Portion of the Sea Read online

  Books by

  CHRISTINE LEMMON

  Portion of the Sea

  Sanibel Scribbles

  Sand in My Eyes

  Whisper from the Ocean

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Penmark Publishing, LLC

  www.penmarkpublishing.com

  Copyright ©2011 Christine Lemmon

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a newspaper or magazine, or on the Internet.

  Distributed by Emerald Book Company

  For ordering information or special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Emerald Book Company at PO Box 91869, Austin, TX 78709, 512.891.6100.

  Cover by Julie Metz. Book design by Carla Rozman.

  Editorial production by Jeffrey Davis, Center to Page.

  Ebook ISBN: 978-0-9837987-0-5

  Ebook Edition

  To John

  “You hurled me into the deep,

  into the very heart of the seas,

  and the currents swirled about me;

  all your waves and breakers swept over me.

  I said, ‘I have been banished from your site;

  yet I will look again toward your holy temple.’

  The engulfing waters threatened me, the deep surrounded me; seaweed was wrapped around my head. To the roots of the mountains I sank down; the earth beneath barred me in forever. But you brought my life up from the pit, O Lord my God.”

  —JONAH 2: 3-6

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION. I wrote it while living on Sanibel, and my love for the area has inspired the writing. It has always fascinated me how generation after generation of families who could vacation anywhere in the world continue returning to Sanibel. My grandparents were the first in our family to fall in love with the area and move to the island.

  They passed their passion on to my parents who began vacationing there from the Midwest. I was two years old when I first walked the white beaches in search of seashells, and I continued doing so all the way through college, spending spring breaks with Grandma on Sanibel. I like to think of my love for the area as being inherited.

  My husband and I did most of our dating on Sanibel and later held our wedding reception there. A portion of my heart stayed even as the tides of our careers carried us geographically near and far from Florida over and over again throughout the years. John and I have lived all over the country. But just as two songbirds travel to far-off places seasonally only to return to the same nest year after year, so too did we find ourselves returning to Sanibel, this time to live. Living here has inspired the writing of Portion of the Sea.

  The history of the island has always interested me; however, in this story I did not intend nor attempt to portray real people or real-life experiences of any of Sanibel’s historical residents or visitors. For information on the history of Sanibel, I recommend a visit to the Sanibel Historical Village & Museum. I created this story and its characters from my imagination; however, I did read historical books, and they were valuable to me. I recommend them. They include the following:

  Dormer, Elinore M. The Sea Shell Islands. Tallahassee, Fl: Rose Printing Company, 1987. (A History of Sanibel and Captiva)

  LeBuff, Charles. Sanybel Light. Sanibel, Fl: Amber Publishing, 1998. (An Historical Autobiography)

  O’Keefe, Timothy M. Seasonal Guide to the Natural Year. Golden, CO, Fulcrum Publishing, 1996. (A Month by Month Guide to Natural Events)

  Oppel, Frank and Meisel, Tony, eds. Tales of Old Florida. Secaucus, NJ, Castle, 1987.

  I

  SANIBEL ISLAND

  1953

  Lydia

  There is a time in every woman’s life when pink is her favorite color, when anything is believable and the lines separating the possible and the impossible are blurred. It was that time for me when I first met Marlena, and the colors of my world changed forever.

  There are many reasons why women tell their stories. I’ll tell mine for one reason only—I never want to forget the girl I was and the dreams I had.

  IT WAS SPRING IN Florida, and I was as much a part of the spring day as the roseate spoonbills flying overhead and the hot pink periwinkles covering the ground and the pale pink coquina shells burying themselves beneath the sand. I was shy, too, like those coquina shells.

  I was sitting on a blanket spread out across the white powdery sand of Sanibel Island, with the late afternoon sun beaming down upon me when I opened my diary and began to write. This crescent-shaped island located in Southwest Florida and extending into the Gulf of Mexico, my father had told me when we arrived two days ago, was my place of conception. Ever since he shared that news with me, I had been trying to squeeze from him more juicy details regarding my conception, but I quickly learned it was one of those “hush hush” topics, the kind that makes fathers who hate any form of dancing look like they’re about to do the jitterbug.

  “So you and my mother were vacationing here when my conception occurred?” I had asked him over breakfast.

  “We were.”

  “Define the word conception for me, Daddy.”

  I was good at vocabulary, and my father was proud of me for this. But when I asked him to define that word for me, he looked nervous as a school- boy on stage before an audience and judges. And then he choked on his grapefruit juice. I waited until he recovered, and then I repeated the word.

  “Conception,” I said. “What is the definition of conception?”

  He walked over to the bookshelf and picked up the wildlife book he had been reading the night before. “Most of the year the heads and necks of brown pelicans are white,” he explained. “But during breeding season, the heads of the pelicans turn a distinctive yellow color, and the sides and back of the necks a dark reddish brown.”

