Down Dog Diary

by Sherry Roberts

The Eight Sides of Love

  HERE’S WHAT I REMEMBER of the moments after discovering the diary had disappeared: nothing.

  Apparently, though, I fled from the house and ran through the streets of Gabriel’s Garden in my nightwear—no coat, gloves, or hat. Driving down Maple Lane, Jorn saw me, pulled over, and gave chase on foot. When I reached my parents’ house, I flung open the door and collapsed into my mother’s arms.

  “I lost it!” I cried. “I lost it!”

  Evie held me and petted my hair and made soothing sounds. She didn’t ask questions. That’s not her style. Evie always waits for answers to come to her.

  When Jorn came clomping through the open door after me, he was breathing heavily and limping. “Christ, Maya, I’ve been yelling your name for three blocks,” Jorn panted, bending at the waist and gulping air. “What’s wrong?”

  Larry clattered down the stairs, tennis shoes thumping. “What’s going on? Why is Maya crying? Evie?”

  “Come,” Evie said, tucking me under her arm and leading me into the living room. She settled me on the sofa, her arm still around me, and I leaned into her. She wrapped an afghan around me.

  “The diary,” I whispered. “It’s gone.”

  Jorn straightened. “What?”

  Larry closed the front door, then sank into one of the two easy chairs facing the sofa. Jorn gingerly lowered himself into the other one. Larry’s cell phone rang, but he ignored it. Upstairs, we heard the chimes of Evie’s phone. No one moved.

  I admit that sometimes, when in stress, I run home to mother. There is no place in Gabriel’s Garden, in the whole world, like Evie and Larry’s home. Designed by Evie, it is a modern octagon sitting on a circle of fieldstone. It is built according to the precise measurements of sacred geometry, a basilica of balance and integration. From the Chinese to the makers of the native medicine wheel, this shape has represented the mountain, the mother, and the movement of the cycles of life.

  Although fascinated by numbers, I am not a serious student of sacred mathematics like Evie. But I believe in the oneness of the universe, in trusting in the patterns of nature that appear over and over again from the tiniest seed to the greatest star systems. And I believed Evie had created something special here. In Evie’s house, I always felt better.

  Larry leaned forward and said, “Tell us what happened, baby.”

  I told them about the new offer to make me a millionaire, five times over, and finding the diary gone. I didn’t mention that I had read the entire diary. The fewer people who knew what was in the diary the better. I didn’t want to burden my parents or tempt the reporter’s instincts in Jorn.

  “Tum entrusted the diary to me. I was supposed to protect it. I’m the keeper now.” I pulled the afghan closer. “How could I have been so careless?” This guilt was immense. Even beyond the healing of chocolate.

  “Whatever happened, it was not your fault.” Evie stroked my hair from my face with her incredibly soft hands. Hand lotion was my mother’s guilty pleasure. I smelled lavender. I closed my eyes for a moment and leaned my cheek into her palm. She laid her forehead against mine and whispered, “You are the keeper. You will get the diary back.”

  I sighed, and she kissed my forehead.

  That’s when Heart and Sadie burst in. “What’s going on? Merlin just told me Maya was running around town like a crazy woman. And no one’s answering the phone around here.”

  “Someone stole the diary,” Evie said.

  Heart’s eyes grew round then she pumped her fist. “Yes!” She grabbed Sadie and whirled her around in a circle. Sadie laughed. Heart put her down and turned to us, all smiles. “This is great! Fantastic!”

  Sadie crawled up on the sofa and leaned her colt-like body against me. “Why aren’t you happy, Maya?”

  “I lost something important.”

  Her face was close to mine, all big blue eyes like her father’s and honey blonde hair like her mother’s. While Heart’s hair is straight and orderly, Sadie’s hair is a riot of long curls, again David’s influence. She edged closer until our faces were practically touching and gave me a butterfly kiss, long eyelashes fluttering against my cheek, our special offer of comfort to each other.

  A joyous Heart couldn’t wait to get Sadie home and share the good news with David. After she and Sadie left, we all piled into Larry’s car, me wearing Evie’s favorite purple jacket. Larry dropped Jorn off at his Jeep. Jorn said he’d meet us at my house.

