Lila Blue (13 page)

"The next morning we got a
call from the police," she said. "They found his body at the bottom
of Lewiston grade, a steep winding highway south of town. They estimated he
left the road at a hundred miles an hour. They couldn’t find his helmet. They
called it an accident."

I stared out the windshield of the
car where happy families were walking toward the line outside Barney's. I said,
"My father killed himself."

Lila didn't respond. I turned and
saw her staring ahead the way I had been. Her hands were in her lap clutching
one another. Tears were running down her cheeks and dropping onto her hands.

Where I had been trembling with
cold five minutes earlier, now I was on fire. I rolled down the window to let
the wind blow away some of my fury. How dare he kill himself! How could he run
away like that? Hadn't he caused enough misery in the world?

My mind was running around in
circles, trying to find some understanding or pity or something, but all I felt
was rage at David. If he had loved me at all, if he had loved anyone at all,
even a tiny bit, he would have stayed and tried to make things better. There
had to be something he could do to make Terry happy or leave her and try to do
right by Janice and me. And Jamie, poor little Jamie wasn't even born yet.
Didn't he want to meet his own child?

I could find no excuse for what he
did, no compassion, no forgiveness, nothing but blame and rage and hatred. I
was suddenly sick with hatred, and I jumped out of the car and ran as fast as I
could over to the edge of the parking lot where I threw up onto the sand behind
some trash cans. I left all my lunch there along with part of my guts it felt
like. I kicked sand over the mess and turned away.

At least I didn't get any on the
red jumper. Soiling two of Lila's jumpers in one day would be beyond tacky. I
took a few breaths of salty air, and the wind felt good on my face.

Lila was watching me from the
driver's seat of the car. I made a yucky face and waved to let her know I was
okay. Then I trotted down to the closest part of the sea and cupped my hand in
a wave to rinse my mouth out with the ocean. Of course my shoes got wet, but I
managed to keep the jumper dry. The ocean water in my mouth was cold and salty.
I scooped another handful and smeared it on my face and neck, coating myself in
salt and sand.

After filling myself with cold sea
air, I trotted back to the car and got in.

"Okay?" Lila asked.

I laughed, shook my head, and said,
"Let's get out of here."

"Good idea." Lila patted
my leg and started the car.

We were mostly silent on the drive
back, speaking only to point out to each other funny sights along the way, like
a green neon sign in a bar announcing
Irish Spoken Here
and another
sign, this one hand painted above a silly gift shop,
Don't tell my mother
.

We got home to Lila's stone house
on the beach, and everything felt more solid than it had, as if the world had
gained weight. Every time I tried to think of something to say, nothing felt
right.

I wanted to call Shelly, but it
wouldn't be right to ruin her holiday telling her about my father driving off a
cliff because he didn't want to grow up. Her father was a grownup. She
complained about him spending more time playing golf with people all over the
world than he'd ever spent with her, but she didn't really mind. She liked it
that her parents were gone a lot. There was always a housekeeper or nanny
around if she needed anything, but she could be her own boss most of the time.

Shelly couldn't relate to me
complaining about how immature and overprotective Janice was. How could she
relate to me crying about having a father who turned an adolescent escape
fantasy into a tragedy for everyone who loved him?

I thought of calling my mother, but
I could predict how that would go. I'd want sympathy and understanding and end
up being the one to comfort her. I didn't know what to do with myself. On top
of that, my lower abdomen was cramping and I didn't know if it was from
throwing up so violently or from my periods or from running so hard and long
the day before.

I came out of the bathroom holding
my belly, and Lila asked what was wrong.

"I hurt, Grandma," I
said.

"Of course you do. What do you
need?"

"I don't know. I just
hurt."

"Be still, breathe, ask your
belly what will make it feel better," she said, as if that were a
perfectly reasonable thing to ask a body part.

"I don't know," I said,
and I was annoyed at myself because I heard a scratchy little girl whine on the
edges of my words. I was mad at Lila too, for not helping me.

