Laughing Down the Moon (13 page)

“Allura, do you know anyone else who is blind?”

“No,” I answered.

“Okay,” she said, “then I am going to ask a very big favor of you.”

“Okay,” I replied, not knowing what to expect at all.

“All right, I…I think you might be thinking a lot, then, not knowing anyone else who is blind…” She faltered, not seeming to know how to say what she was kicking around in her mind. “I mean, you’re probably wondering what to do with me, like what you can ask and what you can’t ask and when you can help and wondering what I need and all of that…right?”

“So far, you are exactly right.” I hadn’t noticed how tense I had been until she said all of this. I couldn’t remember the last time I was this keyed up. “What do I need to…to know, or do, or…what is the favor?” I asked.

“Okay, well, I want you to ask whatever comes to your mind. I promise I won’t be offended and will answer if I can.” She laughed. “Or if I want to. And if you think that you can do something physically that will help, like when you took my arm on my front steps, well, I appreciated that.”

“You did?” I hadn’t wanted to seem patronizing and didn’t want to take advantage of a situation where I could touch her for a good reason, when I found myself wanting to touch her for no reason at all. I stopped for a yellow light so I could look at her. She had tucked her hair back behind her left ear. And with the way the streetlights glimmered on her lips, I thought she must have just licked them. I had to swallow hard. Was this taking advantage of the situation, to stare without her knowing? I felt rich.

“Yes, I did and stop staring at me,” Shiloh said. My eyes got big. Thank Goddess she was still smiling. I snapped my glance back to the road, the light turning green. I drove and felt busted.

“Sorry, it’s just…how did you know I was staring?” I asked.

“Mmm, it’s hard to explain. I just know,” she said, “I’ll try to think of how to explain that, but later, okay?”

“You’re just really…beautiful,” I said, deciding to be honest. What did I have to lose? Shiloh didn’t say anything in response, so I asked the favor that had popped into my head a minute earlier when she had asked me her favor.

“Shiloh,” I began, “will you return the favor and ask me what you want and tell me what you’re thinking, especially if there’s something I’m not doing right?”

“Wait,” she said and put her hand lightly on my thigh.

How did she know where my thigh was? Was she really blind or was she pulling my leg, no pun intended. Her eyes were clear, not the eyes I expected a blind person to have. I didn’t recall seeing a cane or a Seeing Eye dog at her house. Maybe this was some ruse…some reality TV stunt. “You never said whether or not you’d do the favor I asked for,” she reminded me.

“Oh,” I said, “yes, I will. I promise. Will you?”

Her hand still rested lightly on my thigh. I felt even richer than before.

“Yes, I promise I will. So we have a deal then,” she said, patting my thigh for emphasis. Too soon, her hand was back in her own lap. I knew she’d say yes, but even so, when she did, my ribs felt two sizes too small. I realized I had just wrapped my necklace so tightly around my fingers and neck that I was threatening to cut off my oxygen supply. I unwound my fingers and grabbed the steering wheel with both hands.

Before long though, we walked arm in arm into Sea Lavender’s and were seated. We ordered a bottle of Chianti and I told her we’d be here a long time if she expected me to drink my share of the bottle and still be sober to drive her home. She laughed and said that they closed at one and we should try to outlast anyone else who was here. Sometimes it seemed she could see me. She looked right at my eyes, I swear, every time I said something. It made me want to keep talking because I
wanted
her to see me. I wanted to feel her looking at me. But instead of asking her about that—I didn’t know how to phrase it anyway—I asked another question that had kept cropping up entire drive over here.

“Okay, so, without hesitation, Shiloh, I’m going to make good on my promise right now.”

“Good, shoot.”

“So you let me into your house and you know nothing about me. How can you let yourself do that? I mean, what if I robbed you or hurt you?”

“Well, I guess that would have sucked, but what if you didn’t and we hit it off?” she asked me in return.

“Hmm, good point. So have you always been this trusting?”

“No, when I could see I didn’t trust anyone, really.”

“You could see?” I was surprised. She seemed so happy and well adjusted. Why wasn’t she bitter about losing something she had once possessed?

“Yes, until I was thirty-three, but even then my vision had started to deteriorate. I feel more trusting now of others and can’t really explain why. Maybe it’s because I have no choice but to trust, you know?”

