Portion of the Sea (51 page)

   We arrived in Fort Myers by way of train. But it wasn’t until the captain on the ferry came around collecting fares from the passengers that I knew for real we were on our way to Sanibel Island. And when that ferry named “Best” left the mainland at Punta Rassa, steaming its way toward the island, I felt like one of those birds returning after time away. I thanked God for my kids, for my life, and for returning me here, to the island I once swore was the Promised Land.

Our Christmas in New York was lavish, and we all received all the items on our lists. But I didn’t tell the kids that the pennies that went to pay for this trip were buying something money couldn’t afford—my sanity. This trip was another of my glistening steps.

With my arms tightly around my oldest and youngest sons, I looked out at the aqua water surrounding us and knew I should have taken this trip sooner. Since the early twenties everyone I knew had been vacationing in Florida, and even Thomas Edison and Henry Ford were spending time in Fort Myers.

“Boys,” I said, fighting back the tears in my eyes. “I agree with what my mother, your grandmother, once said. Sanibel is probably the closest glimpse of what heaven might look like if there was such a place on earth.”

My youngest laughed. “Maybe to you, Mom. But to me, heaven is a room filled with money.”

I gave him a scolding look and shook my head in disappointment. “Oh, come on, I didn’t raise you, or any of you for that matter, to worship money.”

“I’m just kidding,” Jonathon said, planting a kiss on my cheek. He was doing well as a young stockbroker. All three of the boys inherited Leo’s
ambition and watched their mother work like a fool for everything she had. Each of them in their young careers was now making more money than their father ever imagined. They had also remained living at home and close to me all this time, and I knew and wanted for that to reach its end. No, I didn’t want it to, but I knew it had to. They were more than ready. They were men. It wasn’t that I kept them close selfishly. It was that we were living comfortably on a large estate, and they were fully meshed in their careers. Careers came before women, or at least, lasted longer, I might say. And they had never been in any hurry to marry. I knew that was all naturally changing, and it would be good and healthy for them to fly the nest completely.

“I’d love to sell it all—the estate, the cars, my clothes, furniture—and move out here one day. Maybe I will,” I said, looking over the railing at the water below. “I think I could manage fine without all that stuff. It’s all just clutter if you think good and hard about it. Yes,” I continued. “I think I might do that. Your sister and I will move here once you three get places of your own. Of course we’d visit several times a year. Maybe every other month.”

“You’re not serious, Mother,” said Charles, twenty-four. “No one in their right mind would live in Florida year-round. It’s a state without seasons. Don’t you like your seasons, Mother?”

“There are seasons. They’re just more subtle,” I said. “Don’t judge it yet.”

“Then, if you like it that much,” he said. “I’ll find out how much it costs to purchase the island for you.” Charles worked as a commercial developer and knew a valuable piece of land when he saw one.

“I’d say you could put ten to twenty percent in cash to buy stock in it and get the rest on cheap credit,” added Jonathon. “It’s that simple.”

“Not Sanibel stock, idiot.” Charles fake-punched his younger brother. “Land. I might be able to buy the island and develop it for Mom. Land in Florida has been selling and reselling with profits reaching inflated levels.”

“Not a bad point, Charley,” said Jonathon.

“Boys,” I said. “I don’t want any of you buying me anything, you hear?”
And I meant it. The purchase had been my idea first, and it was something I wanted them to one day inherit from me, not give to me. It was the perfect thing to pass on. People have been exchanging land and sea as gifts for centuries. Spain once gave Florida to England, and in exchange England gave Havana, Cuba, to Spain. This sort of gift-exchanging continued throughout history, so there is no reason why I couldn’t buy a little piece of Florida, with a portion of the sea, for my children to inherit one day.

“Mom, if you really want to buy in Florida, now might not be a bad time to do so and sit on it,” Jonathon said, disrupting my thoughts.

“That’s right,” added Charley. “The bubble burst with the hurricanes and tourism from what I heard has been virtually non-existent up until now, thanks to this auto ferry.”

