Laughing Down the Moon (18 page)

“Is she really? That is bizarre.” He tugged at his chin.

“Yes and she was also at the pottery studio one night when I was there. So I had noticed her twice, but never did I get the impression that she couldn’t see.”

“Too many coincidences. Maybe she really can see, and this is one of those TV shows where they prank some poor person,” Trisha offered.

“I know, I thought that too, for a few minutes,” I confessed, “but I’m pretty sure she really is blind. I only figured it out when I was picking her up to go out on our first date.”

“What happened? Did you try to shake her hand, and you guys missed? Or what?” Patrick asked, cracking himself up with his imagined mishap.

“Patrick.” Trisha’s tone held a warning. I think she thought he was going to take joking too far.

“No, nothing like that. She went into her house to get something, I followed and from the way she ran her hand along the counter to find her purse, I could tell. I felt absolutely stupid for not knowing. I think she thought I was going to call off the date.”

“Did you want to, at all?” Patrick asked. The joking was set aside for the time being.

“Not once,” I answered. “And it could have been a really awkward evening except she made me promise to ask whatever I needed to and to do whatever I thought would help her, you know? So it’s going well and…and I really like her.”

“Cool,” Trisha said.

“Yeah, that is cool,” Patrick said, looking really thoughtful. “You know what’s even cooler?”

“What?” I asked in response.

“The fact that she couldn’t see your bangs.”

Book of Shadows

Offering of Gratitude

Cast the circle using Magnolia Incense.

“Blessed be Creatures of Light.”

Light a wine-colored votive candle. Place it in a glass jar at the center of the yard.

Greet and honor the four directions and the universal elements.

Focus on the flame of the votive remembering that “votive” means “offering.”

Consider the feelings of the first person to discover fire

and the first person to use fire

as an intensifier for her desires and needs.

Recall the mysteries around fire and its light.

Pour gratitude into the flame

Thanking it for its light,

its guidance,

and its comfort.

Pour gratitude into the flame for the Goddess,

God, Mother Earth and the Universe.

Request that the flame bring the gratitude to these profound entities.

Thank the four directions and the universal elements.

“Blessed be Creatures of Light.”

Do not extinguish the candle but let it burn

until it extinguishes itself.

Open the circle.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Big Steps

The smell of coffee woke me. As I padded down to get a cup from the coffeemaker, which was on a timer, something felt different. There was a hush around me, like someone had turned down the world’s volume, but I couldn’t put my finger on what was different. I pulled a handmade-by-yours-truly mug from the cupboard and admired the iridescent brown glaze job on the clunky thing. At thirty dollars a visit, I’m sure this was the priciest, ugliest coffee mug ever, but I liked it. I had built it with coils of clay and had only smoothed out the inside for easy cleaning, but the outside was left ribbed. When I ran my hand up and down its side, my knuckles clacked together in a way that sounded strange but felt good.

I poured a cup and watched the steam rise lazy as a kid with a remote control. I held the cup to my lips but didn’t sip it yet. Instead I breathed in the steam and turned, with the cup still to my mouth, and looked out the kitchen window.

“Hot damn!” I hollered and put down the cup.

“Hot damn!” Dwight echoed from upstairs.

Through the windowsill herb garden I could see a brilliant white landscape in the park across the street. I was surprised that there wasn’t one kid in the park, but it was pretty early and a school day. The vast expanse of unbroken snow was almost blinding. Shiloh. I was going to call Shiloh to see if she knew that it had snowed. She was an early riser. She had told me this over the Scrabble board. Any excuse to call her seemed like a good one, but the first big snowfall was an exceptionally good excuse. She picked up on the third ring.

“Hello,” she said not even sounding sleepy.

“Hi Shiloh—it’s Allura,” I said. I didn’t allow myself time to get shy with her even though I felt it coming. “It snowed last night! Did you know?” I asked right away.

“No,” she laughed, “I didn’t. What kind?”

