Lila Blue

by Annie Katz

  "How did you get back to the tree?" I tried to remember how far it was, probably fifty yards, half a football field.

  "I crawled and drug myself on my belly the first few yards," he said, "praying I wouldn't pass out below the tide line."

  "Maybe Saint Ann helped you," I said, meaning it as a joke.

  "Someone did," he said. He wasn't kidding.

  "Who?" I asked. My heart pounded like a bird trying to escape from my ribcage.

  "I wasn't going to tell anyone, except maybe Jamie later, but when you walked in here, I knew I should tell you."

  "Who helped you?"

  "David, our father. He helped me."

  My mind was arguing with him, giving me all the reasons it was impossible. It was a crazy thing to say, maybe a mean thing to say. My heart fluttered between hope and rage.

  "I know," he said. "It sounds crazy. I had myself convinced it didn't happen."

  "What happened," I said, pulling a chair over closer to his bed and sitting down because my legs were wobbly.

  "I'd only gone a few feet crawling on my hands and knees over the rocks, and I knew I couldn't make it that way, because it hurt too much. So I tried dragging myself up the beach like they show on the marine commercials, but I was digging myself a grave in the stones instead of covering ground."

  "Then I heard him say, 'Stand up, Mark. Stand up.' I looked to see if someone was there, but there was no one. I was conscious. I could see, hear, and feel everything. I wasn't dreaming."

  "What did you do? You couldn't stand up."

  "I did," he said, his face mirroring my amazement. "It was like being lifted up into a standing position, and he supported my right side and I hopped the best I could on my left foot, and it only took a minute to get to the tree. I swear."

  "Why do you think it was David? Maybe it was God or an angel."

  "I knew him," Mark said, and he suddenly started crying and talking through his tears. "He told me who he was, and I knew him. I could hear him and feel him, but I couldn't see him."

  I found I was crying too. "Like Lila feels Ray in her bed at night."

  "She does?"

  I nodded, afraid I shouldn't have told him.

  "She never told me," he said.

  "I'm sorry," I said. "I should have kept it private."

  "No, it's okay. We're family. We need to know important things."

  "Yes," I said. "No more secrets."

  "David saved my life," he said. "And you. You saved me from spending how many more miserable hours in the cove by myself? My baby sister and my dead father saved my stupid dumb-ass life."

  He started laughing then, and so did I. We laughed so hard Lila and Jamie came in to see what all the commotion was about. They pulled up chairs and Mark told them about David telling him to stand up and helping him to the tree.

  One detail of the miracle he'd left out before was how his backpack got to the tree.

  "As soon as I broke my ankle, I took off the pack and threw it as far as I could up onto the beach. It only went six feet, so I knew I'd have to leave it. When the coasties found me, my pack was safe and dry right beside me. The canteen was empty, so I'd drunk the water without knowing it."

  "Now it's Saint David's Cove," Jamie said, and we all agreed that was a wonderful way to commemorate the miracle.

  When we'd all laughed and cried some more, Lila said, "Okay, babies, party's over. The nurses will be in soon. We all need to sleep before Terry and Rich get here." She kissed Mark goodbye and Jamie hugged him and I bowed, "Namaste, Brother."

  Before we left, I said, "Why did you decide to tell me?"

  Mark grinned at me. "Because the last thing David said to me was, 'Compliment your sister on her new hairstyle.'"

  "Impossible!" I said. "I didn't even know I was getting a new hairstyle until Molly grabbed me at the shop."

  "I guess nothing is impossible when you're dead," Jamie said. We all laughed so hard that one of the nurses came and kicked us out of the hospital.

  As we were leaving, Mark said, "Hey, Cass."

  I turned around to see what he needed.

  "I like your hair," he said.

  "Thanks," I said, because sometimes I'm like Zoe. I like to have the last word.

  Jamie slept in the car on the way back home, and I tried to be alert to help Lila stay awake, but I kept dozing off too. There was almost no traffic and no rain or fog, so we were home by three in the morning.

