Sand in My Eyes (30 page)

I hurried into my bedroom and over to the red roses music box that I got when I was a young girl, the one that chimed to the tune of “It’s a Wonderful World,” and I wound it tightly as it would go, then returned to the porch, setting it on the ground since my white wicker table was now regrettably under the house and intended for sale.

“I see birds of blue, red roses, too,” it started to play, and he sang the words to my favorite song. I peeked up at the sky, hoping to find a full moon—an excuse for acting crazy like I was, but the storm clouds were hiding it. Regardless of its shape we could repel each other no longer, and he pulled me close and started humming instead, and that was nice, too, because then we started to dance.

Hidden away in the shady forest, tucked within the leaves of the rubber tree plants and the aerial roots of the banyan, like two birds safely isolated in their own rookery with no land predators, we danced with no others to see us but the owls and the osprey and the pileated woodpeckers. And
hoo hoo hoo
would they possibly tell?

“I don’t know how your husband could have done what he did,” Liam uttered in my ear.

“Well, he did,” I said.

“You’re everything a man could want for—beautiful—inside and out.”

He used his finger and wiped a tear rolling down my cheek, and we danced until the music box stopped. Then we rewound it—first me, then him, and then we took turns. We did this so many times that we no longer minded letting it stop because we went on dancing to the sound of distant thunder. When that settled down, there were the night critters—less romantic to the ear, but we didn’t care—and when they stopped their croaking, it was the sounds of our own two hearts, faint but as powerful as the distant lapping waves. We danced so long I started to fear the light of day and what early risers on the road might say should they walk by and spot us nestled within the branches of the banyan tree.

“I’ve hardly known you a week,” I said to him, his arms wrapped tightly around me. “Funny how some things take a lifetime to figure out and others a mere second.” I wanted to believe there were laws, universal ones,
to explain this sort of thing. That somewhere in my past I had a thought and took an action, and that simple thought and action brought me closer to him, and he, too, in time had thought of me, a woman who would love him the instant she heard his voice from her window. There are those who would tell me we were meant to find each other, and that we were right where we belonged.

I wanted to believe it all, that our coming together was part of a mysterious natural law of physics, but it was hard. Nowhere in the files of my mind could I recall a time when I wanted or wished to fall in love with someone other than the one I had married. I didn’t intend for this to happen. It wasn’t a choice, to feel this way for a man I could not have, to be dancing with him the way I was, our feet slowly swaying back and forth naturally, instinctively, like two birds’ courtship dance, putting no thought or logic into it, into who they love, but letting it occur.

We danced a long time, until my perspective changed. “Why do you do this to me?” I asked him.

“Do what?” he asked.

“I no longer feel like a miserable woman with throbbing feet, living in a tree house,” I whispered, “but more like a snowy egret wearing golden slippers and doing a courtship dance in a mansion by the sea. Pinch me,” I said, and knew by the whereabouts of the moon that it was sometime after midnight.

“Pinch you?”

“So I know this is real and that I haven’t turned into a bird, that I’m still a woman,” I told him. “A rational, logically thinking woman, and not some loony bird without capacity to reason.”

“You’re all woman,” he reassured me. “You don’t have to worry.”

“I can’t help it,” I said. “I’m starting to worry.”

“About what?” he asked.

“Us—we can’t go on like this all night, you know.”

“No, we can’t,” he agreed. “What do you want to do?”

I pulled myself away from him, far enough so I could look him in the eyes, and there I saw my own wants and cravings staring back at me. “I’d love to wake up in the morning next to you and drink coffee in bed.”

“That’s it?”

“Yes, and talk intimately and profoundly until eleven.”

“Why eleven?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But doesn’t it sound good?”

“It does,” he agreed. “Let’s do it.”

“We can’t.”

“Why not?”

There were a million reasons swarming in my mind, but only one emerged. “Your mother,” I said. “What if she found out?”

He shrugged his shoulders and kissed my neck. “She’ll ground me,” he said. “For the rest of the week.”

“That’s all we’ve got, the rest of the week.”

“Then we should make the most of right now,” he said, pulling me close again, his breath in my ears sending shivers down my spine.

“I’ll bet you say that to all your women.”

“No,” he said firmly. By now we were cheek to cheek, our feet hardly moving, hardly dancing at all anymore. “I’ve said more to you than I’ve said to anyone in a long time. You’re different.”

“How do you mean?”

“I don’t know how to explain it.”

“Where did you say you were born?” I asked him.

“Chicago,” he told me, kissing my cheek and my neck.

“Then, no, it wasn’t at our births that we met,” I said.

“But it sure stinks, doesn’t it?” he asked.

“What?”

“How we mutually feel the same way for each other, when you belong to someone else.”

“I will never belong to someone,” I said, more loudly than I intended. “I belong to myself!”

