Lila Blue

by Annie Katz

  "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."

  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 chur
ch, 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."

  "Namaste," I said, tasting the sounds on my tongue. It felt nice. "Namaste."

  "Exactly," Lila said, and she made prayer hands, bowed to me, and said it again, "Namaste." Then she Namasted the cats one by one, and they meowed back at her. She laughed.