Lila Blue (4 page)

As we approached the stairs, the
two white cats I'd seen in the night emerged from the tall beach grass that
grew along the stone sea wall at the base of the cliff. They brushed against
Lila's ankles, and one even stood on its back legs and stretched its front paws
to her waist like a dog to get its ears scratched.

The cats ignored me, which was
fine, because I had no idea what to do with them. Mom and I had always lived in
apartments that didn't allow pets, so while I had seen cats at my friends'
houses, I'd never gotten friendly with one. Besides, these weren't regular
cats. Something was weird about them. Their voices for one thing. They were
yowly and loud and had about a dozen distinct meows, a vivid vocabulary of
demanding sounds. Lila carried on a conversation with them like old friends,
which I guess they were. After she told them how beautiful and brave and smart
they were and petted them everywhere they demanded to be petted, they raced up
the stairs ahead of us.

"Chloe and Zoe," Lila
said. "Twin sisters. They came to me in a dream, and we've been together
six years."

"Are they normal?" I
asked. "They seem different."

Lila laughed. "They’re
different all right. They're lilac point Siamese, which is why their eyes are
such a pale shade of blue and their points are so light."

"I never had a pet," I
said, to let her know I wasn't going to be any good at bathing them or playing
catch with them or whatever people did to take care of animals.

"Siamese are more like people
than some other pets," Lila said. "They'll warm up to you."

I thought, right, but I might never
warm up to them.

 "Siamese are cautious."
Lila grinned at me. "Smart, like you."

Before we went indoors, Lila rinsed
the sand off her feet from a faucet near the porch. Beach houses are different
from normal houses. The front yard is the ocean. The back yard, if there is
one, borders the street. Lila's entrances were on the sides of her house, the
south side being the kitchen door from the garage and the north side being the
main door into the living room. The big wooden porch outside the main door
served as part of the walkway from the street to the ocean. Three broad stairs
led up to the street level and three more led down to the stepping stone path
toward the beach stairs. The porch itself was big enough for a party. It had
sturdy railing everywhere so you couldn't step off into the scrubby vegetation
surrounding it.

On the porch sat a large flat woven
basket full of pretty rocks, shells, and driftwood. There were no shells in it
like the one I had carefully slipped into my coat pocket though. Mine was
special.

"Those are hereby your beach
shoes," Lila said, pointing to my sopping feet. "Let's rinse them
off. We'll get new ones for nonbeach."

After I'd rinsed the sand off my
shoes and socks and the bottoms of my jeans where the wave got me, we sat side
by side on the broad porch steps, dried our feet with faded bath towels, and
watched the fog's progress. It had already eaten the waves and the black rocks
where the waves crashed up. Gauzy fingers of fog were making their way across
the beach toward the sea wall below us, silent as smoke. Lila seemed in no
hurry to go indoors, so I pulled up my hood and huddled down in my coat,
waiting for old Dragon Breath to cover us. In a few minutes it did, misting our
faces with salty coolness.

Lila sat breathing fog as though it
were sacred, and while I was reluctant to disturb her, I had to know. "Do
I have to go to church with you?" I asked.

Lila came out of her fog and looked
at me. There were little beads of water lined up on her eyebrows and lashes.
"What church, Cassy?"

"Sunday church." I shook
my head. "You called me Cassy."

"I'm sorry, sweetheart. I know
you like to be called Sandy. I've been thinking of you all these years as
Cassy. Forgive me."

"Cassy?"

"Yes, when you were two years
old, the first thing out of your mouth when I met you was, 'I'm Cassy. What's
your name?' You were very mature verbally."

"I was here when I was
two?"

"Not here. Idaho. Your parents
brought you to stay with your grandpa and me for a few weeks in Moscow, where
your dad grew up. It was idyllic. Your mother took such good care of you. She
dressed you in ruffled outfits with matching socks and put little pink bows in
your hair. Your daddy carried you around on his shoulders everywhere. We all
adored you."

