Sand in My Eyes (3 page)

“Amazing, with the illness she has,” I commented when a male nurse walked in. “How do you think she did it? How did she make it so far?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Oh, come on. She’s got to have a secret.”

“Good genes,” he said. “That’s probably it.”

“She always said, always believed, she’d live to be one hundred.”

“Well, she’s almost there!”

“You think that’s her secret, believing?”

“Yeah, maybe,” he said, and headed for the door. “That and modern medicine.”

I looked around the room. There were as many photographs on the wall as there were pieces of medical equipment, and I wondered which sustained her more, the equipment or the pictures. I recognized people in the pictures—her children and grandchildren, older than when I saw them last, when she used to pull photos out and brag about them to me. And then my eyes stopped at a sketch of a woman standing in what looked like a mangrove forest. I recognized the mangroves in the background and the bay, and I knew then that it was me—that her son had sketched me. No one else would know it was me. He did a good job of making me more beautiful than I ever was—although I felt beautiful the day I stood there posing for him—that day a long time ago in southwest Florida, on Sanibel Island, at the wildlife refuge.

But there were no flowers in her room, no butterflies, and other than the sketch of me at that refuge, the only color that caught my eye was a lavender sock lying on the floor. I bent down and picked it up, carrying it with me as I walked over to the foot of her bed. Liam had told me over the phone that the diabetes had damaged the sensory nerves in her legs, something that had started years before, and this had been the reason for her unsteady walk. And it was a nail she stepped on in her garden one day, an injury that went unnoticed due to poor circulation, he had explained, that left untreated became infected, destroying layers of her skin and creating a hole that went all the way to her bone. The bone, too, had become infected, and that was why doctors had to take her foot, and that was another reason why her children had talked her into moving into the nursing home. She couldn’t walk.

It was cold in the room, and I wanted to help the woman who once helped me. I never helped her the way I could have. She had been the one living alone, grieving her husband while caring for a house, lawn and, most challenging of all, caring daily to keep her health under control and to prevent or delay the disease’s destruction. And through it all she was the one bringing me gifts from her yard, leaving me optimistic.

“Good morning, Fedelina,” I whispered, waiting for her to stir, or open her eyes, but she didn’t. “It’s cold in here, don’t you think?” I clung to the sock in my hand. “I found this comfy, soft sock on the floor. I could put it on your foot, if you’d like. I’d be happy to.” She didn’t move, but I could still hear her voice from years ago telling me mornings would come to mean a million different things to a woman through her life. I looked around at all the medical equipment, wondering whether she ever imagined her mornings would come to this.

I crossed the room to the window and opened the curtains. A glimpse of the good old outdoors would do the trick, and sunlight would wake her kindly so she would open her eyes and see that I was here. But it had turned into a somber, sunless day, with no flower boxes out her window, only a view of the asphalt parking lot and my rental car. I closed the curtains and sat down in a chair facing her.

“Fedelina,” I tried again, needing for her to open her eyes and look through my rhinestone-studded glasses and know that it was me. “It’s been a long time, but I had to see you. I hope your son told you I was coming.”

It was then that her eyes, a brilliant blue like the petals of a morning glory, opened—only to look right through me, as if she didn’t know me at all. “It’s me—Anna Hott!” I said desperately to no reply, and went on. “I look different from when you saw me last. My eyes are no longer puffy from sleep deprivation, and my hair is showered and styled. I have all the time in the world now for putting on makeup, and look, my nails are manicured, but it’s still me.”

She blinked countless times and closed her eyes again, but licked her lips, which were dry and cracked, and said, “It’s good to see you, Anna.”

“You, too,” I said, poised on the edge of my seat. “I’ve been remembering lately all the good talks we used to have. It’s why I’m here. I felt like talking with you one more time.”

“One more time?” she asked, “What do I look like to you? A woman on her deathbed, a flower with no petals left?”

“That’s not what I meant. I guess I’m nervous,” I admitted, as if talking to a shrink.

“I know,” she said. “I know what you meant. How’s the family, the kids?”

“Great—the boys are well into college, planning semesters abroad, and my daughter, well, she’s a freshman now. I moved her in a couple of months ago.”

“And what are you doing now?”

“Looking around for a town house is all,” I told her, not wanting to pour it all out, the details of my empty nest syndrome: how all I do is saunter around my house, which is hauntingly quiet since my youngest left for college and wonder how to pull myself out of the gloomy, childless hours, those after-work hours that, without kids, feel like nothing more than flat, boring patches of soil. “My house, it’s too big, and too much work. I don’t need it anymore.”

“And what about that husband of yours, how is he?”

“Oh, I’ll tell you all about it,” I said. Her mouth was opened slightly, but she didn’t say anything, and I feared she wasn’t in the mood for all this talk. I could see that her gums had pulled away from her teeth, exposing a part of the root.

“My son tells me you’ve been writing,” she said. “Same old story all these years,” I confessed.

“I remember that about you—that you loved to write. Is it good, your story?”

“I’m too attached to know.”

“Well, Liam tells me you want to share it with me.”

“That’s right,” I said, wondering whether he had mentioned that the story was inspired by her—by knowing her. And when she didn’t say anything further and her head rolled to the side as if she were falling back so sleep, I asked, “Are you tired? Would you like me to come back later?”

