Lila Blue (30 page)

Now for the possible risks of
owning a handgun. If someone takes my gun away from me, he might feel justified
in using it on me. An even greater risk would be if someone who is staying with
me, say a child or an adult who is imbalanced due to drugs, alcohol, rage, or
depression, somehow finds the gun. We've all made poor decisions. Most of us
have been angry, drunk, crazy, stupid, or depressed at least once in our lives.
What would have happened if we had been holding a loaded gun in that moment?
With a gun, it takes less than one second to end the world.

Does owning a handgun keep
families safe or introduce a serious risk? Does keeping a loaded gun in your
car or business protect you or attract violence? Maybe it's time we looked
closely at the handgun issue. Let's all sit down together and decide how we
want to live.

Please come to Tuesday night's
council meeting and share your experiences and opinions. Together we can make
wise decisions about keeping our community safe.

Lila's column seemed simple and
logical, but it made me uncomfortable. I didn't like being afraid, and I
trusted Lila, but I'd had some experience with people like my mom and her
friends, and they don't like it when you question their decisions or ask them
to use simple logic and consider safety issues for children. They don't like to
look at anything straight on or sit down at a table and share their
experiences. They prefer drinking and swearing or dancing on tables and taking
their clothes off. I didn't trust everyone as much as Lila did.

I bet people didn't like the little
kid who said the emperor was naked. They probably slapped him, told him to keep
his mouth shut, and didn't take him to any more parades.

When I woke up the next morning,
Marta was having breakfast with Lila in the kitchen. I helped myself to some
coffee and fruit, and then went in the living room and pretended to read.

Marta said, "Randall at the
police station agreed to put together a fact sheet on the handgun incidents in
the county. We'll publish that next to your column and the notice about
Tuesday's council meeting."

"I'm not happy with my piece
yet," Lila said. "I'm not even sure I want to take a position. Let's
run one of the breezy nature essays in my backup file. Or the one about how the
original Indians managed to tolerate all the rain."

"Don't wiggle out of
this," Marta said. "You're an important voice in the community. We
need you to speak up."

"It's not ready yet,"
Lila said.

I wanted to yell, Leave her alone,
Marta. Stop using peer pressure on her. But I fumed silently to myself instead
of interrupting.

By the time Marta had left, she'd
extracted a promise from Lila to have something ready by press time, which was
eight o'clock the next morning. Lila was working at the shop in the afternoon,
so that didn't leave much time.

I took a long walk on the beach by
myself. My feet were used to the icy ocean water now, and I loved being all
alone on a huge expanse of white sand in the cool wind with the surf beside me
and the gulls overhead.

I felt big and small at the same
time, and sometimes I was outside myself, my soul hovering like a gull six feet
over my right shoulder, watching myself walk, think, see, and hear. It was
peaceful in the same way swimming laps was peaceful. Nothing needed to be done,
said, or defended. I existed in a bubble of comfortable motion, as natural as a
bird or a fish, a wave or a cloud.

I was floating along in that
wonderful state, with no one else on the beach and everything serene, when I
had a clear vision. I saw my mother on a boat in warm seas. She was wearing a
white bikini I'd never seen before. Her hair was sun streaked, and she had it
pulled up on top of her head with a barrette, the way she did sometimes when
she took a shower. It was daytime, the sun was shining, and she was with a man.
His hair was white and he was very tan. They were arguing. She was screaming at
him and he was standing there smiling at her as if she were amusing.

That of course made her even
madder, and she threw the drink glass she was holding at him. He deflected it
with his arm and it shattered at his feet. His smile turned into something mean
then, and he grabbed her arm and shoved her down on the deck on her bare knees.
She started picking up the pieces of glass, and as I watched, a trickle of red
blood ran out from under her right knee, making a zigzag pattern on the white
deck of the boat.