While waiting for the ferry, we had talked with several people and learned that the island had been hit with severe storms in recent years. A 1926 hurricane with a fourteen-foot storm surge covered all the low-lying areas of both Sanibel and Captiva islands, and the saltwater ruined the fertile soil, burying any hopes of further large-scale farming. Who knows whether it was still the sort of place I’d want to spend time at. And who knows what I’d find once I went searching for Jaden.

Maybe he wasn’t there any more. According to Dahlia, his family had started back up again growing eggplants and peppers after the freeze, but who knows whether the hurricanes chased them away for good. Island agriculture hadn’t recovered, and the man I was talking to said it might never. I tried not to think about Jaden. If he were married and still living there, then maybe this would be just a one-time trip for me. But if he were there and he wasn’t married and he was the same person I once loved, then who knows? Anything is possible with God, I suppose. I only knew I no longer wanted to talk about money and investments with my sons.

“We’ll talk about it later,” I said. The only green I wanted to be thinking about was the island looming before us. “I’d like for us all to relax. And speaking of that, where’s Henry and your little sister? I haven’t seen them since the ferry left the dock.”

My middle son, Henry, was as ambitious as his brothers, but in a different way. He had also worked as a stockbroker, but recently put his mini-fortune
into stocks and securities. His brothers lately call him “dewdrop-per” for spending his days sleeping and not having a job. He enjoys telling people he doesn’t have to work because his money is working for him. In a sense, he’s right. When General Motors issued stock, I also pulled my own savings from the bank and put it all into stock. Everyone was doing it. But then I remembered what my mother once told me, that just because all the other kids are jumping off a cliff, it doesn’t mean you should too. So just before this trip, I pulled my savings out of the stock market. That way, if I chose to purchase land on Sanibel, I had money to play with.

“I’ll go find them, Mother,” said Charles.

“I’ll go with him,” said Jonathon.

“Thanks,” I said, watching the way the women were looking at my grown boys as they disappeared to the other side of the ferry. They kept in good shape, dressed fashionably, and spoke properly to women. And they were handsome—each one of them. I was thrilled when Henry inherited his great-grandfather Milton’s hazel eyes. I hadn’t ever seen those eyes, but Grandmalia described them in her stories, saying they were a sparkling brown. When Henry was little I told him where he got his eyes and, horrified, he asked, “Is Milton going to want them back?”

Henry had eyes for one thing, and it wasn’t writing poetry like his great-granddaddy, but rather music. He loved playing the trumpet. He also loved drinking while doing so, and I could always tell by the way those eyes flickered with green that he had been drinking. I hoped no one else noticed. I didn’t want my son getting into any trouble, but those eyes of his worried me.

“Mom, we found her,” Jonathon called out to me.

“Was she with Henry?”

“Sort of. I think you should come see for yourself.”

As I made my way to the other side of the ferry, I could hear music above the sound of the engine, and I heard people laughing and clapping, and when I saw they were doing so for Marlena, I stopped in my tracks. There she was, fourteen years old, dancing the Charleston, with her hair bobbing about her shoulders, wearing a skirt her brothers thought was too short but she thought was not short enough. And Henry was playing his
trumpet passionately with his eyes closed.

“She looks like a miniature version of you,” Charles said as I joined him and Marlena’s crowd of admirers. “Only you never laugh or dance anymore, Mother.”

“I’m too old for any of that,” I said. But I knew that wasn’t true. If I was young enough to have a fourteen year-old daughter, I also had to be young enough to still live life to the fullest and have fun.

My eyes followed my daughter dancing the Charleston. How did she do that after only taking ballet? I did take her to see
The Jazz Singer
and she insisted on seeing it fourteen times more after that. I glanced away from her and out over the railing of the ferry, where I thought I spotted a shiny object bobbing up and down in the water. If only I were thirty years younger, I would dive overboard and swim over to it to be sure it was really mine. And then I’d grab onto my heart and swim with it to shore. There I’d find the first man it ever belonged to.

