Portion of the Sea (28 page)

“Sounds good,” I said as I walked into the yellow room, glad to have the old Marlena back. And I think she was glad to see me return. It was like old times again, and I could hear her humming the tune “Jingle Bells” softly from the kitchen as I pulled out a stack of pages. I thought it odd that she’d be humming a holiday tune now, in summertime, but I was more curious to find out how Ava was faring during her time off from Jaden. I began to read:

SANIBEL ISLAND
1894

Ava

There ought to be a refuge inside every woman where her joy can flutter and her wisdom breed and her dreams nest and her mi akes land softly and the words her mother or grandmother or others have spoken flap about like butterflies and all these things can mingle and thrive harmoniously as long as they like, or they can enter the world by way of her lips
.

“Jingle shell, jingle shell, jingle shell, rock,” I sang out loud as I sat down at my desk and shook a handful of seashells. It was a late December evening, and it was unusually cold. But there was so much to be joyful about. A strong northwestern had cast millions of seashells upon the beach, and my mother and I spent the day together stooped over in search of treasures. We came home with a ton of pearly translucent shells and discovered that a handful of them would “jingle” when we shook them.

I placed the shells in my drawer and pulled out my journal. I opened it to a blank page. It had been way too long since I last wrote, and I had some catching up to do. I dipped my pen in the ink, ready to leave tracks all over the smooth white pages of my journal as to where I had been and where I was going.

After my last day of school, I had worked hard through summer, and
come fall I felt as drab as the warblers looked, doing my own chores and those belonging to my mother. And since Dahlia was getting older and doing less, I took on her work as well. They both needed me as much as mollusks need the water to survive. I tried to be there for them, physically extending myself around their every need, but my mind was its own, and I let it drift toward Jaden. I hardly saw him but in passing, and I missed our walks to school together, but the schoolhouse blew down in an eerie autumn wind, so even if we were still of age to be students those walks would have ended.

Just then there was a knock at my door. It was my mother. “How’d I know you’d be sitting here without stockings on your feet?” she said with a scolding smile. “Here, I brought you your favorite drink.”

“Warm milk, honey, and butter?”

“And cinnamon.” She set the teacup down on my desk, and I took a sip.

She stood there for a moment, running her fingers through my long hair, and I wondered whether she were trying to read what all I had written; so, I closed my journal and shifted in my chair to face her. “The tea is good, but it tastes different tonight.”

“Yes,” she said, rolling her eyes. “You can thank your Grandmalia for that. She added an ounce of brandy. Thought it might take the chill out of the air.”

“It’s working. My toes are warming up,” I said, taking another couple of sips.

“Good.” She reached down and kissed me on the cheek. “I’ll let you get back to your writing.”

“Thanks, Mama. I love you.”

“I love you, too, darling. I love you so much.”

In early December hundreds of white pelicans had arrived, and my mama started rising before the sun like she used to. We could hear her tinkering with the pots or filling the water, and it was as if someone waved a magic wand and turned her back into the other Abigail once again. I was so ready for the happy Abigail to reappear that I jumped up from bed one morning clapping my hands and skipping around the house. But how long until she disappeared again? None of us knew. The Bible says we can ask
for anything at all, and so I prayed that the happy Abigail might stay forever. I tried not to think about the part of scripture that says if it’s God’s will. I only wanted to think about my will, and it was plain and simple—that Jaden still loved me after all these months apart.

After several more sips of hot tea, I noticed it was harder to write and easier to think about Jaden. I was preparing to tell my parents any day now that I loved him and could hardly wait for the moment when I could go running over to his house with the news that we no longer had to be a secret and that we could start back up again loving each other where we left off the last day of school. The time was right. Mama was feeling good again, and things were going well for my parents. They had a fine winter crop of tomatoes; so fine that earlier in the day a man offered my father a hefty sum for it all. Stewart was only playing poker when he told the man to come back in a day or two. The crop was beautiful, and we all agreed we could get a bit more out of the man if we strung him along for a day or two.