The image upset me so much I
stopped the vision. It was as if my soul jumped back into my body and turned
the channel off, click. After I did that, I tried to tell myself I didn't see
anything at all, but the experience was as clear as if I'd been hovering over
that boat and seen it with my own eyes. I couldn't call it a fantasy or an aberrant
brain picture. It was real.

I needed something solid to feel
grounded, so I walked back to the nearest sea wall and used it for a backrest.
I slumped down, sat in the sand, and dug my hands and feet into it. With the
cold stones against my back, I felt collected, solid, as if I had literally
pulled myself back together, so I sat there breathing and trying to quiet my
fears until I got so cold I started shivering. Then I forced myself to stand up
and walk home.

I decided not to tell Lila about
the vision. I thought it was just my vivid imagination running away with me,
taking a fear and building it up into a movie that seemed real. I didn't want
to give it any more reality by talking about it, writing it down, or analyzing
it. It was only a picture, like a dream image, like a bad daydream, and I would
forget about it.

Lila noticed how quiet I was when I
got in. "Everything okay?" she asked.

"Yea," I said. "I
just got a little cold."

"Mmm," she said as I got
my things together for a shower.

In the shower I remembered the red
pattern of blood and looked down to see if my knee was okay. It was of course.
Then I felt all the humiliation, shame, fear, and disappointment Janice must
have felt at that moment, and I was sad for her. I hoped the scene hadn’t really
happened. I was willing to convince myself it was like a dream metaphor, like
the dream of the man and the dog, just a symbol picture of my fears. That's
all.

By the time I dried off, dressed,
and braided my hair, I had put the vision behind me. It was nothing.

When it was time for Lila to go to
work, I went into the village with her. I wasn't sure what I would do, but I
knew I didn't want to spend all afternoon alone in the house.

I went into the flower shop first
to see if Franny had pretty cards I could send my mom and Shakti and the
brothers. Franny carried lots of arts and crafts things by local artists, so
each thing was original, and I'd found a beautiful card for Shakti the last
time I'd been in. On the front of the card under the thinnest rice paper
covering was a butterfly made of dried flower parts. Shakti had loved the card
and her mother had it framed for her to hang on the wall.

Franny was in the workroom behind
her cash register counter, and she called out Hi to me when I came in. I liked the
smell of her shop. It was a combination of fresh flowers, incense, and dried
herbs. None of the cards was exactly right, or I wasn't in the mood for them. I
was pretty sure they didn't even make greeting cards that say, Dear Mother, I
miss you. Don't bleed on anyone's boat.

I heard Franny oohing and aahing,
and I peeked over the counter to see what was so exciting. "Look at these,
Cassandra," she said, and she brought out a box of pottery packed in
shredded brown paper, like recycled paper bags. Each little pot she pulled out
of the box had its own rich color and unique shape. She handed me a jade green
one that had the faintest lavender streak meandering through the deep shiny
glaze. Inside the pot I saw where the glaze had dripped down from the rim, leaving
teardrops of shiny color on the coarse brown clay.

I turned the lovely green pot over,
and it was signed
Dante
. "Beautiful," I said, wondering if I
should send one of these to my mom instead of a card, and one to Shakti, too.

"I asked Dante to make me some
little flower pots that would fit the smaller potted plants," Franny said.
"I never dreamed they'd be so pretty." She held another up to admire
it, a squat dish glazed with royal blue.

"Wow," I said. "Are
they from the valley?" I knew some of her artists lived in Salem,
Corvallis, and Eugene.

"No," she said.
"Dante lives south of town. His parents are potters, too, and they weave
rugs."

"His work is beautiful,"
I said, not wanting to put the jade pot back, but not knowing if I could afford
it. I wondered how long it would take to get that good at something. "Did
he learn this in college?"

"He learned from his parents,
I'm sure," she said. "And he's not much older than you are,
Cassandra. He's been potting since he was ten. He has a real gift."

"Wow," I said, not sure
how I felt about someone my age being a skilled artist. Where had I been all my
life? "How much do they cost?" I asked Franny.

