Portion of the Sea (6 page)

I whipped Dahlia with my eyes. I didn’t want anything negative shooting from her mouth. I then looked back at Abigail. Her eyes told me she liked what the captain had said about there being lots of flowers.

“I believe the captain,” Abigail whispered in my ear. “Men always know the world far better than a lady, and a proper lady knows when to be silent.” She was reviewing a truth she already taught me the day Stewart announced we were moving to Florida.

“Are you sure you’ll be able to find the state of Florida, Daddy?” I had asked that day. “You’ve never been out of the state of Kentucky.”

He didn’t answer, but my mama did. It was then that she first lectured to me that men know the world far better than any woman.

“We’ll find you flowers, Mama,” I said, giving her hand a solid squeeze.

And as the island grew larger before us, my heart pounded and my knees felt weak, for the sun was bringing out its brilliance and it looked as if the island had been dropped right out of Heaven. The sight of it all made me definitely know—not that I ever doubted—that there really is a Lord God Almighty. And before stepping foot onto the green fertile land flowing with coconut milk, I knew I had a decision to make. I could either collapse in grief on behalf of my father’s absence, or I could find courage
and become the leader amongst us three women.

I hadn’t ever been the leader of any people before, just turkeys back on the farm, and that was challenging enough. They were far-roaming turkeys and so it was my job to lead the adventurous birds back to warmth and food. If it weren’t for me building the temporary fences that I did, they’d have wandered straight through the cornfields and wouldn’t have returned in time to be killed for the holidays.

My father, Stewart Witherton, liked holidays, and he liked winter. If asked, I don’t think he wanted to leave behind our home and farm in Kentucky and move to Florida’s little known West Coast. But his wife, when in her down days, had a beckoning way of luring him as if he were a spiny Florida lobster without any claws for fighting back. After Abigail had heard the traveling minister proclaim this island in Florida a healing paradise, he had no choice but to seek it out. I knew he was terrified that he might not ever find such an island. My father wasn’t the type to believe in anything he couldn’t see. When I had asked him if anyone in his line of ancestors had ever been to paradise, he looked at me blankly and said, “My great uncle Abraham. He’s the only one to my knowledge. And he didn’t bother to leave me a map.”

“It’s in the Bible, Daddy. The map to paradise is in the Bible.”

“He didn’t leave me any Bible, either.”

I knew it scared Stewart that he might never make it to Heaven nor find Florida, let alone some remote island off its west coast. But he didn’t have a choice. Abigail grabbed him by the head one cold night, pulling, twisting in an effort to dislodge him. I watched, horrified from the doorway as she took the broomstick and tickled him in the gut and then tapped him on the ass. The next morning he started to pack, and the morning after that we left on our pursuit of the Promised Land.

It pained me horribly to think of Stewart still out there, like a turkey let loose in the open range for the first time with no one to lead him back to safety. Getting pushed out of his homeland, and then wandering through Kentucky, Georgia, Tennessee, and Florida for forty days, he had suffered enough. And now it didn’t feel right to me, arriving in the Promised Land without him, and I could only hope he was still alive.

It sounded like we were knocking at the gates of Heaven as the boat bumped into the lighthouse dock at the eastern most tip of the island. I felt like jumping up from the bench and shouting, “Holy, holy, holy!” at the multitudes of palm trees standing before us, royal and magnificent. Faith had me believing there was a Heaven in the spiritual, invisible sense, but now I also believed in Heaven on Earth, and I wanted to clap my hands at the sight of it.

As the captain tied the boat to the post, I tied my long black hair into a hanging knot and knew in my heart there was no going back. I only hoped that the island would accept me as a newly arriving songbird, but I knew at times I have a loud chirp for such a petite bird, a chirp that some think is slanted, opinionated, and way too unladylike coming from a mouth as prim-looking as mine. Until I open it and the space between my two front teeth shows. It’s the space that everyone blames for my outspokenness, and although my parents don’t really believe it, they use it, too. Whenever I say things that embarrass them, they’re the first to tell people, “It’s that space between her two front teeth. Things just slip out of it, and she can’t help it. We don’t know what to do about it.”

