Lila Blue (3 page)

After I was clean through and
through, I dried with lavender scented towels, and I pulled the soft warm gown
over my head and the soft warm slippers onto my feet. When I came out of the
bathroom, Lila took my hand and led me to the little sewing room across from
her bedroom.

"Sleep here tonight," she
said. "Tomorrow you can explore upstairs. I'll leave lights on in the
bathroom and kitchen. If you need something in the night, wake me up."

I let her tuck me in bed like a
baby. "Sweet dreams, Cassandra," she said.

"Sandy," I said, and she
smiled. My eyelids closed, and I plunged into deep, warm sleep.

Sometime in the night, I awoke to
Lila's voice in a whispered conversation with someone in her bedroom. First I
thought she was calling my mom or maybe she had a grinning boyfriend of her own
tucked away in there, but neither of those scenarios fit what I was hearing.

I got up to use the bathroom, and
as I passed by her open bedroom door trying not to snoop, two tall white cats
came out and brushed by me on their way to the kitchen. They barely glanced at
me. Maybe they weren't cats at all, because cats are supposed to be scared or
curious, aren't they? Whatever they were, they weren't a grinning boyfriend, so
that was a relief.

When I shuffled into the kitchen
early the next morning, Lila was sitting at the table writing in a journal and
drinking coffee. The whole kitchen still slanted toward the sea. The horizon
was pink over a silvery ocean, and seagulls were gliding by the window
silently, all headed south, like early morning commuters on the California
freeways.

"What would you like for
breakfast?" Lila got up and pulled me over to the bank of cupboards and
countertops near the sink. She gave me a tour of the kitchen. She had all the
normal foods, like cereal and crackers and bread and peanut butter and jam,
plus she had lots of stuff I'd never seen before, like a whole pineapple in the
huge bowl filled with fresh fruit. My mom's idea of fruit was canned fruit cocktail
on sale, the diet kind.

The pineapple looked dangerous.

"My mom lets me drink
coffee," I said, because the coffee smelled really good, and it was true
that once in a while Janice let me taste her coffee.

"Okay, sweetie," Lila
said. "Help yourself. The sugar's in the bowl by the breadbox and there's
milk in the fridge if you like to dress it up."

I helped myself before she had time
to remember I was barely twelve years old. The coffee, dressed up with lots of
sugar and milk, looked okay and smelled okay, so I drank some, and it tasted
good.

When I returned to the table, Lila
nodded her approval. "Your daddy sniffed everything before he tasted it,
too. You inherited that from him."

My father. There it was. I was
hoping that subject wouldn't come up until I was good and ready for it. I'd
spent years trying to remember one tiny thing about him, but I couldn't. Then I
pretended I never had a dad, which I mostly didn't because my mom said he was
dead, but how could I believe her?

Now here I was sitting with my
father's mother.

I put the coffee cup carefully on
the table and stared at the waves crashing on the ridge of black rocks that
poked out of the ocean below the house.

The possible facts. It had taken my
whole life to drag these tidbits out of my mom, usually when she was drunk or
too tired to remember she hated my dad and hated me by association.

My mom and dad were married in
Reno, Nevada, in January of 1973. It was raining, and my mom's pink linen suit
was crumpled by the time it was their turn at the wedding chapel. There were no
pictures, no flowers, no presents. Their honeymoon was one night at a casino
hotel, where they lost money playing black jack all night. I was born June
fifteenth of the same year. There's some math for you.

My dad's name was David and he was
tall, dark and handsome, probably not unlike the Marlborough man. David had
green eyes like mine and curly hair like mine, only his hair was brown and mine
was orange. Grandma Betty called mine strawberry blonde, but I’d never seen
orange strawberries. Mom and Grandma Betty had nagged me about my hair for so
long that I refused to let anyone touch it. No one could mistake
me
for
a model. Don't they know how insulting it is to say, "Sandy, you'd be so
pretty if..."?

When Mom found out their marriage
wasn't legal, she tore up everything related to him, including the invalid
wedding license and my real birth certificate. She had to write for a copy of
my birth certificate to register me in school, but she scratched out the
father's name and threw a tizzy fit in the school office when they asked her
about it. The clerks let it go. They recognized a difficult mother when they
saw one.

