Sand in My Eyes (18 page)

As I write this to you now, my hands are the hands of a woman who has been toiling in dirt, going to extremes for her daughter. It’s okay. Mothers do that. They cannot help it. You’ll do it yourself one day. And besides, I’ve always believed a woman should get down in the dirt on her hands and knees, and immerse herself into life
.

Sincerely
,

Mums

P. S. So far, nothing has sprouted and winter is growing near, but it’s okay. I will not cry when the hummingbirds are gone because I feel all the time the spirit of the Lord hovering above me, and there is no greater thing on Earth—no breeze coming from the north, south, east, or west, or raindrops from above—than experiencing that, than feeling the hair on your arms standing because you know, not because you’ve seen or touched or heard about it from someone else, but because you know firsthand that it is true, that the good Lord does exist and that he is here and there and everywhere, through winter and through spring
.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

BELVEDERE

YOU KNOW,” I SAID
to Fedelina when I looked up from the manuscript, “after reading that letter I closed my eyes in the canoe and said a prayer, the first I had said in a long time.”

“I hope it was a prayer of confession—over how you felt for my son.”

“You knew about us, didn’t you?”

“Had no idea,” she said.

“I thought a little bird would have told you by now.”

“No little bird told me anything,” she said adamantly. “I must have had my head in a hydrangea bush.”

“I don’t mean to stun you,” I said, “but I was lonely, not that loneliness justifies it.”

“You were a married woman, mother of three!”

“I was a lot of things back then,” I told her, “and a little bit of everything, especially lonely. It isn’t only for old people. Even with three small children depending on her for their every whim, a woman can feel the loneliness that comes from not having another adult to talk with.”

“I agree, Anna, and let me tell you from my own personal experience that it doesn’t matter where you live—a bustling city or a small-town island—a person can get lonely anywhere. Back then, I was lonely, too, and until I met you, I was going about my days not making a whole lot of personal
contact with anyone, other than cashiers, waitresses, and boys bagging my groceries. But guess what!”

“What?” I asked.

“I realized it’s a choice. Loneliness is a choice!”

“Why do you make so much sense?” I asked her. “You should have been a counselor.”

“Anna,” she replied, “I was a counselor! All mothers are, whether they see it or not. We listen for years to our children’s problems, starting in preschool when they come home telling us there’s a bully hitting them over the head with a toy train. And it’s then that we start giving advice, teaching them how to survive in the world, how to handle difficult people.”

“That’s true,” I said.

“Yes, but at a certain point,” Fedelina said, “they want us staying out of things, that is, until you get old like me. Then they’ll make pilgrimages to come see you, as if you were an old sage full of historical secrets. And then you’ll learn of all their secrets, too, things you never knew about your own children, which reminds me—what happened next between my son and you? Did the two of you meet up again?”

“Oh, I’ve read enough for one day,” I said with a smile and a raise of my brow. “How about you get some rest and I’ll come back in the morning.”

“Okay,” she said. “But did he feel the same about you?”

I gave her a soft kiss on the cheek. “Are you in the mood for daisies?” I asked her.

“I’m always in the mood for daisies, but I forget what there is to know about them.”

I crossed the room to the bouquet of flowers, pulled out several black-eyed Susans and put them in her hands. “Come morning, I’ll remind you,” I told her. “I’ll tell you what you once told me about daisies.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

THE NEXT MORNING, I
opened my eyes and looked around. The orchid, still closed, inspired me to get up, stand tall, and start my day as a strong, sturdy woman on a quest to get to know herself. The roses instilled in me a desire to better care for myself so that when my children returned I might give more happily as a mother.

I touched my toes to the ground like a ballerina ready to leap through her day, when suddenly I heard a noise—oh no, not again, not a knock at my door. Whoever it was, they had switched from using their knuckles to the old rusty knocker and it sounded like they were knocking to the tune of “Happy Birthday.”

But who knew that this was the day, the day I turned thirty-seven, other than my in-laws—who probably forgot, as I forget birthdays, too, when consumed with my three children—and my husband, who was far, far away, and my biological father, the man I never knew, a married man who never intended to get my mother pregnant and who went away upon hearing the news, and who probably to this day cringes around the time of my birthday, regretting what he did with that woman, my mother thirty-seven years ago. I thought about the question as I pulled my unruly hair into a ponytail.

I wanted to ignore the knocking at my door. I wasn’t in the mood for anyone fussing over my birthday, and all I could think of was my children and how they would feel if they knew today was Mama’s special day. Children
expect hoopla and believe in celebrations. I didn’t feel at all sorry for myself. I only felt bad for them as I headed for the front door.

