Portion of the Sea (4 page)

“Is Mr. Ashton okay? Is he alive?”

“I don’t know at this moment. But the bank can’t run without him. They need me there right away.”

“But can’t we just stay until morning?” I looked to make sure the journal was concealed in my bag. It was.

“Sorry, dear. We’re leaving immediately. If the driver ever gets here, that is.”

“Why not one more night?” I pleaded.

He looked at me like he wanted to fire me as his daughter, or worse, hang me. And he was the type to do it. I knew he wanted to get back because a promotion was on his mind. “Lydia, a man is on his deathbed, and all you can think about is staying on the island? There are decisions to be made at the bank, and I don’t want any of them made without me there,” he said. “It’s not fair for you to whine about your vacation at a time like this.”

I wanted to tell him all about what the lady on the beach had given to me, and how I promised I would return it before leaving, but then I remembered that I swore on my mother’s grave I wouldn’t tell a soul about it. I didn’t know what might happen to me for having sworn on someone’s grave, and then not following through with my promise.

“Daddy, have you ever wanted to become famous?”

“Never, just wealthy and important and to play a man’s part in the world.”

I hadn’t ever given it any consideration, either, but after hearing Marlena dangle it before me like she did, I now liked the thought of it. As I stood beside my father waiting for the driver to show, I no longer wanted to one day become the wife of someone important, but instead to be someone important myself. I felt selfish as a pirate for thinking the new way in which I was, but I’m sure pirates felt no guilt for wanting merry old lives for themselves. And all I really wanted was a life I liked. Marlena said I could do anything, and I believed her. She wasn’t hired by my father to be nice to me.

“For Christ’s sake, where is this guy?” Lloyd was starting to scare me. He was looking like he wanted the driver dead or alive.

I didn’t want to add to his frustration, but I had to somehow think of a way I might return the journal to Marlena’s mailbox before we left. “While we’re waiting for him, sir, can I run back to the beach? I think one of the starfish in my pail is still moving. It’s unethical to take a live shell.”

“Lydia, you’re making me question the progress I thought I’ve made in raising you. No! You cannot go to the beach—not at a time like this. Don’t leave my side!”

When I heard a car round the bend of the road, I considered burying the journal in the dirt, anything so I wouldn’t have to leave the island with a beach basket full of booty. But the men loaded the suitcases in the trunk so fast that I could hardly think. I only knew I never intended to loot Marlena like I was, and as I climbed into the backseat of the car, I felt more alone than I ever had before, even on the holidays when Lloyd worked and the nannies had gone home to their families and it was back before we had bought our first television.

As I watched the cottage shrink out the back window, I thought about what I was getting away with, both the journal and newfound belief that I had choices in life and I could be whatever I wanted to be.

“Daddy,” I said as the car turned onto Periwinkle and headed east. “Did my mother ever want to be anything other than a homemaker?”

“No, darling. Your mother put in a good sixty to eighty hours per week
working around the house. She was committed to that, and she didn’t have any leisure time to sit around thinking about much else. Why do you ask?”

“I’ve been thinking,” I said. “I’d like to be a journalist. Do you think I could be one day?”

He glanced back and looked at me like I was some feverish sailor losing her mind. Then he gave the driver one of those male camaraderie glances.

“I want a job outside of the house,” I continued. “I want to write for a newspaper.”

“Sir, if you don’t mind my saying,” the driver said. “There
are
female journalists, you know. It does exist.”

“There may be a few, I suppose. I’m not familiar with any. I don’t read the recipe and household cleaning sections,” said Lloyd. “I do know there’s a hell of a lot more women nurses. Nursing and teaching are suitable jobs for women who insist on working, Lydia. And secretaries are good. I appreciate all of mine. But if you’re still set on working in five years, consider nursing or teaching. We’ll discuss it then, dear. Could you go faster, please?”

A few minutes later the car pulled up to the marina. “I don’t want to be a nurse or a teacher,” I dared to say when my father opened the back door for me. “I want to be a journalist.”

“It doesn’t matter what you want, angel,” he said. “No little girl of mine is going to work around a bunch of men someday.”

“I’m not a little girl,” I mumbled once he was ahead of me on the dock. “I’m fifteen.”

The driver had already removed our luggage from the trunk and was handing it to the boat captain. I walked grudgingly toward the boat, listening as my father gave orders to the boat captain.

“Get us across this bay as fast as you can,” he stated. “I’ve got innumerable phone calls to make tonight and we’ve already lost time waiting for that guy to pick us up.”

My mind felt frazzled. I didn’t want to leave the island with the journal. I wanted to read and return it to Marlena who had been so nice to
lend it to me in the first place. As I staggered along, I feared the only fame I might own one day would be that of a notorious pirate captain who plundered a priceless, timeless treasure from a nice lady living on a barrier island in Florida. The driver must have thought I was trailing behind, moping for the way my father had talked to me.

