The Lovely Shadow (24 page)

When all the crying was finally done, and
everybody had composed themselves a bit, we all sat up and faced
Mrs. Fischer to find that she had also been crying and that her
massive amounts of eyeshadow had run down her face, making her look
something like Alice Cooper with a severe bee sting reaction.

“Mrs. Fischer,” June said, “I can’t thank you
enough. I truly can’t. But when we have a court hearing, how likely
is it that Johnny will be placed permanently into our care?”

Miss Lilly beamed in satisfaction,
understanding that June’s use of the word ‘our’ was intentional and
implied Miss Lilly’s continuing presence in our household and a
place in my upbringing.

Mrs. Fischer smiled (which was a macabre
sight indeed with her makeup in such a bad condition) and said, “It
is exceedingly unlikely that the court will grant joint custody to
the two of you.”

She pointed in our general direction and
wagged her plump little sausage finger back and forth between Miss
Lilly and June.

“However, Miss Devon, you are a blood
relative of Mr. Krimshaw and the court is generally fond of
preserving the unity of family whenever possible.”

“With the whereabouts of Mrs. Krimshaw still
unknown, and the condition of the environment in which she
abandoned him, it is very unlikely that custody would ever be
granted back to her even if she does resurface soon.”

“In my estimation, the likelihood of
permanent custody being granted to you is very high indeed,
especially considering that I’ll be recommending that very
judgment, and I don’t like to toot my own horn, but when I throw my
weight around, the court generally listens.”

Mrs. Fischer gave a slight wink and patted
her belly as she used her self depreciating humor to emphasize her
point, and June and Miss Lilly laughed.

There seemed to be an unspoken signal that
went off, as all three adults in the room rose from the couches
simultaneously, and reached across the table to shake hands. I,
however, remained seated.

I did not think my legs had healed enough in
such a short time to support my weight, and I didn’t want to bring
Mrs. Fischer’s attention to the fact that I’d just been crippled by
my guardians.

“Lilly,” June said, “I’ve got to drive Mrs.
Krimshaw back to town, and pop in at the police station again.
Would you mind keeping an eye on Johnny again?”

“O’ course not June-bug. De boy be like a
breath o’ fresh air to me. I don’ never mind watchin’ him. An’
b’sides, I done promise him a sammich an’ den did no’ give it to
him on account o’ all dis ruckous.”

June thanked Miss Lilly, bent down and kissed
my forehead, and then headed out the door with Mrs. Fischer.

Miss Lilly went back to the kitchen to check
her gumbo and get my sandwich, and I sat on the couch, massaging my
legs, and feeling bad about having been so mortified by Mrs.
Fischer’s outward appearance.

She turned out to be a lovely maiden on the
inside, but I could not escape the fact that on the outside, she
was a dragon.

I was still rebuking myself when Miss Lilly
came back carrying a plate with two grilled cheese sandwiches on it
and a bowl of tomato soup. She set them on the table, pulled a soup
spoon from her apron and set it down next to the bowl, and told me
I should come eat. Then she headed back to the kitchen to play with
her gumbo.

I headed over to the table and bent down to
smell the soup. For as long as I could remember I had always loved
the smell of tomato soup. I sniffed deeply, expecting to have my
senses bathed in the acidic aroma of creamy tomatoes, but instead I
got a nose full of rose scent.

I stood up quickly and stared at my bowl of
soup, checking to make sure it was really tomato, and not some kind
of bizarre Cajun flower soup. It appeared to be tomato. I bent down
and smelled it again, but with a bit more caution. It smelled just
like tomato soup.

Shaking off the weird, I sat down and took a
gargantuan bite out of my sandwich, then reached for my spoon to
wash down the bite with a bit of soup. My spoon was gone.

I checked all over the table top, and looked
around on the floor but could not find a spoon. I was sure that I’d
seen Miss Lilly put a spoon down next to the bowl, but thought I
must have imagined it, because all evidence seemed to point to the
contrary. There was no spoon here.

