Sand in My Eyes (23 page)

“Did you go to Machu Picchu?”

“I sure did,” he said. “It was amazing.”

As we maneuvered the seat down the hall and through the front door, I no longer noticed the pain in my muscles but felt a tingling in my gut instead. Maybe my gut was tingling because my eyes were on him, and liking what they saw—his biceps were strong and his face was rugged, with the sun-carved lines of a man who likes to hike, and I could picture him trekking through the Lost City of the Incas, climbing the Andes Mountains without a care in the world. His nose, cheeks, and chin were chiseled handsomely, like a statue.

“Why don’t we set it down a minute and rest before going down the stairs with it?” he suggested, and then asked, “Did you have a good birthday?”

“Yeah,” I said.

His eyes stayed on mine. “Just yeah?” he asked.

“Yeah, it was fine,” I told him, looking away. “Birthdays aren’t a big deal anymore—not at my age. So it was fine—not great, nor grand, just fine.”

He stared at me like he didn’t believe me—like he knew that I was
lying, but how could he know I was lying when he hardly knew me at all? “Can I ask you a personal question?” he said then.

“It depends,” I said. “What kind of question?”

“What were you wishing for?”

“What do you mean?”

“When you blew out your candles.”

“I’d love to tell you,” I told him, flattered that he wanted to know. It was something Timothy would never bother to ask, nor care to know. “But wishes don’t come true when you tell them.”

“It’s just interesting, that’s all.”

“What?”

“Oh, nothing,” he said.

“Tell me,” I said, my eyes urging him on.

“Pick up your end,” he said, “and maybe I’ll tell you.”

As we slowly carried the love seat down my stairs, I thought about how easy he was to talk to. It was as if he were hearing every word I had to say. Timothy never listened to all my words. At best, he heard every other word, or more accurately, every other sentence, and even then he never made me feel as if anything I had to say was important anymore.

“You had this look to your face,” Liam then said. “When your eyes were closed—when you were wishing.”

“I did? I’m so embarrassed.”

“It was sweet.”

“It was?”

“Like you really wanted to believe in something,” he said as we reached the bottom. “I’m only telling you the truth.” We dragged the love seat under my house. I didn’t want to tell him he had been wrong, that what my face showed on my birthday was more the look of a woman not getting the things she had wished for.

Suddenly there was a silence between us, and I was glad for the sounds of the island critters croaking, for it gave us something to laugh about, but then we stopped laughing and stared awkwardly at each other until I asked, “Would you like to sit down a minute?”

“On the world’s ugliest love seat?” he said. Then, with a shrug of his
shoulders, he decided, “Sure, maybe for a minute. If I nudge this thing over a foot we won’t be sitting under your house.”

“That’s right,” I said, knowing that then we’d be sitting under the stars. When I sat down beside him, I didn’t mean for the side of my leg to be touching his as it was, but those things happen when two people sit together on a love seat. I think it’s what the furniture designers had in mind when they named it a love seat in the first place. I tried nudging my thigh over an inch, but Florida’s nights are humid and I felt stuck to him. “You know,” I said then, “I’ll never tell anyone what I was wishing for.”

“I don’t blame you,” he said, raising his eyebrow at me. “I normally wouldn’t have asked, but I was thinking how you asked me on the water yesterday whether I ever lived on the East Coast, that maybe we knew each other from somewhere. I don’t think we do, but I have to say, I feel it, too. I feel like we do. I guess that’s why I find it easy to talk with you. I just hope I haven’t talked too much.”

“Not at all,” I told him, and it was then that our eyes met and I could hardly look away. But I did, and happened to spot a brown glass bottle, round and squat, sticking out of a box of glassware. “Would you like a drink?” I asked him and all I could think was, my, what a bad girl am I!

“What do you have in mind?” he said.

“Grand Marnier,” I told him, getting up and pulling it from the debris.

“It’s all I have. It was a gift.”

“It serves its occasions—Grand Marnier. What’s it doing outside?”

“It’s sweet for me. I was going to sell it.”

“I don’t think you can sell that at a yard sale, darling. You need a liquor license.”

“Then maybe we should open it now and enjoy it. Would you like some? Otherwise I’ll probably dump it.”

“All right,” he said. “I’ll have a little. I’d hate to see you pour it out your window. It would kill my mother’s flowers.”

I handed him the bottle and, as he tore its foil off, I rummaged through a box, pulling out two glasses and using the bottom of my blouse to rub them clean. As I held them out for him to fill, I thought quickly of the
next morning and whether I might come to my senses, regretting what I was doing—talking the way I was, and having a drink with another man. As I swirled the liqueur in my glass, my thoughts were swirling, too, and I didn’t know which I dreaded more—the morrow and my own disappointment with myself, or the day my daughter might discover my mistakes and throw stones at me as daughters do when they learn, not from their mother’s words, but by seeing all the flaws in their mother’s life.

The first sip made my eyes tear, but the second sip went down smoothly. By my third sip I was drinking, not the way a mother is supposed to drink, but like a woman who has had a bad year. I was hoping the cognac with tropical orange might put things into perspective for me, like why being with this man made me feel the way I did—as if I were riding through the air on a very fine gander.

“Do you have a coaster or something I could set my glass on?” he asked.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “You can rest your feet on this old table if you like. It’s a replica of a much bigger one my husband and I saw a long time ago, on a trip to California, while touring Hearst Castle, but I don’t care the least bit about it.” I wondered instantly whether it showed that I no longer cared the least bit about him, either—my husband.