"Idaho," I said, suddenly
chilled to my bones. I hugged myself so hard I felt the sand dollar in my
pocket break into pieces. Its crumbling called up some fragile part of me that
was broken, and I cried and sobbed and hugged myself harder.

Lila sat beside me, both of us
enveloped in salty Dragon Breath, until all the tears and sobbing were gone.
When it was over, Lila gave me her headscarf to wipe my eyes and blow my nose.
I sat twisting the damp ends of the bandana in my hands for a long time,
waiting for Lila to say something, but she was silent.

Finally I looked down at my toes,
which were pale and blue tinged from cold, and said, "She tore up my birth
certificate."

"Oh, sweetheart, I'm so
sorry." She put her arm around me and hugged me close for a moment then
released me before I became uncomfortable with hugging.

"I don't remember him."

"Your mother didn't tell you
what happened?"

"She told me he was a liar and
she wished she'd never met him. She said some other stuff, but she's a liar
too. That's all I know."

Lila sighed. Then we both sighed.

"I was afraid of that,
Sandy," she said. "You're here now. This is good. When you are ready,
I'll tell you everything I know. We have plenty of time."

"Is he alive?" It was all
I really needed to know to begin with.

"No, Cassandra. Your father is
dead. He died when you were four years old. There was an accident." That
seemed all she wanted to tell to begin with.

We sat for several minutes letting
the fog deposit tiny drops of water all over us.

"I broke my shell," I
said, reaching in my pocket to see what remained of it.

"Show me."

I pulled out three large pieces and
lots of smaller eggshell thin chips plus what looked like sand.

"From sand, to sand,"
Lila said. She picked up one of the larger pieces and said, "Look at the
little chambers inside. If you slice the top off a sand dollar, there's a lovely
star pattern inside, underneath where the flower is on top. So complicated and
lovely and simple, all at the same time. Beautiful."

"But it's broken," I
said. "The wave gave me a special gift and I broke it." I felt fresh
tears spring to my eyes, but I didn't let them out.

"Oh, everything is perfect,
don't you see? Everything changes. We make ourselves miserable if we hang on to
what used to be."

"I wanted to keep it," I
said. "I wanted to give it to my mother." I don't even know why I
said that, because the thought hadn't entered my head until I heard it come out
of my mouth. I sounded like a spoiled child.

"Here," she said, and she
gently handed the piece back to me.

I arranged it along with the other
remains on the wooden porch beside me, making a little collage of ruin, then
shook the smallest sand particles out of my pocket.

Lila pulled the big basket of rocks
and seashells over to where we were sitting. She chose a large spiral shell
that was creamy colored with an intricate design of pale purple lines. It was
perfect except for a round hole at the top.

"Look, Sandy," she said.
"This creature was alive one time. It's a big shell, so the animal lived
quite a few years. Mollusks mature slowly in this cold water. This is the
skeleton of some old gal who had kids and grandkids and all, and then another creature
came along and ate her.

"After her skeleton was
cleaned and polished, Mother Ocean tossed it up on this beach. Before this was
a mollusk shell, it was a fish or a plant or a whale or a tiny octopus or part
of a pine log or a deer that washed into the sea during a flood. Everything in
nature is alive, dead, alive, dead, recycled over and over, all one big play,
all beautiful, all perfect, at every stage. Our task is to appreciate the play,
be grateful for a chance to participate.

"If we complain when things
change, we'll make ourselves and everyone around us miserable. Enjoy every
moment. Look deeply into now with a peaceful mind. That's all. Enjoy."

She handed the spiral shell to me.
"Give this one to your mom," she said. "More durable." She
put the shell in my hand and closed my fingers around it. Her hands were warm
and soft over mine.

The words she said made sense, her
conclusion was obvious, but I felt cheated. She was taking something away from
me, something I was attached to. It made me cranky, like a toddler when you
take away her dirt clod to give her a cookie.

Lila stood up and stretched her
arms high into the soupy fog and let out a series of short yips, like a cartoon
coyote. A crow answered from somewhere nearby with a long, annoying caw.

