Portion of the Sea (19 page)

“When can I start reading?” I asked.

“Why not start now? Follow me.”

The cottage was charmingly small, with wooden floors and windows that ran the entire length of the great room, and because the walls were painted lime green, it looked as if the sea grape leaves outside had come in. I followed her down a short hall and into a yellow room with a high, pointed ceiling and wooden fans hanging in parts where the ceiling was lower and flat. There were windows in that room too, and a banyan tree beyond one window made it look like we were standing in a tree house.

“Have a seat,” she said pointing to a mahogany desk with elaborate pineapple carvings. “You’ll find the torn-out pages in the drawer on the right.”

I took a seat and pulled out a bundle of pages that were tied together with a thin rope. I glanced at the door and noticed Marlena had already left. After carefully untying the rope, I recognized Ava’s handwriting immediately.

XVI

SANIBEL ISLAND

Ava

There are three treasures inside every woman: a heart, a mind, and a soul. Each is priceless and worth far more than gold, silver, or diamonds. However, keeping these treasures locked up and hidden from the world will do her no good and bring her no pleasure
.

I GOT TO KNOW
the new yellow-crowned night herons and the little blue herons and the baby ducks, before summer’s end, and I also got to know Jaden. I wanted to be fair to my heart, to at least give it an opportunity to do what I had heard hearts do best—love.

I snuck over to the shack three more times before the hotly humid summer had ended. I only went on clear, bright nights using the moon to guide me, and I rubbed my face, neck, and hands with a mosquito salve. It was a secret recipe Jaden had created and when I no longer felt the bites, I believed I could survive anything with that boy. I could walk through a
swamp by his side and still feel safe.

But I never gave him any indication that I needed a boy to feel safe, and I proved I was good and strong myself. That first night at Fighting Conch, my little Queen Isabella did surprisingly well, proving I was better than that roomful of boys at coaching crustaceans. Then I took twelve sips of the “Black Drink” and still walked a straight line across the broken piece of dock the boys had balancing on two chairs—another competition of theirs.

I saw the way the other boys watched me and I knew they had never seen a girl do things so well before. I felt pride in myself and walked in a confident way, one that says, “I’m president—president of the unladylike club.”

One night, after the boys had deserted Fighting Conch, Jaden, his best pal Riley, and I stopped by the beach. After Riley threw a coconut into the Gulf, I laughed out loud and said, “I can throw further than that.”

“You think you can do anything us boys can do, don’t you?” Riley asked as he jogged to the water to look for his coconut.

I’d rather show my skills than tell all about them; so, I stretched my arm behind my head and threw my coconut with the same force as a shooting star. A second later there was a splash, a loud one, too loud to have come from the coconut and when the moon poked out from a passing cloud, we spotted Riley down in the water.

“God almighty!” I cried as Jaden handed me his coconut and ran to lift his friend’s head out of the water. He pulled Riley’s body up onto the sand. “Did it hit his head?” I asked.

“His nose. It’s a nasty one.”

As the cloud passed and the moon beamed fully down on us, I covered my mouth with my hands. I had never made a person bleed before. He lay in Jaden’s arms, his eyes slowly opening, only to spin for a moment and then they scanned the beach from left to right before stopping on me like the eyes of a male panther on a kitten it’s planning to eat.

“Forgive me, man,” Jaden quickly said, interrupting the way Riley was looking at me. “I can’t believe I did that.”

“I thought she did it!”

“No way. Ava can’t throw that hard.”

“The Hell I can!” I snapped, but when Jaden jerked his head toward me I added, “But I didn’t, not this time.”

“That’s funny, because I swear I saw her raise her arm just before …”

“She did, but so did I. She’s still holding her coconut. Hold it up, Ava. Show Riley you’ve still got yours.”

I held up the coconut Jaden had given me to hold after I had thrown mine toward the water and hit Riley with it.

“If my nose weren’t bleeding so bad,” Riley told Jaden as he stood up, “I’d throw you a hard punch. Instead, give me your shirt. I’ve got to stop the bleeding.”

It was at that moment that I knew for sure Jaden loved me. A boy who lies to protect a girl almost always does it because he loves her. And as I watched him take the shirt off his back and hand it to his friend so that he could wipe the blood from his nose, I tried not to stare at his chest, which was strong as any conquistador. Instead, I tried focusing on how Jaden’s kindness made me feel. His fibbing to his best friend made me feel as important as that wounded pelican, the snake around my leg, and his crab getting personally trained. No one has ever made me feel that way before.

When Riley’s nose stopped bleeding, we parted from him, and Jaden and I walked back to my parents’ property. It was then that I decided to surprise him with a second kiss. And this time, I’d kiss him like a hero ought to be kissed, not like the first kiss I had given him the night of the crab races. I was nervous that night and didn’t know what to do but had since gone over it a zillion times in my mind, rehearsing what one might say. I wasn’t nervous any more, and I felt embarrassed thinking back to that first night we kissed.

“You’re shaking like a live starfish grabbed from the water,” he had said sometime after his crab came in first and mine second.

“I am?”

“Yes. Are you afraid to kiss me?”

“No,” I lied. “But do you hear all those frogs quonking?”

“Yeah. Male frogs. They’re calling for mates.”

“How romantic,” I laughed. “But you’re only kidding. How would you know what they’re doing?”

