Laughing Down the Moon (26 page)

Shiloh, now relaxed and panting in my arms, fell to the bed beside me, letting one arm and leg drape over me. Her grace and weight soothed my senses. I held Shiloh as tightly as she held me. She burrowed her face into my neck. I smoothed her damp hair away from her cheek. She moved her hand to my face to do the same. I turned my face to her palm and felt every part of me relax. Being a believer in Karma, I had to wonder what I had done right to deserve this.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Blindsided

The next morning, after refueling with bagels and coffee, Shiloh and I sped past the houses in my neighborhood in an attempt to get her home in time to make it to class at Davidoff. Shiloh’s fingers toyed with the big, blue hat she held on her lap. I had warmed the car before we left, so her hat wasn’t necessary. Goddess knows how but she had returned her hair to its usual glossy perfection. It was tucked behind her ear and the edges flipped coyly at her chin. How did I get so lucky? Shiloh had asked me that very question about herself right before falling asleep for a couple of hours earlier this morning. I hadn’t had an answer, so all I had been able to do was kiss her gently until our breathing took on each other’s sleepy rhythm.

“Allura?” Shiloh tipped her chin, the edges of her hair drawing my eyes from the road, “were you being funny last night in bed?”

“Uhhh…” was my response. Being funny
in bed
? This might be the all-time worst question after making love for the first time with someone you really wanted to make love with again. Quite possibly a world record, but I couldn’t recall anything I’d said or done to be funny. What was she talking about? And did I really want to know?

I tried again, “Uhhh…what do you mean?”

“Well, I know how you think in humor, and you always try to make me laugh,” she began.

Even if I didn’t want to know what she was talking about, I had to ask, “And?”

“Well, when you were saying ‘Oh Goddess,’ were you being funny?” Her voice faltered at the end of her question.

Impenetrable walls shot up around me. She couldn’t be asking me this, could she?

“I wasn’t trying to be funny. Sorry if you thought I was.” I was surprised by how mean I sounded as I said it. Feeling stupid was making me angry. My heart hurt. I frowned. “I was just being myself.”

“I’m sorry.” Shiloh’s voice was quiet. “I thought you were playing around. The whole goddess thing has thrown me for a loop. Don’t you believe in God, Allura?”

Whoa! What? Is that where she was taking this? Really? Who the hell had I slept with last night?

“Apparently not like you do,” I bit out. Why was I getting so defensive? I tried to push down the walls, but I was too hurt to muster enough power to calm myself.

“So what, then? You believe in the goddess you were calling out to last night?”

“Yes. Is that a problem?” I had a feeling her answer would let me know that it was indeed a problem.

“It is a problem,” she confirmed.

“I believe there are several powers, entities, that exist, but I don’t believe there is just one, all by himself, who’s in charge of us all. I most strongly believe in the Goddess and the Mother Earth. God is fine, but
he’s
not so much my thing. I’m Pagan.”

“Pagan?” Shiloh’s voice was still quiet.

“Pagan.”

“So you weren’t just being…feminist?”

“Shiloh, don’t do this, not now…not after…” I sounded kind of pathetic in my own ears.

“Don’t do what?” Shiloh asked.

“I was being myself—Pagan.” I had to take a deep breath. “Regrettably, I was not being funny, and I was not being feminist.”

“When did you choose to be Pagan? And why would you choose a religion that is so obscure when there are real religions out there?”

Oh. My. Goddess. Hearing that, I decided I was done with relationships. We’d never discussed religion before. Why was it suddenly an issue? I couldn’t take this. I quit. Well, I’d quit right after I set this woman straight. Ha. Straight. Ha ha…hmm. Fuck it. I couldn’t even laugh with myself right now.

“Shiloh.” I didn’t care if I sounded condescending. “It was no decision. It was…well, it just was. It just is. What do you believe?” Why was I asking? I was through with this.

“I’m Jewish. I believe there’s only one God, no goddess. Judaism includes Goddess references, so I understand the
notion
of the Divine Feminine, but it’s just an idea. There’s no literal goddess—but I can understand the concept, figuratively.”

