I SPENT THE AFTERNOON PLAYING with Dream. Mrs. Bailey White was resting; Jackie went back to her house to be with her kids, and Plain Jane puttered around the garden. I was glad for a chance to be with Dream, who was beginning to warm up to me. She liked it when I played on the floor with her. I had not spent much time with an infant since my babysitting days in high school.
I got to thinking how strange it is to be alive in this world. It’s not like anyone asks to be born; you just arrive whether you like it or not. You’ve got no say whatsoever in who your parents are. And yes, life is good and even wonderful. On good days you say to yourself, “My, it’s good to be alive!” or “Ain’t life grand?” or “Thank you, Jesus!” But other times, when things go badly, you say, “What the heck is this thing called life?” or “What exactly am I doing here?” Or even, “Lawd, what kind of trick you be playing on me?” Now the last is sacrilege, of course, but I bet there’s not a human being alive who hasn’t had moments of despair.
Of course, Dream was a long way from having thoughts like these, good or bad. She was still living in her own world, as yet unformed as an actual person, her future a question to be answered in time. What questions, I wondered, would Dream ask her mother one day? Would she be angry at Priscilla for going away to college and leaving her behind? Would she demand answers about who her father was?
By the time Robbie-Lee returned from his hike to the fishing shack, Dream was fed and asleep. I was waiting for a chance to talk to Robbie-Lee, but I must have dozed off, too, because when I awoke in Dream’s room it was dark and I heard the sound of his voice coming from the kitchen.
As I came quietly down the stairs, I said a little prayer. I wanted to clear the air with him before he went back to New York.
He had showered and changed his clothes, and was sitting at the kitchen table with Mrs. Bailey White. The remains of a Key lime pie—one of Mrs. Bailey White’s specialties—sat in front of him.
“Why, hello, Dora!” he said, sounding like his old cheerful self. “Mom is doing fine. I gave her some money to buy some things she needs. I wish she had let me know she was so tight on money! But that’s Mom—she’s nothin’ if not prideful and stubborn.”
“So . . .” I said, searching for words, “she’s okay then?”
“Yes,” he said. “And it’s up to you if you want to see her. She and I talked about it and of course it’s your decision. I’m sorry I tried to push you. I was wrong.”
“So I should—”
“You should do what you want to do, whenever you’re ready to do it,” he said, taking another mouthful of pie.
Hearing the commotion, Plain Jane, wearing an old plaid bathrobe, joined us in the kitchen. The only ones missing from our old book club were Jackie, who was at her home, and Priscilla.
Mrs. Bailey White left the room for a moment and returned with a copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and, just as we sometimes did, back when the book club met regularly, we took turns reading it aloud, passing the book around the table.
Just like old times.
Thirty-Five
Robbie-Lee left the next morning for New York City. I watched him walk down Mrs. Bailey White’s long dirt driveway toward the Tamiami Trail until he disappeared from sight.
An hour later I was dressed and heading to the fishing shack.
I told myself little tales as I began my walk. I could turn around at any time. I don’t have to go. I wasn’t really going to see her. I was just going for a walk in the swamplands, by the river. . . .
I carried a copy of the Naples Star with a headline that screamed, SWAMP QUEEN PREVAILS IN COURT.
So much had happened. The river and the land surrounding it were safe from development.
I was adopted.
And this strange woman named Bunny Ann McIntyre, of all the women in the world, was my mother.
Once Robbie-Lee had stopped asking me to see her, I thought it through and I knew that nothing would feel settled until I did. But it had to be my idea—my choice.
I wondered if I got this stubbornness from her? Pride and stubbornness, Robbie-Lee had said. Oh dear. That sounded mighty familiar.
I stopped and drank from a canteen that Mrs. Bailey White had given me. The water was hot and metallic tasting, and I spat it out. I was suddenly angry at Robbie-Lee and I wasn’t sure why. I should have gone with him yesterday to see her. I could have let him do all the talking. I could have . . .
But I couldn’t go back in time.
It would have been nice if there was a way to run away, to reject all this new information, these inconvenient facts. It was a burden. I had been forced to rewrite the story line of my own life.