And my eyes get me in trouble, too, for they’re big and brown and strong as the color of coffee, and, like my mother’s, they tell anything my tiny peach-colored lips forget to say.

I stood up and then glanced upward at the sky and spotted a flock of bright pink birds that were flying in long, strung-out diagonal lines. “Flamingoes?” I asked the captain.

“Nope. Easy to confuse them,” he said. “Until you look up close at their bills. Roseate Spoonbills.”

Lydia

We had just entered the city, I noticed as I looked up from Ava’s journal. “Roseate Spoonbills,” I remarked. “That’s what those birds were.”

My father was punching numbers into his calculator, so I knew he wasn’t paying me any attention. “Roseate Spoonbills,” I said again, this time
looking into the mirror at the driver. “They were amazing.”

The limo driver turned his rearview mirror so he could talk directly to me. “No, I don’t think so, Ma’am,” he matter-of-factly said. “Those were pigeons. I know for a fact. They just pooped all over my window.”

“I know what pigeons look like,” I said to his eyes in the mirror. “I’ve lived in Chicago all my life. I was talking about the bright pink birds that I saw when I …”

“Bright pink birds are called flamingoes,” he said interrupting me. “And if you think you just saw flamingoes, then I must have made a wrong turn and we’re at the zoo.”

“I saw the pink birds running wild at …”

“Ma’am, they don’t run wild in the city. I don’t know what you claim you saw back there,” he said, this time with a gleam in his eye for agitating me. “It might have been that old lady’s hat. Damn, did that thing stick out in the crowd or what?”

I sighed heavily like the spring wind outside my window. Then I returned to my reading in hopes I might learn more of the birds I had seen on Sanibel.

Ava

“I didn’t know such birds existed on Earth,” I peeped to the boat captain.

“They’re stunning.”

“Just don’t go hunting them down for their pink plumage,” he said.

“Sir,” I stated, “pink is my favorite color, but let me tell you, I wouldn’t do such a thing.”

“Ladies are doing anything for those pink hats. And over in St. Augustine, they’re making fans out of their wings. It doesn’t make any sense to me. Their feather color fades rapidly so the hats only have a limited lifespan. I guess the ladies don’t care. They’re the reason why the Roseate Spoonbills have been driven to the brink of extinction.”

“Criminal,” I said, shaking my head as the birds disappeared over trees. “There should be laws against that sort of thing, the poor birds, living in
danger for their beauty. Women like that make me wish I were a man.”

“Ava,” my mother scolded me. “A lady knows when to add to the conversation with her gentle views, and she knows when to be silent.”

I cast my eyes toward the east so no one would see them ornery; then, I reeled them back toward the captain who was lifting our belongings off the boat. My mother then handed him the name of the place where Stewart had arranged for us to stay.

“I’ll see to it that your boxes are there and waiting for you, Ma’am,” he told her.

“Thank you,” chirped Abigail.

“I can do it myself,” Dahlia with her nose in the air told the captain when he offered her a hand off the boat. “I don’t need the help of a man. My son-in-law was supposed to be here with us but he’s not worth a plugged nickel. Us women can manage fine on our own.”

“Ava,” my mother turned and called on me as a teacher does in the classroom when she wants a student to fill in the blanks.

“I know, Mama,” I answered. “A lady never fails to be polite and accept help from a man.”

“That’s right,” Abigail said as she hopped onto the dock. “I guess I’m not doing as poor of a job raising you as I had feared.”

Lydia

Ava’s words continued, but I stopped reading as the limousine pulled up alongside the curb outside the bank headquarters where my father’s office was located.

“See to it she gets home safely and her bags are brought in,” Lloyd ordered the driver.

“I don’t need the help of a man,” I blurted out. “I can carry my bags myself.”

“Lydia,” snapped Lloyd. “Apologize for what you’ve said.”

Sorry, sir.

He closed the door and disappeared into the skyscraper.

I didn’t know why I said what I did. I didn’t mean to be rude, but I had always felt passive and lazy as I watched our hired help do absolutely everything for me. I didn’t think it was so bad of Ava’s grandmother, Dahlia, wanting to step off the boat herself, without any help from a man.

The driver turned and looked at me and, once I smiled, we were off through the city in the direction of our estate. I continued to read.