  “Daddy,” I said, rolling my eyes, “you’re speaking to the state of Illinois vocabulary champion. You think I’m going to accept a definition like that? I’m not.”

  He closed the book and tried once more. “Much like the pelicans, there are also changes that must take place in the body of a man and woman right before conception.” He was looking back and forth at the bowl of fruit and me. “Let’s just say, after ‘courtship’ is over, the neck and heads of the pelicans return to white. I know it’s a lot to think about. Conception—it’s all so detailed.”

  “One more thing,” I said. “Where exactly on the island did my conceptiontake place? Was it in a bungalow or on the beach?”

  “Lydia!” he said, and I knew I had rattled his cage. “There are things a girl shouldn’t ask, nor know, nor think about. Enough! Understood?”

  “Sorry, sir. But I am growing up.”

  “You’re only fifteen.”

  “Almost sixteen.”

  “You could be thirty and I’d still say you’re too young to know those sorts of things about … about courtship.”

  “Conception,” I corrected. “The word in question was ‘conception.’”

  “Whatever,” he said. “I regret mentioning that word in the first place. It’s time to move on now. How about you start making me lunch.”

  I stopped writing about it all and looked up from my pink-poodle diary, wondering whether the details of my conception
meant anything at all. I did have hair as white as the Sanibel sand I was now digging my toes into, and eyes which were most days blue but on occasion green like the Gulf of Mexico. Then again my mother was a fair-skinned Irish woman with green eyes. I could probably credit her for the way I look more than my place of conception.

  I often watched mothers and daughters as they shopped, drank sodas, walked in the park together, and now strolled by me on the beach, and I could always match which girls belonged to which mothers. Usually it was their hand gestures flapping about in a synchronized manner like wings of birds, or their smiles, identical to those of dolphins. Sometimes it was less obvious, and I had to match their eyes or the shapes of their hips and butts. And there were the girls who gave it away the moment they opened their mouths, sounding sarcastic, critical, uppity, or sweet like their mothers—similar to parrots repeating whatever they’d heard over and over again.

  As the warm, comforting air wrapped itself around me, I tried not to feel sorry for myself, a parrot alone in its cage with no one to mimic, no one to teach me about certain words and things I wanted to know. My mother died when I was an infant, leaving me her smile, her hair, and on some days, if I wore green and stood under the right lighting, the color of her eyes. I loved to look at pictures of her, but all they told me was what she looked like.

  One day I had asked my father to tell me more about her, about things she loved. And when he told me there was an island off the coast of Florida that the two of them had visited once, and that my mother had fallen madly in love with, I had to go there, to see it for myself. And if she were sitting here beside me now, I would turn to her and say, “You and I are a lot alike. I agree with you that this place is utopia.” And just as my father said that my mother never wanted to leave the island and return to the Midwest, neither did I. But after a one-week vacation here they did leave, and nine months later I was born. This was the first time my father had been back since her death nearly fifteen years ago, and we were here for a week.

  It was also the first vacation he had ever taken me on. He didn’t like vacations. He had accumulated a treasure chest of wealth and money but didn’t know what to do with it, nor did he care. It wasn’t the money he liked but the acquiring of it. He was a man who lived to work, and earning salaries that rose higher each year was pure recreation to him. Vacations, vocabulary competitions, and me in general, only got in the way.

  I’m sure wives know as much or more about their husbands than daughters do about their fathers; so, my mother must have known this about him, which is why she put it into writing, that sometime around my sweet sixteenth birthday my father must take me here to see the place she loved. They found this request of hers in a letter she wrote the same morning they found her on the bedroom floor.

  I turned to the front of my diary, to where I had first started entering all the information I had gathered about my mother. And now the book was like a precious seashell to me, with a living creature inside. As I flipped my thumb through its pages, I swore I heard her laughing, whispering, and crying out loud.

  I clasped my hands together tightly, closed my eyes, and whispered to my mother. I only talked to her every so often and didn’t know whether or not she could hear me. “Thank you for insisting that I see this island. I love it. If loving a place is an inherited trait, then I got it from you. We are alike in many ways, I think.” I stopped only to wipe a tear from my face and then continued. “But I hope we’re different. Please tell me we’re different.I want to be different from you, too.”

  I opened my eyes and listened, thinking I heard and felt someone or thing hovering behind me. Maybe it was the seagulls, for great numbers of them had been stalking my box of crackers. Or maybe it was my mother’s spirit. But then I twisted around and looked up to find a woman standing behind me holding a plastic bucket.

  “Did I interrupt?” she asked, soaring over me, wearing a white bathing cap decorated with brightly bold circles. She looked like a movie star.

  “No. Interrupt what?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “I thought maybe you were praying, so I waited to hear an ‘Amen.’”

  “No, I was talking to my mother,” I said, and then regretted telling her that. I should have said I was talking to myself or, better yet, said nothing at all.

