If you must know, everything changed when Lila threatened to slash my face. Her eyes, pure and green and flecked with brown. The colour of my childhood blanket. I must have screamed this because Lila lowered her broken pint glass. She wiped the blood from my lips. “Lesson one: parents are villains,” she whispered, and I felt those words pitch and roll inside my bloodstream, racing straight to my pumping heart.
I awoke five minutes later, caked in blood, wallet and car keys stolen.
Love surprises you sometimes.
***
Fate pushed Lila back into my life two months later. It had been a weird and quirky summer. I was walking towards the bus stop on 52nd and Orange Street when a thin woman slammed an elderly gent against a lamppost across the street. That ass, I thought — two ripe melons draped in black. “One flick and you hemorrhage on the sidewalk,” Lila hissed.
A knife! Imagine the pride I felt, the soaring bliss. My darling learns. She evolves.
She was motion incarnate, recalibrating on the wind.
***
Half a year passed without seeing her again. Cupid, the bastard, bleeding me dry. I was vacationing in Exmouth, chewing street meat I’d smuggled into McDonald’s, when six black bodies in ski masks burst through the doors. They waved pistols, threw wallets in trash bags, demanded my watch or my life. Terror, yes, but no black fabric could obscure those eyes, that bottom.
A trout-lipped woman screamed “Jehovah!” when a gun barrel pushed between her ribs.
“Lesson one, love,” Lila replied. “Religious persecution is older than prostitution.”
My baby recognizes no faith but all faiths, no God but all gods.
I would have raced after her but police were surrounding the restaurant.
***
Twice, I arrived at St. Matthew’s Penitentiary to have Lila refuse me. Once, I’d baked a cake because it was our anniversary, and beginnings matter. Fondant can be shaped into anything. A pint glass, say. Lila’s left cheek was swollen purple when we finally met. She bristled bravely at my tears. “Fat bitch wanted to celebrate Columbus Day. I say great, let’s celebrate the massacre of aboriginal culture as well.” She then raised her leg to the glass and showed off a new tattoo of a dollar bill eating a snake.
This world is too dark to navigate empty-handed. We all need flashlights. For my father, that was his brother’s wife. For my mother, that meant Tom Collins and a martini shaker and the Bible and the blank slate of an eight-year-old boy. What is love, exactly? And lust? And the romance of two in-laws sharing daiquiris and potato skins at Applebee’s?
When I asked Lila, she wrote a letter in ketchup saying that I should dunk my iPod in Bailey’s and coffee because that’s what love was now, electronic devices coated with depressives and stimulants. My darling also said she was learning Korean. There was talk of one day opening a steakhouse.
There is no end to her wisdom.
***
The day of her release I waited outside with flowers and a McDonald’s gift certificate. Lila knew that families save their worst pains for each other. She knew that blood oils the world, that life is best lived along the sharp edge of a glass shard, a knife, a hair trigger. When she guided us to a quiet hilltop and asked for my credit card PIN, I knew there was wisdom here, too. Yet another piece of living I did not understand.
“Count to twenty before opening your eyes,” she said, twisting the rope around my wrists.
“Lesson two: they sacrificed people before they sacrificed goats.”
I opened at fifteen. Cars looked like insects scurrying down the motorway below.
I miss you, Lila. There is still so much I don’t understand.
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