  “You don’t have to,” I told Jorn.

  “It’s more fun than writing up the zoning commission meeting.”

  I was too upset to argue. When we reached my house, the door was unlocked, just the way I’d left it.

  As we entered, Larry asked, “Has this been unlocked all day?”

  “Probably,” I whispered, reaching down and lifting Bella into my arms.

  My father sighed. Even after the break-in, it was difficult for me to break old habits. No one ever locked their doors in Whispering Spirit. In fact, many buildings didn’t even have locks.

  Evie patted Larry’s arm, a calming gesture. “Weren’t you going to take measurements for a security system? Two times is really too much, Larry.”

  My mother had experience distracting my father. “Right. Measurements,” he said, pulling a tape measure from his pocket. A mission. Larry was good at missions.

  Evie threaded her arm through mine and guided me into the yoga studio. “Let’s sit.” We sat cross-legged on my yoga mat and watched Larry commandeer Jorn to hold one end of the tape measure as he measured windows and mumbled numbers, filing them away in his memory drawers. Larry never wrote anything down.

  Suddenly, Larry stopped as if struck by an idea. “Who knew how to find the diary? You said the diary was hidden.”

  “Yes.”

  Jorn and Larry exchanged looks. “Show us exactly,” Larry said.

  I hesitated, looking at Jorn. He flung up his arms in exasperation. “I swear I won’t reveal your secret hidey-hole, Maya.”

  I shifted the table to the left of my yoga mat, jostling the Buddha, and removed the loose bricks. Hunkered before the hole, I motioned like a model in a car show. “There.”

  Larry walked over, studied the hole for a moment, poked his arm inside, then walked back to the middle of the room and slowly turned in a circle. Still sitting in lotus on my mat and with Bella now curled in her lap, Evie watched him. On his second revolution, Larry stopped and pointed to a spot near the opposite corner. “Grab me a chair,” he instructed Jorn.

  Jorn returned with a chair from the front office. Larry placed it against the wall and climbed up. He peered closely at what seemed to be a dirty spot on the wall.

  “What is it?” Jorn asked.

  Larry took out his Swiss Army knife and gouged a hole in the wall. He pried out a small object, then jumped down from the chair. He held the object up to the light. “It’s a camera.”

  Evie’s hand paused in stroking Bella.

  “A camera?” I slowly stood and walked over to my father.

  “Big Brother got here before me,” Larry said. “It’s pointed right at the front of the room, at your mat.”

  “Someone’s been watching me?”

  “They must have seen you hiding the diary one day and came back for it when you were out of the house,” Jorn said.

  Evie continued petting. “I suspect your first burglary wasn’t just a break-in. When they couldn’t find the diary, they installed the camera.”

  “Do you think there are more?” I asked, feeling ill at the thought of strange eyes spying on me.

  While Jorn and Larry searched, I paced, chanting quietly to myself. I could feel Evie’s reassuring presence. I don’t recall ever having seen Evie lose it. She fought tension with relaxation; fear with positivity; distress with calm.

  They found one other camera. This one was upst
airs, positioned to see the entire living room and kitchen.

  As everyone left, Larry taking the cameras with him and promising to be back tomorrow morning with a decent security system, Evie hugged me. “Don’t worry.”

  I smiled and kissed her cheek.

  Jorn lingered.

  “You are not putting this in your stupid newspaper,” I said.

  Pulling on a knitted hat and fleece gloves, he said, “I’ve never met a woman who gets in as much trouble as you do.”

  Chapter 12

  Ladies’ Day

  WHEN YOU LOSE A book that people have died for, you do not get out of bed—for days. You feed the cat and make yourself a piece of cinnamon toast every once in a while. You cancel yoga classes due to “illness.” You hide. You ignore Jorn banging at the door and e-mails from your family until one day your sister lets herself into your home with the key that was supposed to be for emergencies only. On that morning, your cat is patting your head incessantly, and you try to burrow deeper under the covers but you can’t. Someone has ripped the covers from you. You can growl and threaten, but you know, when you open one eye, that you’ll see her standing at the bottom of the bed. Heart.