  But she didn’t look at me like I was crazy and instead turned her focus toward some shells in her bucket and nonchalantly picked a few up and tossed them back to the beach. I had to stare. She was glamorous, wearing one of those two-piece bathing suits, the kind my father would never allow me to wear, and the kind I had never seen anyone other than a mannequin at Marshal Fields wearing. I pulled my eyes up off her belly—a good quarter of it was showing—and placed them back onto her face.

  And that’s when I noticed she wasn’t looking into her bucket at all, but rather her eyes were stretching all the way down to my diary, lying open on the blanket beside me. The woman was trying to read what I had written, so I nudged it over a few inches to be sure, and then she cocked her head to the side and continued reading with the fervor of a gull feasting on its prey. As I did with the cracker box earlier, I slammed it shut, not wanting some stranger to peek any further inside at the essence of my mother captured in a book. Then I jumped up from the sand, ready to “shoo” her away, to fling my arms and possibly kick, but I didn’t know her next move and feared she might take off down the beach with the seagulls, my diary and the words depicting my mother dropping from her mouth.

  “Hi. I’m Marlena,” she said in the most elegant of voices, turning her eyes back at me. “Marlena DiPluma. Are you here on vacation?”

  “Yes,” I said as quick and snappy as one might say the word “yes.”

  “Aren’t you going to introduce yourself?”

  “Lydia,” I said. “Lydia Isleworth.”

  “And your mother?”

  I made a face at her and then remembered it was me who said in the first place that I was talking to my mother who clearly wasn’t here. “She died when I was an infant.”

  “I’m horribly sorry to hear that.”

  “It’s fine,” I said, sitting back down again. “I’ve written everything my father has told me about her in my diary. And it’s private. Diaries are private, you know.”

  She laughed and started swinging her pail back and forth like a child as she looked up at the clouds. There were only two clouds in the entire sky, and they weren’t shaped like anything fascinating so soon she stopped swinging the pail and bent down eye-level with me. “I respect journal keepers more than you could know,” she said. “And I am a firm believer that the words a woman writes in her journal are like bits and pieces of her heart, soul, and mind.”

  I loved words, vocabulary words, but I never thought about words as bits and pieces of anyone’s heart, soul, or mind. I wanted to ponder what she had said, but I also wanted to know why she wore a scarf wrapped around her head, covering her nose. Back home we wore our scarves as belts or halter-tops, or tied around a ponytail like mine was now, but never around our faces to cover our noses, like she wore hers. It was a pretty scarf, brightly colored chiffon.

  “I don’t mean to pry,” she said, standing back up again. “But is your father remarried?”

  “No,” I snapped.

  “So you’ve been raised by a man?”

  “No,” I said again. “I’ve got nannies, housekeepers, and tutors, and they’re all women.”

  “I see. So, where are you visiting from?”

  “Chicago.”

  “Do you come here often?”

  “No. It’s the first time I’ve been back.”

  “Since when?”

  “My conception.”

  She raised an eyebrow at me. “Really? Not many people know that sort of information.”

  “My father regrets telling me.”

  “Where’s your father now?”

  I reached for my pink saddle shoes and my socks. She was nosy, and I wanted to leave.

&nbs
p; “Maybe you could introduce me.”

  “No,” I said. “He bumped into an acquaintance, and now they’re having a business meeting. He’s always working.”

  “And where do you want to work when you grow up?”

  It was my turn to raise an eyebrow at her. “Work? What do you mean?”

  “A job, a profession. What do you want to be?”

  “A wife and a mother.” I started to back up, sweeping the sand off my feet with my hands while looking up at her.

  “I see,” she said, her dark eyes peering at me like a bird digesting its meal.

  “So what is your most favorite thing to do?”

  “Write,” I answered without hesitation. “In my diary.”

  “You love it?” I nodded.

  “You love it more than …” She scratched her chin. “I don’t know. It’s been a while since I was young like you … more than Hopscotch and Hula Hoop and dancing?”

  “More than anything.”

  “Then why not apply it to a profession one day? You sound like an intelligent young lady.”

  “I am,” I said. “My father says I’ll be able to keep up with my husband in conversation and educate my sons one day.” I couldn’t get all the sand out from between my toes, so I tossed my shoes in my bag instead of putting them on and then stood up and tugged the blanket out from under her foot. “I’ve got to get going,” I said as I lightly shook the blanket.

  “If that’s what you want to do, fine,” she said. “I won’t keep you. I just think it’s a shame that in addition to being a wife and mother your father has you thinking there is nothing else in life a girl can do. What about one day when your kids grow up and your husband works all day? What will you do then?”

  “I don’t have to worry about any of that. I’m only fifteen.”

  “Oh, I think all girls around your age should be challenged to look ahead and ponder who it is they want to be and what sort of life they’d one day like for themselves. But people don’t give it any thought until they’re grown up and disliking their lives and then they don’t know what to do. If only they could think back to when they were around your age and remember what sorts of things they loved to do, things they were good at and things that made them happy.”