So, no photos, no memories, no cute
teddy bears from Dad, not one word.

The smell of frying bacon pulled me
off Memory Lane.

"How about scrambled
eggs?" asked Lila.

When I looked at her helplessly,
she said, "And toast and jam. That should be a good start for your first
day at the beach."

Even in my shell-shocked condition,
I noticed that breakfast included the best scrambled eggs I'd ever eaten.

"Natural brown eggs from
Wilson's farm," Lila said. "Best tasting eggs in the county."

Something about the way she said it
made me think she'd tried eggs from every chicken for miles around. Maybe she
had, or maybe her voice rang with authority no matter what she was saying.

Lila pointed to my giant suitcase
parked against the back of the living room sofa that faced out to sea.
"Get on some warm clothes and beach shoes," she said. "Unless
you want to go barefoot, like me. Barefoot is the best way to venture forth
into a new life."

I opted for canvas shoes.

The stairway in front of the house
was a sturdy wooden one, wide enough for one person, with strong handrails on
both sides. Twenty-one steps. Lila counted them out loud when she led me down
that morning. "Just twenty-one steps to the magnificent Oregon
coastline."

Magnificent is a word that must
have been invented with Lila's beach in mind. We walked north along the tide
line on the wide empty expanse of white sand toward a dark cliff covered in
pine trees. The trees must have been ancient, because they looked tall and we
were a mile away.

A chilly wind blew from the north,
misting our faces with salty air. I stuffed my hands in the pockets of my
hooded winter coat, glad my mom had made me bring it. Lila wore her red sweater
and a long skirt, which whipped around her ankles in the wind. Her hair was
braided in one thick rope that hung nearly to her waist. She wore a red cowboy
bandana over her ears like a headband. Lila looked old and young at the same
time. Hunched over in my hooded parka, I probably looked young and old too.

"Always start your walk facing
the wind," said Lila. The wind and steady rumble of the waves made it hard
to hear her, so I stayed close. "That way you can walk as far as you like,
and when you turn around to go home, the wind pushes you and you glide home
like a gull on the breeze." She lifted her arms and ran flapping barefoot
through the foamy shore break like a big red duck trying to take flight.

We were the only ones on the beach
that early in the morning, and no one here knew me, but still. Weren't
grandmothers supposed to be sedate? I was mortified.

My mother would have hated it here,
and I admit this realization pleased me. Janice wore those tiny little high
heel shoes everywhere, even with jeans, because she thought they made her look
tall and sexy. She abhorred sand or dirt of any sort. The few times her
boyfriends had taken us to beaches in California, she'd never actually touched
the sand. She preferred visiting local art galleries and viewing the ocean from
inside a restaurant that served expensive wine.

"Come on, child," Lila
shouted back at me. "Run! Feel the freedom in the wind and sand and sea.
Fly!"

I shook my head. No way was I going
to run around like an idiot just because I was at the beach.

Laughing, Lila trotted back to my
side and resumed walking, deliberately slowing herself down to match my pace. I
trudged along beside her, wishing I'd worn my sunglasses. The sun's reflection
off the water and white sand hurt my eyes. Plus the salty wind stung. We
finally got to the base of the cliff where the waves crashed, so we could go no
farther. We climbed up on a shelf of rocks and watched the water splash on the
rocky point below us.

After a time, what I thought were
plain rocks being battered by the waves started looking like communities of sea
life. Clinging to the more protected faces of the rocks were hundreds of
barnacles. Clusters of pale green sea anemones, some as big as my fist, were
tucked underneath rocky ledges. And most startling of all, big orange and
purple starfish, each one bigger than my hand, clung to clumps of double
shelled oblong things that Lila said were called mussels. The black clad
mussels ranged from baby fingernail size to fat monsters six inches long. How
could they hang on in the pounding surf? One medium sized wave would have mangled
me and hauled me out to sea, no matter how hard I hung on to that rock.

"The starfish eat the
mussels," Lila said. "They slide on top of one and secrete an acid
that weakens the mussel so its shells open and it becomes dinner."