I stood up from my desk and tippy-toed over to my bed and pulled the Junonia Jaden gave me out from under my pillow. “Tomorrow, the last Friday of December is the day,” I whispered. “I will tell my parents everything and get back together with Jaden in the morning.” I climbed into bed and tucked the blanket around my body, and a few minutes later I heard Dahlia entering the room and crossing the floor toward her bed. I was so tired from the day and from the brandy that I never said “good-night.”

I slept deeply, like a bear hibernating through winter, but when I awoke the next morning, way before sunrise, something didn’t feel right. The effects of the brandy had long worn off, and the coldness in the room felt more like Kentucky cold than Florida cold and it made me feel delicate as a dainty bird.

“Grandmalia,” I whispered across our room. “I’m cold. Aren’t you?” there was no answer, just the wind blowing outside our window. “You’re not snoring,” I continued. “So I know you’re awake. Talk to me, Grandmalia.”

When there was still no answer, I feared she might be dead, and because I didn’t feel like facing that right now, I pulled the blanket up over
my head, but then my toes stuck out so I sat up to cover them and lay back down again, only to feel my toes exposed once more. I refused to believe that Grandmalia might be dead; so, I tried once more to strike up a conversation.

“I’ll bet granddaddy Milton would love this weather,” I said, knowing she never passed up an opportunity to talk about Milton. “He loved the cold, didn’t he? Didn’t he used to say if life dumps snow on you, build a snowman? Tell me something new I don’t know about Milton.”

When she didn’t respond by starting her same old story about the snowman Milton built in the sand one year, I sat up and glanced over at her bed, ready to face the sad truth. But there was no lump under her covers, and I knew by the flatness of her bed that she was alive but missing, which in this chilling weather could turn out to be just as bad. It was too early to start chores, so where could she be?, I wondered, as I placed my feet on the wooden floor. She long ago gave up skinny-dipping for spending early mornings wading along with the large flocks of shorebirds, gulls, and terns that arrived with the start of winter. That’s probably where she was this morning, I thought, wondering why the cold air didn’t stop her.

Just then the door in our bedroom, the one that leads outdoors, flung open, slamming against the wall, and a gust of bitter air howled in and whipped me across the face. I froze with fear, as a dark figure wearing a cape appeared in the doorway. “Get out of here,” I yelled, “whoever you are. I’ve got a rifle and I’ll use it.”

“Milton used to say that too,” said the body in the doorway. “But he had the worst aim. Everyone knew it, even the bandits. I always feared we’d get robbed because of it.” The floorboards creaked as Dahlia, wrapped in a blanket, not a cape, crossed the room, and then sat down on the side of my bed.

“I was worried about you,” I said, putting my arm around her shivering body and laying my head on her shoulder. “You shouldn’t be out in this cold weather all by yourself so early in the morning.”

“I know. It’s blowing great guns.”

“Then why did you go out? What were you doing out there?”

“Would you believe me if I told you it’s snowing out there?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “It’s impossible. It can’t snow in Florida.”

“I swear I’m not fibbing.”

“You swear on granddaddy Milton’s grave?”

“I can’t swear on his grave. We don’t know where it is. If I were to bet you on it, I’d say Egypt or California. Did I ever tell you …?”

“Yes, you did,” I said, draping the blanket from my bed over my shoulders. “C’mon, show me that snow.” I took hold of the damp, stiff sleeve of her nightgown, and we scurried to the door, tugged it open, and stepped into a subtropical winter wonderland kingdom where anything was indeed possible.

It looked as if billions of white egrets were shedding their feathers, but, no, it was snow, pretty and white as the island sand. Heaping mounds were forming atop the green fronds of the palms while single flakes were landing on my nose. Crystal icicles were hanging from wooden posts nearby, and I thought for sure the sun had overslept today or taken its first day off in the history of the world, but then the ground around my feet lit with orange and one hundred shades of pink, and I knew that the good old sun was reporting for duty.

I felt like collecting the snowflakes in a jar before they melted or running into the house to enter everything I was seeing into my journal so it would never be forgotten. But I didn’t want to miss anything as it was happening. I would write about it later, once my fingers weren’t so stiff.