I doubted that. I felt crushed by the weight of the discovery that Shiloh was narrow-minded. I never saw that coming. Being blindsided like this made me cynical and that in turn made me mad at myself as well as at Shiloh.

“So that was your decision, then? To be Jewish?” This whole thing smacked of the hetero-slash-homo genetics-versus-decision argument. I couldn’t believe we were having the bloody conversation. How could this go so wrong just after it had gone so, so right?

“No.” Shiloh’s one-word answer made me hope she also saw the futility of this discussion. “Allura, I get the whole Christian thing—been there, dated that. But Pagan?”

I had no luck; she was still talking.

“And to not believe in one God? Really, Allura? Isn’t that kind of…I don’t know…kind of prehistoric?”

I sighed in response.

“And,” Shiloh continued, “nobody goes out and just chooses a religion. And if they did, who the hell would
choose
to be Jewish? Who would choose to be oppressed like Jews were and still are?”

“That’s the point I was trying to make, Shiloh. I didn’t choose.” That wasn’t true. I did choose, but only because Paganism fit. My parents had raised me Christian, but it never really felt right, so after a lot of exploration, I discovered Paganism was a perfect spiritual match for me. I didn’t need to explain myself though. I was right. “Who have Pagans ever oppressed anyway? It’s not like we’ve ever gone out on our own version of a witch hunt to oppress anyone.”

“That’s not the issue,” Shiloh said. “I wasn’t saying Pagans were oppressive…I was saying my being Jewish was never a choice.”

“Well, maybe it should have been,” was my retort. I wasn’t making sense; I wasn’t able to put into words what I wanted Shiloh to know.

Trees, houses, traffic lights, pedestrians and of course a goddamn black cat all streaked together beyond my windshield. So that I didn’t hyperventilate or cry in front of Shiloh, who might not even
deserve
my tears at this point, I started to focus on one thing at a time outside my car, rather than letting them wash into a big blur.

The trees in their late winter nakedness loomed cold and forbidding, arching over the street like claws. Under them an elderly man walking his ancient, gray-muzzled golden retriever, looked at me as we passed. His eyes bore into mine as if he knew all my secrets, of which there were not many. Time misaligned itself as my head swiveled to hold his deliberate, wrinkled gaze.

Looking at him made me recall Madame DuVaulle’s words about falling in love. What, exactly, had she said would come of that love? I combed through the tangle of remembered phrases in my mind. She’d said that I was going to fall in love and that it might be with a career or with a person. Well. That wasn’t helpful at this moment. Falling in love with a career was not much of a consolation prize for losing Shiloh. Damn it! Losing Shiloh was not exactly what this felt like. Rather it felt like having Shiloh replaced by some conservative, self-righteous person. It felt like we were breaking up, breaking apart from each other. God? Were we really breaking up over God? Kill me now.

Madame DuVaulle had also said that I could run blindly in the snow and I’d be safe, or something along those lines. I knew she had been speaking of Shiloh in the park, but maybe she had also been speaking of life in general. I could only hope so because all I felt right now was a monumental case of The Funk reappearing. I swerved to avoid a squirrel and Shiloh’s right hand shot out for the door, but she didn’t say anything. I looked back in my rearview mirror and the squirrel still sat, seemingly undecided on which way to go. Little fucker probably had his own big case of The Funk. If he didn’t move his tiny gray butt, he’d have a case of death.

“Sorry. Squirrel,” I offered Shiloh.

She didn’t respond. What was she thinking? Without vision, without being able to let her gaze drift around, she did not have the luxury of giving her mind something else to chew on as she contemplated my crime of Paganism. Was she even thinking of that anymore? I peeked sideways at her face. She looked thoughtful, but beyond that, I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Her eyelashes were nearly resting on her cheekbones. Her eyes were downcast as if she were looking at something on the floor of my car. Her face was still emotionless, but her air was sad and vulnerable. Tears started to wreak havoc with my vision. There were only four more blocks to go before we’d be at her house. I couldn’t bear to leave this unresolved.

“Shiloh, what are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking that we’re really very different from each other.”

She rolled and unrolled the belt of her pea coat around her hat in her lap. We were different from each other? Of course we were, but she was implying that her different was acceptable and mine was not. The judgment in that statement felt so heavy! Right. Now I was really done with this. If she thought we were so different, well, her loss. The tears that had started from sadness turned to angry tears. This relationship wasn’t going to get a fair chance, was it? I felt robbed.

