Portion of the Sea (25 page)

“Everyone on the island is having babies, it seems,” muttered Abigail as I opened the front door. I turned to look at her, and she was gazing into space, holding the same piece of bread she had clutched the first moment she sat down. “I always wanted more than just one child,” she said, then focused her eyes on me. “Don’t ever leave my side, Ava. It would kill me.”

The news I had all morning on the tip of my tongue now worked its way down my throat and into my gut where it secretly churned about, making me nauseated. I thought about Jaden, who was probably already there at the tree waiting for me and waiting to hear how my family reacted to the news that I loved him, madly loved him. I would have to tell him that this morning wasn’t right. My mama couldn’t handle the news. I walked over to her and planted a kiss on her cheek.

“You didn’t follow me out there last night, did you, Ava?” she asked me.

“Follow you where?” I asked.

“To the beach, because if you plan to follow me, you’ve got to be quiet or you’ll frighten them.”

“Here we go again,” Stewart uttered under his breath. “Who? Frighten who?” I asked her.

“The mother turtles.”

“The turtles again. If you’re really sneaking out at night to watch those giant-headed turtles on the beach, why don’t you bring some home so we could cook up some soup at least?” asked Stewart.

“Why do you like to watch them, Mama?” I asked.

No one truly believed that my mother wandered out alone at night to watch any turtles, but we played along with her anyway. And if she did indeed sneak out, Stewart wouldn’t know. He was the type to sleep through a hurricane.

Abigail stood up and ghost-like sauntered to the window and looked out at the darkness that would soon turn to light. “The full moon was shining last night,” she said in a monotone. “And my friends arrived from the sea, dragging themselves along the beach in search of a good place to dig their nests.”

“Did they find one? Did they dig their nests?” I asked.

“Yes. Then the mother turtles went back out to sea.” She turned and walked over to where I was now sitting and combed her hands through my long hair. “They followed a glistening pathway that the moon created atop the water.”

“It sounds beautiful,” I said.

“It was. I’m thinking maybe I might head out to sea myself,” she said, then kissed the top of my head and walked toward her bedroom. “Who knows? Maybe I will.”

I followed her, but the door closed in my face. I felt queasier than when I tweezed the stingers out of Grandmalia’s butt. What did my mother mean? Why would she want to head out to sea? I didn’t want her going anywhere. I wanted her here, in the nest with me, but her mind had already swiftly propelled itself out there, to that portion of the sea where the sea turtles swim. I’d just have to wait for her to return again. It is a mystery to me how she does return, how she finds her way back to us after being gone so long, but she does. And I’d just have to wait and watch.

“Ava,” Dahlia called out to me as I stood with my ear up to my mother’s door. “None of what she says makes any sense.”

“But why would a mother turtle abandon her eggs?” I asked.

“Why should you care if they do?” Stewart asked, looking at me as he always does when I try turning simple things into in-depth connections. “Never mind your mother. She’s talking nonsense again,” he said. “Now get yourself off to school or you’ll be late.”

I looked at Grandmalia. “Are you going to be okay today without me?”

“I’m fine,” she said. “Especially now that my fever is gone. Listen to your father and get your behind out that door, young lady.”

I did as I was told, and when I opened the door and stepped outside, I entered the world I loved, the one full of beauty and anticipation, and I ran as fast as a panther to meet up with Jaden by our tree.

Lydia

I was about to put the pages away and quietly leave when Marlena stepped into the room.

“Lydia” she said.

“Yes?”

“How did the reading go today?”

“Fine,” I said. “But did Abigail ever go out to sea?”

“Don’t take her literally,” she said.

I didn’t know how else to take that one, so I stood up and gave her a hug and then reached into my purse and pulled out a tissue.

“What is going on?” I asked her. “Is this really about your not getting any of the parts?”

“I’m not sure,” she said through sniffles. “I get like this from time to time. It takes a few days, other times a few weeks before something happens to me.”

“What? What happens?”

“I feel fine again. I function. I audition. I go out with friends. And then it hits me again, and I don’t feel like doing anything.”

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

“No. But do me a favor. Take some of Ava’s pages with you. That way you can read them over at your place. I’ve got some cookies a neighbor brought over. You want those, too?”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. I’m just not in the mood for any cookies or company. Like I said, it’s not you.”

I felt disappointed as I gathered up a stack of pages. I liked coming to her place to read, but I also liked seeing her. But if space is what she wanted, I’d give her some, and then I’d return, and hopefully she’d be okay again. I tucked the pages into my bag.

“I’ll read and return them soon.”

“I know you will.”

“Bye,” I said, not sure whether leaving her like this was the right thing to do. “Would you like me to bring you flowers tomorrow?”

“No. I’ll get outside and get some for myself. I need a task to get me going. Don’t worry about me.”

“Would you like to go to the beach with me?”

“Lydia,” she said. “You better get going. This is my problem. I can’t rely on someone else to restore my happiness. It’s not that kind of sadness I’m dealing with. I’m not lonely, so you keeping me company isn’t going to fix it.”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll be going, then.” And as I walked out her front door, I turned and said, “Did you know there’s a patch of periwinkles at the bottom of your steps?”

I thought I saw her smile. Or maybe she just nodded. I waved and was on my way.

XXIII

JOSH AND I HADN’T
snuck out at night for some time, but I told him there was something important that I wanted to do and it could only be done in darkness. There was a lot on my mind as I lay in bed waiting once more to hear his gentle tapping on my window. I had told him all about my relationship with Marlena and how she was letting me read an old journal belonging to a girl who once lived on the island. I told him I felt like the girl and I were friends. And I shared with him how Marlena filled a gap I felt in my life from not having a mother. I decided not, however, to tell him about the way Marlena looked and how she talked today. It troubled me, and I didn’t know what to make of it.