  “You need a haircut,” she said, frowning at me. “It gets lifeless if you don’t keep the ends trimmed.”

  I twisted my hair back so she couldn’t see it.

  “I can do it,” my sister offered.

  I trusted my sister with dye but not scissors. She was not a skilled stylist. She got caught up in obsessive loops, trying to “even up” one side or another. If I let a scissor-happy Heart near my hair, I was likely to end up with no hair at all.

  Heart patted her shoulder-length perfect page boy—so shining and full of life. “Or,” she continued, “we could drive into The Cities and have a ladies’ day.”

  I sat up with a start. “Not a ladies’ day!” I moaned.

  Heart loved being pampered at a day spa called Colette’s on Nicollet Mall. I, on the other hand, hated being smeared with goo, scrubbed with salt, and wrapped in seaweed tighter than a tamale. I could tolerate the massage with mango and cocoa butter afterward, but still, it was a hell of a way to hydrate, exfoliate, and restore my glow.

  “From the looks of you, we’re going to need the full treatment: facial, eyebrows, manis, pedis.”

  “And henna tattoos.” I piped in. “Just a single rose on your shoulder. Something small and tasteful.”

  “No, I’m not letting some crazy woman dye my skin. Stop trying to distract me.” She sniffed the air and made a face. “Shower. Now.” When Heart decides she knows what’s good for me, she is immovable.

  I looked to Bella for sympathy, but she just made three circles and settled in a curl on my pillow, the cat equivalent of a shrug.

  As I trudged out of the bedroom, showered and wearing the clothes Heart had laid out for me, she shoved a travel cup of tea and a piece of toast in my hand. “You don’t have any food,” she said. It had been a week since the diary was stolen, since I’d left the house.

  “You don’t have to do this, Heart,” I said.

  “What are sisters for?” She gave me a wicked grin and pushed me toward the door.

  I hollered good-bye to the traitorous cat who didn’t even leave my warm bed to walk us to the door, and we were off. Heart drove. I sat in the passenger seat of her Honda Civic Hybrid and pouted. Heart, who dealt with an eight-year-old on a regular basis, let my sullenness slide off her like Jello on a warm plate. We passed huge semis as if they were standing still; snow-covered fields blurred in the window. Sooner than we ought to have been, we were on Hennepin Avenue, driving past the Walker Sculpture Garden. It was the first week of April and still only twenty-eight degrees. No flowers bloomed in the garden. No water misted the air from the fountain-sculpture of a giant cherry resting in a spoon. Heart flitted through lanes, and soon we were in downtown Minneapolis on Nicollet Mall.

  We spent two hours and several hundred dollars bringing out our inner beauty at Colette’s. Heart insisted on paying. “You know,” I told Heart as we left the spa, “we could have saved a ton of money by just doing a little yoga. Yoga gives good glow.”

  “I don’t do yoga,” she said. That didn’t stop me from trying to get her to the occasional class. To be frank, Heart can be tense, like wired-on-a-gallon-of-caffeine, screaming-banshee edgy, when she’s feeling overwhelmed by work or family or things that don’t quite fit her world-view. Yoga and meditation, however, were remnants of our life at the Whispering Spirit Farm, a time Heart wanted to forget.

  “Wasn’t that seaweed wrap refreshing?” she asked, steering me down the street.

  “It smelled fishy.” I sniffed my arm. “Do I smell fishy?”

  “You shed about a million dead cells.”

  “Like getting a whole new body,” I said.

  “I really need to get David in there.” Heart paused to look at a dress in a store window. “Poor man is having fits over his greenhouse.”

  “Why?” I asked, studying the dress. The midnight blue gown was strapless with a skirt big enough to hide five kids under. The mannequin, looking over her shoulder at a train of bows and ruching down the back, was lifting the front of the skirt and about to step through a gold trimmed mirror. On her feet were apple green high-top sneakers.

  “Great dress,” Heart sighed.

  “Great shoes,” I said.

