Portion of the Sea (24 page)

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.

“If anyone heard any moans last night,” I said, looking up, “they weren’t from any woman giving birth over at the lighthouse. They were all from Grandmalia as I pulled pieces of stingray out of her behind. It was bad.”

“How’s it looking now?” Stewart asked.

“Slightly blue and swollen, but there’s no more pus. I just don’t want her dying from any allergic reaction,” I said. “I wish you’d let someone other than me, a doctor or my father, take a look at it,” I said to Dahlia.

“Don’t go there,” she snapped. “I already told you that no one but dear Milton’s eyes have ever seen that area of my body.”

Maybe she truly had lost three ounces of sanity for having three children because it made no sense at all that she’d let nobody but me see the wound on her ass, yet she got it from something as risqué as skinny-dipping in the first place. Stewart and I must have been thinking the same thing at the same time.

“With all due respect,” he started at her. “I don’t think it’s wise for a woman of your age …” He stopped and cleared his voice. “I mean any woman to be skinny-dipping in that water, or any water. It’s dangerous.”

“A gal knows she is in the winter of her life when family members nearly half her age start telling her what she should and shouldn’t be doing,” she said, sipping more of her medicine. “Besides,” she continued. “I’m not alone out there when I skinny-dip. I know my Milton is watching down from Heaven, keeping a close eye on me.”

I laughed as did Stewart and even Abigail, I think.

“Those years before we were wed,” continued Dahlia, “back when I was around your age, Ava, we used to skinny-dip together all the time, I might add.”

Stewart cleared his throat. “I’m sure you did,” he said, “but we’re trying to raise a lady, and you’re talking about an activity that ladies don’t do.”

“Leave me alone.” She flagged her hand through the air. “I can say whatever I want. I’m in the winter of my life.” She rolled slightly over on her side and continued. “I may not be the definition of a lady, but I don’t care. I’ve lived life, and I don’t want to forget the girl I was when I lived it to the fullest. We took all our clothes off and jumped into that pond outside the shed one spring night.”

Stewart slammed the jar of jelly down on the table. “Too many details,” he said, glancing over at me. I was kneeling beside her bed like a girl at a campfire, eager to hear more of the story and feeling a bit envious that my own grandmother, as old as she was, had more juicy details to share than I did at age eighteen. “We get the idea,” Stewart said to her. “All I’ll say to you is that if you go back out into that water, just stay on your feet and shuffle so the stingrays know you’re coming. End of story.”

Dahlia turned her head toward me and grumbled, “Why is it that everyone thinks they’ve surpassed me in knowledge?”

I stood up and took the bottle of whiskey from her hands. “I don’t know,” I said. “Everyone knows more than me, too. I guess you and I are both in those phases of life where no one thinks we know anything.” I walked over to the hooks on the wall and took my school bag. I couldn’t wait to open that door and run out, to meet up with Jaden, the boy I once
knew and the man I still knew I would one day marry.