“If you say so, but I wouldn’t set my glass down if it were still in your house and you cared about it. I hope you mean what you say.”

“Oh, I do. I don’t care about any of this stuff anymore. In fact, this cleansing frenzy of mine was the result of an epiphany I had,” I told him, my eyes tearing from the liqueur. “If I rid myself of excess, I may start seeing real beauty again, and start fresh.” I didn’t tell him it was his mother, his grandmother, and the daisies that sparked me.

“I wish my ex-wife had you as a friend,” he said with a grin. “She could have learned a thing or two. I probably shouldn’t say this. I don’t want to bore you, but I was married to a woman who could talk for hours about designer comforters and decorative pillows. She kept at least twenty of them on our bed, and each night she had me remove them—carefully set them on the trunk at the foot of our bed. And if one slipped, and she found it on the floor, look out! Going to bed should be the most relaxing
part of one’s day. For me, it was the most stressful. It sounds funny now, but at the time, when I was going through it, I was a tiger in a cage.”

“You really were mismatched.”

“My ex could shop daily. It’s all she wanted to do, and we were complete opposites like that. All she thought about were the clothes she could buy. Call me an extremist, but all I kept thinking was how much easier life would be if we didn’t have our bodies, if there wasn’t the whole physical realm, so then we could focus instead on our souls and who we are on that level. Some people have different notions of what insanity is. Little decorative pillows are mine. But enough about me—I have no desire to talk about her, and I hardly think of her anymore.” He looked at me oddly. “So what about you?”

“I don’t know. What about me?”

“You’re a deep thinker. I can tell.”

“It’s a curse, don’t you think—being a deep thinker?”

He smiled and nodded. “How are your ideas coming for your story?”

I laughed. I laughed and laughed and couldn’t stop.

“What’s so funny?”

“I don’t know. I have no idea why I’m laughing.”

“Must be your story. What are you currently writing?”

“A scene about this woman,” I said. “I’m always writing about this woman—an overwhelmed woman.”

“Why is she overwhelmed?”

“She has three kids and a messy house.”

“Sounds interesting—strangely original, sounds like a real
New York Times
bestseller, Anna. Thinking about making a movie out of it?”

I shook my head, thinking to myself how ridiculous my own story sounded. “I’m not that far along. It’s just a novel in my drawer, like every other person has. Only I care about it, I really do.”

“Let’s toast,” he said. “We’ve already started to drink, but let’s toast to the novel in your drawer, the one you care about, and to the overwhelmed woman.” We touched glasses and I downed the rest of my drink.

“So how do you like the Grand Marnier?” I asked as I set my empty glass down on the ground.

“It’s good.”

“Would you like a little more?”

“In a minute,” he said, and then poured me more.

I felt self-conscious for having drunk mine first, so this time I sipped more slowly, feeling the drink settling in my toes.

“I hope you don’t mind my asking—tell me if you do,” he stated in a serious tone, “but you mentioned in the canoe the other day that you are going to leave your husband. Is that something you really plan to do?”

I felt myself sober immediately. “I don’t know,” I told him honestly. And then I told him more, all about my freshman year of college—how my mother had died and I escaped into the pages of books—and, until I met Timothy, how lonely I was. And even after we married, the comfort I found moving from state to state, knowing no one, but finding refuge in editing, or jobs at libraries, and eventually the publishing house—anything related to books, for books and the characters living within them had become my closest friends.

“But are you planning to leave him?” he asked again, firmly, but with a respectful look on his face so that I didn’t mind his asking.

“I don’t know,” I said again. “I’m a mother. And as a mother, a part of me is deprived. Going back to what you asked me before, what I wished for, well, I don’t know if this is going to make sense to you or not, and stop me if it doesn’t,” I said as I looked up at the dark sky. “But I remember how it felt when I was young, when there were as many options for me to choose from as there are stars up in the sky tonight— infinite choices—with countless possibilities. And even after I married,” I went on, looking at him now, “I still believed I could become whoever it was in life I wanted to become. But then I became a mother—once, twice, three times—and don’t get me wrong, I discovered for the first time in my life things like abundant joy and unconditional love, but when I looked up at the sky one night, I no longer saw any stars with my name on them. I don’t wish all that many things in my life anymore, and most of the ones I do wish for are no longer about me.”

“They’re about your children, now,” he said.

“Yes. And it’s daunting sometimes, that my life and love belong first to
my kids, and that at this stage in the game, the ages that they are, every waking hour, thought, and action goes to them. But they’re the brightest stars I see up there now, the reasons I look up when everything feels down. They’re the only brilliancy I see to life lately, but gosh, I don’t mean to sound poetic. I’m horrible at poetry.”

As I held out my glass for him to pour more, I wanted to go on and on, tell him everything about me—a woman trying to reunite with her true self, a woman who for so long has been covered partially by clouds, like the moon that Liam, with his head resting on the love seat, was staring up at.

“Expert, oh, expert, oh, what would you say?” I wondered in my mind until I knew what they’d say, “I’d tell you it’s a rebound and run far away!”

But I could care less what any experts had to say, and I knew there were no words in the English language to describe it, to truly articulate how Liam made me feel. When looking at him, I knew who I was, could see my core, and liked it. And I felt like I knew him, too, and what I didn’t know, I wanted to know. Ours was the sort of thing that only comes around once in a lifetime, and no one or nothing could do anything to deny it.

CHAPTER THIRTY

BELVEDERE