Portion of the Sea (52 page)

“She said I would be a famous actress in Hollywood.”

We all raised an eyebrow. “It’s a promising industry,” said Henry. “Hollywood’s been mounting multimillion-dollar productions to meet insatiable demand for movies.”

“Yep, and I’m going there,” said Marlena. “As soon as I turn eighteen.”

“You along with a bunch of lonely, bored, discontented housewives in America. I hear so many have been up and leaving their lives that there’s charity funds set up to support these women once they get there,” said Jonathon.

“You hear that, Marlena?” said Charles. “Hollywood is just a far-off patch of California. Go for the sure thing when you get big. Go for where the money is. Marry a rich man like Jonathon or me. Don’t marry a Henry who drinks away all his money.”

“Bushwa,” Henry said.

“Watch your language,” I scolded.

“Sorry, Mom,” Henry said, patting me on the back, and then he turned to his brothers and said in a lowered voice, “Cut the crap. You’re both bootleggers and you know it. And regarding Hollywood, Marlena, it’s not all bad. I enjoy what I’ve seen so far.”

“Marlena,” I said, squeezing her hand. “First and foremost, don’t listen to your brothers. Don’t marry a man for his money. Marry the man you love. And secondly, dear, Hollywood is too far away. I’d miss you horribly. The only entertaining you need to do is for your family. You stick by me and keep me smiling, you hear?”

“Okay,” she answered, her eyes moving on to something else. “Can we go into that store over there and see if they’ve got any chocolate?” She was used to getting what she wanted so, before I could answer, she took off running ahead toward Bailey’s General Store.

“They didn’t have stores like this back when I lived here,” I noted. “And we certainly didn’t have anything like that,” I added as we stopped to check out the 1926 Model-T Ford delivery truck parked in front.

I don’t think any of my children could survive an hour without spending money, so inside the store they bought English Herb Soap, Mrs. Stevens’ Candies, and Hershey’s Chocolate before I pulled each one of them out the door.

I felt eager, but I couldn’t tell the kids why. I couldn’t tell them about the boy I once loved and the man I wanted to find. They wouldn’t understand. Kids want their mommy loving no one but their daddy, I think, even years after their daddy has passed.

Lydia

That was all that Marlena sent me, and it was fine. Our plane was about to land, and now I knew who the stranger was that long ago had planted powerful seeds in the ears of a little girl.

I closed the journal and closed my eyes, wondering whether Ava met up with Jaden and whether he still loved her and whether the two of them spent the rest of their lives happily ever after together on the island. I would soon find out.

XLV

JACK AND I WERE
happy to see Marlena. She looked more beautiful at fifty-three than ever, and she claimed it was because she was doing what she wanted to be doing. After directing her last film, she returned home and started working diligently on ideas for writing a screenplay.

“Lydia, if you stay here to live, you can write the novel, and I’ll write the screenplay.”

“I don’t know if I can write a novel.”

“Oh, come on!” she said. “Am I going to have to go out and have you build another snowwoman in the sand?” We both laughed. “Of course you can, and, besides, it would be easy. We can base it on my mother’s journals.

She would have loved the idea. I just know it.”

“Let’s just see how my encounter with Josh goes tomorrow,” I said. “One thing at a time.”

“Grandmarlena,” Jack called as he came running into the room. “Can I have some ice cream now?”

“Grandmarlena?” I asked, looking over at Marlena, and then I laughed for a good five minutes.

But that night in bed, I wasn’t laughing at all, and I could hardly sleep. Come morning I’d be facing Josh, and thoughts of it kept me awake as if I had downed gallons of caffeine. Maybe it was all a big mistake, one I would regret.

Jack was sound asleep in the bed beside me as I sat up and looked around the yellow room where we were sleeping. Then I walked over to the desk and opened the left drawer and pulled out matches I had seen in there before. I lit a candle and opened Ava’s journal. I didn’t think Marlena would mind my reading forward. I needed to know whether or not Ava met up with Jaden and how it all went.

Ava

We stayed at an inn located on the Gulf of Mexico where each night we fell asleep to the whisper of the sea, and in the early mornings we sat on the verandah drinking java and looking out at the sea we had heard the night before. I wanted our time on the island to go by slowly as a manatee roaming up the Florida peninsula, but of course it did the opposite. It sped by like a dolphin riding the bow waves of a ship.

The boys woke late and spent their time fishing in the bay or golfing at a nine-hole miniature-style course while Marlena, and I rode bicycles, attended events at the Community House, walked the beach, and went for tea over at Miss Charlotta’s Tea Room near the ferry landing. The menu was simple, and the room was filled with residents and visitors alike, and it was a cozy place for the two of us to talk.

“When you were my age,” Marlena said as she poured a bee’s hive worth of honey into her tea, “what did you want to be when you grew up?”

I waited for the server to pour hot water into my cup. “A fiction writer,” I said once the waitress left for another table. “Like Louisa May Alcott. Remember I gave you that book of hers? She was my favorite author when I was around your age. My mother liked her too.”

“Is that why you get sad?”

“What do you mean?” I asked, aware that she saw my spells as a mystery she wanted to solve.

“That you’ve never become a fiction writer like her. Is that why you get sad?”

“Oh,” I said, sipping my tea, unaware until now that she had noticed
my extended naps and quieter periods in recent months. I took two more sips, and then searched her eyes, hoping she had moved on.

“I don’t like when you get sad, Mama.”

I still did not know what to say. I didn’t know myself why I got sad at times, just that I remember my own mother also getting sad, and as I looked my daughter in the eyes, I could only hope her eyes would never grow sad like ours.

“Am I really sad all that often?”

“Sometimes,” she said. “Especially in the winter. I hate when you’re sad.”