"Yes you do, Cassandra. Use
the pain to sink into yourself and listen. Only you can give you what you need.
Listen to your body. Listen to your heart. What do you feel? What do you
need?"

"I feel dirty. I feel beat up.
I feel whipped."

"Good! You feel. You're
alive." She held my shoulders and looked intently into my eyes.
"Okay, now what do you need to feel better?"

"I need a bath. I need
peppermint tea with honey. I need water, lots of water inside and out."

"See?" Lila said.
"You pushed past your fear and your mind telling you something was
impossible and silly, and you found the truth. The truth is always inside you,
always. You can count on it."

After I gave myself all the water I
needed, I felt better. Then I wanted to sleep, which I did all the rest of the
day.

The next morning I woke up happy.
The truth about my father didn't kill me. Even though my father was dead, I was
alive, so I decided to live a happy life.

After dusk on the Fourth of July,
Lila and I hauled a big canvas tarp down to the beach in front of her house. We
arranged it on the damp sand, and then we took down flashlights, old woolen
blankets, pillows, and a big thermos of hot chocolate and got ourselves all
cozy to watch the show. The fancy resort south of town had a huge fireworks
display every year, so we would have a great view without having to drive
anywhere. Lots of other folks were on the beach too, and we saw them walk by
with their flashlights and supplies.

High clouds had covered the sky
earlier in the day, but as soon as we got on the beach the clouds broke apart
and disappeared. The air was still and cool, and the surf whispered peacefully.
We wrapped ourselves in the blankets like a couple of tacos and lay on our
backs staring at the heavens. An enormous full moon that had just risen over
Lila's house, and the stars over the ocean shone bright in the cold clean air.

"Grandma," I said.
"Do you think there are people out there? I mean intelligent beings,
people we could communicate with?"

"What do you think,
Cassandra?"

"I think there must be. There
are so many stars. The sun is a star. We evolved on this little planet. Even if
life was a freak accident, it would have had millions of other chances to
happen."

She didn't say anything. I heard
her hum, the hum that meant she was thinking things over.

"Maybe I'm wrong," I
said, suddenly thinking my idea was dumb.

"Maybe you're right,
Cassandra. Maybe we can communicate with them. Maybe they communicate with us,
but we just don't know it."

"You mean like crop circles
and UFOs and alien abductions?" There was one boy in sixth grade who did
all his reports on crop circles in England. Everyone else thought he was a nut,
but I loved the idea that someone was trying to talk to us in beautiful giant
pictographs.

"Maybe all those ways,"
she said. "And maybe dreams and visions and tricks of the eye. I like to
think the whole universe is alive, and we can't help but communicate with one
another all the time, because we are intimately connected. The same way that my
ear knows what my finger is doing all the time. It might not be paying
attention, because it's minding its own ear business, but if I ask it, 'Hey,
what's the little finger on the right hand doing?' it can instantly tune in and
tell me."

"Whoa! Grandma. That's
incredible," I said, and my mind jumped all over the place. "So I'm
connected to everyone in the world and to whales and redwood trees and
butterflies in South America and aliens in another galaxy."

"It is credible,
actually," Lila said. "Lots of great thinkers, besides us, have posed
that idea throughout history."

"How do you know so
much?" I asked her, still staring at the stars.

"We all know everything. We
just have to remember it. Plus I read. Reading helps us remember what we know.”

"Some philosophers," she
continued, "say that when we come into the world, our bodies and our minds
are undeveloped, but our spirits, our souls are closely connected to infinity.
The way society helps our bodies and minds mature has the nasty side effect of
forcing us to forget our connection to God, because our parents and teachers
have all been forced to forget their wisdom in order to be accepted in human
culture."

"I have no idea what you are
talking about," I said, laughing. "I'm lost in space. La ti da ti
da." I let my spirit float out into the sparkling black heavens all the
way to the round vanilla moon.