My eyes returned to Marlena. She was every bit beautiful, from her wide, oval blue eyes to the charismatic and charming nose she inherited from her great-grandmother, Dahlia. I guess Grandmalia had been right about that nose and how it skips around the family, showing up on the fourth babies. It pained me horribly when Marlena grumbled about her nose because to me it represented where she came from and the ancestors she was connected to. She was so beautiful that heads turned and watched her, and that nose of hers only added charisma to her face—and it softened her piercing eyes.

Maybe I’m not that old, I thought as I watched her dance. If Jaden is still around, he’d be two years older than me. And I had aged gracefully over the years, with just four wrinkles big enough to count and they were worth it, for my children gave them to me as gifts. Jaden would have a few lines, but knowing him, or the boy he once was, he’d try telling me that wrinkles on a woman’s face are the tracks of where she has been and that they’re beautiful in a natural sort of way and purposeful too, reminders of the life she has lived. He had been the sort of person to make anyone feel better, even a wounded pelican. He had to be married. I’d find out soon enough.

“I can hardly look at her without smiling,” Jonathon said as he marveled
at his baby sister. “Look at her. She’s a natural entertainer.”

Just then Marlena stopped the Charleston, and a beautiful woman in her thirties, smoking a cigarette in a long, decorative holder, reached out from the crowd and pulled her close.

When Henry, who was putting his trumpet away right beside his little sister, didn’t notice, I feared he had been sipping from his secret stash of liquor again. I started for where the stranger was whispering in my daughter’s ear, but Charles held me back. “She’s fine, Mother. She’s a small bird with big wings. We’re watching her closely,” he said.

Then the woman kissed Marlena on the forehead and continued talking to her.

“Marlena,” I called out.

She looked around, disoriented, and when she spotted me in the crowd, she said, “Just a minute, Mama. This lady is telling me something important.”

“Go get her, Charles,” I said. “What’s that woman saying to her?”

Charles walked over, and Jonathon followed, but Marlena turned her back to them as if she didn’t want them butting in. I laughed when Charles swept her petite body up in his arms and carried her over to me. She was mad, but her dramatic side continued to flare as she swung her head back while in the arms of her brother and blew a kiss to the woman who was still smiling.

The woman held her finger up to her lips as if to say, “Shhh, don’t tell,” then she waved to my daughter.

When the ferry touched the dock and people started rushing about with anticipation, I nearly did the Charleston myself. Charles put Marlena down, and she and I held playful hands as we joined a line of people exiting the ferry. We bumped into the woman who had been whispering into Marlena’s ear and she winked at my daughter.

“What was that woman whispering to you about?” I asked.

“It’s a secret,” she answered coyly.

I shook my head and looked her straight in the eyes. “I’m your mother,” I said. “And that woman was a stranger. You will tell me what she said.”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“It’s none of your beeswax,” she said, sounding way too old for her age and making me feel too old to deal with her.

“Marlena,” I scolded. “A young lady respects her mother.”

She rolled her eyes and said, “If I tell you, it will ruin my destiny. If I tell you, I won’t be famous.”

“What on God’s Earth are you talking about?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Fine,” I snapped. “If you don’t tell me everything right this moment, you won’t get to search for shells or walk the beach or do anything with us as a family, do you hear?”

By this time we were stepping foot off the ferry, and I was questioning God for giving me a daughter so late in life. I did that from time to time, whenever she acted up. Most of the time, though, she didn’t act like this and I thanked God for giving me a daughter so late in life.

When I noticed her eyes moving about in a creative way, as if she were thinking about the seashell mirror she wanted to make, I knew she was about to give in and tell me what the woman had said to her.

“The lady told me that one day I would be famous.”

“Famous?” asked Jonathon, walking close behind us and listening unbeknownst to us. “For what?”

Marlena stopped at the end of the dock, just before stepping foot onto the east end of Ferry Road. “The lady on the ferry liked the way I danced. And when I finished, she said that I would be famous, more than Lucky Lindy himself, and she said that I would be rich, not from the stock market, but from my fame. Do you think I could be richer than all three of my brothers?” She looked at me for the answer. “I don’t doubt, Marlena, that you’re just as adventurous and invincible as Lindbergh,” said Charles. “But tell us, what would you be famous for?”