Lila Blue

by Annie Katz

  Lila Blue

  by Annie Katz

  Copyright © by Annie Katz 2012

  All rights reserved

  http://www.anniekatz.com/

  This book is fiction. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is coincidental.

  For Verginia,

  who believed in miracles

  Table of Contents

  New Rules

  Rainbow Village

  My Father’s Sins

  Lila’s Grandsons

  Saint Ann’s Cove

  Dreams & Visions

  Exotic Friends

  Lila’s Mighty Pen

  Shattered Glass

  Magic & Miracles

  About the Author

  New Rules

  At dawn on June 15, 1985, my twelfth birthday, my mother shed a few tears and shoved me up the steps onto a Greyhound bus heading north. I didn't know where I would end up or where I truly wanted to be, but I was certain I did not want to be riding that bus away from Sacramento and the only life I'd ever known.

  Janice, my mother, was sending me to stay with someone I'd never met. Her name was Lila Blue, and she was my father's mother. I knew almost nothing about my father and even less about his family. I should have asked lots of questions and made someone give me straight answers. If I had, maybe I wouldn't have spent my twelfth birthday making myself miserable. How was I to know my real true life would begin in Rainbow Village, Oregon?

  "Lila cuts hair," my mom said before she pushed me onto the bus. "Here's her shop." She handed me a white business card, which I stuffed in my jeans pocket along with the wad of birthday money she gave me at the same time. "She'll pick you up," she said.

  The bus trip was long, boring, and punctuated with soggy sandwiches, stinky toilets, crying kids, crumpled old men, and exhausted women. The best part was I was lucky enough to get the front seat behind the steps, so I could see the road and not feel packed in a crate like the people behind me. The worst part was all that time to think.

  The first hour I imagined wonderful ways to get back at my mom for sending me away, like having the bus plunge off a cliff and me dying while saving a child's life. My vengeful fantasies were interrupted at the stop in Willows when a man with whiskey breath pushed my backpack onto the floor to sit next to me. I was trying to decide what to do when the bus driver made the guy move.

  "Sorry, Miss Teledin," the driver said, and he smiled at me.

  "Thanks," I said, returning his smile. He nodded my way and turned back to his job.

  I looked at the bus driver for the first time. I'd been so obsessed with my pity party I hadn't seen anything outside my own head. The bus driver had a gentle voice that didn't fit his body, which was bulky and solid. He looked like a retired football player who'd kept in shape. No wonder the guy had moved without a fuss.

  The driver probably felt sorry for me, a kid sitting alone on his bus. I wasn't actually alone, because kids under fifteen couldn't travel by themselves, and besides my mother would never have let me go anywhere alone. Technically I was being looked after by my mom's work friend Jane, who was going to Tillamook to visit her sister for two weeks. Jane had partied all night and boarded the bus with me at six in the morning looking ghastly. As soon as we got on the road, she left me alone in the front seat to go search for a seat in the back where she could sleep it off.

  Before the trip was over, Jane turned out to be as much trouble as many of my other babysitters had been. I had to make sure she was alive and fed and watered and alert enough to survive without me when I got off the bus.

  Lila says angels are always looking out for us, so the bus driver was probably an angel, and that's why he let me leave my pack on the seat and kept an eye on who sat beside me. And come to think of it, I must have been Jane's angel.

  Angels were not on my mind though as I watched the bus driver and wondered what it would be like to be in command of such a huge vehicle. My mom wouldn't let me touch her car steering wheel. Some kids my age brag about driving, and one Mexican kid in my class said he drove all the time on his farm down there. He was about half my size and barely spoke English, so I don't see how he could drive a truck.

  The bus was climbing into the mountains, still a long way from the Oregon border. I had no idea there was so much California north of Sacramento. I stopped fantasizing about my messy, guilt producing death and stared out the window for a few hundred miles. The Golden State was gold and yellow and beige and orange and manila and tan and brown, all topped with dusty blue skies.

