Sanibel Scribbles (6 page)

There is nothing worse than a perfectionist tongue twisting, she thought as she spotted her parents standing in a crowd, everyone’s faces bronzed and looking quite relaxed as if the entire crowd had just finished a great game of golf. “Great game of golf on gorgeous green grass … great game of golf on gorgeous green grass … gate game of goof … get off it!”
she scolded herself. “You can practice later.”

“Practice what?” asked her mother as she threw her arms around her.

“Golf,” she rapidly replied, noticing how much younger her parents looked, since relocating to Florida several months ago.

“We’ve been playing every morning, and we’d love for you to join us,” said her father, joining the hug.

“Did I say ‘golf?’ I meant ‘goof.’ What a ‘goof’ I feel like with my ears popped. I must be shouting right now,” she said, and then forced a wide yawn, hoping that might help.

Could Florida, or golfing, actually take years off a person’s life? Maybe, she thought, as she hugged both her mom and dad together, noticing a fresh glow to their skins and natural highlights in her mother’s hair.

As she and her mother waited on the curb for her father to pull the car up, Vicki noticed a group of women standing around them, looking as if they were linen hung to dry in the scorching sun a bit too long. And, as quick and fleeting as a hummingbird’s presence, a moment of déjà vu fluttered through her mind. Suddenly she could predict exactly what her grandmother would be about to say at this exact given moment were she still alive and picking her up at the airport for her annual visit.

“Sunscreen is the Fountain of Youth,” Grandma would say before pulling a brand-new bottle of lotion from a drugstore bag stuffed in her large straw purse. “I’m only going to warn you once on this trip. You don’t want alligator skin.”

“Thank you, Grandma, but wrinkles are not something I need to worry about now. I don’t care what I look like when I’m older. I only care about now.”

But now, like never before, she did care about wrinkles, aging and even death. She reached into her bag and pulled out sunscreen she had bought at her layover. She rubbed it into her arms, legs and face, then, fearing that SPF 60 might not be strong enough to protect her from the sun’s deadly rays, she reapplied a second, and then a third coat.

In the backseat of her parent’s tiny white car, with the air-conditioning not working properly, Vicki felt as if she were sitting in a sauna, ready to exit, but unable to do so. The door was stuck. She felt a kind of panic she
had never felt before, and suddenly she couldn’t breathe. She closed her eyes and tried to inhale deeply, but there didn’t seem to be anything for her lungs to inhale. She tried convincing herself that a few more minutes of socializing in the sauna would be nice. She and her parents had much to catch up on as they drove west on Daniels Parkway, then made a left onto Summerlin Road and followed the signs toward Sanibel Island. Like private cramps deep within her gut, Rebecca’s death agonized her, yet she didn’t want to make it public news just yet. She chose to suffer alone, like someone choking silently, dying unnoticed during a wonderful dinner with family. Several minutes later, they passed billboards that teased travelers with painted glimpses of paradise ahead. She still couldn’t properly catch her breath, but like the man standing knee-deep in the water out her left window, she wouldn’t give up. She had to catch it just as he had to catch his fish.

“Oh, thank God. The bridge is going up,” said her father. “That means we’re forced to stop and wait.”

“There’s no place I’d rather be stuck then here on this bridge,” added her mother.

“I’m getting sick. I’ve got to get out of this.”

Vicki waited as long as she could, then, as soon as the car stopped, she opened the door like a person escaping a burning house and rushed over to the side rail of the bridge, as if she might throw up, but then she couldn’t help but notice the water below her, looking so clear. She glanced up and saw giant brown pelicans gliding overhead like creatures one might see in
The Wizard of Oz
. One lunged downward and caught a fish, and carried it toward land. She couldn’t arrive on Sanibel carrying the heavy news of her friend’s death alone. It would sink the island. Laughing gulls swirled around her as well, but she couldn’t hear them.

As she watched a sailboat to her left with two—no, three, no, four—bottlenose dolphins riding its front wave slowly approaching the bridge, she noticed her parents getting out of the car to join her, and she knew she needed to share the weight that was pulling her down. She had finished telling them how Rebecca died by the time the sailboat finally showed up under full sail on the other side of the bridge. Grateful for their comfort,
she stood embracing her parents and watching the pod of smiling dolphins now leaping through the air, weightless and exposing their pink stomachs behind the boat.