“Uhm,” I said bending over to peer through the window, “it’s the kind that sticks to tree branches. Everything is outlined in white, you know? And it stayed on the ground. There’s actually quite a lot of it out there.” I leaned closer to the window. I could see my neighbor shoveling a path down the sidewalk. I gasped. It looked like it was over a foot deep. From my kitchen it seemed like the kind of snow that a person could fall down into without getting hurt. I looked harder at the burgeoning path down the sidewalk. No, a person would definitely not get hurt if she fell in this stuff.

“I knew it felt different this morning when I got up!” Shiloh said, sounding happy about the snow.

“Hey Shiloh,” I asked, “do you have an hour or so free today?” If she had time, I had a plan.

“Yeah, I don’t have to be at Davidoff to teach class until noon,” she said.

“Do you want to come and play in the snow?” I asked.

“Oh, I’d love to!” she cried. “Come get me!”

And so I did. I picked her up at her house and then drove her back to mine. We didn’t go inside, however. Instead I held her mittened hand in mine. I walked with her to the middle of the park. We were the only people there, and there was not one thing around for at least 150 feet on all sides of us. It was perfect. I described what was and what wasn’t around us, so she could picture it.

“Shiloh, remember when you told me the thing you missed most was taking really big steps?” I asked her, still holding her hand, but not walking any longer.

“Yes?” she answered.

“I think this is your chance,” I said. “There’s nothing around, and if you do fall, you won’t get hurt. The snow will protect you.”

“No way!” she laughed, clasping my hand more tightly in hers.

“Yes, come on, we’ll take really big steps together to start out. Then you can do it on your own,” I said. “I’ll watch to make sure you don’t get in trouble, and I’ll holler if you need to stop.”

I looked at her face. I could see she was trying to decide. She was breathtaking. She had an enormous blue knit hat pulled down over her head. It pushed the wisps of her black bangs toward her light blue eyes. Her cheeks were red. I didn’t know if it was the cold or the idea of big steps that reddened them. Either way, she was the prettiest person I’d ever seen. I hoped this was a good idea. I hoped she would enjoy it.

“Wait,” I said, “let me see something.” I let go of her hand and fell backward into the snow before I could think about it and chicken out. It was perfect. It didn’t hurt a bit. “You’ll be safe and pretty comfortable if you fall. I just tested it,” I said, standing up and brushing snow off my butt. I took her hand in mine again.

“Okay,” she said and bit at her bottom lip, “but I’ll tell you when to let go of my hand.”

“All right,” I said. “Let’s take big steps in this direction first,” I said as I guided her forward. She took big steps, and I trotted alongside her. It was hard at first to stride out because the snow was on the heavy side, but once we got going we could almost run. Shiloh started laughing, her breath coming out in a wonderful puff of fog that we both blasted right through with more big steps.

“I love it!” she yelled. “Let’s turn around. You can let go of my hand, but stay next to me!” She sounded exhilarated but a bit scared.

“I’ll stay right by you.” I turned her around while still holding her hand. We started taking really big steps back. Then we got our speed up. “Okay?” I hollered.

“Okay,” she hollered back and let go of my hand. She didn’t slow down at all but kept running. She was taking huge steps and shrieking the entire time. I had to race hard to keep up with her, she was going so fast. We ran all the way across the park, leaving a path of churned up snow behind us. Shiloh started to slow down right when I started thinking about warning her to do so. She was still laughing as she held out her hand in my direction, but she didn’t stop altogether.

I grabbed her hand and swung her into my arms, and before I knew it, she brought her face close to mine, close enough for me to see that there were tears on her lashes and cheeks. Then she was kissing me. Our mouths were warm even though our noses and chins were cold. We were both out of breath, so it was a gaspy kiss, but it lasted and lasted until Shiloh pulled me down on top of her in the snow. I tried not to squish her as I landed. I rolled to my side while keeping my arms around her. She was laughing and I think crying. She pushed her face near mine again and murmured, “Thank you, Allura.” So I kissed her again.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Soundtracks

I stretched my legs up the wall and blushed even though no one could see my bare thighs when my bathrobe fell back and pooled around my waist on the bed.

“So, then I decided that we needed to have a soundtrack for the wedding,” Shiloh was explaining why she spent her thirteenth summer grounded to the house, “because everyone had the traditional songs, and my brother and I thought my sister deserved something extra special since she and her soon-to-be husband could only afford a backyard wedding at my parents’ house.”