  My mom didn't always hate me. I had good memories. Like the time she took me to a horse barn. I was in kindergarten, and she was dating a Marlborough man, one of the models who posed for cigarette ads. He didn't seem that handsome to me, but my mom loved the idea of dating a model. At least he didn't smoke. Janice had some limits. Smoke was one of the things she didn't like about tending bar. She put up with smoke at work, but she wouldn't have a smoker in her house or car. So the model didn't smoke, which I imagine is not the norm for Marlborough men. He did have a horse, though, which is probably not the norm for Marlborough men either, and the idea of a horse enthralled me.

  My mom's pattern with men was like this. Each boyfriend lasted six months. For the first three months she was so crazy about the guy, she would hide me away with babysitters or leave me with her mother, if she and Grandma Betty were on speaking terms. The second three months she would wedge me between her and her boyfriend to help them break up.

  Once when I was seven and another time when I turned ten, there was no boyfriend. Both times my mom had sworn off men for good, and she lavished so much attention on me I had nightmares about drowning in chocolate milk. "For good" ended up being six months each time. Maybe it was a hormone thing.

  So this must have been toward the end of the Marlborough man, and my mom and I were at the horse barn with him. We were in her mother/daughter matching clothes phase. We both had on bright green cowboy boots. Mine pinched my toes. When I complained about them, she said, "Get used to it, Sandy. Beauty hurts."

  I was excited to see real horses and scared too, because, well, if you've ever been five years old standing in straw up to your shins in a stall with a shiny black horse whose front leg is taller than you are, you know why I was scared. Horses look small on TV.

  The model boyfriend had given me a carrot to offer the horse as a present, and before I was ready, the horse's big head came down at me and his enormous whiskery mouth closed over the carrot and yanked it out of my hand. Terrified, I ran behind my mother and bawled my head off. Well, they both got a big kick out of watching little Sandy cry so hard over nothing.

  Now why am I telling this story? Oh yea, good memories. Okay, I'm getting to that part.

  While I was crying myself into a fit of hiccups, the model said to my mom, "Babe, I need to make a phone call," and he disappeared.

  My mom picked me up and took me outside to a huge tree beside a pasture. She sat me on the top rail of the fence, wiped my face with perfumed tissues from her pocket, and kissed me. "I'm sorry, Sandy," she said. "I forgot how big horses are when you're little. Don't worry. Horses don't want to hurt anyone, especially sweet little girls like us."

  She pointed to some horses at the other end of the pasture. They were standing still eating grass, and when she pointed to them, they raised their heads and looked at us. "See," she said. "They like us. They're nice."

  "Come on," she said. "I have an idea." She picked me up, and I wrapped my arms and legs around her and burrowed my nose into the hair behind her ear. She smelled sweet and beautiful, and I felt safe all wrapped around her.

  She took me back inside to the horse and petted its neck. "You know what?" she said. "This horse really likes little hands like yours to touch him on this s
oft part." She took my hand and gently placed it on the horse's warm smooth neck. "See, Sandy, this horse is nice." She held me close, cradling me in her fragrant warmth. I believed her and I wasn't afraid.

  Janice put me on the bus in between boyfriends. The last one was over, and I could tell by the way she dressed and touched up her nails every day that she had met the next one. I was so tired of her endless parade of lovers, I planned to avoid boys forever. The whole notion of men was too predictable and tiresome.

  School was out, and I was facing a summer of being too young to get a job and too big to hang around the neighborhood swimming pool. My best friend Shelly spent summers with her grandparents at a lake in Wisconsin, where she and a gaggle of cousins splashed their way through the vacation. So I resigned myself to an endless boring summer.

  The day before my birthday, my mom said, "Cassandra, I'll help you clean your room."

  "What?" First of all, she only called me Cassandra when she was introducing me to someone important, and second of all, my room was always tidy.

  "Come on," she said, marching into my bedroom before I could stop her.