"Ick," I said, wrinkling
my nose.

"Humans like to eat mussels,
too," she said. "When you're ready, we'll get some and make garlic
mussel pasta. Yum yum."

I shook my head no, and she
laughed.

"Around this point is a
magical place," Lila said, pointing north where all we could see were the
breakers rolling in to whatever was on the other side of the cliff. "It's
called Saint Ann's Rock Garden. If you're still here in August, I'll take you
there."

My mind got stuck on Saint Ann and
August, and I couldn't find any way to sort out the dozens of questions those
words stirred up in my displaced brain.

Adding to my confusion was the fact
that being tongue tied was new for me. My nickname in sixth grade was Mouth,
because I'd always correct Mrs. Jonstone's pronunciation. I hated it when she
mispronounced simple words like
library
and
nuclear
in front of
innocent sixth graders. I practically died when one kid raised his hand and
said, “The card catalog in the
liberry
doesn’t have
newcuelar
."
Mrs. Jonstone had polluted our elocution for life.

Mom said the minute I turned one I
spoke in complete sentences and hadn't shut up since, which is a lie, because
Janice thinks I'm being disrespectful if I talk when she's talking, and she
talks nonstop, so there.

But since she'd shoved me on that
bus, I'd said a total of what, four short sentences? If Janice saw me now,
she'd accuse me of getting myself abducted by aliens who took out my tongue and
replaced it with a spy camera.

She'd say, "Stop standing
around with your mouth open, Sandy. You look like a dummy."

I followed Lila as she climbed down
and skipped off toward her house. I didn't skip, but she was right about how
delicious it was to have the wind push you home. By that time, other people
were on the beach. We passed some couples walking their dogs and some ladies
who greeted Lila and smiled at me. They probably knew my whole life story
better than I did.

Lila waited for me at the tide
line, facing the ocean, gazing out to sea. I went to stand beside her and gazed
a while myself. A thick bank of fog I hadn't noticed when we were at the cliff
seemed to be sliding toward us like an enormous ghost. I could see at least a
mile down the coast to the south of us where the fog had already eaten the
shoreline.

After a few minutes of standing so
still she seemed to be vibrating, Lila made prayer hands, bowed to the sea, and
whispered something that sounded like The Misty. I looked around to see if
anyone was watching, deeply embarrassed to be standing next to someone who was
praying to fog.

Rage at my mother rose up from the
bottom of my toes. How could she send me to this dangerous place with a crazy
person? How would I ever get home? And what would I find if I made it back to
Sacramento?

I pushed the rage down enough to
see again, and there was Lila smiling at me, her eyes wide open with
excitement. "Dragon's breath," she whispered, pointing to the fog
bank. "The ancients knew everything is alive, and they thought fog was the
breath of the great grandmother dragon who lives at the bottom of the
sea."

As that was sinking in, a wave came
all the way up to my shins. I was so shocked I stood there looking down at my
legs, and when the water swooshed back out there was a white disk on the foamy
sand right between my soaked canvas shoes. I picked it up and turned it over.
It was some kind of shell that weighed almost nothing.

"Sneaker wave," Lila
said. "Ah. A perfect sand dollar. One of Grandmother Dragon's most mysterious,
fragile jewels."

I held the pale disk on the palm of
my hand, and she pointed out a five-petal flower pattern.

"The pattern corresponds to
little chambers inside the creature, the internal structure that gives it
shape." She took the shell and turned it over, pointing out the round hole
in the flat bottom. "Here's where it ingests and eliminates. When it's
alive, it's covered with fine green spikes that help it move along the bottom
of the ocean."

She turned it back over and rested
it gently in my upturned palm again.

"Are you a teacher?" I
asked her.

"What?" she asked, and
then she shook her head. "No, sweetie. We're all teachers and all
students, all learning together."

While I stared at the shell, Lila
cupped her hands around my cool face and kissed me on the forehead. I looked in
her eyes and saw for the first time they were exactly the same green as mine.
"My Jewel," she said. Then she turned me around and pointed me toward
the stairs. "Home."