I blew on my tea, then took a long, slow sip, put my cup down on its dainty matching plate, then picked it up again and took another sip. “It has nothing to do with me not becoming a fiction writer.” I laughed at her simple innocence. “Writing my columns and magazine articles has been just as rewarding to me,” I said. “And so has keeping a journal. I’ve kept one since I first learned to write, you know. It’s long enough to be a novel by now. Three, probably.”

“Yeah, but no one ever reads journals. They just sit around in some hiding spot, like under your bed, and even then, when someone finds one, there’s usually a lock on it.”

I looked at her suspiciously. “You haven’t, have you?”

“What?”

“You know, been trying to read my journals, young lady.”

“No, Mama,” she insisted. “I would never do such a thing. You tell me all your good stories anyway.”

Thank Heavens, I thought, for I wouldn’t want my daughter knowing how I once snuck out and how I married as an escape and as the only option I thought I had but then grew to love her father later and how he had a secret gambling problem and how even on this very vacation I had, every chance I got, been secretly sitting out on that verandah or lying on the hammock in the grass until wee hours talking and reuniting with someone from my past. How could she possibly understand that my love for Jaden felt as old and precious as the Caloosahatchee River? These were things my children didn’t know about me, things they wouldn’t understand.
But some day Marlena might, and, then, if she ever went through anything remotely similar, I’d want her to know that she was not alone in the world, that there was someone who understood.

“Do me a favor,” I said after giving it thought. “One day, a long, long time from today, if you and I are ever far away from each other, break open my journals and read them, okay?” She stared at me as if I were a ghost. “I mean it,” I continued. “But not until you’re at least twenty-one, promise me?”

She nodded. “Do you want me to lock them up after I read them?”

“No,” I said. “Share them with someone, maybe a nice girl like yourself who you think might appreciate them as you did, but only after I’m gone someday, okay?”

“I don’t like to think about you being gone,” she said.

I rolled my eyes. “I’m talking about when I’m one hundred and fifty, and, believe me, by then, you’ll want me gone. Don’t worry. I won’t go before that.” We laughed and talked more that day and the next few about her dreams of becoming a Hollywood movie star and inviting me to the premiers and making more money than all her brothers combined.

There were things my children didn’t know about me, and as we went to watch the sunset one night at an area of beach located between the two islands, I considered telling them what I had been up to.

It all began our second afternoon on the island with a little white lie. I told them I had enough of the sun for one day and that I was going to run to the store for something, and insisted they all stay on the beach and have fun without worrying about me. And then I did my probing and found him. We didn’t talk long, but I invited him over to the inn that night, way past any hours that might interfere with my family, and he accepted. We spent that night sitting on the verandah overlooking the water, reminiscing and sharing stories and gaps in our lives until sunrise.

But now wasn’t the time to tell my children about it. As the sky turned a deep pink, the color of a more mature Roseate Spoonbill, I knew I first had a decision to make before telling them anything. I glanced down the beach at my grown sons, who had been getting antsy to return to their lives back home. They were wrestling in the sand like little boys.

Good, I thought, just as I did when they were babies. Tire them out so they’ll fall fast asleep early tonight and I’ll have some time to myself. And I knew exactly what I’d be doing with my time. Jaden would show, and we’d pick up where we left off in conversation from the night before and from the five nights before that, and we’d talk and laugh until the morning sun came peeking through, urging us to say good-bye. It was yesterday’s sun that meant something special. Our night of getting to know one another all over again had been so pleasant that we weren’t expecting the sun so soon, and when we saw it, we quickly kissed, our first kiss in how many years?

I couldn’t possibly tell my kids. I was still surprised myself by the way things progressed so quickly in just one week of meeting up and spending the entire night talking to the sound of the waves gently reaching the shore before us. But I shouldn’t be surprised. Like my mother once said, a boy who helps hurting animals turns into a kind and gentle man. A boy who prays as a child grows into a God-fearing and respectable adult. And a boy with wide-set, clear eyes and a square jaw only gets better with age. I was surprised that a boy who wanted to marry me some thirty years before still wanted to today. It made me tingle back then and tremble now. And I was glad when Marlena put her little arm around me. Without her knowing, it comforted me. As the sun sank into the horizon I knew I had a decision to make and that I’d have to make it soon.

“Don’t you love it here?” I asked her. “Couldn’t you stay here forever?”

“Yes, but not with them,” she said, pointing to her brothers who were still wrestling in the sand. “I don’t think men and women should be on the same island. They belong on an island all their own,” she said. “Especially when they drink giggle water. They’re drinking it now, aren’t they?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “What’s giggle water?”

Marlena looked around the beach, and then whispered in my ear. “Booze.”

“Of course not,” I insisted. But I knew they were. I knew it this morning when Jaden and I were sitting on the verandah and Henry came sauntering across the lawn, carrying a bucket and not noticing us, that he had
been toting more than bait in there. And later that morning, I overheard his brothers ask him where he got the “bait” and he told them it came from deep within the mangroves and that he paid an arm and a leg for it. Then he snapped his fingers together, which I’ve come to learn over the years means, “you two owe me big time for this one.”

Jaden had assured me that the Coast Guard cutter patrols all night in search of rumrunners but seldom do they catch any. I didn’t want them catching my sons, just as I didn’t want my sons catching me. We all had our secrets, I suppose. But soon I might have to tell them, for we were set to be leaving the island in the morning, and tonight would be my last night of reuniting with Jaden. The decision as to what to do next was up to me, just as it had been many years ago. Together we cried in each other’s arms with regret over the decision I made back then. He had the hardest time understanding why I took off and married someone without first returning to Florida to hunt him down. I tried telling him that hunting a man down isn’t something a proper lady does.