She took a deep breath and got back into the car, looking ahead toward Sanibel and Captiva Islands, the most amazing islands in Southwest Florida, surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico.

At the first stop sign on the island, they headed east down Periwinkle Way and drove another couple of minutes to the condominium where Grandma and Grandpa used to spend their winters, two birds of paradise—the Great Egret and the Snowy Egret—as they used to call themselves.

“Mom and I say it every day, honey. We still can’t believe the timing of it all,” her father said as he opened the door of the condo. “We sold the businesses and the house, and planned on moving here to be closer to Grandma.”

“And now, the loss of your friend,” added her mother. “There’s so much in life we can’t control.”

“They both left at horrible times,” said Vicki. “I just can’t believe it.” That evening Vicki wanted a break from the morbid thoughts that raced through her mind. She wanted to forget that her friend had died, to toss the incident into her Sea of Forgetfulness. Her parents suggested they stay in for dinner, but she insisted they go out so they went for all you-can-eat shrimp-and-crab platters. Vicki’s parents tried urging her to return to Michigan for the funeral or to make phone calls to friends or send flowers. She appreciated their concern and their support, but still, as she spoke of it all, she felt like a dolphin tossed into a lake. Come morning she would be back in the ocean again, where everything made sense.

She could only talk so much about it all and, instead, wanted to enjoy the feelings that came from being reunited and sharing a dinner with her parents. They were a close family after years of mopping floors, cleaning toilets, waiting tables and horseback riding together through the woods at her father’s ranch, the last of his entrepreneurial endeavors. Since the sale of the businesses and the southward migration a couple of months ago, they had only spoken on the phone and they had much to catch up on.

After dinner, they returned to the condo, and Vicki went for a quick swim in the pool. It felt good, hiding from the humidity that had clung to her ever since she stepped foot off the plane, but she felt guilty, as if she should be around people who knew Rebecca and were mourning her death. She should be walking up to the open casket at a funeral, not splashing around in a solar-heated pool! She didn’t dare to smile because she should be wiping her eyes with a white handkerchief, not drying herself off with a beach towel. Instead of wearing a pastel-colored bikini, she should be wearing something dark, solid, and solemn. She didn’t want to cry because that would only rub in a fact she couldn’t accept: her closest friend had actually left this life without finishing anything she wanted to accomplish.

Oh, why didn’t she just skip her flight and attend the funeral? How could she have made such a rash decision? She blamed it on shock. It had to be shock, because it all happened so fast that she didn’t know she had any options. Then again, she had to leave. Her hometown would always stay where it lay on the map, between Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, but everything comforting about it had changed. She felt a chill and missed the cozy mitten.

That night in bed, minutes, perhaps hours, had passed when Vicki saw a woman sitting at the end of her bed. It took a moment for her eyes to focus and, like an Etch-A-Sketch filling itself out in midair, she gradually saw more detail: Rebecca’s long dark hair, tinseled in silver, then her royal blue eyes.

“
Hola
, Vicki. I’ve got a Heavenly secret to share with you. Dreams not fulfilled on earth can still be fulfilled,” echoed her friend, and then, in an instant, as if someone shook the Etch-A-Sketch, she vanished.

Vicki sat up in bed, staring at the foot of her bed like a magician staring confidently at her magic hat, awaiting the reappearance of a rabbit. “Rebecca,” she called out. “Please come back. Don’t go. I heard what you said, but tell me more. I need to hear more. I’m scared. My grandma died, and now you. Does death really strike in threes? Who next? Could it be me?”

She waited and listened, realizing no magic word would make Rebecca reappear. As much as she did or didn’t believe in what she had just seen,
she still felt thrilled to have had the perceived, and perhaps real, experience of seeing her friend moving and talking once more. She felt honored and wanted to memorize everything she had heard and seen. How could it be? Had Rebecca really visited her there in the room? Had she crossed the life-death barrier just to deliver that message?