"Okay, here are some
examples," said Lila. "Empathy, compassion, imaginary friends,
conditional love, operant conditioning, quantum physics, miracles, celestial
music, communicating with animals. Let's start with empathy. When babies are born,
they instantly feel what others around them are feeling. They've done lots of
research on this, much of it criminally abusive if you ask me, but what they
found is something any maternity ward nurse can tell you. When one baby in the
nursery cries, other babies cry, even though they are not hurting or
uncomfortable themselves. When someone around them hurts, they hurt. That's
empathy, and it fosters compassion and nonviolence. We're all born with it.”

"Empathy is a built in
survival tool,” she said, “because if the baby is not intimately tuned to her
caregiver, she may not get fed and protected. When Mommy feels pleased, Baby
feels pleased. They call it bonding. And it happens the other way, too, when
Baby is happy, Mommy is happy. Baby needs Mommy to survive, so when Baby does
something and Mommy is happy, Baby does more of that, because it ensures her
survival. Her tiny ego begins to bud, and she thinks she may have some control
over the outer world, and what a mess that turns into. But that's another
lecture."

"Have you written all this
down, Grandma?" I asked.

"I've written a lot of it, in
different essays for the paper and to friends and such, but others have written
it so much better than I could. If you're interested, we'll make a reading list
for you. Everyone needs heroes, and practically all of mine wrote books. I'm so
lucky!"

"Can I read your essays
someday?" I asked, because I'd much rather read something by my own
grandma than by some stranger.

"Of course you can, Cassandra.
Now where was I?"

"Empathy. Budding baby
ego," I said.

"Thank you. So right away our
parents and teachers train empathy out of us. They do it because they're busy
and they don't like crying and they tell us to toughen up, stop acting like a
crybaby, and the message is keep all your feelings inside, or better yet, don't
feel. Feelings are so messy and time consuming. Parents and teachers don't like
mess. They have their jobs to do, and they don't tolerate little kids who cry
just because something in the area is hurting. To survive, babies have to stop
feeling or at least stop expressing their strongest feelings, and not just
their anger and hurt and jealousy either. They have to suppress their good
feelings, too. You'd be surprised how many people tell you to not feel too
excited or too happy and too hopeful.”

"Anyway,” she said, “most
children have to shut up, grow up, adopt the behaviors and belief systems of
their culture, or else. The 'or else' used to include death. Lots of babies
were murdered throughout history if they didn't conform to what was expected of
them. Now the 'or else' most often involves prescription drugs and various
forms of parental and educational abuse. So most of us conform enough to
survive."

Lila's monolog was as bad as the
story about my father killing himself. I hoped it had a happy ending.

"The good news is," Lila
said, "we can instantly reconnect to the source."

"I'm so glad we got to the
good news part," I said. "You were depressing me."

She laughed. "The good news is
we can wake up and remember it's all a dream. We can never stop being divine,
because all that is and ever was and ever will be is God. Goddess. The Great
Mother. Infinite Wisdom. Creative Intelligence. Spirit. Love. Life."

"Well that is good news,"
I said, and I couldn't help being a tad bit sarcastic. Lila reminded me of my
mother when she was gaga over some new gorgeous man. On cloud nine.

"Excellent news, in fact,” she
said. “And it takes less than a second to wake up. No matter how deep we are in
our dream, no matter what kind of nightmare we have created for ourselves.
Boom! Wake up! It was only a dream."

Before either of us could say
another word, BOOM! Fireworks! Five blasts one after another. Red, white, and
blue fire stars appeared in the sky over the ocean and, trailing smoke, drifted
down to oblivion.

We laughed and struggled out of our
blanket wraps to sit and watch the display.

"See," she said.
"God is always listening. Her timing is perfect."

"You big dreamer," I
said, scooting close to her and bumping her with my shoulder. She bumped me back,
and we joined all the others camped on the beach exclaiming with wonder at the
heavenly extravaganza of light, color, and sound.

Bits and pieces of the rest of the
David story came out over the next week. They cremated his mangled body. His
memorial service was held in the city park, because David loved being outdoors,
and practically the whole town came. Everyone knew the families, and most
people knew David, or at least they'd heard about his tragic adventures.