And yet I had to do it. I told myself: Sometimes the hurricane hits south of you, and sometimes north, and once in a while, the dang thing smacks you head-on. Well, Dora, this is your hurricane. And if you hang on for dear life, you just might make it through.
I didn’t know what to expect when I got there. I thought she might be sitting in her favorite spot on the dock, maybe whittling as she had that first day when I responded to her telegram and she’d said, “It’s about time you got here.” It made me laugh to think about that now. In retrospect it sounded like something a mother might say to a daughter.
I had no idea what I would say to her. A few things went through my mind, but none of them were right. I’d just have to pray that the right words would come to me. I hoped to keep it brief and, well, manageable. Tidy. Just a few words for now. I’d tell her that I had to go back to Mississippi for a spell but that I’d be back. No promises. Just an acknowledgment of what had occurred between us.
But that’s not how it worked out.
I arrived to find her in full uproar. Something—something terrible—had happened. I mean it had just happened, seconds before. She was wailing and carryin’ on like somebody had up and died. When she spied me, she reacted as if I was any old person, no one special. I could have been anyone. “Look, look what happened!” she cried out. She was pointing up at the tree where the night heron had been keeping her nest.
Apparently sometime during the night the nest had been disturbed—a bobcat, maybe even a panther. The nest was hanging at a sickening angle; part of it appeared to be missing altogether. Bunny must have just woken up, come outside, and found it that way.
“Peggy Sue is gone!” she hollered, and I didn’t know if she meant dead or flown away.
As I walked toward her she turned her back to me to hide her weeping. She was crying so hard she had to gulp for air, which scared me to pieces. After all, it was just a bird.
And then I thought, No. It’s not just a bird. It’s not “just” a bird any more than Norma Jean, my Everglades snapper, is “just” a turtle. Once you love something, it owns a smidgen of your heart. That’s the price we pay for giving our love away.
I took her arm, but she yanked it away. I watched as she sat down on the dock with her back to me. I could see her shoulders heaving with sobs.
I examined the nest, or what was left of it. I found no sign of Peggy Sue. There weren’t even any scattered feathers, so hopefully she’d been able to fly away.
I poked at the debris and jumped back when something moved. At first I assumed it was a snake or some other swamp critter. But then I realized I was looking at something wonderful. I was nose to beak with two helpless chicks. I had never been so happy in my life.
“Hey!” I shouted. “Lookee here, two babies!”
Bunny stopped wailing. She was by my side so fast it spooked me.
So there we were, me and my mother, peering anxiously at the tiny chicks, which, bless their little avian hearts, were the ugliest things God ever put on this earth.
We named them Lamar (after a skinny-necked guy who sometimes worked at the Esso station) and Liz (after Elizabeth Taylor, of course). We took them into the fishing shack and spent the next hour arguing about the best way to feed them and keep them warm.
Once we got them situated, Bunny poured herself a
small glass of gin. “Want some?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“Robbie-Lee’s gone; now even Peggy Sue is gone,” she said bluntly. “And if these little babies don’t make it, I won’t have nothin’ at all.”
“Well,” I said finally. “You’ve got me.”
• • •
AND SO I BEGAN TO accept that I had two mothers—the one I called Mama, who had raised me, and who had died; and the one who had given birth to me, who was standing before me, puffing on a small cigar and fussing over two baby night herons—the heiress of the river.
“I don’t suppose you’ll want to call me ‘Mama,’ ” she said, loosened up by the gin.
“Well,” I said slowly, “the fact is, I won’t call you Mama, because I had a person in my life who will always be Mama.”
She flinched ever-so-slightly. “Well, Robbie-Lee has decided to start calling me Mom because that’s what he always wanted to call me,” she said. “You know, I always insisted he call me Dolores.” She started to say something more but stopped. “I guess you can call me whatever you want.”
“I need to think about it,” I said. “Maybe just Bunny.” I felt like I was being a little snippy but, mercy, I’d been through enough. At least I could think this over.