  As soon as we got home, Lila called Terry and Rich on their car phone. I still couldn't believe people could have a telephone in a car. Didn't you have to have phone lines?

  Anyway, they were driving into Portland, where they were going to stop for food and coffee and then drive straight to the hospital. They'd arrive there about sunrise.

  I was so grateful when my head hit the pillow in my little bedroom, I went to sleep whispering thank you thank you thank you.

  The sound of laughter woke me up out of a swimming dream. After the big wave dream, I would have been happy to forget my dreams, but it was like a rusty old faucet had been broken open and dream images poured through my brain as soon as I closed my eyes for sleep.

  In the swimming dream, I am underwater in a river, swimming like a fish that breathes water. I have gills, even though I'm still me. I'm the only human fish that I see, and the other fish accept me and swim around me so we are a school. They are all beautiful blues and greens and yellows and purples, but I'm just me. The sound of laughter in Lila's house mixed in with my dream, so the fish were all laughing and happy and excited, because something wonderful was happening.

  I got up not knowing if I was awake or asleep. It was only six-thirty in the morning, and there was definitely a party. I peeked out of my room and sure enough, the living room was crowded with people. Molly came and slipped into my room with me.

  "Jamie's seal is gone," she said. "Her mom came and got her. Mrs. Mulligan saw them together on the beach at first light, and she watched the baby follow her mom into the sea. She lived!"

  "Jamie's baby," I said. "Is he awake?"

  "Yes," she said. "Come on, get dressed. There's food and everything."

  Jamie was tucked in afghans in the middle of the couch looking out to the beach where he'd first seen the baby only four mornings before. It seemed like months had passed in between. Everyone in the house was smiling and laughing and recounting stories about how their relatives in Iowa couldn't believe the whole village was defending a baby seal.

  Ronny from the bakery was serving everyone from a tray of fresh scones and donuts, and Mrs. Mulligan was pouring hot cocoa and coffee from her station in the kitchen.

  "It was a blessing to see them swim out through the waves together," she said to Molly and me when she handed us cups of chocolate. I recognized her then as the lady who said she would light candles and pray for the baby. It seemed right that she was the one who saw the happy ending to the story.

  Molly and I circled back to the living room. "Where's Lila," I asked Curtis, who was sitting in Lila's desk chair.

  "I don't know," he said, nodding to Molly. "We got here a few minutes ago." I saw he had a book in his hand.

  "My friend Shelly is coming all the way from Wisconsin to meet you," I told him.

  "Me? Why?"

  "I told her you were a famous Reading Poster Boy."

  "What?" he said.

  "I had to get her out here somehow."

  He grinned, shook his head, and opened his book. "You girls are always cooking up something. As long as it doesn't involve braiding my hair."

  We laughed and went up to the Crow's Nest to see what we could see from there. It was strange to see people walking their dogs in front of our house again. No signs, no guards, as if the seal had never been there. She was safe, as safe as anyone could be in a huge ocean with her mother.

  "Molly, do you think seals have guardian angels?"

  "Sure," she said. "We all have spirit helpers. Bradley talks to his sometimes when he's working on his
Legos. He has a creation committee who give him ideas for what to build next. Sometimes they even fight, so he lectures them about speaking respectfully to each other."

  "Mark told us that David helped him get across the beach in the cove."

  "We heard he got rescued. He saw your father?"

  "He didn't see him, but he said he could hear him and feel him. It was a miracle he made it all the way to the waiting tree from the edge of the cliff."

  "Wow," Molly said. "That's so far."

  "He said when the rescuers found him, his backpack was on the ground right beside him. He'd thrown it off as soon as he broke his ankle."

  "Definitely spirit helpers," Molly said, nodding her head.

  "How did you know about Mark being in trouble?" I wondered if Marta had called everyone.

  "After Lila found out the rescue guys spotted Mark from the helicopter, she called my mom, who got the word out to the whole village. I think the celebration downstairs is for Mark being safe even more than for the seal."