"I was thinking about seven
fifty for the ones that size. Do you think that's reasonable?"

"Yes," I said, glad my
guess had been way too high. "I'll take this one, please."

"Don't you want to see all the
rest? There's another whole box."

"This is the one," I
said. When I know what I want, I hang on to it.

I took my little green pot to show
Molly and Marge in the bookstore. Molly was ringing up a sale and Marge had
taken Bradley to get some new shoes, so I walked around the store, checking to
see what new fantasy books had come in. I liked the artwork on the science
fiction and fantasy book covers, but I knew from experience the cover art
didn't necessarily fit the characters, action, or mood of the story. I'm sure
the artists didn't read the books.

The best way to choose a book, and
this Molly taught me, is to read only the first page and then close the book
and put it back. If you find yourself on page three or four before you remember
to close the book, you should read it.

I was picking up paperback books at
random testing this method, and I got to page seven in a book about vampires of
all things. I put it back anyway. Who wanted to read a whole book about
vampires?

Molly was done and came and found
me. "What did you get?" she asked, pointing to my Franny's Flowers
bag.

I showed her the pot, and she
smiled and said, "Dante," before she even turned it over to check.

"You know him?"

"Sure," she said.
"Haven't you seen him in here? He hangs out with Curtis discussing
astronomy every time he comes to town."

"No," I said. "Was I
here when he was?"

"I can't remember," she
said, looking up to check her memory banks. "You'd remember if you met
him, though." She got an impish look on her face, "In fact," she
said, "I bet you'd really like each other."

She pulled me over to stand in
front of Curtis. "Curtis," she said, "Cassandra just bought one
of Dante's pots. See?" Molly used her tone of voice that worked to get
Curtis to look up from his book. He looked at the pot.

"Green," he said, looking
from Molly to the pot to me and back to Molly.

"What do you think of
Cassandra and Dante together?" she asked him, and I poked her with my
elbow.

He studied me, he studied the pot,
he studied me, and then he grinned and said, "Fate brings us together and
separates us in myriad ways." He dove back into his book, which was a
biography of some English guy by the looks of the cover.

"Is that a quote from
Shakespeare?" I asked Molly.

"I don't think so," she
said. "Curtis is profound all by himself."

"He's good," I said.

It was fun standing there talking
about him as if he weren't sitting right in front of us. His lips were curving
up in the tiniest smile, but they could have been responding to what he was
reading rather than to us. He was an enigma.

An older couple came in the store
and looked around as if they were lost, so Molly went to offer her services.

The couple looked at each other and
then down at her little pixie face, and then they searched the store until they
saw me by the vampire book and Curtis in his recliner. They seemed to relax
then, perhaps thinking they understood there was an adult present to run
things. It was true. What they didn't suspect was that Molly was the adult.

It reminded me of something Lila
had said.
We see what we expect to see, not what's really there.

The couple didn't seem interested
in books, because they didn't touch any, but before they left, Molly had convinced
them to buy a copy of
Fishy
Tales
, by Captain Bob.
Fishy Tales
was a collection of stories by a local fishing boat captain about his
adventures on the dangerous coastal waters.

Lila cut Captain Bob's hair, and he
was always telling her new stories that were going into his second book,
tentatively titled,
More Fishy
.

Molly sold more copies of
Fishy
Tales
than everyone else combined, because she had a special deal worked
out with Captain Bob. For each book she personally sold, he gave her a dollar
commission from his own pocket. Molly was brilliant.

After the couple left with their
autographed copy of
Fishy Tales
, Molly came and took the vampire book
out of my hands and put it back on the shelf. "So ask me to tell you
everything I know about Dante," she said to me.

"Tell me, then," I said,
crossing my arms over my chest and pretending to be put out by her being such a
smarty pants.

"He's home schooled, which
means he gets to study what he wants and his parents buy whatever books and
supplies he needs."