Sand in My Eyes (28 page)

“No—your eyes,” he told me, “and the way in which they danced and smiled. And later, I noticed your lips, and their form. Most of what comes out of your mouth is calm and laid-back, and I can tell by how feminine, how beautiful, your lips are that chattering about others, gossiping and rambling on about people, isn’t your thing.”

“You get an A,” I told him, and felt flattered that after all I’ve gone through someone could still detect something good in my eyes.

By now he was rummaging through the brown leather pack he wore around his waist.

“What are you looking for?” I asked him.

“My camera,” he said. “I’d like to take a picture of you so I can later sketch it and capture …” His words stopped as he pulled out a tiny
camera.

“Capture what?” I said, standing with my hands awkwardly at my sides and my eyes squinting from the sun that was poking through the branches at me.

“You,” he said as he focused the lens. “I want to capture you!”

“Why not just sketch me?”

“I don’t have a pencil or paper.”

“Too bad. I’d love to see your artwork in progress.”

“I do it best when I’m alone. I don’t know if this is what writers do, but I let myself go when I sketch. I set myself free.”

“How nice, to be able to do that, set yourself free,” I said, smiling for his photo.

“I don’t worry at all whether what I draw is good or not,” he said with his eye to the lens, “and I have no idea whether I’ve sketched a masterpiece or not. None of that matters. All I care about is that I love to do it. I love to draw.”

“That’s great,” I said, trying not to let human disturbance, the car doors I heard opening and closing on the road, or people walking onto our platform disrupt my stance.

“I’m not a good photographer,” he said, fidgeting with the lens. “But when I sketch it later, I’ll make it good. I’ll draw that smile of yours. A photograph could never do it justice, but a pencil could,” he went on, and stopped when an older couple had come out to where we were.

I was standing still as an American bittern, pretending I was a part of the scenery when the man offered to take the picture for him, to take one of the two of us together. We let him, and I was glad to hear that they were from Ohio, not local, and didn’t know and could never know who I was, a woman not supposed to be standing here in this mangrove forest as my heart did things it wasn’t supposed to be doing. But a woman’s heart does that. Sometimes it involuntarily beats too quickly, just as the Gulf waters pick up with excitement every now and then, acting as if it were the ocean.

The beam on my face as I stood there with the sun in my eyes and Liam’s arm around me may have told my secret—that I was a perplexed
woman, trying to figure out whether it was impulsivity or instinct that brought me to where I was now.

When the couple from Ohio left, and we were once again the only two people standing in the forest, his arm still around me, I knew then what had brought us together. We were like two shorebirds that migrated along traditional flyways, across continents and oceans, to arrive at the refuge where we were now, and our being here together was nothing planned. It was the forces of nature that brought us together, the way those birds navigate by sun, moon, and stars, taking advantage of prevailing winds and sensing changes in the earth’s magnetic field.

“Are you sure you don’t have a pen or something?” I asked minutes later. How could I not want a pen when hanging from the mangrove branches were hundreds of pencil-shaped propagules that made me want to write!

“I don’t,” he said, searching the pack strapped to his waist once more. “Well then,” I said, reaching into my purse. “It’s all I have, so lip liner will have to do.” I picked up a dry, tan-colored sea grape leaf off the ground and quickly, sloppily wrote all over it, filling it front and back with words.

“I have to admit,” he said. “I’ve never seen anyone write with lipstick on a leaf before. Mind if I ask what you’re writing?”

“Oh, a few things that came to me,” I said, dropping my lip liner and the leaf into my purse.

“If that’s how ideas come to you,” he said, “why don’t you carry around a notepad?”

“I don’t want to scare it away.”

“Scare what away?”

“Inspiration,” I told him.

“Is there really such a thing?” he asked. “Or is there only imagination?”

“Inspiration is real,” I told him. “It’s like watching for wildlife. You need to be at a quiet, comfortable distance or you might disturb it. Sometimes it’ll freeze and go away, but I try not to assertively approach it or force it. It shows up when it’s ready, as long as it feels secure, as long as my mind is still and in a quiet, receptive state.”

“Just like that?”

“Yeah, and I’ve used receipts, dollar bills, and coloring books to write on.”

“Is that so?” he asked.

“I would think most writers get their ideas this way, but I don’t know for sure. Everyone is different.”

“And what do you do with all these objects that you’ve scribbled all over?”

“Stash them in my desk drawer,” I told him, “so one day I can hopefully apply them to a novel.” I looked back out at the tidal flats and then at him. “So what do you fear most?” I asked out of the blue.

“You ask good questions,” he said, “but do you really want to know?”

“I do.”

“Okay, then, I’ll be frank. My biggest fear is that history might repeat itself. I don’t mean on a grand scale, but in my own life.”

“How so?” I asked.

“I know I said I’m content—that I enjoy my own company—but the truth is I don’t want to go through my entire life alone. I do like companionship—but here I go, off on another monologue. I just fear I might fall for someone—and maybe I already have—but it can’t work out. It can’t work out because she doesn’t feel the same way, or because she isn’t capable of loving me back for whatever reasons she has in her life. And now I’m really embarrassed. I’ve said way more than I wanted to say.”

“You don’t have to be embarrassed,” I told him. “Not with me. It’s refreshing, the way you talk. I don’t talk like this often. My husband and I, we don’t talk about things like this, about love. Nor do we talk of the environment or politics. All we talk about is the house and what a mess it is and who is to blame and whose turn it is to get the baby her milk in the middle of the night.” I bent down to scratch my ankle, which itched where it had been stung earlier by the fire ants.

He crouched down and took a closer look at my ankles and feet. “Are you sure you’re not allergic to them?” he asked.