  "Maybe the seal pup's angel was the one who woke up Jamie the first morning," I said.

  "That makes sense," Molly said.

  "That crazy woman might have stolen the seal baby for a pet or a science experiment."

  Molly nodded. "Jamie saved her life."

  We heard the door downstairs open, so we went back to the big round window that overlooked the street behind the house. Everyone was leaving at once, it seemed. Lots of people had walked, and they were headed back toward home, still laughing and chatting in groups. Others got in their cars and drove off to work or wherever they normally needed to be early on Thursday morning.

  Molly and I went downstairs to find Lila and Curtis sitting on either side of Jamie on the couch. Everyone else had left. We went to sit on the floor near them, and pretty soon Chloe and Zoe came and joined us. They'd been hiding under Lila's bed during the party. They both jumped up on Jamie's lap and purred and kneaded the afghan covering his legs. He petted them and rubbed noses with them while the rest of us enjoyed watching them together.

  Molly and Curtis left soon after that, and Lila called the hospital. They said Mark was fine. Terry and Rich were with him, and after Lila talked with Terry a few minutes, she hung up the phone and said to Jamie and me, "We should go back to bed."

  So we did.

  That afternoon Terry and Rich checked into the resort down the street. They brought Mark with them, and Jamie and Lila and I walked down to see them after they got Mark situated in the room. He had a cast on his right leg from his toes to his knee, and he had to use crutches to get around. They were all exhausted, so we stayed long enough to see they were okay, and then we went home.

  After we ate a light lunch, we had plenty of energy to go back and play in the resort swimming pool. We were the only people using it, so Jamie decided to do as many cannonballs as he could. Lila and I swam with our heads above water at the other end of the pool. It was hard to believe it had only been two weeks since we'd been there the first time.

  "How come time doesn't behave itself?" I asked Lila.

  "What do you mean?"

  "In some ways the last two weeks seem like years," I said. "In other ways they seem like two days. How is that possible?"

  "Hmm," she said, nodding in agreement. "I think it's because clock time and natural time are completely different, almost from two different universes."

  "Like science fiction," I said.

  "Maybe, but maybe more like dream time and machine time. Clock time is a relatively new concept that humans made up. It came with the mechanical revolution, when logic gained supremacy over magic.”

  I shook my head, trying to understand how magic had anything to do with it.

  Lila smiled at me and said, "Ancient peoples observed the seasons and the moon's progress around the earth, so their time was connected to big natural events. They didn't divide up the time from one sunrise to the next in equal segments so you would have the illusion that one segment was as important as the next. This is getting too technical for you, isn't it Cassandra." She swam without speaking for a while, and I kept up, trying to sort out how her answer related to my question.

  I said, "You mean one clock hour dreaming and one clock hour sitting in a boring class and one clock hour reading a book and one clock hour stranded in the cove with a broken foot are not equal in a real way, only in a made-up logical machine way?"

  "Precisely."

  "Oh," I said, but I wasn't satisfied. "But how come it feels so weird, Grandma?"

  "Because our culture values machine time, so we accept it as real, meaningful, and true. It's a faulty premise, a wrong belief that everyone accepts as true. When our real life experience points out the error, it disturbs us. It rubs us the wrong way. Our culture values logic, sometimes above truth, beauty, goodness, justice, and grace. It takes a brave person to see the truth. Sometimes a courageous person is like the child who says the emperor has no clothes."

  "The fairy tale," I said. "When one innocent child sees the truth and says it out loud, everyone else's eyes are opened."

  "That's the miracle," Lila said. "That's how one person can change the world."

  Everything was quiet after that. We rested after our swim, then joined Terry and Rich and Mark in their hotel suite and had room service bring us dinner. It was fun to eat hotel food for a change. I had a club sandwich with potato chips and a strawberry milk shake.

  Mark seemed relaxed and happy. I think the pain medication was strong, because he was spacey and silly.

  Terry and Rich fussed over him, making sure he was comfortable and had the best ocean view. He was the prince surrounded by adoring subjects. Getting hurt had it rewards.