  I followed her, meaning to get all huffy about her insinuating my room needed cleaning, but when I saw a giant suitcase open on my bed, I was speechless.

  "Now before you get excited," she said, "it's probably just for the summer, until I straighten some things out here."

  "You said you'd never let anyone take me away again." I pushed the suitcase off onto the floor and slumped down beside it.

  "This is not the same." She tried to pull me up, but I pushed her hands away.

  "You promised."

  She sighed and took off her spike heels so she could sit on the floor across from me. "Just listen, okay? You're going to stay with your grandmother in Oregon for the summer. I need the space and she wants to get to know you."

  "Grandma and Hugh are on a cruise to Mexico."

  "Not that grandma, your other one, your dad's mom."

  "What? All of a sudden you invent a new grandma?" I wrestled the big suitcase in between us and pushed, so she had to scoot back against my bedroom wall. "It's another foster home, isn't it?"

  "It is not a foster home. It's your real flesh and blood grandma, Lila Blue, your father's mother."

  "I have a grandma you never told me about? How could you?"

  She pushed the suitcase back into my shins, jumped up, and stormed out of my room, carrying one shoe in each hand, like weapons. I knew she'd be back when she had a rebuttal prepared, and sure enough, it only took a few minutes.

  "Ever since those child protection people took you away from me, I've busted my butt making sure you were never left alone for one second. You think it's been easy taking care of you all these years with no help? I could have bought a Mercedes with all the money I spent on sitters."

  "Mom, don't send me away. I'm twelve now, not four. No one's going to call the police if you leave me alone a few hours or even all night. I don't mind, really. Let me stay. Please."

  "I can't, baby. Don't you see? You're growing up. I can't protect you. I know I'm not the best mom, but I try. I want you to be safe."

  "I am safe. I lock the doors. Aunt Lacey is two blocks away. I could run there in one minute. Let me stay."

  "No, Cassandra. It's all arranged. You're going tomorrow, like it or not."

  "Tomorrow's my birthday!"

  "I know, but that's when Jane's going, and she's taking you."

  "Jane?"

  "You know Jane, my friend from work. It's all arranged."

  "No. I won't go. I'm staying here where I belong. Don't send me off to some stranger."

  "Lila Blue is not a stranger. She's a friend. She sends us money. Every Christmas and every birthday and whenever I'm in a bind."

  "Lila Blue is my grandmother?" A slide show went off in my head, year after year of Christmas letters featuring Lila Blue and her grandkids and her pets and her adventures at the beach. The world she described was unimaginable. I had always wondered why she signed them, "Love and blessings to my beautiful California Girls."

  When I had asked my mom about it one time, she'd said, "Oh, we met Lila Blue when you were two years old, and she thought you were the cutest thing alive."

  I glared at my mother and imagined daggers streaming out of my eyes into her heart.

  "She's a nice person. You'll like her."

  "How could you?" I started crying from anger and frustration and fear all mixed together. I pounded on the suitcase between us.

  "Sandy, please don't do this to me. I couldn't tell you. You were too young. I didn't want to complicate things."

  "So every time we had a shopping party, it was her money? You lied to me my whole life?"

  "I can't tell you everything."

  "Some basic facts would be nice, Mother."

  "I want to change, Sandy. That's why I need some privacy now. I need your help."

  "A new boyfriend." I climbed up on my bed, buried my head under the pillow, and screamed into my mattress.

  She sat beside me and put her hand on my shoulder. I scrunched to the edge of the bed away from her. "A friend. Not a boyfriend. His name is Roger."

  "You dumped Roger three years ago!"

  "Not that Roger. A different one."

  I screamed into the bed again.

  "He's good for me, Sandy. He's older, he wants to help me get a better job and stop drinking. He stopped two years ago."

  She'd never talked about stopping drinking before. "You'll stop drinking? Even wine?" She went nuts over fancy wines, the more expensive the better. She memorized labels and cared more about wine pedigrees than she did about my report cards.

  "Everything," she said. "For good. One day at a time."

