Sand in My Eyes (29 page)

“Is that what you do then, write?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “I don’t do anything. I don’t read, don’t watch television, and don’t spend time with my husband. I collapse into bed, telling myself that tomorrow is another day and maybe I won’t feel so tired. I’ve been telling myself this for weeks, months, and years. I’m thirty-six now—no— I’m thirty-seven, and other than being the mother of three of the world’s most amazing children, I haven’t the slightest idea who I am, only that I must be dull to listen to.”

“I don’t find you dull at all.”

“You’re kind,” I said, feeling embarrassed for having talked on about me, and fearful that I might start back up again. But it was as easy to talk to him as it had been hard talking to Timothy. And as unhappy as I felt when I first learned of Timothy’s act, I now felt that same swing of the pendulum, but in the opposite direction, toward happiness with regard to another person.

“I still feel dull,” I told him. “I mean, not right now, not here talking with you, but dull—like I no longer see the vibrancy of life, the colors.” I blushed for having said so much. “I’m always overwhelmed, feeling like I can’t keep up with the housework, the grocery shopping, the cleaning. It all leaves me feeling like a failure at the end of the day. But like I said, I no longer know who I am.”

“I once heard someone say that when you don’t know who you are anymore, or what you like, think back to when you were eight, and come up with three words you would have used to describe yourself and the things you liked then.”

“Roller skating,” I said with a laugh. Come to think of it, I liked writing in my diary more. I kept that to myself.

“Roller skating is good,” he said, “but you’re supposed to use words like adventure, philosophical, free-spirited.”

“Are those your words?”

“I guess they are,” he said. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“That’s why you and I get along so well.”

“What do you mean?”

“You and I have different circumstances, completely different lives, but
virtually, we’re the same. We expect things from life. We see life for what it is—an experience—and we want to make the most of it, make it as beautiful as possible. And what’s wrong with that, right?”

He got up from my bed and walked over to where I was sitting at my desk and, with a smile on his face and a gleam in his eyes, he picked up a piece of paper—the most recent printed page of my novel. “It’s hard being a mother,” he read my words aloud, “as hard as a woman climbing all four sides of Mount Everest every day all by herself, a solo expedition, with no time or energy left at the end of each day to celebrate her summits.”

It didn’t feel right hearing such words coming from the mouth of a man, so I pulled it from his hands.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Is that in your novel?”

“Of course not,” I said, feeling my face turn red. I didn’t know if it was good or not and didn’t want anyone judging what I had written, what I had been feeling.

“So where is this novel of yours? Can I take a look at what you’ve written?”

“It’s getting too dark,” I said, glancing out the window at the thunderstorm coloring the trees lime green against the black sky.

“Do you have a flashlight?” he asked me.

“I have candles,” I told him, going to my closet and pulling out the jars I had stashed when we first moved to the island and I read of potential hurricanes. When all six of them were lighted, I thought he would have forgotten, but he hadn’t. He asked me again if he could read what I had written.

“I’ll read a little of it to you,” I said, “but it’s intimate. My writing is intimate, so you’ll first have to tell me more about you.”

“Like what? What do you want to know?”

“Something no one in the world knows,” I said, aware of the fact that our time together was going to end, that all I would have afterward would be my memories and that even those would eventually fade, making me question whether all this happened or if it was only in my imagination. “Tell me your biggest secret. Tell me, and don’t leave a single thing out. I won’t tell a soul.” Only then could I consider handing over my manuscript
pages, letting anyone see this aspect of me spilled onto paper.

“I’m not that complicated,” he said.

“Oh, yes you are,” I told him. “Now don’t be shy.”

“Okay,” he finally said. “There is something nobody knows about me.”

“Not even women you’ve sat next to on a plane?”

“I tried telling this woman in Venice, but she didn’t speak English, and I don’t know Italian.”

“Oh, stop,” I said with a laugh. “Just tell me.”

“If you insist,” he said. “I’ll tell you what I struggle with most—what bothers me more than anything.” And it was then that he told me how he tried to view life as art, tried to see beauty in it all, but hard as he might, he saw nothing good produced from his first marriage—no kids, no masterpieces created together—just wasted time and nothing to show, no gain, nothing to walk away with but regret for having spent that time in misery.

And when he finished telling me his secret, I almost gave my writing to him, like a little girl handing over her coloring book, the one she worked on for hours that felt like years, that felt like a lifetime, but in a change of mind I pulled the pages toward my chest and folded my arms so he could never see them.

“Oh come on,” he said, taking hold of a corner of one of the pages and tugging it lightly. “I’ve told you everything there is to know about me.”

“But what you said was beautiful,” I told him. “What I’ve written is not. You’re the one who should be writing a novel. And I should be burning mine—ripping it to shreds and dropping it in my candles.”

“Have you got it saved on disc?”

“Yes, but I could burn that, too.”

“Why would you say such a thing? Why would you burn it?”

“It’s stupid.”

“I don’t believe that. I don’t believe anything you write could be stupid. I wish you’d let me take a look.”

“I can’t,” I said, this time more firmly.

“That’s fine,” he said, his hands in the air, showing the face of an innocent man. “I’m not going to force you. But I would think it would be fun sitting here talking about what you’ve written.”

“No, it’s not. I find this hard.”

“Okay, but I’m curious as to why you don’t want to show me.”

I felt my throat constrict. “It’s truly no good.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t, for sure.”

“Well, if you change your mind, I’d be happy to take a look. I would think you’d want to run it by another person, have a fresh set of eyes take a look.”