She soon wanted to fall asleep so she tried talking to her arms and legs, urging them to relax, but there is nothing more boring than talking to a body part, which is probably why the activity puts a person to sleep in the first place. After a horribly dull conversation with her toes, she gave up. There is a time for everything, or there should be, so Vicki declared night her time to mourn.

Her mourning began the next night. As she lay in bed at eleven forty-five, she envisioned herself and Rebecca finishing up their list of goals on the paper tablecloth at Till Midnight. Still awake at midnight, she analyzed age, and how so many things had gone unfinished in Rebecca’s life. At one o’clock, she resented heart attacks for sneaking in and robbing her friend and her grandmother of life, while they slept. She felt angry at death, the disgruntled gunman randomly opening fire.

No, death chose Rebecca, and it chose Grandma. They must have been carefully selected for some holy reason. What is it the very devout say?
It must have been their time
. And just as there is a time to be born and a time to die, Vicki decided there was a time to climb out of bed, and to forget about falling asleep.

At two o’clock, the irony of life haunted Vicki. Half of life is spent looking forward, counting down to holidays, vacations, and weekends, while the other half is spent pondering backward. But if she didn’t let herself reminisce, things she once loved would die. At three o’clock, she promised herself that from this day forward she would start living for the moment. At four o’clock, she cried for Rebecca’s family and their lost time together.

She tried counting sheep but instead turned to counting the number of antacid tablets she had given Rebecca. It must have amounted to a full bottle within a one-month span. She felt psychic as she watched each orange-glowing second tick by.
I knew it would turn 4:46 at that exact second
,
I knew it! I knew it would turn 4:47 when it did!

After getting a tension headache, she covered the clock with a shirt. She envied others on the island for sleeping soundly. Why couldn’t she, too, fall asleep? Why wouldn’t she? She felt alone, lonesome in a world of sleeping people. She focused on her breathing, and then suddenly it changed. Perhaps it changed because she now thought about her every breath. She skipped a breath and her breaths sped up. She tried to slow them down again, and felt in need of an extra breath but couldn’t catch one. As the hours passed, Vicki was becoming preoccupied with her own breathing and her own death. She felt a lack of air, as she had in the car on the way home from the airport. She didn’t know why she couldn’t catch her breath, or why she was now hyperventilating.

She quietly got out of bed and, still wearing her nightgown, walked out the front door of the condominium. She walked the five minutes to Lighthouse Beach, at the east end of Periwinkle Way. She wanted to thank both the rising sun, for providing her its natural light, and the historical cylindrical steel lighthouse, for giving her a destination to walk toward. She liked having a destination just as much as she liked having something to look forward to on her calendar. Every spring, Vicki and her sister had gone to Sanibel to see Grandma, and they went to Lighthouse Beach to walk. Before each trip, they’d count down days. When the annual trip to Florida rolled around, they savored those days, and when it passed, they remembered them.

Just as one might crave chicken noodle soup when feeling down, she craved a walk on the beach. Something about walking a beach always made her feel as if she could forget what happened yesterday or what might happen tomorrow.

She sat down where the water met the talcum-powder sand and stared out at the Gulf of Mexico. She sat with the shells and felt sorry for them, cast ashore by storms, tides, and wave action. She loved the shells, the sand, and anything related to a beach. She could never live in a land-locked world.

Carefully scanning the sand around her to see if she might be sitting alongside a Chinese Alphabet, her grandmother’s favorite shell, she spotted
a mound about two feet down. It looked like a sand castle. She got up and ran toward the mound with destruction in mind. She jumped and landed on the fortress and stomped it down to nothing more than silken sand. She felt good, yet wicked, and grateful that no one else walked the beach early on this particular morning to witness her anger-filled act. She picked up a Lightning Whelk that had decorated the top of the castle and tossed it as hard as she could into the water. She heard it land. She didn’t know what to do now that the castle was destroyed. She felt energy, fierce as a Calusa Indian. Her surging power fascinated her, but she knew these first inhabitants of the island wouldn’t waste their energy destroying a sand castle. Instead, they probably used it productively, for things like carving canoes and making masks for religious events.