  "How is sending me away going to make you stop drinking?"

  "Roger says when you change a habit, it helps to break up your routine."

  "I'm your daughter, not your routine."

  "Listen. Lila and I decided this together. She wants you, Sandy. She's your grandma, and she's been very good to us. Please try it for two weeks? If you don't like it, I promise you can come back on the bus with Jane in two weeks."

  "You're putting me on a bus?"

  "You have to help me here, baby. I need to change, and this is my chance. Please try? For me?"

  What choice did I have? What choices do kids ever have?

  I stared out the bus window at Lake Shasta in the afternoon light. Imagine forty giants kneeling in a circle gouging a deep sloppy hole in red dirt and then filling it partway with muddy water. That's Lake Shasta for you. Not pretty.

  This was not how I planned to spend my twelfth birthday. Not that I had planned anything, but I certainly never imagined being banished to the wilderness all by myself. I felt like Hansel and Gretel, only worse. At least they had each other. I wished I could talk to Shelly. She always made me laugh.

  Then I remembered Shelly's gift, the only real birthday present I’d received this year. I took it out of my backpack, where I had kept its gold wrapping paper safe by folding my sweatshirt carefully around it. While I unwrapped my gift, the gold paper crinkled enough to attract the attention of the bus driver, who glanced at me and smiled when he saw what I was doing. Everybody loves presents.

  The gift turned out to be some kind of book, covered in green brocade satin, luxuriously soft. Inside was a blank journal with creamy heavy paper. The book was just the sort of elegant gift Shelly always chose for me. There was no card, but she'd inscribed it on the first page, Happy Birthday, Sandy. Write all the most delicious words of the summer in here. All my love, Shelly. PS Remember,“Girls Just Wanna Have Fun!”

  I smiled, remembering how we’d sing along with Cyndi Lauper’s newest hit songs on the radio, not caring what anyone else thought about us when we were together. Having a friend like Shelly made everything easier.

  I dug a pen out of the front pocket of my backpack and wrote underneath her inscription, I love you, Shelly. Thank you for the perfect birt
hday present. PS I'm sitting on a Greyhound bus on my way to Oregon. Help! This is NOT my idea of Fun. Then I closed the lovely book, wrapped the gold paper around it again, and found a safe spot for it in an inside compartment of my backpack.

  While paying for a ham sandwich during the lunch stop, I found the card to Lila's shop in my jeans’ pocket. Back on the bus, I used it for a bookmark in the dictionary I carried with me at all times.

  The dictionary has always been my favorite book. In my suitcase I carried a hardcover college edition. In my backpack I had a pocket edition nearly as thick as it was wide. I'd put clear tape all over the cover to reinforce it, but the poor thing was frazzled from constant use.

  Ever since Grandma Betty gave me a picture dictionary when I was four, I've loved words. I never worry about being bored if I have a dictionary. I guess I'm addicted to it the way some people are to crossword puzzles or to those tiny breath mints. I open it anywhere and study the first word my eyes land on. I flit around from page to page tasting words, the way bees visit blossoms on apple trees. Some words are sweet, like memorabilia and willowware, and I say them over and over in my head or out loud if I'm alone. Others are bitter or salty. Or sour, like propitiate. Or sharp, like cataract. I feast on words. That's what Shelly meant by delicious words of the summer.

  The dictionary is guaranteed to calm me down and help me get through hard times, and there had been more hard times than ever lately.

  Janice wasn't doing so well. She hadn't smiled in weeks. She'd stopped going out with her girlfriends, and her last boyfriend had gotten mean to her and too interested in me. Three babysitters in a row quit because my mother came home so late, and she'd run out of ideas for where to get new sitters. I told her I was old enough to look out for myself, but she felt too guilty to leave me alone.

  The last two sitters had been useless. They should have paid me for doing their homework. How do some girls get to be seventeen without developing brains?

  I was worried about my mother, and I was worried about me. She was all I had, and she was in trouble.