Sand in My Eyes (34 page)

“Aren’t you feeling tired?”

“A little,” she said, “but I’m curious as to what happened next, after the yard sale.”

“Okay,” I told her. “If you fall asleep, I’ll leave. I’ll come back in the morning.”

I fingered through the pages of the manuscript to where I left off, hoping she would fall asleep and not hear what I had written next, about the disagreement we had long ago, the one that sent us down diverging paths.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

IN THE MORNINGS FOLLOWING
the yard sale three little children chit-chattered away as the birds chirped through the windows of the yellow room. The house that was clean the week before was a mess again, and I could no longer see my dreams of writing or hopes for love, or figure out where I had left them. “It’s okay,” I tried telling myself. “The love a mother has for her children is all she needs to sustain her.”

As I sat out on the porch steps early one morning in the middle of spring—a big old book of Mother Goose nursery rhymes opened in my lap—I felt content with the children and challenged by the harebrained questions they were tossing my way, like, why did the farmer’s wife chop off his tail with a carving knife?

“Because she was crazy,” I told them as their eyes grew big. “All the characters in these nursery rhymes are a bit crazy.”

They were fine with my answer, and I turned the page, knowing that one day they would ask me more, like, why do we remember you crying on the kitchen floor, and giving Daddy all those slams of the door?

“Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater,” my son said next. “Why did he have a wife and couldn’t keep her?”

“That’s a good question,” I said, searching my mind for an answer. I was glad when he turned the page in the book. “She pitters, she patters, oh, what does it matter,” I read, but their attention span was waning, and the boys grew more enthusiastic about catching love bugs in plastic sandwich
bags than in hearing me read. I closed the book of rhymes and let them capture as many as they liked, since the state of Florida didn’t need so many love bugs and the circle of life had no use for them—and because Timothy had a work-related conference call, and there was nowhere in our home that a person could go and not hear the ruckus three children make. I left the children outside while I hurried inside and grabbed a pen and piece of paper.

When I came back out again, the children were holding hands, spinning and singing, teaching their sister “Ring around the Rosie,” so I sank into the swing chair that hung from the beams of our house. With the early morning sun touching my face, I felt like a girl with nothing better to do than to swing up to the clouds, swing up to Heaven. It felt nice, in those tens of seconds that my children were doing their own thing, to think my own thoughts. And when Liam came to mind, I tried pushing him out. I had done this countless times since my children returned. It would be too painful for me to think about the kind of love I felt for him, so instead I thought about the love I had for my children, and of all the things I wanted to teach them about life. As I watched the three of them drop to their knees in the childish game, I knew then what I wanted them to know, and that is that sometimes we all fall down!

But when I heard Timothy’s voice through the window, growing softer, I put my feet to the ground and stopped the swing. Holding my breath, I tried to hear the words upstairs. I had to. Once a husband fools around, his wife can never again be the oblivious type, but when his voice grew louder and I heard mention of sales numbers, I put my feet up and let the chair swing.

I lived for these moments, sitting outside with my children, and something about the way in which my children’s voices were blending with the chirping of the birds inspired me and got me to thinking like Cora, that I should write them each a letter to let them know how much I loved them, so out of all the things they might question in life, they would never question that! And since they were now blowing bubbles and hardly noticing me at all, I got up from where I was sitting with my
pen and paper. I sat down on the bottom wooden step so the sun was warming my face and wrote what came to mind.

Dear Son
,

You are like the cardinal in the tree that makes me smile
.

No, you mean more to me than the cardinal in the tree that makes me smile
.

You are the child who makes me sing
.

You are like a ruby-throated hummingbird that makes me smile
.

No, you mean more to me than a ruby-throated hummingbird that makes me smile
.

You are the child who makes my thoughts flutter
.

You are like the dolphin in the bay that makes me smile
.

No, you mean more to me than the dolphin in the bay that makes me smile
.

You are the child who makes my heart leap
.

You are like a treasure on the island that makes me smile
.

No, you mean more to me than a treasure on an island that makes me smile
.

You are the child who makes my eyes glisten
.

You are the manatee in the canal that makes me smile
.

No, you mean more to me than the manatee in the canal that makes me smile
.

You are the child who makes me cherish each moment and move more slowly through life
.

I put my writing down and joined the children where they were, this time, singing “London Bridge Is Falling Down,” while trying to think up another letter for Marjorie, and one for Thomas. But then Timothy came down and loaded his suitcases into the car.

“It’s only a week this time,” he said after kissing the children.

“And two weeks after that,” I reminded him.

“What do you have planned while I’m away?”

I felt my “poor Anna” look spread across my face, letting it answer for me that while he was away I’d be sweeping, mopping, cleaning, grocery
shopping, cooking, putting to bed kids who won’t sleep, comforting nightmares and observing night terrors, and basically walking around like a sleep-deprived zombie.