  Jamie told his parents all about the baby seal protection project, and how happy he was this morning when the baby was strong enough to swim out to sea where she belonged.

  Lila and I said goodbye to Mark and Rich there, and Terry and Jamie came back with us to pack the boys' things. They would leave early in the morning for home.

  Jamie and I went down to the beach to say goodbye to the sun and to each other. We sat on a heavy drift log near our sea wall and watched the sky change colors. The sun melted into an hourglass and then a pyramid and then a gold brick resting on the horizon. We didn't say anything. We watched until the last brilliant orange pinpoint of light slipped into the sea, flashing a brilliant green light that shot two beams of green out from the center point up into the sky like searchlights.

  With the afterimage of it still on my brain, I looked at Jamie and his expression mirrored mine. "The green flash!" we cried.

  Jamie jumped up and grabbed my hand to hoist me off the log. "Let's see if the others saw it," he said, and I ran up the stairs after him.

  Lila met us on the porch. "The green flash," she said, jumping up and down, clapping her hands, and yipping her coyote yip.

  Jamie called the hotel. Mark and Rich had been watching the sunset too, but only Mark saw the green flash. Rich thought Mark was teasing him when he cried out, so Mark was thrilled that we had seen it. Jamie went upstairs to ask his mom if she saw it, but she had been packing clothes and didn't see the last few minutes of sunset.

  When Jamie came back downstairs, he said to Lila, "Maybe it was David giving us a sign, because we're the only ones who could see it."

  "Yea," I said. "It could be him saying goodbye until the next time we're all at the beach together."

  "Isn't life grand, my darlings?" Lila said, hugging us both to her. "Anything is possible. Everything is a miracle. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily. Delight in every moment."

  Dreams & Visions

  After Jamie and Mark left, everything got so quiet it was strange. I tried to remember what we did before they came, but everything felt weird. Lila's house seemed different having had them in it.

  I hibernated for the weekend, staying indoors with the cats and feeling restless. The cats were fine. They were good teachers for "going with the flow" and "being here now,
" which Lila said were wonderful spiritual practices. Siamese cats must be highly evolved spiritual beings then, because they were happy napping, washing themselves, and looking beautiful and serene. I, on the other hand, must have been on the spiritual level of a flat worm. All I did was wiggle around for two days.

  Sunday morning in a fit of nerves I decided to do something about my braids. They were more than a little ratty looking, so I took them out, saving the beads in a shell dish on the bathroom counter. If my hair had been wild before the braiding, now it was truly insane looking, so I spent several minutes making goofy faces at myself in the bathroom mirror.

  I took a hot shower and scrubbed my hair and scalp good, and then got dressed and decided to try my own braids. The most I could manage was Pocahontas style pigtails, which were kind of cute. I even got the glass beads on right to decorate the very ends of the braids.

  "Very nice," Lila said when I finally emerged from the bathroom an hour later.

  She gave me plenty of space and was her regular cheerful self, but I thought she missed the boys, too. She only saw them three or four weeks a year. Plus this time she didn't get much time alone with them, because I was involved, reacting to everything and needing her support. I hoped I hadn't been a nuisance.

  When she went to work Sunday afternoon, I called my mom. We hadn't had a long talk since before Mark and Jamie came.

  "Mom," I said. "I'm glad you're home. How are you?"

  "Oh. Sandy. It's you. I was wondering when you'd have time for me again."

  "Mark and Jamie left Friday," I said, ignoring her foul mood, "so it's pretty quiet around here. How are you?"

  "Baby, put Lila on the phone. I need to talk to her."

  "She's at work. Do you want her to call you when she has a break?"

  "Who's there with you, Sandy?"

  "No one, Mom. The cats. We're fine. This is a very safe place. I know practically everyone in town already."

  "I want you home this instant, young lady. You are never to stay by yourself. You know that."

  "Mother, I'm twelve years old. People have babies when they're my age. I'm almost grown."

  "You're not pregnant, are you?" she said, sounding completely insane.