I pulled to the curb in front of Shiloh’s house with a gentleness I didn’t feel.

“Yes,” I said, “we really are different from one another because while you are busy looking for deal-breaking differences, I’m looking for…” Where was I going with this? Indignation and hurt were pulling words from my lips faster than I could make sense of them. “…I’m looking for common ground in our differences,” I finished. That was a definite lie on my part. I’d been the one looking for deal breakers. Would I have been more willing to listen to Shiloh’s religious concerns had I not just spent over a month warning myself not to fall in love with her?

Before Shiloh could say anything, I unfastened my seat belt, exited the car as noisily as possible so she’d know what I was doing, went around to open her door, gently took her by the wrist and walked her to her front door. I expected her to start punching in her security code on the little numbered Braille pad, but she just stood there. In my head, I said goodbye to Shiloh. Maybe she wished me a silent goodbye as well. But as it was, I left her there without speaking.

I made it a few blocks before I had to pull over and succumb to the tears. With my forehead pressed to my steering wheel, I bawled. My tears fell into my lap like rain, but my sadness choked me, so I made no noise other than some tortured, tense rasps and gasps. What the hell had just happened? Were we so different from one another that we couldn’t bridge the gap and be in love? What the hell was so bad about being Pagan? Did Shiloh have some misinformation from scary movies or children’s fairy tales that she was confusing with Paganism? What the hell? Or maybe I could blame this all on Elizabeth. Maybe her revenge on me for comparing Daniel’s addiction to Mickey’s was to secretly make Shiloh’s acquaintance and turn her against me.

I kept my head on the steering wheel even after my tears slowed and my throat loosened up enough to allow me to breathe again. I contemplated driving over to Madame DuVaulle to tell her to take her prediction of love and shove it up her psychic ass, but I figured she’d somehow hone in on that message as it floated about the cosmos. A snort of laughter, made sharp by a post-cry hiccup, forced me to pick my head up off the wheel and search for a tissue. I flipped open my glove box just as my cell phone rang.

My shoulders tensed, yet a jolt of hope coursed through me. Oh, thank you Goddess! I grabbed my cell, hoping to see Shiloh’s name in the caller ID, but it wasn’t Shiloh.

“Hi, Falina!” I forced lightheartedness into my voice so she wouldn’t know I’d been crying.

“Allura…” Falina’s voice cracked. Unlike me, she could not hide the tears or the fear in her voice. “Allura, Mom and Dad have been in an accident.”

Chapter Thirty-Four

Letting Go

Falina, Alaina and I, along with our mom’s relatives were the first wave of a cheerless family reunion held in the waiting room of Flagler Hospital in Florida. Dad’s only brother and his family were on their way from Seattle. They were expected to arrive in a few hours. Dad’s sister would round out the reunion when she arrived the following day.

Mom was healing nicely. Her doctor and nurses were pleased with her recovery. Dad was still in an induced coma that, according to his doctors, would allow his brain and body to recover from his collision with the RV’s steering wheel and doorframe. He was scheduled for surgery to relieve pressure on his brain. The seven of us in the waiting area had just finished filing through his room, one at a time, to see him. I was the last in the line.

When I exited Dad’s room, I had to rest with my back against the corridor wall for support and tip my head back to keep the tears in check. Like this, they ran down the back of my throat instead. Behind my closed eyelids, I pictured Dad as I had just seen him, small and pale in his hospital bed, his chest rising and falling from the air being forced into his lungs. The blips of his heart monitor and the digital static reflecting his low blood pressure accompanied the mechanical sighs of the ventilator.

For a moment, when I had first entered his room, I doubted it was really my father. I knew the chart in his room would read “Benjirou Satou,” so I didn’t check it, but it was staggering to think that this was Dad beneath the tubes, the bandages and the unfamiliar, sterile sheet.

When I was able to open my eyes there in the corridor, I contemplated walking back into the waiting area and family reunion. But I found my body was uncooperative. Instead, I pushed open the door to Dad’s room and reentered the dim chamber.