“You should win an award, darling, for the look on your face. I wish I had an Oscar to give you. No one deserves one more.”

“Oh, stop,” I said.

“It’s true. You’re too pretty to look so miserable all the time.”

“Overwhelmed,” I said. “I’m not miserable. I’m overwhelmed.”

“You’re life isn’t so bad, Anna.”

“I never said it was.”

His face perplexed, he hugged and kissed the children, said his goodbyes and got into his car. These were the moments when I found myself missing Liam the most. I missed the man who talked to me, listened to me, laughed with me, and wanted to be with me. And I missed that “me,” too, and tried not to think about it. I didn’t want to cry. All those tears hitting my pillow each night did me no good as they were absorbed into the feathers. What a shame, because if all the tears I shed over Liam could be put to good use—collected into barrels and transported to the areas of this earth undergoing drought—there’d be no more dried-up crops, unusable land, farmers going broke, lawns turning brown, or flowers wilting.

Once Timothy’s car pulled out of sight, the children ran over to my neighbor’s yard and began circling her magnolia tree. I stood where I was, watching them while interrogating my heart as to whether my love for the man who planted that tree had been real, or only to fill a void.

“You children like butterflies?” Fedelina said, coming out her front door and down her flight of steps. “Would you like to see my butterfly garden? C’mon, I’ll show it to you.”

By the excitement in their voices, one might think the ice-cream truck was coming down our road, and I took advantage of Mrs. Aurelio entertaining my children. It gave me a few more seconds to myself. And once I reached the conclusion that my love for her son was real—pure in and of itself, a rare sort of love, as rare as a red-throated loon, which I have never seen with my own two eyes, but read about a couple of nights
ago in the encyclopedia set I never sold the day of the yard sale—I headed over to his mother’s yard, granting my heart permission to go on longing for Liam, if only in my mind.

But then I stopped short, hiding behind a rubber tree plant, listening to that which she was saying to my children.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

IF YOU WANT BEAUTIFUL
things to appear,” she was telling them, “it’s quite simple. All you have to do is attract them.”

“So,” I said, coming out from where I was hiding, and putting an end to the lesson on life that she was giving to my children. “You’re one of them.”

“Hi, Anna. One of who?” she asked me.

“You know, who believe life can be perfect simply by following a few simple steps, and that if you want good things to appear, you’ve got to think good thoughts and abracadabra, life is good?”

“Well,” she said. “I don’t know if I’m one of ‘them’ or not, but positive thinking does go far.”

I shook my head. “Sometimes,” I said, “life just happens—it rains, it pours—regardless of a positive outlook.”

“What’s your point, Anna? What are you trying to say?”

I rolled my eyes at her. “I refuse to believe that I once had a thought, or didn’t have a thought, or did something, or didn’t do something, to attract into my life a husband who cheats.” I felt my face turn white as snow. It was the first time I had blurted out to her the bitter truth about my marriage, and the tone in my voice told her I saw no possibility of it blossoming again. My words had a chilling effect within me, starting with the valves of my heart—freezing them like pipes on a wintry day—and I stiffened in the way I was standing, crossing my arms like a cold person does.

“Oh, Anna,” she said.

“So where’s this butterfly garden?” I asked her, wanting to change the subject.

“Actually, it’s a parsley plant,” she told me, “but it attracts them the same.” She squatted down, pointing to a terra-cotta pot beside the shed where the boys were counting the fluttering creatures. Marjorie had her finger pointed, and her eyes were begging for one to land on her. “Give me a couple of months,” she went on, “and I’ll have a real butterfly garden. I’m having a
Lantana camara
put in next week.”

“A what?”

“A plant belonging to the vervain family, a perennial, and it blooms all year in South Florida. Butterflies go wild over its orange and yellow flowers. And soon I’ll be putting in scarlet milkweed. I’ve heard the monarch, and two other kinds, lay their eggs on it. But I’ll tell you, the butterfly I most desire to attract and am willing to wait until fall for is the zebra longwing. Ever heard of it?”

“No,” I said, feeling irrational for how I reacted, and aware now that she hadn’t been teaching my children any universal law. She had simply been teaching them how one goes about attracting butterflies into a garden.

“The zebra longwing is Florida’s state butterfly,” she told me.

“And how will you attract that?” I asked, softening my tone.

“Passion vines—the largest native passion vines I can plant. If you want butterflies to appear, then you’ve got to know which plants to grow—the ones with flowers in which they can find nectar.” She reached down and tore a browned leaf off her plant. “My daughter called this morning,” she said. “She called to tell me her son failed his first year of college and that he’s moving back home again, and her marriage is ending. ‘Mom,’ she cried. ‘What did I do wrong?’ And I know I should have kept my mouth shut, Anna, but I told her, ‘You gave your children everything. You made their world too beautiful.’”