“Oh,” I said when I opened the door to find Fedelina Aurelio with a small, round pie and the large straw bag parked at her feet.

“It’s today, right?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“I was trying to recall, you’re thirty-nine?”

“Thirty-seven,” I corrected. “And trying to get used to it—this new age.”

“You think thirty-seven is hard? I put my underwear on backward three times this morning,” she said.

I gave her a fake laugh. I had told her to stop by again this week, but I wasn’t in the mood and wanted for her to leave my front porch quickly so I could take the pie inside and dump all those fat calories into the trash. “This was nice of you, but your son is visiting,” I said. “I don’t want to keep you, take you away from him.”

“He’s fixing my stairs,” she said. “So what have you got planned for yourself today?”

“Not much, just rest,” I said, and thought
So that I might bloom again
.

She handed me the pie and said, “Here, this is my way of saying ‘thank you.’”

“For what?”

“Helping me like you did,” she whispered, looking back toward her yard. “It was either a pie,” she said, her voice picking up again, “or more flowers.”

“The pie, it’s nice of you,” I said, although a woman can never have enough flowers—those were her words.

“I do know what it’s like to be alone on your birthday. Why don’t I have a piece with you, if you’d like?”

I tried thinking of an excuse as to why I couldn’t, not today. It wasn’t that I didn’t want a piece of the pie, but that she was showing strong signs of being a lonely old woman and I didn’t know whether I wanted to assume the responsibility for alleviating another person’s loneliness when I myself was a lonely woman and hardly knew what to do for myself. I could invite her inside
my house, but the mess would spook her, and anyone as old as she might trip on the kids’ toys and fall down, holding me accountable, and then I would be on the news and the whole world would know I was the woman with the messy house—the messy house that killed someone.

“I know,” I suggested. “Why don’t we sit right here on the porch steps and have a quick piece of this together?”

“Don’t you have a table in your yard?”

“A small one, come to think of it, but it’s rusty, and my yard is a mess, full of toys. And my grass, what little grass I have, hasn’t been cut in weeks—it scratches the ankles, you know—and there’s fire ants, but we could go down there if you like.”

“It sounds lovely, Anna.”

“Silverware,” I said. “Let me run inside and wash some.”

“No need,” she said. “I’ve got everything under the sun in my bag.”

I followed her down, barefoot and kicking broken seashells off my steps as we went. “I should get out here and clean this yard—get it done before they return,” I told her. “I don’t know how it gets like this. All I do is clean. I don’t stop, never watch television, or read.”

“I used to keep my house so clean you could lick butter off the floor,” she said. “But you know what, Anna? My children, if you ask them, don’t remember a spotless house. If I could do it over, I’d spend less time cleaning and more time enjoying them.”

“Everyone says that,” I told her with a smile that said, “Thanks, but it didn’t help.”

“I’m sure I’ll say it myself one day, but it’s hard to play ring-around-the-rosy and fall down onto an ant-infested floor.”

By now we were in the backyard and I was using my sleeve to wipe dirt and small bugs off the cast-iron table before steadying it the best I could on its unsteady legs. I then looked around the yard with my hands on my hips, the way I stand when I see a major project but have no time to embark on it, only time to think about it.

“My house is so messy that I dread the delivery guy showing up,” I said, and when she let out a loud laugh I went on, feeling like a stand-up comedian full of hilarious one-liners, “and my yard is such a mess that I fear
someone on this street might report me to the Centers for Disease Control. My car is so bad that when I open its doors in the parking lot of the grocery store, things fall out. I don’t feel good when everything is a mess. It makes me feel mentally chaotic, but the problem is, as often as I clean it, an hour later it’s a mess again,” I said, and finally laughed myself.

“I know,” she said, nodding her head as if ready to applaud. “You clean one disaster, another is made. I do remember. It’s like chasing the wind, but one morning, Anna …” She tapped my arm and looked me in the eyes. “It was a long time ago, but I’ll never forget the morning I woke to a perfect house—immaculate, no speck of dust, no dirty dish, no pillow cushion on the floor, no toothpaste in the sink, and I went to bed that night and woke the second morning, and guess what?”

“It was all trashed again?”

“Nope.” She shook her head. “It was immaculate the second morning, too, and the third, and the fourth, and I couldn’t figure out why the mess was no longer an issue and all of a sudden, on the fifth morning, I woke and it struck me hard. I knew why the house was staying clean.”

“You hired someone to help?”

“No, my children were grown and they were gone. It was me and Oscar in our perfectly clean house, with hours upon hours of calm, quiet stillness in which I had nothing to do but dust and mop. I would have paid a million bucks at the time to have my children small again and my house a mess. Oh, how I missed the chaos of it all that morning I woke and my children were gone.”