“Grandmalia,” I said, looking deep into her eyes. “What’s the one thing you want most?”

She must have been in an inspired mode of thinking like me, because her answer came without any hesitation. “That Milton and my love for him won’t ever be forgotten.”

I rubbed her hands vigorously and said with a smile, “That’s it? That’s all you want?” I shook my head as she nodded. “I can help you with that. That’s easy,” I said.

“How?” she asked.

“I’ll put your love for Milton into writing. I’ll write all about the two of you in my journal. Then, I’ll turn it into a novel one day so the whole world will read of it. Novels last forever, Grandmalia. That’s why I want
to be a novelist. So I can create something that lasts forever. Do you believe I can do it? Do you believe that anything is possible?”

“With God,” she said. “Don’t forget God. Anything is possible with God.”

I took hold of her other hand as well, and we circled around like two little girls playing “ring around the rosy.” I was full of purpose in my life and happier than I had ever felt before. I already knew I wanted to write a novel, but now I saw it as a way of keeping Grandmalia and the man she loved alive and remembered forever. I’d pass it on to my own daughter who would then hand it to hers, then hers, and hers straight down the line until, by golly, some futuristic great-, great-, great- and so on granddaughter of mine, living in the new millennium, if the world still exists then, if our Savior doesn’t return by then, will know all about Grandmalia and her love for Milton and me and my love for Jaden. And because anything is possible with fiction, I could even create between Abigail and Stewart a love that would make the lovebirds envious.

And thinking of birds, in my book I would make Grandmalia’s nose smaller and more feminine. There’s no need for the world to think of her with a beak. And Abigail would be such a happy character that circus clowns would travel from all over to train with her for a week.

“Anything is possible with God,” I said as we stopped circling and bumped into each other out of dizziness. “As it is with fiction.”

We tried walking, but we slipped, and since I was the leader I made sure to fall first and then catch Gandmalia in my lap. I posed there on the ground like a frozen statue, holding her as both of us tilted our heads back and welcomed more snow, like flakes of chilled coconut into our mouths.

“Dreadful,” a man’s voice rang out. “Do you two have any idea what this weather means to us?”

I felt numb and couldn’t answer. Maybe I didn’t want to. The world around me was glowing pink from the rising sun, and there was no room for anything negative in a moment as fleeting as this, where I believed anything at all was possible and close at hand. But then a dark shadow showed up on the ground in front of me.

“Our crops have been killed to the ground. Our crops, everyone’s
crops—dead, frozen,” said the shadow. It was Stewart, and he was looking ornery as a stone crab.

“People are saying this is the coldest morning in the history of Florida,” my mother said walking up beside him. “We’ve lost it all. So much for that man and his offer—the tomatoes are ruined. The oranges, too, and not just the oranges,” she continued. “But the trees. They’re also dead.”

I no longer felt ripe with inspiration, nor numb, but rather bruised, dented, and destroyed as I jumped up from the ground and pulled my grandmother up as well. “What does this all mean?” I stepped up eye-level to my father. “What’s going to happen now?”

He shook his head and kicked an icicle beside his foot. “You’re talking to a man who just lost one hundred and sixty acres of fertile land. I haven’t any answers, blossom.”

“You’ve got to have answers,” I insisted. “I mean, what are we going to do?”

“First thing that comes to mind is leave.”

“No. What do you mean by that? You mean leave the island? Us?”

He shrugged his shoulders and then meandered over to the icicle hanging from the post. He gave it a nudge and it swung back and forth before crashing to the ground.

“We’ve got to look on the bright side,” I said. “We still own land on Sanibel.”

“It’s worthless now,” he said, stomping his shoe over the ice.

“Land is never worthless,” I cried as my father walked into the house.

“We can start over.”

“Everything,” Abigail said through violet lips. “Everything we grew together. Our tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and watermelon—destroyed! It’s not just us. I was over talking to the neighbors on both sides, and it’s the same for them, for everyone.”

“The damn freeze,” stuttered Dahlia. “The damn freeze has killed us all.”