Portion of the Sea (33 page)

Sincerely
,

Marlena

I didn’t know for sure what Marlena was referring to. At twenty-one years old, I felt I had already made the major choices of my life. I chose not to get married and not to move to the suburbs. In the back of my mind, I knew that one day I might choose to reconnect with Josh, but for now, I liked exactly where I was. I was working for a newspaper, another choice of mine. Maybe it was Ava who regretted the choices she had made.

I felt mine were good ones and they weren’t strange, as Lloyd and the rest of the country had me believing. I was glad to have chosen print journalism since it already had a long history of women working in it, whereas television news was a new frontier with a new group of groundbreaking women. I appreciated women who paved the way.

I tucked Ava’s latest journal entries into my briefcase and walked out my door. I took the elevator to the lobby, then walked to Michigan Avenue and sat down on a shady bench. I pulled out her journal, eager to know how my poor old friend had fared after leaving the island a heartless woman. How could any woman survive without a heart? I had to read quickly for it was my first day of work and there was no way I was going to be late.

KENTUCKY

1899

Ava

There is a reason why so many women look back on their lives and regret the things they’ve done or haven’t done. It’s because they didn’t notice the options and choices arriving on the shore until it was too late and those options and choices floated back out to sea. Rarely do the important options in life smack us in the face like a cold wave. Often those are the ones that come and go quietly with the tide and blending with our lives so that we didn’t pay them any attention
.

I arrived in Kentucky a heartless woman, and, off and on throughout the next year, I wondered whether I was losing my mind. There are certain circumstances, when put together all at the same time, that make any woman lose her mind, even those who haven’t any history of mindlessness in their families.

While Stewart was off in Key West rolling cigars, Abigail’s days of rolling happily on the ground with the flowers were gone for good. She was overtaken once more by the spell of sadness, and I cried out each night with prayerful pleas that a prince might come along to kiss and wake her from the spell.

My mama looked like a dead person as she’d lie in the bed in the middle of the afternoon, her eyes open, but not looking, and her lips pressed together softly, but not saying anything. With the tips of my fingers, I’d touch her lips and try shaping them into the beautiful smile that my daddy once fell in love with.

Our first year back in Kentucky, I tried many things. And so did the doctors. We all did. Even Abigail herself did. But when a flower is picked from the ground where it wants to be, its days are numbered, and she lost all desire and eventually her ability to take in and keep down food or water.

“You need this,” I tried insisting as I held her head back and poured
water into her mouth. “You’ve got to drink it, Mama.”

And the first day she let it dribble down her chin; I tossed the water onto the floor, not caring that I broke the glass. “Mama,” I cried. “Remember that glistening pathway? The one made by the moon on top of the water? The one you said those mother turtles followed?”

She stared through me.

“I need you to walk that glistening pathway or at least take a couple of steps. Please, you’ve got to do whatever you can to pull yourself out of this and survive.”

But when she stayed in the crumpled-up position, her condition had gone too far and she was too weak to go for any walk or to take any strengthening measures of her own. I knew then she had already taken her final glistening walk, and it was years ago when she uprooted our family and moved us to Florida, despite our extended kin thinking she was nuts for moving us to a place far away and one that we had never been to before. Now that we were back, I think she made the decision not to go for any more glistening walks.

“I don’t know what to do,” I said one day when I was buying wheat in town. “I’ve got a plant that’s dying.”

“Water it,” said the woman after handing me my change.

“I’ve given it water. Three to four times a day or more.”

“Too much water. Try sunshine.”

I shook my head. “That once helped, but not any more.”

“Have you tried talking to it?”

“It doesn’t talk back.”

“Of course it doesn’t. Plants don’t talk, but they still hear.”

So that day I returned home with the wheat and sat down on the end of my mama’s bed and began to talk. I thought I noticed her eyes opening wider, and they were the color of mine as I told her all about the boy I loved on the island and how we’d meet up in the moonlight, like two owls wanting to love without any interference from daylight or people. I told her all about our walks to school and the tracks we left behind in the mudflats and how he was a boy who prayed and who cared for animals and believed in my dreams. I continued to tell her how my heart had leaped over
the side of the boat the day we left and I watched it sink.

She liked my story, I think, for it was the first time in weeks that she sat up in bed and placed her feet on the ground, as if she were about to stand on her own. And then I told her why I thought the Lord put the moon up in the sky. It was so that even in the dark of night there would be some light and somewhere it would be glistening down on earth. And there would be no excuse. The glistening pathway would always be there, and it’s up to us to go out and walk it. I waited for my mama’s reaction, for her to conjure up in her mind a simple step she might take, but just as I thought she was about to stand, she fell onto the floor instead.

I cupped her in my arms and caressed her pale soft skin.

“No, Mama. Don’t leave me. Please don’t go,” I cried.

“Ava,” she uttered. “Your soul.”

“What did you say, Mama? What about my soul?”

“Listen to it.”

“But what does it sound like?”

She took a slow breath in and said, “The sea,” then let it out like the tide.