“No. I should stop writing,” I told him as I got up from my desk, set the papers on my bed and then sat on top of them. “Move on with my life.”

“You think?”

“Yes,” I said. “It sounds sad, but I should try.”

“If you have to ‘try’ to stop writing, then you ought to continue.”

“No. I don’t want the craving anymore, the craving to write. I’d be more carefree without it, without feeling compelled all the time to write. I don’t mind feeling compelled. But every time I feel compelled to write, life gets in the way and there’s something else I have to do, like change a dirty diaper, feed a hungry mouth. I guess if I ignore it long enough—the craving to write—it’ll go away.”

“Not if there’s a story in you that has to come out,” he said.

“I’d love to believe that, but I only have these few measly pages that I’m sitting on.”

“There’s got to be something you like about those pages.”

“No. And what a waste of my time.”

“Creative endeavors are never a waste,” he said. When he sat down next to me on my bed, I got up and walked over to my desk, opened the top right drawer and put the pages back in. “What does your husband think of your story?” he asked.

“He doesn’t know I’m writing one.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. “And I don’t know if you realize this or not, Anna, but you just told me one of your biggest secrets in life.”

“I did not,” I said.

“In so many words, and by the look on your face, you did,” he said. “You let me know in a roundabout way that writing is the most intimate
part of you.”

I stared him in the eyes, wondering how he knew so much about life, and about me and the things that were churning in my head. I wondered even more how much I knew of him, and what he was thinking, and whether he truly was thinking what I thought he was: that he wanted me like I wanted him. “Maybe I’ll work on my story more,” I said. “But I still can’t get over how nice it must be to be you, to have all the time in the world for thinking profoundly and sketching.”

“I wouldn’t change a thing.”

“No, I’m sure you wouldn’t,” I said, and then picked up a decorative pillow sitting on my bed and whipped it across the room with a smile on my face. “But what if you fall in love with a woman that you meet at Stonehenge, or one you see trekking up to Machu Picchu in Peru?”

“I don’t think I will,” he said, giving me a peculiar look. “I’m not going to any of these sacred places in hopes of meeting a woman. I’m going for research, and I’m going to have a million other things on my mind, like what I am going to put in this book I plan to write—you’re looking at a man who hates to write. Sorry, but it’s true—my other deep, dark secret, and I hope it doesn’t make you dislike me.”

“You’d be an impossible person to dislike,” I said. “You’re the kind everyone loves.”

He looked at me oddly again and I feared I had said too much, but then his eyes told me it was okay—what I had said—and, like an irrational creature, I said more. “What if you meet a woman while you’re traveling—visiting the Colosseum—you’re going there again, aren’t you?”

“I’m not going to meet any woman,” he said quickly.

“Yeah, but let’s say you do. Let’s say she’s sitting there all by herself, smack in the center, in the dirt, crying at the profoundness of it all.”

“I’d look at her like she was a whack-a-doo,” he said, “and I’d walk on by. I think what would affect me the most is if, one day, I’m walking on the beach and I see a woman, a mother of three, laughing out loud, playing with her kids, but I can see in her eyes that she is crying on the inside, crying because her husband doesn’t appreciate her.”

“Would this woman that you’re talking about be here or somewhere far
away?”

“Here,” he said, looking me straight in the eyes. “On Sanibel.”

“Oh,” I said, “so there is a woman in this neck of the woods that you care about.”

“Yes, and I’m getting to know her, and there’s something about her.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. She’s married.”

“What a shame,” I said. “And you—you’re free, completely free. Like I’ve said, it must be nice to be you.” I wanted to reverse time, take back my comments, my tone of resentment, and the look on my face. If this were the story I was writing, I could do all of that. I could delete the entire paragraph and start over, but it wasn’t a story. It was life and there is no taking back the words that escape our lips. Then again, we do author our own lives. To a certain degree we can control what happens next. At least, we try.

I got up from where I was sitting beside him and walked over to the small screened porch attached to my bedroom. “You probably think I’m a ding-dong,” I said as I stepped out. “I don’t blame you if you do.”

“I haven’t heard anyone use the words ‘ding-dong’ in a long time,” I heard him say from inside my room. “I was thinking more along the lines of ‘ding-a-ling.’”

“You’re mean,” I called in to him as I stared out at the dark limbs of the banyan tree.

“I should go,” he said, poking his head out.

“You don’t have to.”

“Thanks, but I should, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Let me think about it.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

I LISTENED
TO
THE
SOUND
of the whippoorwills and looked good and hard at the ever-expanding banyan roots and how simplistically complicated they were, and then I looked back at Liam and took hold of his hands, pulling him out onto the porch with me, so close that we were as interlocked as the roots and branches surrounding us.

“What should we do, Anna?” he whispered.

When I felt his lips, his breath in my ear, I no longer cared about whippoorwills or rubber tree plants, husbands, or housework. My only care was him, and all I wanted was to stand intertwined as we were all night long out on my back porch.

“We could dance,” I said.

“Dance?” he asked.

“Doesn’t that sound nice?” The night was dark from the thunderstorms. There was no one but the owls to see us, and they were too wise to be sitting around staring at a midlife couple dancing, unless they were debating how foolish we were to have let happen what was happening.

“Do you have music?” Liam asked.

“The electricity is out,” I reminded him. “Don’t you sing?”

“Only in the shower,” he said.

“Well, let me think,” I told him and then said, “do you mind if it’s a music box?”

“No.”

“Okay then. I’ll be right back.”