  We reached Montaldo’s, one of Heart’s favorite restaurants because it serves baskets of popovers. I’d never seen a pastry filled with so much air until I moved to Minnesota. They were heavenly. As I buttered a popover, I said, “So tell me about the greenhouses.”

  Heart leaned back, closed her eyes for a moment, and sank into popover bliss. Then she filled me in: plants withering for no reason, shrubs browning, no bugs that David could find.

  “Soil seems nutritious,” she said. “Climate control thermostat’s working. It’s driving him bats.”

  I hesitated to bring up the diary, but . . . “I know you don’t want me to say it,” I smiled at the waiter who placed two salads in front of us.

  “Then don’t.”

  “There must be balance.”

  “Maya, the diary is gone. We don’t have to deal with that cosmic crap anymore.”

  “Still, Merlin broke his arm—”

  “Like any of us could not have seen that coming. He’s an old man bouncing on a trampoline.”

  “He received a gift,” I said.

  “And you think he paid the price.”

  All through lunch, it hung between us. Karma comes from the Sanskrit for “action”; it is the belief that all actions lead to inevitable results, both good and bad. The thing is you never knew when the “reaction” to that action would appear in your life. Was the trouble in the greenhouse the result of the blooming tree in March, a tree full of life?

  Heart shook her head, signed the credit card receipt, and tucked her card back in her wallet. “I’m not letting you undo three hundred dollars of spa work. The plants will recover. David will be okay. Period.” Cosmic payback was a bitch, and Heart was afraid to admit it.

  I glanced out the window, spying a woman in pink on the sidewalk across the street in front of the Mary Tyler Moore statue. It was Sasha, and she was arguing with a man. He was big, in a well-tailored black woolen overcoat, no hat or gloves. “Look at that,” I said, motioning to the window.

  “Is that Julia’s sister?” Heart asked.

  I nodded, unable to take my eyes off the pair.

  “Do you think she needs help?” Heart asked, considering the giant who was leaning over Sasha. It was like watching a Transformer square off with a small Scandinavian doll in a heavily embroidered fuchsia coat and matching high-heel suede boots. And the Transformer was losing.

  “I think she can handle him,” I said, watching Sasha poke the guy in the chest. He dropped
his head and stopped talking, which was good, because Sasha had plenty to say. She reamed him as passing shoppers and downtown workers jostled them. Finally, she flung up her hands and stalked away.

  The man stood, for a moment, head hanging. Then he looked up at Mary, the one “who can turn the world on with her smile.” She is flinging her beret into the air with happy abandon, just like in the television show.

  The man looked both ways then kicked the statue.

  Chapter 13

  Meditation Marathon

  I AWOKE, GASPING, FIGHTING OFF the tangled arms of the bedcovers. The dream gnawed at the edges of my mind. Sitting up, I peered into the darkness, as if the haze of the dream would clear if only I could focus. I felt a hand on my arm. No, a paw. Bella was either telling me to go back to sleep or she was hungry.

  I drew my knees up and held on. I struggled to remember the dream. I was running through a forest of weeping willows, their feathery fingers reaching for me. Attached to the waving fronds, like Christmas ornaments, were geometric shapes. Red cubes, blue spheres, black tetrahedrons, gold pyramids. Every time one of the shapes touched my skin, it burned. I held my arms close, trying to dodge the shapes, and then I burst from the trees and skidded to a stop—at the edge of a waterfall. I looked back at the trees and their nasty mathematics. I couldn’t go back through them, but I couldn’t go over the falls either. I was frozen in fear.

  My room came back into focus. There was nothing but darkness. I pulled Bella into my arms and cradled her under my chin.

  “Tum,” I whispered.

  I felt I knew something but couldn’t pull it to the surface. Bits from the Down Dog Diary swam through my head. Once I had almost copied the journal, even had the first page on the scanner. But something stopped me. For some reason, it didn’t feel right to transfer the contents of the diary to any other medium.

  “Silly huh, Bella? Like there was some deep, dark magic that would be transferred via computer cables to an unsuspecting world.” I sighed. “I know, that’s a plot line from Buffy. I’ve got to start watching more documentaries.” Bella flexed her claws in reply.