for him brought me closer to God and made me a better person and how it only made me love him more.

  “Now you be a good boy,” I said to Jack. “And let me do all the talking, okay? I’ll get you a lollipop if you’re good and quiet while I talk to the man.”

  Jack nodded his head and took hold of my hand, and we stood there as the boat docked, unsure whether he noticed us, and then we watched as he tied the rope around the posts.

  “Thief, thief,” I thought I heard him or the birds overhead cry out to me as they did the day I finally returned the journal to Marlena.

  “Lydia Isleworth,” he announced a second later as he retied one of the ropes. “It has been a long time. What’s kept you away for so long?” He glanced over at me. “I’ll bet you hardly get any vacation days with the sort of work you do. The news just doesn’t end, does it? It keeps going on day after day after day.” He walked away from the post and I noticed a slight limp as he walked up to us, and then kneeled down to look Jack in the eye.

  “Hello there, young mate.”

  Jack nestled his face in my thigh, and I laughed. “He’s shy at first, but once he warms up, look out!”

  Josh stood up and looked at me as if deciphering how I had aged, and I assumed he was noticing the dark sleep-deprivation circles under my eyes. I had already sized him up and decided he was gorgeous. The sun had aged him handsomely, and he wore an extra fifteen pounds solidly. His face, commonly unshaven in the past, was now clean-shaven. But none of his looks mattered, I convinced myself. I came bearing news, important news. Good or bad? I didn’t know. That would be for him to decipher.

  “Looks like your life has really changed in the last few years,” he said, patting Jack on the head, then letting his eyes wander over to my ring finger.

  “No husband,” I stated matter-of-factly as I waved my left hand through the air. This wasn’t the time to play games. I had to present the facts one by one up front. “I’m not married. Never have been, not to a man anyway.”

  “Oh?” he raised an eyebrow at me.

  “I mean, just to my career, that is.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “No, it hasn’t been bad. I get to come home to Jack. It’s the best part of my day. He’s incredible.”

  “I don’t doubt that! So what brings you to Florida? Vacationing or doing a story on men returning home from the war?”

  I laughed and shook my head, and Jack laughed too, just for the joy of laughing. He had no idea what we were saying.

  “I came here just to get away from it all, reevaluate what’s best for our son.” I wanted to kick myself in the behind for having slipped and said “our,” but he didn’t notice at all, and I questioned who had the higher intelligence, him or the dolphin still leaping in the background.

  “So, tell me, how old are you little fellow?”

  Jack peeked out from my thigh and gave an impish smile. “I’m not little,” he stated.

  “You’re not? What are you then?”

  “I’m a big boy!” He pushed his face once more into my thigh and I rubbed my hands through his wavy hair.

  “You certainly are a big boy!” said Josh. “I’ll bet you’re big enough to capture a shark.”

/>   “Tell him how old you are, Jack,” I hinted. “Four,” he whispered, looking up at me.

  “Come on, kiddo. Tell him louder. He didn’t hear you.”

  “Four,” shouted Jack.

  I studied Josh’s face, waiting for something to click. The speech I had written, edited, and then rehearsed until I was blue in the face was not surfacing. It was drowning in my nerves. My mind was blank but for the simple number hints I kept tossing his way.

  “That’s right. Jack, you are four years old. And it has been four years since mommy has been to Sanibel.”

  Suddenly the world went still—the breeze, my son, and the man standing before us on the dock. It was an eerie still, like when Jack gets quiet in the backseat of the car and I fear he’s choking on a lollipop.

  But Jack was fine, I noticed, as he wandered off to the edge of the dock and peered down at the water below. Josh looked at me, then over at Jack as if looking at a ghost. But it wasn’t a ghost, just more like a shadow, his shadow. They looked a lot alike.

  “Jack, want a lollipop now?” I asked, hoping to lure him away from the edge, yet keep him good and quiet a bit longer.

  “No, not now, Mom. I don’t want a lollipop. I want to capture a shark. The man said I was big enough to capture a shark. I want to fish.”

  “I’ll take you fishing later,” I said.

  “I want to fish now,” he insisted. “Take me fishing now. I don’t want to go later.”

  My plan of Jack being perfectly good was quickly going overboard, and the last thing I wanted at a moment like this was any sort of temper tantrum, especially because he was too old for those and I didn’t want to scare Josh away.

  “Nothing can stop a boy from wanting to fish,” Josh said, studying my eyes. “I think I might understand this little fellow.”

  Tears were welling up in my eyes, and I tried hard to fight them back. “You can? Why is that?” I asked.

  “I was just like him as a kid.”