“I just have one thing I want to say,” she said, slurring her words a bit. “I want you to know that I admired your mama as a person very much, and I think she done a durned good job raisin’ you, if I may say so myself. I couldn’t have done nearly as good.”
“Well, you did a good job with Robbie-Lee,” I said. And it was true.
“If you don’t ever want to call me Mom or Mother or nothin’ like that, I understand,” she continued solemnly, as if she had practiced these words. “And I agree you have only one ‘Mama.’ She may be gone, but she’ll always be your mama.”
I felt tears stinging my eyes and blinked them away. “Thank you,” I mumbled.
“And if you don’t want folks to know about me, or you don’t want to be part of my life, I will git used to the idea,” she said, with a sniffle that might have been for dramatic purposes but I couldn’t be sure. She added, “You have that right.”
That’s how we left things. I wasn’t about to make any promises, except for one: “I’ll be back,” I told her. “I’m leaving for Mississippi for a spell. But I’ll be back. And I hope these little critters”—I pointed to Liz and Lamar—“are big and strong by then.”
As I hiked back to the main road, all I could think of was getting back to my little cottage and seeing my turtles. I understood Bunny’s attachment to Peggy Sue; herons, like turtles, don’t talk back. They just listen.
Whether I ever really got to know Bunny or not, I was determined that it would have to be on my terms as well as hers. I would take my time. This situation was going to require a whole lot of thinking and forgiveness, which was not going to happen overnight.
I’d have to forgive Mama for her secrets, and I’d have to forgive Bunny for being who she was, and for giving me away.
On a much lesser scale, I was annoyed—just a bit—at Robbie-Lee for not telling me long before that he knew, or suspected, that he was my brother. But then that thought led to another: I have a little brother! This was a dream come true. And while our mother was, well, a lot to handle, at least we could handle her together.
As I came near the end of my hike, it began to rain. I didn’t care that I would get wet—soaked to the bone, even. This made me almost as happy as discovering those fragile baby herons. I kept moving but I listened. The rain, making its way through the thick tree canopy, made its distinctive sound like an audience applauding—first a few claps, then growing to a thunderous roar.
And I thought, That is Mama, speaking to me from the Spirit World. For the first time I realized something important—crucial, even. As a nurse, Mama had always seemed to find room in her heart for damaged souls. She didn’t fault people for their mistakes. She recognized that we were all worthy human beings.
Bunny Ann McIntyre was precisely the type of person Mama would have been kind to.
And she would have expected me to do the same.
Thirty-Six
After all of the hullabaloo died down, a couple of things happened.
Darryl offered to buy part of the river from Bunny but she refused. And although Mrs. Bailey White told Bunny she could move into her old Victorian house, Bunny declined, preferring to live in her fishing shack. When Darryl offered to buy a different section—the part that included the Negro settlement—that got on Bunny’s last good nerve, and she threatened to shoot him if he set one foot anywhere on her property.
The night heron chicks, Liz and Lamar, survived.
Robbie-Lee continued to thrive in New York City. He began studying acting with a famous teacher. He even got an understudy role in a play, and although it wasn’t on Broadway, we were ecstatically happy for him. Maybe this would be his big chance.
Priscilla continued to get straight As at Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona Beach, and there were hints that she had met someone special. She came home as often as she could to see the baby as well as her grandma, whose health had begun to decline.
Jackie still had regular arguments with Ted about all the time he was spending on the road while trying to launch Wild Blue Yonder Airways. The business continued to be rocky, and Ted didn’t help matters when he misspoke at a Chamber of Commerce event in Tampa. “We have a dozen frights, er, flights, a day,” he said. The audience burst out laughing. For a while, people referred to Mr. Toomb’s pride and joy as White Knuckle Airways.
Jackie and Plain Jane continued their plans to start a home for young, unwed mothers at Mrs. Bailey White’s house. I could see trouble on the horizon already; there’d been a heated discussion about what the residence would be called, with Jackie insisting on the Collier County Home for Exceptional Girls.
We never did find out who vandalized the Welcome to Dreamsville billboards with paint. Not that it mattered. Perhaps it really was the ghost of Seminole Joe. Some folks thought it was Judd Hart, but I never believed that. My money was on Mrs. Bailey White.