“I guess…kind of,” I said.

She told me about how she was diagnosed with retinitis-pigmentosa and about how her vision went crazy. As she put it, it was like living life in front of a fun house mirror. Then she said it just started disappearing slowly, bit by bit. It made me sad to think that she had once seen and now had nothing but darkness. I didn’t tell her this, but I felt it all the same. I didn’t pity her exactly. I didn’t get protective of her either, which surprised me, but I did feel bad that she couldn’t see the aquarium and the filled wineglasses. I was saddened that she couldn’t see the pristine paper tablecloth that was expecting fresh artwork to be created upon it with the four crayons—red, blue, green and yellow—that rested near the little spice set in the middle of the table. I wished she could see me and then felt selfish for that.

When dinner came, she told me all about her novel. I spent more time laughing about the antics on the lesbian retirement ranch she had created than I spent eating or drinking.

“How did you know I was a lesbian?” I asked Shiloh after our dessert plates were taken away. I was leaning forward with my elbows on the table even though I was so full I might burst.

“You’re a lesbian?” Shiloh’s upper lip curled into a grimace as she said the word.

Oh my Goddess, what was this? How could she not like lesbians? She was writing about them! Wasn’t
she
one? Wasn’t this a date? Shit. Hadn’t Collette asked if I were single? Yes, she had. Was this a trick Collette was playing on Shiloh? That nasty piece of work, Collette, if it was a joke.

“I…I thought you knew,” I said, pulling my elbows off the table and distancing myself from Shiloh.

“I’m sorry,” Shiloh burst out laughing. “That wasn’t nice of me. I’m so sorry!” She held her hand out and laid it on the table with her open palm up. She said, “Come here.” I put my hand in hers, and she squeezed it. She did not let go even after the squeeze ended. “I am so sorry, Allura, I was just kidding around. Are you okay?”

“Almost,” I said, even though the blood that had drained to my feet still hadn’t risen to anywhere near my brain. I didn’t want to have Shiloh thinking I was okay enough for her to let go of my hand, which she didn’t.

“I’m sorry,” she said again. “I didn’t know if you were when I first heard you laughing, but I hoped you were. I wanted you to be. And then after the pottery thing, where I recognized your laughter after all that clatter and the voices of the people who helped you, well, by then I really hoped you were a lesbian. Weird, hey? I had to ask Collette what she thought and she has no gaydar whatsoever, but she said you had potential.” Here she laughed a little and squeezed my hand once more. “Collette told me your hair might be too long for you to be a real lesbian, but she said she thought you might fall into the ‘lipstick lesbian’ category.”

“Oh nooo,” I groaned. “I’m not wearing lipstick, just to let you know.” I felt I should confess about the crookedness of my bangs as well, but didn’t.

Shiloh laughed and continued, “Well, so that’s when I asked her to at least ask you if she ever saw you again. And I figured if I hoped hard enough, you wouldn’t stand a chance, that even if you were straight, you’d succumb to my sparkling charm and wit and you’d convert just for me.”

I almost choked on the last sip of my wine. “And you’d win the toaster oven,” I teased.

“Yes,” she laughed with me, “and I feel it’s only fair to warn you that I am hoping hard for a few more things now.”

“So I
don’t
really stand a chance, do I?” I asked, pretending innocence and compliance.

“No, I’m afraid you don’t!” she said.

And that was when I knew Shiloh Liebermann liked me.

Chapter Seventeen

An Unprotected Patron

I replayed that first date in my head so many times over the next few days that I fully expected to wear a groove in my gray matter and get stuck with the memory of the night playing over and over like an old-fashioned record with a scratch on it. I was walking to a coffee shop a few blocks from home armed with my work. I needed a change of scenery to cajole my creative juices from the bottom of the jar they were residing in lately. I was enjoying the unseasonably mild weather and knew it wasn’t the smart thing to do, but I couldn’t help comparing the night to my first date with Mickey. The memories were so far at the opposite ends of the spectrum that they were hardly comparable, but I did it anyway. With Mickey there had been very little conversation on our first date. There was no laughter that I remember and bantering like old friends never entered the picture.