“I’ve watched them before. It’s true,” he said, softly taking hold of my chin and looking into my eyes, conquering my heart the way no boy had ever done. “And you know what else is true?”

“What?”

“I’m going to marry you one day.”

“How can you say that?”

“I’ve watched you tonight, and I just know certain things.”

“You’re just saying that so I’ll hurry up and kiss you. I’m not so naive.”

“I do want a kiss, but I mean what I’ve said. Just wait and see. One day, you and I will be married. I promise.”

And then he kissed me, at first like a boy who wants to marry, but then like a conquistador going for gold, and all the time I heard the chorus of croaking frogs growing louder all around us. His kiss changed me on the insides and the flattering idea of him wanting to be with me forever made me want to do everything better—throw harder, run faster, shout louder, talk more interestingly, look more beautiful, and kiss better the next time—just so I could further impress him. His kiss sent me on a mini crusade in search of how I might attain for myself more beauty, intelligence, personality, and wit.

His kiss made me overzealous in the weeks following, and it almost got me in trouble at home.

“Ava,” Dahlia snapped at me one Monday morning. “You just swept that floor, scooped up the dirt, then dumped it back down again. What’s wrong with you, girl?”

I stopped rehearsing my kiss with Jaden in my mind and began focusing instead on the look of bewilderment in Dahlia’s eyes. And I didn’t at all mean to dishonor her, but when I saw what I had done with the dirt, I started to laugh and couldn’t stop. There was a lot of it, and normally I never minded a bit of dirt on the floor. Dirt made me feel like I was outdoors, and I loved the outdoors, but this was too much, I had to admit.

I had tears rolling down my cheeks because moments before I felt like I was standing in a room full of gold and silver, not dirt. That’s how
thinking of Jaden made me feel. I bent over, trying to stop myself from laughing any louder, but then my mama entered the room and that stopped me abruptly.

“Is there a boy, Ava?” she asked.

“Ick,” I groaned. “You’re talking to me, Mama. You know I’ve never tolerated boys.”

“You’re acting as if some boy is making your mind wander off.”

My daddy had a way of showing up and shaking my jar of joy any time the word “boy” came up in our household. “Boys are dirty as the dirt on that floor, blossom. I’ve told you that,” he said and then walked out the front door. It made me mad that my daddy spoke willfully and then left without further conversation. They knew full well I loved a good debate. In fact, I craved it but could never get it, at least not to my contentment.

As my mama watched me from the doorway, I tried one more time going after the same old dirt on the floor, and I know I did so in a way that reflected my views on dirt, that dirt would never truly be gone, for it was probably two-thousand-year-old dirt and the same dirt the Calusa Indians walked across. I could see from her face that my mama disagreed with my belief that dirt never goes away. It just finds a new place new to hide.

“Okay, there is a boy,” I finally said when I knew she wasn’t going to leave the doorway. “A nice boy. In fact, he’s the one who prayed for Daddy that day in the periwinkles.”

Abigail drew a blank look, and although she had said that day that a boy who prays is a good thing, I knew she no longer remembered her periwinkle ways so I decided to skip over that and get to our second encounter.

“He was helping a hurt bird that day you and Dahlia gave me the morning to myself.”

“See, Mother, why I don’t believe it’s wise to set a young girl free for a day?” Abigail said, raising her I told-you-so brow at Dahlia.

“You can’t stop natural progression,” said Dahlia. “You can delay beach erosion, but sooner or later it’s going to happen just as a girl is eventually going to fall for a boy.”

Neither of them thought to ask me how many times I have snuck out
of the house in the middle of the night to go see him; so, I decided not to offer that information. They weren’t ready for me to fall in love. And I think it was because they still needed me. I was their only child, and they liked having me at home. And whenever Abigail started wilting, I was the only one she’d open up to slightly. She wouldn’t survive without me, I don’t think. And neither would Dahlia, nor my father, nor Jaden come to think of it. Jaden made me want to live forever, not that I didn’t want to live forever before falling in love with him, but now my life here on Earth was appreciated by another person, and that felt good.

“A boy that is nice to animals,” Abigail said, taking the broom from my hand, “is usually decent to women. But you should still stay away as your daddy warned. Now go start the laundry.”

Lydia

I closed the journal and thought about the ingredients that, according to Abigail, make up a good man—one that prays, and is kind to animals—and I realized something was missing in this recipe, a very important spice: A man who supports a girl’s ambitions. Josh was made up of all these things and he was like a cookie I had never tasted before. My father had me believing men rule the world and women clean it, but when Josh talked positively about my plans of becoming a journalist, I learned for the first time that there were men out there that truly do respect the individual minds and ambitions of a woman. And I wondered if maybe I was ready to let my heart try what hearts were meant to do.

“Done reading?” Marlena asked, poking her head in the room.

“No,” I said, jumping in my seat. “There’s more.”

“The sun is about to set.”

“It is? Then I’ve got to go,” I said, neatly setting the pages I had read atop the stack. “Can I come back and read more?”

“Of course, you can,” she said. “But my agent has set up a few more auditions for me. I’ll be in California for about two weeks. Why don’t you come back after that?”

“I’d love to,” I said, disappointed to wait so long, but I had made her wait a couple of years. Besides, I was thrilled that Marlena might become famous and I could say I knew her when. “I hope you get a role opposite Marlon Brando. He’s gorgeous, don’t you think?”