Lila laughed and said, "Come
on, girl. Let's go in and warm our toes."

The toe warming ritual was just as
unexpected as everything else about Lila. She got me all situated on the big
crescent shaped couch facing the picture window, which was like a white screen
from the fog, and brought a plastic tub of warm water for my feet to rest in,
along with a fluffy clean towel. She set up another footbath station for
herself on the other end of the couch and then placed a small round table in
between the two pans.

While I was trying to convince my
toes the water was actually tepid, not scalding, Lila was in the kitchen
preparing peppermint tea with blackberry honey from local bees. She seemed to
be on speaking terms with every plant, animal, and insect in the county. If I
had tried to invent a grandma who was the complete opposite of my mom, I
couldn't have done a better job.

By the time I could dip my toes in
the water a few seconds before they jumped back out again and perched on the
edge of the pan, Lila had brought a tray in for the little table. On it was the
largest teapot I had ever seen. It must have held half a gallon of tea. It was
blue and white with an intricate design of bridges and little houses and bamboo
thickets and flocks of sheep and ladies in long dresses and old bearded men in
long dresses. A person could get lost in the blue landscape of that teapot.

Lila poured tea into thick blue
mugs that looked like squat glasses because they didn't have handles. My
fingers wrapped around the warm mug, and soon a little cloud of peppermint
honey steam formed around my head that made me giggle.

Lila giggled in response, and when
she was all settled on her side of the couch, she poured half her tea into her
footbath. "Feet love peppermint tea too."

As soon as we were both still as
pillows, the cats hopped up on my end of the couch. They walked across my lap
single file, their hard little feet pressing on my legs with surprising weight,
and gracefully collapsed on Lila, one on her lap and the other between her and
the end of the couch. "Ah, my beautiful darlings," she said, and they
both purred like miniature lawn mowers.

I was thinking how protected and
private we were, with the whole house blanketed by thick fog that muffled the
roar of the surf and with us wrapped in peppermint and purring cats, when Lila
said, "No."

"No?" I asked.

"The answer to your church
question."

"Oh."

"I don't go to church, but if
you want church, we'll find you one."

"I don't want one," I
said.

"That's fine," she said.
"Does your mother go to church?"

I laughed. "Janice get up
before noon on Sunday?"

Lila didn't say anything, she just
offered me more tea for my cup and some for my feet, and I said okay to both.
She helped herself too, even though the cat on her lap chirped and batted her
arm to show its displeasure at being disturbed.

"I tried different
churches," I said. "With my aunts and my grandma, Grandma Betty, I
mean, and some of my girlfriends."

"Good. It's fun to learn all
you can about different religions," Lila said. "Tell me how it
went."

"Grandma Betty likes the
churches where the preacher is mad and the singing is bad and the ladies wear
lots of perfume."

Lila smiled and nodded for me to
continue.

"Aunt Lacey, my mom's sister,
likes the ones where the singing is pretty good and the preachers are all huggy
and try to make you to promise to join this and attend that."

Lila nodded again, her smile
growing.

"I even tried a Catholic
church once, where the preacher had on satin robes and was too serious."

We sat and stared at the window.
Something was changing outside, because there were occasional brief rainbows
streaking through the fog.

"So what do you think about
churches now that you've tried a few?"

"I like the happy songs. Those
are nice. Some of the people seem friendly. They might be good neighbors if you
needed to borrow the phone to call home."

Lila chuckled and wiggled her toes
in their foot pan, which made the lap cat purr louder.

"But the preachers," I
said, frowning. "I don't trust them. They all seem to want
something."

Lila kept smiling and nodding.
"That's about what I found in my research."

"But you were praying out on
the beach. It looked like praying."

"I pray all the time. It makes
me happy. I especially feel like praying on the beach."

"What did you say to the ocean
before we came up? When you bowed your head."

"Namaste," she said.
"It's a way of saying hello to God. From the Hindu tradition. People bow
to each other and say 'Namaste' the way we say 'Good to see you,' only the
meaning is different."