“That’s a good idea,” she said. “Why don’t you enjoy the fall colors and come back tonight? I am tired, and besides, I have a lot to do today.”

“Of course,” I said, reaching down for my bag.

“Anna,” she then announced, those blue eyes opening once more, this time looking right at me, “I’m kidding. You really think I’m busy, that I have things to do? What—cook, clean, run a marathon?”

I dropped my bag and shook my head. “It’s so good to see you.”

“Sit down,” she said. “Your hovering is making me nervous.”

I sank into the vinyl armchair beside her bed. “So how are you doing?” I asked.

“I need constant, around-the-clock medical care,” she said. “My children did what was best, putting me in here, did what they had to do.”

“Of course,” I had said, but still, I never imagined her—a mother of seven—ending up in a nursing home. It wasn’t that I thought of them as bad places, just places nobody wants to be in. Then again, as a mother of three, I couldn’t imagine myself intruding into my own adult children’s lives, moving into a room in their house one day, burdening them.

“It’s hard,” she told me as her fingers fidgeted around the side of the bed, taking hold of a remote control and pressing a few buttons. “I’ve lost the capacity to take care of myself. I need help now with eating, bathing, getting to the bathroom.” But in less time than it had taken me to get the top down on the convertible, her bed started to rise. “Waking up is the hardest,” she said, now fully upright in a sitting position, her face proud, as if she had reached a mountain summit. “But, modern technology, it makes getting up in the morning easier.”

“I shouldn’t have come so early.”

“You’re fine,” she said. “Once I open my eyes, once I manage to keep them open more than a few minutes, I’ve made it! I know then that I’ve made it another day.” She looked deeply into my eyes. “So what are you waiting for?” she asked me. “Aren’t you going to read me that story?”

“There’s no hurry,” I said. “I’m here to visit with you. I’ve got a few days.”

“I want to hear it, Anna.”

“Okay,” I said, “but first, I brought you something.” I walked over to the bureau where I had put the bouquet of flowers, and I pulled a lavender orchid out from the rest. I gently opened her fingers, placed it in her hand, and closed her fingers around the stem.

“An orchid,” she declared, her lips curving into a smile. “It’s been years since I’ve held an orchid.”

“Remember what you once told me about them?”

“No,” she answered, her face strained.

“You said orchids ought to remind us women how strong and resilient we are, more so than the world believed.”

“I said that?”

“Yes.” I nodded as I pulled the manuscript from my bag. “You learned it from your mother. You said she taught you all kinds of things about flowers and life.”

As I sank into the uncomfortable armchair facing her bed, I knew she needed to hear that from me. She needed to hear the words she once spoke to me, fed back to her.

“I’m glad you’re here,” she said, “and glad for this morning, another morning.” She pulled a pillow from the side of her bed and added it to the one under her head, propping herself up as if she were ready to read a good book. She clutched the orchid against her chest. “Now read me that story of yours.”

As I pulled the rubber bands off the manuscript pages, I could feel my hands shaking. I had never read it to anyone and feared she might not like it, especially the parts about her.

“It’s longer than I wanted it to be,” I told her. “I could paraphrase, skim the good parts. I don’t have to read the entire thing.”

“Start at the beginning,” she insisted. “We’ll see how far we get. I may only have one foot, Anna, but don’t let that fool you. I’m all ears.”

CHAPTER FOUR

TWENTY YEARS EARLIER

THERE ONCE WAS A
woman who lived on an island in a little house on stilts. From the outside, hidden within the forest-like branches of the banyan trees, it looked more like a birdhouse than what a family of five calls “home.” On the inside the house was a disheveled mess. The floors would shake as a load of wash tumbled about in the machine, making all the pictures on the walls hang crooked, and in the days after they first moved in the woman of the house swore there were earthquakes in Florida, until she figured it out.

I was that woman. And an exhausted, overwhelmed one was I. It didn’t matter whether living up north, or down south, in a city or on an island, in a big house or a little house, clean house or messy house, loud house or quiet house, mornings for mothers are tough—especially mornings after having no sleep.

“It’s hard being a woman, harder a wife, but hardest of all is to be a mother,” I pitifully cried to myself in bed, my hand feeling its way to my daughter beside me, fumbling across her lips and nose, and then stumbling upon her forehead. It was still warmer than normal after my fierce battle to reduce a stubborn fever. All night I spent dozing in ten-minute increments, keeping watch, terrified the same thing might happen again, the muscles of her face, trunk, arms, and legs contracting into a convulsion
the way they had when her fever peaked in the wee hours. And the involuntary moan she had let out from the force of the muscle contractions haunted me all the hours I lay in bed facing her, crying from having gone through the most frightening tens of seconds of my life watching her seize mysteriously, while thinking I was about to lose her when the clock struck one and she stopped breathing and turned blue.

After the paramedics left and she fell asleep in the territory of the bed once occupied by my husband, only then did I let my mind wander to the fiery forest. There my thoughts scattered for hours, lost in the details of my husband’s dark affair. I was frequenting this forest nightly, twisting and turning, caught up in its branches, smoldering in resentment and sacrificing sleep to go there, but my days were consumed by children and household responsibilities and allowed me no time for thinking. And when a person isn’t able to think during the day, her thoughts come out at night, darker and creepier.