“What if I can’t hear it?”

“I see it,” she said, her voice trailing off.

“My soul, Mama? You see my soul?”

“No. I see Heaven. I think.”

“What does it look like? You’ve got to tell me.”

She closed her eyes and never got to tell me. I could only imagine.

Hours later the men tried taking her from me, and I cried and screamed and kicked. And soon I stopped kicking, but I screamed in my sleep for weeks, and when that ended, I cried night after night for months on end.

At first, Dahlia would hear my cries, and she’d sit beside my bed, holding my hand. “Those damn winters,” she’d say. “They killed her, you know.” We both needed something to blame, and winter was the easiest. The season lasted long, like our sorrow, and I could kick the snow and let the ice knock me down to my face giving me a reason to lie there cold and crying and feeling sorry for myself.

But when spring came and we both still felt upset over my mama’s death, we knew winter wasn’t truly to blame. There had been something else. It was as if Abigail’s mind went through seasons of sickness.

I had hoped that with the arrival of spring I might pick myself up again and get on with my life, doing all that I wanted to do. But I wasn’t ready when the flowers started blooming.

XXXI

LYDIA

RAIN WAS A GOOD THING
. If it hadn’t started to rain, I’d have gone on reading. Instead, I glanced at my watch, threw Ava’s journal into my briefcase, and took off, sprinting faster than any Chicago bus or earthly man or Florida panther. And when I collapsed into my chair at work, I was heavily panting and didn’t catch my breath until I finished writing my first obituary. It read like this:

Abigail Blake Witherton, 51, of Kentucky, died Sunday, June 24, 1896 in the arms of her daughter, Ava. The damn winters killed her
.

She was born and raised in Kentucky where she worked on the turkey farms. She and her husband, Stewart J. Witherton, later moved their family to Sanibel Island, where they lived amidst the flowers and worked the land before returning to Kentucky. The flowers of Sanibel brought her pleasure, as did the white sugar sands. Abigail’s soul is now soaring, not in an earthly paradise, but across the everlasting kingdom of God where the periwinkles bloom year-round into eternity
.

She was the daughter of Milton and Dahlia Blake
.

I didn’t turn the above obituary in, but it served as a good warm-up activity, I thought, as I folded it tightly and stuffed it deep inside the seashell I had placed on my desk for good luck. I would keep Abigail’s obituary there inside the seashell on my desk to remind me of the significance of my job.

I was glad to have a job, my own job and my own desk with a seashell on it and a telephone just for my use. Things were going well now, and I was close to doing what I wanted with my life.

I wrote and turned in several obituaries, and when lunchtime came around, I decided to spend it with Ava. I didn’t yet know anyone else, and I felt like being with her, so I opened her journal and continued to read.

Ava

Abigail was survived by a mother: Dahlia, who day-by-day was losing more of her mind; a husband: Stewart, who, after a short stint rolling cigars in Key West, regained a portion of his mind and returned to his family and turkey farm; a brother: Henry, who, after losing his own wife just two months prior, was walking around grief-stricken and despondent; three nieces: Violet, Lilly and Rose, ages 12, 14, and 16, and who, after losing their mother, and now facing a distant father, were like raging wildflowers, nasty but with good reason, closing their petals on anyone who came too close; and finally, Abigail was survived by a daughter: Ava, a girl who once was full of dreams. But now, in the wake of losing her own mother and her aunt, her dreams were pushed aside, for she has been given three nasty flowers to care for.

   Those three girls were craftier than any wild beasts roaming the earth. And they hated me. They were out to get me for the simple fact that I wasn’t their mother and they wanted their mother. I think I understood, for at twenty years old, I wanted mine, too. But no one gave me any pity, for I was now an adult, and since there were no men calling for me, the
care and responsibility of those three girls fell into my lap.

At first, I naturally tried churning them into ladies, for that’s what a mother does, and I remember my own mama passionately trying to turn me into a lady, but the girls didn’t like it at all. If I tried being sweet to them, they accused me of handling them like babies. If I told them I didn’t like their behavior, they thought I was being judgmental. If I tried giving them my opinion on things, they swore I was ruling their lives and telling them what to do. If I tried asking them questions out of interest regarding boys or anything at all, they thought I was being nosy and invading their privacy. If I tried telling them anything about myself when I was their age, they looked at me, bored, as if I was comparing my life to theirs or lecturing and preaching in some way. In reality, I was only trying to relate. And it felt like yesterday when I was their age. Years are only big to young girls. To older girls years are nothing.

They made me feel like twenty going on one hundred. And those girls made me feel like a bossy, judgmental, opinionated old spinster, which I wasn’t. I was the opposite of it all, but that is how those girls wanted to view me, and I could say nothing pleasing to them and nothing that wouldn’t offend them. I didn’t want those girls changing who I was or how I felt about myself, but they were starting to do it to me. They were starting to make me self-conscious of everything I said and asked and how I communicated, and I had never been one to worry about my own words before. Those girls were changing me, and they were changing the way I would have been there for them had they not been sensitive to me in the first place.