Darryl got into some trouble when authorities asked him to explain where and how he got the idea that he could build Dreamsville Estates on what was, in fact, Bunny’s land. Darryl claimed to have bought the land from a fellow in Kentucky who, as it turned out, didn’t exist, but charges against Darryl never materialized. Meanwhile, Darryl began work on a different development, this one called Pirate’s Landing. He convinced the state to build the roads but after losing in court to Bunny, he lost his Basking Ridge, New Jersey, investors, along with the fiancée—kinfolk, we learned later, of our mayor’s wife. The abandoned roads of his new development eventually became an ideal landing strip—for drug smugglers coming to the U.S. from Central America. Way to go, Darryl.
I went back to Jackson on a late November day with barely a dime left in my pocket. I’d been gone three months and didn’t expect anyone to forgive me for being gone so long. To my surprise, my job at the library and my room at Mrs. Conroy’s waited for me. I worked at the library long enough to pay Mrs. Conroy the money I owed, plus a little extra on account of her being patient with me. I wrote a brand-new short story called “The Book Club” and showed it to Miss Welty in her garden. This time she not only liked it, she suggested that I write more.
When it was time to say good-bye to Jackson, my new friends implored me to stay, but this much was clear to me: I belonged in Collier County. I wanted to say farewell to 1964, and welcome 1965, by singing “Auld Lang Syne” with my book-club friends. I had always known Naples was home but now I understood my deep attachment. Of course, nothing would be the same, knowing what I now did about Mama and myself. My life had changed; I had changed. There was no going back but taking steps toward the future was necessary, even if it sometimes felt like running barefoot in deep sand. I had learned that dreams have a life of their own, propelling us onward even when they don’t c
ome true or are realized in unexpected ways.
Now there would be time for new dreams, though, and I had a feeling that Mama, up in heaven, would have liked that. Mama used to say, Open your heart to the future, Dora. You can either be afraid of what’s to come, or embrace it, come what may. I was so glad I could still hear her voice.
Back at home, near the mangroves, the herons, and the turtles, and sleeping soundly in my little cottage by the sea, I would start the next chapter of my life. This new beginning would, no doubt, include writing and storytelling. Only now, thanks to my recent journey, and the encouragement of Miss Welty, I had the confidence to value my own experiences. My stories were my own, and I would tell the stories I was meant to tell.
Come what may.
Acknowledgments
I am overwhelmed with gratitude to thousands of readers, including book clubs across America and beyond, whose love and enthusiasm for my first novel, Miss Dreamsville and the Collier County Women’s Literary Society, inspired me to write this sequel. I am humbled and deeply moved by the support of each and every one of you.
Both books are works of historical fiction inspired by my long-ago experiences as a fledgling newspaper reporter in Florida. Thank you to the people of the great Sunshine State, especially in Hillsborough and Volusia Counties, where a key part of my life was launched.
And, of course, thank you to the people of Collier County, where my wonderful and devoted husband, Blair, grew up. It’s safe to say that this book and its predecessor would not exist if not for Blair, whose stories from life in Naples in the 1960s captivated my heart and imagination.
Collier County folk who have been enormously helpful include Robin DeMattia, Sandy Linneman and the Friends of the Collier County Library, the staff of Sunshine Booksellers on Marco Island, the librarians and staff of the Collier County Library System, and the volunteers at the Museum of the Everglades in Everglades City.
I must thank my parents, Dorothy S. and Lee H. Hill, Jr., for encouraging me to become a writer. I would be nothing without my parents. Thank you for (among other things) reading to me as a child; putting up with me when I was a highly annoying teenager; paying for my college education; and teaching me (to quote my old friends, the Delany Sisters) to reach high! Thanks also to my brother Lee, a race-car driver; my brother Jonathan, a cultural anthropologist; and my sister, Helen, a musician and elementary school teacher. I have learned a lot from each of you. Thank you, also, for my nieces and nephews, who are my joy!
Miss Dreamsville and the Lost Heiress of Collier County Page 23