Sanibel Scribbles (51 page)

He knew that by taking the assignment he would not be able to see Vicki this summer, and that might alter their future together. He didn’t know if it was the sort of place Vicki would like. She had mentioned that she wanted to travel and had seemed disappointed when he had once said he was done with traveling. Maybe she would go with him, and together they could build their home, their floating Amazon hut, whatever, or at least she might wait for him to return. He wanted her for a wife. He could hardly wait. He had gone over the proposal a million times in his mind and shared the idea with a woman sitting next to him on the plane.

“We’ll get out of the car, and I’ll mention that I haven’t seen snow in years. Then, as I struggle to carry the luggage toward her place, I’ll slip and crash in the snow.”

“Don’t lose the ring,” replied the woman.

“Then, she’ll run over to help me, and she’ll probably be laughing. Instead of getting up, I’ll get on my hands and knees.”

“Will she be on the ground with you?”

“No, of course not. I hope not. She’ll be standing next to this crazy snow person she keeps talking about.”

“A what?”

“A snow man of some sort. She called me on my cell phone and said something about it reminding her of her grandmother. She gets a bit eccentric at times.”

“I guess so. Will this snow creature intervene in any way?”

“Let’s hope not.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

THE SUN ROSE AND SET
some 365 times, over and over again. Fridays arrived, but Mondays crept quickly around the corner every time. Vicki reached the end of her journal, her letters to Grandma, and saw time flipping by like the pages of a book. She wanted to read life slowly, paying attention to the details. Sometimes she read the same sentence twice. She couldn’t ask summer to take its time. There would be too much ice cream consumed. Winter arrived when it liked, and with it, she imagined shark’s eyes, fighting conchs, and other seashells crawling around Sanibel sandbars at low tide, attacking each other for dinner, leaving the empty shells to wash onto shore. Fall had much to do in such little time. She would never be able to control the timing of the leaves turning orange or crisp, or falling to the ground, or the time it took people to rake them into piles and burn them before the snow. She could only control her own pace, and she wanted to walk through life, slowly, as a conductor who had once wanted the piece played only loudly but now interpreted it differently and decided when the volume should change.

Once in awhile her breathing troubles still haunted her, and she continued writing about the episodes, allowing her fears to be expressed through the writing. Often she prayed. Sometimes she would close her eyes and visualize herself on the dock of Tarpon Key or in the park outside the Prado Museum in Madrid. She no longer feared death. That fear and its ridiculous obsession belonged to her dark days, or, in Picasso’s language,
her “blue period” of madness. She painted with a rose palette now.

As her days grew busy from the demands of practicing psychology, she handled things well and simply remembered there was a time for everything. She cried at the thought of the cold, dead ground where the tulips once stood. She smiled when she thought of spring and the ducks arriving from the south. She closed her eyes and laughed at summer and the people lining up to buy ice cream. She went through the motions of the backward good-bye wave just thinking about fall and the ducks heading south again. Yes, there was a season for everything, and this God knew.

Her patients each had a unique story to tell, and she cherished listening to them. She had put much time into her thesis and had felt proud turning it in. Using Denver’s analogy, she classified personality types and diagnostic states as vessels. Some ships anchored at a specific point for quite some time. Others just needed to refuel for a brief period. Her paper went more in depth than that and triggered significant debate and discussion in the psychology department. Now, in her practice, she specialized in anxiety disorders and in helping her patients through their dark days of life.

On February 14, at four o’clock in the morning, the phone rang, waking her. She had programmed her phone to only ring once, so almost instantly a voice came on the answering machine, a familiar voice from her past shouting,
“Victoria, Victoria!”

As if riding on the wings of a butterfly, Vicki flew to the phone so quickly she could hardly catch her breath.
“Hola?”
she said as she held the receiver tightly to her face.

The man on the other end of the line said he couldn’t refuse the wrinkled piece of paper that Triste had one day waved before him. He had tucked it away for quite some time; then, with the help of an interpreter, he had called the school and tracked her down. Her home phone number was unlisted so she knew he had gone to great investigative lengths to reach her.

They both had much to say, and several times they both talked at once, and then laughed. His voice came like an echo across an ocean, and she tried hard to picture his face, but the waves were too high. She had no
photographs of him, only those in her mind. Still, they had faded with time. As he spoke of his life in recent years, she stared at the silk tulips standing proudly in a vase on her desk. The voice on the phone said he had spotted her standing tall on her first day of classes and that he had picked her, of all people, to ask for directions.

“You spoke funny Spanish,” he said in a strange English accent, “but you stood tall and proud, like a flower.”

“Rafael,” she said, smiling. “You’ve been learning English. I’m proud of you.”

“Tell me, Victoria, have you been changing with time?”

“Wiser and better, and you?”

They talked long enough to generate a phone bill that could have paid for an expensive four-course, or as Rafael would say, “five fork” dinner. Neither knew how to say good-bye, so Rafael finally took charge.