He pulled himself away and ran his hands through his hair. “I have no right being here.”

“But you are,” I said.

“Call it what you will, but it’s against the grain for me to talk for more than a minute to another man’s wife.”

“I may not be his wife for long.”

“But you are now.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Are you one-hundred-percent positive you’re leaving him?”

Suddenly the reality of what I was doing struck me the way a bolt of lightning had the tree out back the month after we moved in, cutting it in two. “I don’t know,” I told him honestly.

“Then what should I do right now? I don’t want to overstay. What do you want me to do?”

“Will your mother come looking for you?”

“Only at four, when she wakes up,” he said, looking in the direction of her house.”

“Then stay until four,” I told him.

“Then what?”

“Then we’ll listen to the mourning doves.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

BELVEDERE

GIVE ME A PIECE
of that fudge, will you?” Fedelina asked when I stopped reading. “It’s too early, and bad for my teeth, but I don’t have to chew it. I can melt it in my mouth.”

I got up and sliced a piece of the fudge. After handing it over I went back to my chair and sat down.

“So he stayed the night? My Liam stayed the night with you?” she asked as she pressed the fudge between her two fingers until it softened, and then put it into her mouth.

I looked down at all I had written, at all that was coming next. “You really want to know?”

“Yes,” she insisted, and I continued to read.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

THROUGH THE PASSING OF
the storm and into the morning sun, I could have stayed dancing the way we were, his arms wrapped around me, our feet moving back and forth slowly, but the phone rang. On the second ring I opened my eyes, returning to the reality of my life, of who I was and who I was not, and who I had chosen for my husband and who I had not. On the third ring, I closed them once more, imagining a life with Liam. By the fourth ring I had pulled away and ran fast as I could to pick up the telephone and say hello to my husband.

As I answered all his questions, “yes,” I’ve pulled myself together, “yes,” the house is picked up, “yes,” I’m ready for everyone to come
home again, home again, jiggedy jog
, there was something I wanted to ask him—why are you calling me in the middle of the night, and why are you awake at this hour? But I didn’t want our conversation dragging on and I wasn’t in the mood for an argument. As I answered my husband’s questions, I took hold of Liam’s arm and silently tried to get him to stay. But he didn’t. In the yellow room the next morning there were roses on my desk that were starting to wilt, an unopened orchid standing at a tilt, petal-deprived daisies floating in water, and a lonesome mother missing her sons and daughter. But there was no man having coffee beside me in bed, and I would forever imagine what might have happened between Liam and me had my husband not called instead.

I climbed out of bed and went to my window, feeling gloomy that our
dancing ended as it had, and that I was not, nor would I ever be—despite him having made me feel like I was—the bird that seems to be wearing golden slippers, or the princess in glass shoes.

The morning outside was gray, everything was gray, and I felt gray, too, as I stood perched at the sill, my eyes wandering over to my neighbor’s house, thirsting for the slightest glimpse of her son, while determining how I might spot beauty in this gray day and in my bleak future, knowing Liam and I could never be. I was about to walk away from the window and the colorless day when Fedelina, with her big straw bag in one hand and a pillow in the other, came out of her house and down her steps. She tossed the pillow into her convertible, then propped herself atop it like little Miss Muffet sitting on a tuffet. But instead of eating curds and whey, she backed out of her long, curvy driveway, veering too far to one side, scratching the side of her red convertible against the branches of her hydrangea bush, and then turned onto the bumpy road and disappeared.

The lavishly blooming white shrub looked fine, not damaged at all, but Fedelina’s car had to be scratched. If it wasn’t, it would be the next time she came into her driveway with those branches extending as they were.

“I should tell her son,” I declared. “I will go over there now, before she gets back, and tell him what I saw and that I’m worried about his mother’s life—the lives of others, too—the way she drives so far to the right.”

I dressed, and as I headed out my door and down our porch steps, I thought about my neighbor, whom I cared for immensely, and her son, whom I also cared for. I couldn’t decide who I cared for more, since I cared for them in different ways. But her son I would hardly see anymore, whereas she I would see every day out my window.

I no longer wanted to go snitching to her son about the way in which she drove. Instead, I would do her a favor while she was away—cut away the branches closest to her driveway—I decided as I walked over to the trunk where she kept her gardening tools. I took hold of the pruning shears, not intending to cut much away from something not belonging to me, but once I started, I got carried away, moving inward, too, snipping away at dead blooms hidden within. It didn’t take a horticulture degree to decipher which ones were dead. I found the activity of snipping profoundly
therapeutic, and couldn’t stop until suddenly I wanted some for myself—lavish, white, live blooms for my bureau! I wanted them as badly as I had a piece of her son, and I wondered, if Liam were my husband and this hydrangea shrub were in my own yard, would I desire them this much?