Conversation was scarily easy with Shiloh. So was the laughter. I didn’t expect this amount of emotion, of nervous joy and expectation, with Shiloh. I always have this idea in the back of my head when I have a first date that this could go really well, it could be great, even, but I never allow that idea to crawl to the front of my head. I certainly don’t give voice to that hope. I turned left one block short of Minnehaha Avenue to avoid the rush of traffic. A tall wall that had been erected the year the light-rail was put in buffered the noise and cast a shadow across the street. I looked into the front windows of the houses wondering how the inhabitants felt about looking out onto a wall of wood. A glossy black cat with hair that was neither short nor long wound itself around a porch column at the house I was about to pass, so I slowed and considered turning back. The cat hadn’t noticed me, so I figured I was safe to pass. He’d probably leave me alone, but I kept my eyes on him just in case.

I walked on as quietly as I could, hoping the cat would continue to rub his head on the post and keep his eyes downward. Just when I thought I was safe, his golden eyes locked onto mine. It was
the
cat. I was sure of it even before I spied his little black hind toes surrounding one white toe on each paw. The cat was giving me the bird. There’d be humor in this if it weren’t so creepy. He was definitely stalking me.

I broke my gaze from his and forced myself to continue walking. I didn’t look back even though I wanted to in case his stalking became a full-blown attack. I let myself carry on with comparing Mickey to Shiloh. Mickey’s friends had been the instigators of our relationship. All of them had thought I would be good for Mickey. My friends encouraged me to get on with the relationship because, as they put it, how could she not be the right one after so many wrong ones?

With Mickey, our first few encounters found us surrounded by her friends in one campus bar or another, shooting pool and eating burgers. What I realized after Mickey and I were already seriously involved was that what her friends had meant was I’d be a better partner for Mickey than the bottle of Jack Daniels was proving to be. For the first year of our relationship, Mickey was kind and attentive, and even though I had the feeling she never really let herself be
herself
with me, I enjoyed the time we shared together. Initially I’d thought her drinking to be a cute quirk. She was a self-admitted germaphobe and would joke about the alcohol washing away any rogue bacteria.

But after the first year, Mickey started hanging out with her old friends at the campus bars again, minus Trisha who had pretty much started to devote all her time to Patrick. After a few months of accompanying Mickey, it got old for me. I was not cut out to sit around hammering back beers and drinks, chasing balls around a table with a wooden stick and forcing smiles over the same tired old stories that were smiled over last night and the night before.

I threw myself into my writing career. Mickey threw herself further into the bottle. Pretty soon I stopped going out with her, and she took it personally, like I was rejecting her and not the idea of sitting in a dank bar doing nothing productive or meaningful for yet another night. Mickey claimed I had changed. When I thought about it, I couldn’t be sure that I hadn’t.

I hadn’t done bars much before meeting Mickey. I kept waiting for our relationship to get back to the place it had been during that first year. Ugh. As I thought about Shiloh, I asked myself why was I even opening myself to the possibility of that loss again. The possibility that I might be delusional, thinking that I found that forever person, going with the flow, giving all of myself to someone else, only to be left in the end and to be told that it “just wasn’t working anymore.” I would have hung in there with Mickey out of principle, but she didn’t give me the choice to do that.

Eventually, after living alone but together, Mickey told me that she no longer felt the same way for me and that we’d be better off apart. After she moved into the guest bedroom, I suggested she get help for her drinking problem. It was as if I suggested she slice off an arm. She called me temperamental and judgmental, and maybe I was. But I couldn’t understand going to the bar five nights a week, getting so wasted you could barely tell the cab driver your address and then sleeping it off until noon the following day.

Shiloh might not turn to the bottle to eclipse me out of her life, but my failed attempts at relationships before Mickey reminded me that most good things do come to an end. And was there really any point when something as equally heartbreaking would eventually happen, like it had with all my other relationships? Even for all of my ease with Shiloh a few nights ago, I still wondered if the intensity and hard work of getting to know someone new was worth it. I was still coming down from my high anxiety buzz from our first date. The phone conversations we had shared since had quelled my nerves, but the endings of those nerves still went haywire when I thought of her or heard her voice. This with Shiloh, whatever
this
might be, felt important and real. If it were real, then it would hurt that much more when it ended.