“Te quiero Victoria de los Estados Unidos. Te quiero.”

He hung up before she could get his phone number, and, once again, she had forgotten to get his last name.

Awake, she didn’t care about time. She’d always have the next day’s siesta to catch up.

Dear Grandma
,

You’ll never guess what time it is. It’s four o’clock in the morning, and being awake at this hour reminds me of the sleepless nights I went through after Rebecca died. I don’t know that I’ll ever hear from Rafael again, just as I don’t know that I’ll ever make it back to Tarpon Key. I might not need an island as remote as that again
.

Last night I had a nightmare. I was holding on for dear life to a raft I made myself out of a few logs and ropes. Of course it was dark out and the waves stood high. With my hands in the water, I paddled my way toward a little island but never made it there. Suddenly I saw Ben, as crazy as this sounds, bobbing up and down in the water. There were
other men as well, men I once dated, and men I once left. I couldn’t see their faces or remember their names, nor did I care about them. I only cared about Ben, and I cried my eyes out seeing him in the Sea of Forgetfulness. Perhaps I made a mistake? Perhaps he didn’t belong there? I searched around in the water for Rafael and called out to him, but I couldn’t find him. I don’t believe he had been tossed in there just yet. Then my raft fell apart, and a big boat rescued me. Unfortunately, they were heading for the mainland and refused to take me to the island
.

My life is comfortable now, like a warm breeze blanketing my skin. I once lived inside pink walls that smelled of waffle cones
.

When the cone broke, I felt so cold. I wondered why anyone would ever want to leave a comfort zone. Now I find myself loosening the bedding at night so my toes can stick out. Yes, I feel confined when my toes can’t breathe. Anyway, now I value the voyages we take from one comfort zone to the next
.

P.S. Do you see my writing to you? Do you read these letters?

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

VICKI HAD BEEN SWINGING
in the white wicker chair on her porch for hours, listening to the water as it gently arrived on Sanibel’s shore. Her hair, now gray and somewhat purple, lent her a look of wisdom, like a seasoned woman who had sailed through life, through choppy water, through calm water, through storms and through sunsets. She could close her eyes and let herself sit in silent contentment, a woman who had conducted countless symphonies in life and used the silences to hear the music. She read the very last letter she had ever written to her grandmother, over thirty years earlier.

Dear Grandma
,

Sitting here at the Lighthouse Beach inspires me in a special way. I sit here all the time. I am thankful to be living here on Sanibel Island and to be raising my babies here. Sometimes I miss my psychology practice, but I’m glad I have never missed my babies’ first steps or first words. I know I can return to work any time I choose, and I can work just a couple days a week if I like. There’s so much I once wanted to do in life, and now I just want to savor life. Have I lost my ambition? No, I don’t believe so
.

This is the last letter I will write to you, so I’m writing to say good-bye. You see, Grandma, I’ve been coming here to the Lighthouse Beach to write for a long time now and, well, one day, when I began a typical letter to you, I suddenly realized you had better things to do up in Heaven, so instead, I addressed that particular letter to God. Sure, I could have started writing, ‘Dear Diary,’ but I didn’t feel like locking my worries and dreams into a book. Diaries are too good at keeping secrets, whereas God, well, hopefully He shares some secrets with his angels, who then might want a project to work on
.

Grandma, I haven’t written to you since, and I’m only writing this time to explain why I stopped my letters to you. As I scribbled my dreams and goals to dear God, the results were powerful beyond belief. I felt such immense peace when I surrendered my life and all the things I wanted to do over to God and to His will. I am confident He reads what I write. I still write to God on a regular basis, often sitting at the Lighthouse Beach just as the sun wakes. Sometimes I scribble so fast and passionately that no person would ever be able to read my handwriting, but it doesn’t matter. God doesn’t check for grammar or penmanship
.

So Grandma, this is why the letters to you have stopped. I love you and always will and I know I will see you again. This is why I must now live my life. I must enjoy my time
.

P.S. Until we meet again!

She could hardly wait for her company to arrive as she closed the last letter to her grandmother, then closed her eyes. She allowed herself to look back for a moment, but only as long as it took for a soft wave to arrive on shore, carrying treasures from the Gulf of Mexico with it, yet leaving that body of water behind.

She opened her eyes and knew from the location of the sun that it
would soon be time to plug in the string of miniature white Christmas-tree lights that decorated the porch and windows of her Sanibel bungalow. She wanted everything to be lit up and festive when they arrived.

She walked inside and down the hall, framed with pictures of her children, fully grown. Noah, her firstborn, was now in his late forties and living in Ann Arbor, Michigan, of all places. This, she was glad of. He lived far from her, yet close to the world she grew up in, her old Midwest comfort zone. It had provided her with a wonderful place to visit several times a year, ever since he had started and graduated from the University of Michigan.