“A couple of years back,” he whispered to me, “some female war correspondent won a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting, you know.”

“I didn’t know that.”

He raised an eyebrow at me. “Yeah, she reported from Korea, the first woman to win the award and shared it with five male war correspondents. You can do whatever you want.”

“Thank you,” I said, vigorously shaking his hand like a man.

He nodded and walked into the darkness and for a quick moment I thought about running after him and asking whether he’d do me a favor and return the journal to “Bougainvillea.” But that was too risky. He was a man, and Marlena especially instructed that no man ought to ever lay eyes on the inside of this girl’s journal. I could trust no one. And I had no choice but to step onto that boat with my treasure, hoping after all of this, that it would turn out to be filled with golden jewelry, silver coins, and bits of shining, priceless womanly wisdom.

III

AS THE BOAT PULLED
away from the island, I told myself things would be different had I a mother. Maybe I wouldn’t be telling lies or swearing on graves or embarrassing my father or turning to a life of piracy had I a mother to keep me in line.

And I would no longer look with envy and insecurity at girls who had mothers, if I had one of my own. I always wondered whether the girls with mothers knew more than I about the world or the handling or perceiving of situations. They looked so sure of themselves, as if they were wearing beautiful pearls of wisdom handed down to them from their mothers, who inherited the pearls from their mothers and so on throughout the generations of women in their ancestry. But a motherless girl like myself would have to figure the world out on her own, raiding others for scraps of knowledge and information.

As the boat entered the bay, I could feel the balmy air closing in around me like the walls of a jail, and I felt like I had already stood trial for piracy and was soon going to be made to walk the plank. That’s when Lloyd tried talking to me.

“I’m sorry it was cut short, but did you like our little getaway, Lydia?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good because I was thinking we could start a tradition, you and I taking a leisure trip once a year. It doesn’t have to be Sanibel. There’s New York City, Martha’s Vineyard, Lake Tahoe, San Francisco, Paris—You
name it, darling, anywhere in the world and we’ll go there.”

“Sanibel,” I muttered.

Returning there would be my only chance at returning to my life before pirating, for I could hand the journal back to Marlena and explain everything, setting my conscience free. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. “I don’t want to go anywhere else,” I stated. “I want to return to Sanibel.”

“Did I ever tell you that you sound like your mother?”

I made a mental note to enter that new information about my mother into my diary once we got to the hotel. “But my mother never returned to Sanibel,” I said.

“I know darling, but you will.”

“Do you swear? Do you swear on my mother’s grave that I’ll return?”

“No. I don’t like to swear on anyone’s grave like that.”

“Oh,” I said. “So it’s true.”

“What?”

“A boy at school swore on his uncle’s grave, and the next day his aunt died. And the friend of a second cousin of my best friend’s second-removed aunt once stepped on a crack and a couple hours later, my best friend’s second-removed aunt’s second-cousin’s mother fell down the stairs and broke her back. I never met the woman with the broken back, but my friend told me all about it. Is it true? Would I be cursed if I swear on someone’s grave, and don’t stick to what I swore?”

“Never swear on anyone’s grave,” he said. “And never swear. It’s not proper.”

I glanced back at the utopia that earlier had birds under a pink sky and saw nothing but a lump in the darkness. I felt a burden within, one heavy enough to sink the boat that was now speeding toward Fort Myers as I put my hand over my mouth, ready to vomit over the side of the boat for having sworn I would return the journal before leaving the island.

“Mind if I borrow your flashlight?” I asked the captain as soon as my queasiness subsided. “I’ve got some reading I’d like to do.”

I pulled the girl’s journal from my pail and as soon as I opened it I felt my father’s eyes aiming over my shoulder.

“J.D. Salinger,” I told him before he asked. “I’m reading
Catcher in theRye
, a novel.”

“Yes, I’ve heard of it. A couple of the young interns at the bank were reading it just last week. Isn’t it a bit boyish for you, Lydia?”

I turned the flashlight off and closed the journal so he wouldn’t give it a closer look. “No, sir,” I replied. “I don’t think so at all.”

“I don’t know that I want my daughter reading a novel about a school-boy at odds with society.”

“Better a boy than a girl at odds with society, don’t you think, Daddy?”

We both laughed, and I knew I was free to read. I opened the journal once more, feeling guilty for what I was about to do and wondering whether there were laws against this sort of thing, of reading another girl’s diary. I had never been a law-breaking person and actually believed there should be more laws—against touching the wings of butterflies and feeding alligators and wild birds and taking live shells from the beach. Maybe there were laws for all of these things. I didn’t know for sure. I only knew I felt like a criminal as I aimed the flashlight at the top of the page and let my eyes begin feasting off the handwritten words.

IV
SANIBEL ISLAND

1890