“Oh, stop,” I said.

“Stop what?”

“Looking at my feet. I’m embarrassed,” I said.

“Why would you be embarrassed?”

“By how ugly my toes are.”

“Your toes aren’t ugly. Why would you think your toes are ugly?”

“Look at them! They’re dirty.”

“You’re at a refuge. They’re supposed to be dirty at a refuge, and even if you weren’t at a refuge, a person with dirty feet is a good thing.”

“Why?”

“It shows you’re real, alive, a part of this world, and in touch with the earth.”

“Why do you do that?” I asked.

“Do what?”

Our eyes were locked and I was finding it hard to look away. “Make me feel better,” I told him.

“I’m not trying to make you feel better.”

“But you are.”
It’s raining. It’s pouring
, I thought to myself, and he must have been thinking the same.

“All right then,” he said, looking up. “We should probably get going. I should put the top up on my mother’s car.” He let go of my foot and stood up.

Rain, rain, go away. Anna wants to stay and play
, I thought, and asked, “If it weren’t raining, couldn’t you stay here all night?”

“I could,” he said.

“Then maybe we should. Rain never hurt anyone. But would they ask us to leave if they found us here after dark?”

“I don’t know, but a crocodile might,” he said. And we left.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

I DON’T KNOW WHY
I invited him in, but a woman can’t always explain her own actions other than by blaming natural laws for the way in which she conducts herself. And after telling him how my husband’s throwing darts at my heart made me feel, as well as all the other things he wanted to know about me during our ride back in the car, it felt as natural to let him walk into my house with me as if it was the “freshwater from the river mingling with the saltwater from the gulf,” the words I had written in shorthand on the sea-grape leaf and that I had handed over for him to read as we walked up my steps together.

“The two don’t separate, but form an ecosystem rich with life,” he read out loud, then handed back my documented burst of inspiration. The rain had stopped, but the sky to the west of my house was dark and luminous and headed our way.

“If you really want to know the truth about my life,” I told him a few minutes later as I rummaged through the medicine cabinet in search of hydrocortisone cream for my foot, “every part of it, lately, has been falling apart. It’s why my children are with their grandparents this week. I think I had a momentary mental malfunction of sorts.”

“Do those really exist?”

“Yes,” I said. “They happen to people who don’t have the time or know-how to fix their own problems, people who go, go, go until mentally, physically,
they shut down.”

“Sit down,” he said, taking the tube of cream from my hands. “Let me help you with this.”

I sat down, balancing my buttocks on the edge of the tub and pointing my toes toward him, no longer feeling like the frenzied, confused woman from days earlier, but more like a bird sprouting brilliant plumes. As he rubbed lotion into the ant bites on my feet, I no longer cared that my feet were dirty, or that I had no polish on my toes. I opened my eyes once or twice to peek, to be sure my toes were still my own and hadn’t turned into the golden feet of a snowy egret, for that was how his rubbing made them feel.

But then he moved his way to the bites between my big and second toe, and I started to shake.

“What’s wrong, why are you laughing?”

“You’re touching my feet!”

“And you’re ticklish?”

“It’s been a long time since anyone touched my feet,” I said. “Timothy would never do this for me. He’d take one look and say, ‘You’re fine. Give it a day or two. They’re ant bites—no big deal.’” It was then that I heard the loudest thunder of my life and, startled by it, I kicked my foot up, smacking Liam directly in the face.

“I can’t believe I did that,” I told him. “Are you all right? Did I get your nose?”

“Did the lights just flicker or am I seeing things?” he asked.

“The electricity,” I said, laughing. “About the same time I kicked you, it went out.”

“Then I’m fine.”

“You must think I’m a complete whack-a-doo, don’t you?” I asked as I got up off the floor where I had landed.

“I don’t know. What’s a whack-a-doo?”

I gave him a teasing look and went into my bedroom. He followed.

“See all those flowers?” I asked, pointing to my writing desk. “Your mother gave them to me.”

He walked over and pulled a daisy stem out of the bowl of water.
“Odd,” was all he said.

“It used to be a daisy,” I explained, “but I plucked its petals.”

“Some might call that wacky. It’s a wacky activity, but it doesn’t mean you’re a whack-a-doo.”

“It’s not something I do all the time.”

“Good. I was starting to worry.”

“I was playing that silly little game,” I told him. “He loves me, he loves me not.”

“I hope for your sake it ended the way you wanted.”

“No,” I said, stepping on the petals on my floor. “It didn’t. A lot of things in life haven’t turned out exactly as I once hoped they might.” I went over to my writing desk, opened the top right drawer, and pulled out the pages I had printed, the pages I had written so far in this week on my own. “If you really want to know what I was thinking when my eyes were closed, just before I blew out my candles,” I told him as I sat down at the desk and he on my bed, “well, I was thinking how I’ve always wanted to write something significant.”

“That’s great.”

“It sounds great,” I told him, “but as much as I love my children, more than anything in the world, motherhood and all my domestic responsibilities leave me little time for my own pursuits. It’s a three-hundred-and-sixty-five-day-a-year job of nonstop reacting and responding, Monday through Sunday, from sunrise to sunset, as well as all through the night, without any break.” I stopped, then said, “Here I go again. I must sound like a blabbermouth.”

“It’s your life,” he said. “It’s not blabbering. It’s talking about your life, and it’s so different from mine.”

I looked at my watch. “Every night, around this time,” I said, “when the children are asleep, the floors swept, dishes washed and put away, laundry tumbling about, I take a hot shower to unwind. As I dry myself off, I feel that same burst of motivation, to start something spectacular, something all of my own, and I think to myself, the house is quiet and my time is my own. I should put my nightgown on, sit down at my desk and write.”