I chose to simply slurp my soup directly from
the bowl rather than go in the kitchen and pester Miss Lilly for
another one. I did not want her to think I was insinuating that she
had not been up to snuff on her performance.

When I was all done eating I packed up my
dirty dishes and brought them into the kitchen to wash them. I was
a quick study, and had learned at breakfast that those who dirty
the dishes wash the dishes.

Miss Lilly had apparently tired herself out
with all the activity that had gone on, for she was sitting in a
wooden chair at a small table in the corner of the kitchen with her
head on her chest, snoring loudly.

I washed my dishes as quietly as I could and
got them put away. Then I headed out of the kitchen and went
looking for something entertaining to do.

I spent some time exploring the rest of the
house, wandering aimlessly from room to room. I found a laundry
room, study, bathroom, and a family room (complete with a T.V. and
V.C.R. downstairs. There was nothing of any vast interest
downstairs aside from a bookcase in the family room that contained
a plethora of books.

June’s minimalist decorating sense prevailed
in every area. Every room had just enough ornamentation to keep the
room from seeming empty, but never so much as to make the room
appear busy or cluttered.

The scant decorations did not detract from
the elegance that the builders of the house had engineered in, but
rather seemed to enhance them. Ornate woodwork appeared in every
room around doorways and windows, and also in moldings that ran
along the floors and ceilings.

The exploration of the house did not turn out
to be the time sink that I’d hoped it would be and I soon found
myself restless and bored.

I decided to head back to the family room and
turn on the television. June had satellite television and I was not
familiar with the controls on the clunky remote control, but I
played around with them long enough to get them figured out.

I flipped through the channels for awhile
until I found an old Tom and Jerry cartoon and sat there staring
blankly at the T.V. for a bit, watching the mischievous mouse
tormenting the poor tomcat in at least a dozen different and
entertaining ways.

I felt lazy and somewhat depressed but did
not know why. So many wonderful things had happened to me in the
last sixteen hours or so—since June had first opened the basement
door—that I could think of no reason to feel down, but there I
was.

There was something niggling at the back of
my mind but I could not concentrate on it quite hard enough to
bring it into focus, and its presence seemed to weigh heavy upon my
soul, soiling me from the inside.

My mood rapidly digressed and depression
began to steal over me like a cold shadow when a cloud slips in
front of the sun. On the television, the poor tomcat was currently
tied to a chair and the small brown mouse was sadistically yanking
out his whiskers one by one, and I saw no humor in it.

I clicked off the T.V. and set the remote on
the coffee table. I leaned back onto the couch, and committed to
the idea that I was going to sit there and be miserable for no good
reason.

Just when I got comfortable on the couch and
uncomfortable in my soul, a quick breeze blew gently through the
room, carrying with it the scent of roses, and then dissipated. I
glanced at the window that was set in the wall directly across from
me and saw that it was open part way, leaving a three inch gap
which was undoubtedly the source of the wind.

The open window I saw, but what I didn’t see
was the curtains moving in the breeze. I was still puzzling over
that phenomenon when the breeze blew by again. I was staring
directly at the curtains when it happened, and they did not
move.

I sat upright on the couch and looked around
the room. Nothing appeared to be out of the ordinary.

I got up and went exploring the rest of the
downstairs to try and discern the source of the rose scented
breeze. I checked every window and door and found them all closed.
I found Miss Lilly still in her chair with a stream of glistening
drool running from the corner of her mouth, down her chin, and onto
her shoulder.

I stood there for a second, breathing in the
wonderful aroma of the gumbo that was simmering on the stove when
Miss Lilly woke with a startled snort and jumped out of her chair,
scaring me at least half way to death, if not even closer.

I figuratively jumped most of the way out of
my skin, and was convinced for a second that I had literally jumped
out of my socks until I remembered that I had left my socks near
the front door earlier in the day.

I screamed like a girl with a scraped knee at
the fright Miss Lilly had given me when she jumped up, and my
scream in turn scared Miss Lilly halfway to death and cause her to
scream out in shock.