“This isn’t going to end well, is it?” I asked.

“Not as bad as you might think, but if I had to do the whole thing over, I think we could have chosen less provocative songs,” Shiloh continued.

“‘Walk Like an Egyptian?’” I tried to think of the worst 80’s songs possible.

Shiloh laughed. “No, that would have been benign compared to what we chose. The worst part about it was that we thought it would be especially magical if it were a total surprise. If suddenly the music were to emanate from hidden speakers. We waited for days, listening to the radio, for the disc jockey to play the songs we wanted. When the songs came on, we hit record on our boom box, and we felt like we won the lottery or something. Lucas and I spent all night prior to the wedding rigging up the wires and the speakers to blast out over the backyard from his bedroom windows.”

“‘Hungry Like the Wolf’?” I tried again.

“No,” Shiloh laughed. “We got all the way through ‘I Might Like You Better If We Slept Together’ by Romeo Void and half way through Madonna’s ‘Like a Virgin’ before my dad found where the music was coming from and ripped the wires from the speakers.” I was laughing too hard to comment, so Shiloh went on, “These were the most romantic, wedding-appropriate songs two thirteen-year-olds could come up with. We did it with respect and love in mind, truly, but my parents saw it differently. We got grounded. My sister has since told me that her friends still talk about it now and then, so she at least saw the humor in it.”

“I love it,” I said. I did love it. I loved having my ear pressed to my cell phone listening to Shiloh’s laugh. I loved that she had called me once a day since our snow date, just to chat as she put it. With my free hand, I bunched up a pillow under my head and then switched hands on my phone because my right elbow was starting to ache from being bent for so long. I should have found my Bluetooth earpiece. Tomorrow, I’d have it ready for Shiloh’s call. Or maybe I’d actually call her first.

“Okay,” she continued, “so you asked me about my first love, and I got sidetracked.”

“I don’t mind at all,” I reassured her.

“Well, the whole grounding thing was partly responsible. My cousin Althea’s parents, my mom’s sister and my uncle, were having some trouble with their relationship. Apparently they needed some space and time to discover whether or not they should stay together or if they should split up, so Althea came to live with us for the summer. And Althea’s best friend, Mary Claire, visited a few times in late May, when Althea first came. I’m going to tell you it was love at first sight, but Mary Claire would tell you otherwise because I was sort of horrible to her at first.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I think it was because I liked her,
like that,
and I didn’t know what to do with that, you know?” Shiloh almost sounded thirteen again as she told me this. “So I had this crush thing happening. It caught me off guard because I had expected it to happen, of course, but not, definitely not, with a girl. So I picked on her, called her names, ruined her time with Althea. I still can’t figure out why they spent so much time around the house when they knew I’d be there because I was grounded. Althea and Mary Claire were lucky enough have a break from me in June when they went to summer camp together. When they came back in July, I had sort of come to terms with what I was feeling, so I was a lot nicer to her.”

“And were your feelings reciprocated?” I asked, hoping for Shiloh that they were.

“Yes, but not acted on, you know?” she said. “It was fabulous and terrible all at once. I knew she knew I liked her, I knew she liked me back, but we were never alone. Althea was always around and…well, I’m glad today that the tension didn’t kill us both. July was a long, hot month that year. And I never got grounded again.”

“Ughhh! I feel for you!” I sighed. “Do you still see her?” Dumb word choice, I realized half a second later.

“Not really, not on purpose anyway.” Shiloh didn’t seem to notice or care about my faux pas. “We were both at Pride a few years ago though, and she recognized me. She came and said hi. Funny, hey? How we know before we even really know?” she asked.

“Yeah, it is funny,” I agreed, thinking about the first girl I fell in love with. She had been gay, and the thought had never crossed my mind that she might not be, or that I might not be. We never even checked with each other, we just knew or assumed. In my experience now, we always check with people before we let ourselves assume anything. Hadn’t Shiloh checked with me first? Well, hadn’t she had Collette check for her? Why was that? Why couldn’t we just trust ourselves to be good judges of who might be right for us?