Ava

“C’mon, Grandmalia. It’s your turn,” I said. “You can do it. Step off the boat. Onto the dock.”

I noticed Abigail standing impatiently on the dock with her hands on her hips. We ladies had arrived to Punta Gorda by train, and we then took a steamer into Fort Myers. We did it all without any glitches. And it was a long trip. I wasn’t going to allow Dahlia to accidentally slip and kill herself now nor waste any more time.

I put my arms out like a bed, ready to catch her, should she fall back. She had a big belly, so big we couldn’t afford to have the seamstress make her a corset. It was that belly that made it so tough for her to see the ground where she was stepping, but she refused to blame anything on it. Instead, she blamed her large nose. No one disagreed about it resembling the beak of a hawk, and we tried telling her that hawks can still see past their beaks.

I could hear Abigail tapping her shoe on the dock, and it sounded like the tick tock of a clock. “C’mon, Mother. Step off the boat. We haven’t all day. I’d like to find flowers.”

Dahlia’s eyes glided across her nose and landed on me. I shrugged my shoulder, hoping to nudge her round black eyes away from me.

“Oh stop with the rude look, Ava. Your mother and you were spared.”

I rolled my eyes, knowing she was about to start talking about her nose again.

There were only a dozen stories Dahlia liked to tell and she repeatedly told them in a revolving manner like the revolving beacon of the lighthouse.
And just as ships sixteen miles at sea can spot when the wick of the lantern is lit, I could recognize which story and which part of the story Dahlia was about to tell next by the tone of her voice.

“I got this nose from my grandmother, Myrtle, her name was. She was the fourth baby in her family.”

“I know, Grandmalia. Time to get off the boat.”

“Myrtle got it from her great-grandmother, also the fourth in the family.

You better be concerned for your fourth baby some day because this nose shows on all the fourths of the family, you know. At least it’s not as big as that beak over there, is it?” Dahlia pointed to a white bird with a long, curved orange-red beak and matching legs, wading in the shallow water.

“That bird is beautiful—big beak and all,” I said. “And so are you, Grandmalia.”

“My nose is the reason I stopped having babies after Abby, my third,” she mumbled, and I knew her story was ending.

Lydia

I closed the journal as the elaborate wrought-iron gates to our estate electronically opened. Then I ran my fingers alongside the contours of my nose. It was a small nose, like my father’s, but unlike his mine had an upward tilt at the end that would send a downhill skier into back summersaults in the air. I had seen photographs of my mother and her mother, but neither had a tilt at the tip of their noses. I wondered the origins of my nose and whether the shape of it came from a great aunt on my mother’s side or a not so great uncle on my father’s side.

“Where did you get your nose?” I asked the driver as he opened the back door for me.

“I was born with it,” he answered, wiping his nostrils with his fingers as if mention of his nose meant it had to be checked and cleaned. “Why? Do they sell noses at Marshall Fields? Do they have a nose department?”
He pulled out a handkerchief from his back pocket and blew. “Is that where you got your nose?”

I stopped and rubbed its contours once more. “I don’t know,” I said, wishing I had some matriarchs in the family to make such connections for me. Women do that. I’ve heard them. ‘She’s got her Aunt Nannie’s sense of humor,’ they’ll say or ‘You just laughed just like your grandmother,’ or ‘I know, she’s got my strong will, all right,’ or when a young girl throws a tantrum in public, ‘You have your father’s temper.’

When I saw the driver lift my luggage from the trunk, I put my arm over his and stopped him. “I can do it myself,” I insisted, looking up at the stately steps leading into our mansion.

“Fine,” he said. “Have a good day.”

I should have let someone help me, I thought an hour later. After dragging my luggage inside and upstairs by myself, with the housekeepers watching, I landed on my bed like a bird, exhausted after migrating across hemispheres, and I was ravenous, but not for food. Instead, I opened Ava’s journal, hungry for more tidbits about nature and the island. I wanted desperately to be there, not here inside my sterile bedroom, where I felt alone, pampered, and disconnected from the outdoor world.

Ava

“Mother,” moaned Abigail. “Take my hand, please. And Ava,” she said to me, “Get ready to catch your grandmother, should she fall back.”