Lila Blue
Authors: 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
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 soft
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."