“Hey, baby,” he whispered as I opened the window. “You ready?”

“I am, but no fishing, boating, or sitting on my bed whispering, not tonight.”

“You name it,” he said. “What are you in the mood for?”

“There’s a full moon, and there’s something I’m itching to do,” I said pulling the sheet off my bed and draping it over my shoulders.

“Sure, anything.” He took my hand and helped me crawl through the window.

“Take me to the beach so I can see if it’s true, if those mother turtles really dig their nests and then return to the sea.”

“They do,” he said. “It’s a fact.”

“I need to see it with my own two eyes.”

On our way to the beach, Josh asked me why the sudden interest in watching turtles, but there are those things a girl doesn’t feel like telling a boy. He asked me again as we quietly lay on our stomachs, watching and waiting for turtles, but there are also things a girl doesn’t want anyone in the world to know.

And things nobody knows that she knows. I don’t know what sort of depression propelled my own mother to take her life shortly after I was born. Weren’t there any other options or steps she might have taken? I’ve never come to terms with how she could have done that, or why, and I don’t think I ever will. It’s not natural. Even parent pelicans stick around because their featherless newborn chicks need to rely on their body heat for warmth. No one tells them to, they just do, naturally. So why would a mother leave her babies motherless inside their eggs?

I have never asked anyone and never has anyone talked to me about it. I found out accidentally one day when I overheard Lloyd and Doctor Conroy talking about it. I can’t imagine any mother laying eggs or giving birth and then disappearing. It makes no sense to me.

Josh and I hadn’t been there long before a silent mother sea turtle emerged from the water and made her way across the sand. Soon she used her curved flippers to toss sand to the right and to the left. And when the holes were deep enough, she laid her eggs. She covered her nest with sand and, sure enough, she headed toward the shore. The moon was bright, and it formed a glistening pathway on the surface of the water, just as Abigail had mentioned. The mother turtle followed it out to sea.

“What’s out there, Josh?”

“Water,” he answered matter-of-factly.

“No, I mean after death. What is there after we die?”

“Heaven,” he said.

“I don’t know that I believe in any Heaven,” I said. “Nor any God.”

“Look at you,” he said. “You’re beautiful. You’re a work of art. You don’t think you just happened, do you?”

“I don’t know what I believe. My father once told me people evolved from fish. He was busy analyzing a report when he told me, so I don’t take it all that seriously. Do you believe anything about what he said?”

“No, I don’t. I believe God created the Heavens and the Earth and …”

“Oh, shush,” I said as I jumped up from the sheet and pulled him by his hands. “Don’t get so serious on me. C’mon, let’s go for a swim.” I ran to the shoreline stopping just as the warm water touched my toes. I laughed thinking of poor Dahlia sick in bed, but then, stingrays or no stingrays, I decided I wasn’t going to let some old lady living a century before me have more fun then me, so I slowly started unbuttoning my blouse.

“What are you doing?” Josh asked.

“I’m not going to wait until I’m an old fart to go skinny-dipping,” I said as I pulled my blouse off my shoulders and tossed it to the sand. “Aren’t you going to join me? It’s not right for a lady to skinny-dip all alone.”

I only had time for a quick peek as he unzipped his jeans and pulled them down, and then kicked them off his feet and into the air a bit too far, only to land down in the water. I laughed, and so did he, then I got back to my own arduous task of gracefully struggling to remove my easy stretch, cool lacey hug girdle without looking like a fool. It took so long to get the dang thing off that it ruined my spontaneous mood, and I started to have second thoughts, mostly concerning the recent tourist boom on the island.

“What’s taking so long?” Josh called out. He was standing waist-high in the water and facing the moon.

“What if a tourist spots me?”

“They’re not interested in you,” he said, turning his head to see my rounded foam rubber contour shell bra drop to the ground. “Anything short of beaches, sunsets, shells, manatees, alligators, shorebirds, or dolphins would only disappoint them,” he continued as I quickly tiptoed toward the water like a shorebird that might fly away at any moment. And when I stepped up beside him, waist-high in the water wearing nothing but the transparent light of the moon beaming across me, he smiled and said, “But if I were a tourist, I’d be interested in you, very much so.”

I no longer cared about any tourist or local resident or even my father finding us there in the water. When Josh took hold of my hand and kissed me I felt as if we were the only two people on the island and I felt as much inner peace and calmness as one might expect from spending time at a wild- life refuge, exploring and observing, with lots of respect and restrictions,
of course.

“We can’t be a secret anymore,” Josh finally said. “You’ve got to tell your father about us.”

“What would I tell him?”

“That we’ve been seeing each other a lot and that I love you.”

“You do?”

“Of course I do.”

I looked up at the moon and for a woman in that moon, hoping she might tell me what to say, but there wasn’t any woman up there and I never ever believed there to be any man in the moon and so I simply said, “I love you, too, but what about my father not paying for my tuition come fall?” And I said both together in one sentence.

“Isn’t what we have together more important than any of that?” Josh asked.

“Any of what?”

“That—that which you’re chasing after and hoping to find out there in the world.”

“My education and career? Is that what you mean?”

“I guess,” he said.

“It’s time we get going.” I started walking quickly toward the shore. “We’ve been out here too long, and I’m started to feel creepy.”

“Look,” he continued when we reached the shore and started putting our clothes back on. “I didn’t mean to upset you, Lydia. I support you doing whatever it is you need to do in life, but I know what all of that means. It means you’re going to leave here in a few weeks and we’re going to have to say ‘good-bye.’ I just want to make sure that leaving is what you really want. What is it that you want, Lydia?”