When Miss Lilly screamed, she involuntarily
jumped and tried to swivel her body around to the source of the
scream that had startled her. The jumping, swiveling, and screaming
proved to be far more than her heavy frame could pull off
gracefully and she lost her footing.

The floor trembled beneath my feet when Miss
Lilly’s robust rump landed forcefully on it. I was mortified. I was
certain that Miss Lilly was going to be pissed that I had given her
such a fright.

She sat there and stared at me for a couple
seconds, and I waited tensely for her to start hollering and
threatening me with her spoon. Instead of getting angry, Miss Lilly
started laughing in the same sharp barking tone I’d heard at
breakfast time.

When Miss Lilly laughed, there was no
superficial quality to her laughter. She laughed hard and deep. It
seemed that within her stout body somewhere, there was an
infinitely deep pool of joy, and her throat was a pump that tapped
this well of happiness, pulling the joy to the surface, and
spurting it out of her mouth in the form of laughter, drenching
everybody around her with it.

I began to laugh along with Miss Lilly,
forgetting my sour mood and curiosity for the time being. When Miss
Lilly was laughing, it was impossible to remain dour.

Finally, our laughter subsided and I helped
Miss Lilly up off the floor. When she was upright again and had
finished smoothing out her dress and apron, she looked at me very
seriously and said, “I done told you we was all gonna be bustin’
our butts before de day were done!”

We both laughed again, and Miss Lilly opened
her arms, inviting me in for a hug, which was precisely what I had
needed to complete my transformation from gloomy to blissfully
content.

When we broke free of our embrace a few
seconds later, Miss Lilly kicked me out of her kitchen again and I
returned to the family room to see if I could find a book to pass
the time until supper.

When I entered the room I saw a paper lying
on the coffee table that I hadn’t noticed before, and was fairly
certain had not been there. It was lying on top of the remote
control, and I knew I had not placed it there when I set the remote
down.

I picked up the paper and looked at it, but
could not understand what I was looking at. There was a line of
script written on the paper in a very elegant, flowing handwriting.
The style of writing on the page seemed to exude an effeminate aura
and brought to mind indistinct images of the female form, flowing
and undulating in a most alluring dance that was at once exotic,
sensual, and graceful.

Trying to clear the images of infinite beauty
from my mind I stared at the handwriting on the page and tried and
make out what it said.

La tristesse se lave l'âme, mais il peut se
laver l'âme de suite.

I was certainly not a philologist or linguist
and had no idea what the words might mean, but I suspected that
perhaps Miss Lilly could figure it out.

I grabbed up the note and headed back to the
kitchen to pester Miss Lilly as she worked diligently to get supper
prepared.

“Miss Lilly,” I said as I walked in the door,
“will you look at something for me?”

Miss Lilly looked at me suspiciously and
said, “Wha’choo be wantin’ me to look at?”

I handed Miss Lilly the note I found and
said, “I found this paper in the family room and thought maybe you
knew what it said. I can’t read it.”

Miss Lilly read the note out loud.

“La tristesse se lave l'âme, mais il peut se
laver l'âme de suite.”

As she read the words a tingle ran down my
spine and in my mind I saw a flash of the same indistinct but
definitely feminine form moving gracefully.

I must have been deeply buried in my vision,
for when Miss Lilly spoke again it startled me and I felt my face
flushing, as though I’d just been caught doing something I
shouldn’t have been.

“Dis note be written in French,” Miss Lilly
said. She looked slightly puzzled as she stared at the note in her
hand.

“But I be de only one in de house dat be
knowin’ de French, an’ I know dis not be my writin’. But it be
sayin’ true fo’ sho’.”

“Where you say you be findin’ dis letter
again, Boo?”

I explained the scenario to Miss Lilly, about
feeling the breeze and not being able to locate its source, and
finding the note laying on the table when I reentered the room, but
I left out the smell of roses and the indistinct but compelling
images that flashed into my mind when I looked at it. Those two
things seemed somehow private to me and I was not yet ready to
share them.