The Transformation Of Amy Lunaro: Chapter Twenty Seven. {fiction}
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Halfway to Maine she took the top down off the jeep, and she soared up the eastern seaboard like that, in the open air, with Lucinda Williams playing on the stereo.
Sweet Old World came on, with Lucinda listing the things we lose when we leave this life, and her heart panged for her mother. She remembered the dimly lit living room her mom had danced in in her childhood, and she couldn’t have been much older than Amy was now.
Her mother loved The Band, she loved The Last Waltz. When she came home from work she’d take off her power suits, put on her white jeans and an over-sized soft t-shirt, and pour herself a glass of white wine. Then she’d pad into the living room with a book, which got tossed aside for dancing barefoot on the oriental rug.
Amy mostly remembered Neil Young, Lucinda, or the Band, playing on the stereo. “You won’t understand this now,” she had said to Amy, “but Robbie Robertson is all. man.” But when Amy got older she found herself drawn to the vulnerable boyishness of Rick Danko.
How she used to cringe as a child when her mother danced. But now she’d give everything to watch her dance again, and now how she wished her mother had danced more. She remembered the last time her mother danced, not knowing she was at death’s door.
After that, her mother was too tired to dance; she was mostly in bed, at home or in the hospital, until the end. Amy’s pulse raced when she realized, how could any of us ever know whether or not we’re dancing our last dance?
How could we ever know if we’re at death’s door, or death is at ours, and why does anyone act like a long life is guaranteed, when time and time again it’s proven not to be? Amy thought about the last time she had danced in the rain in Leanne’s backyard. It was too long ago. She made a note to do it again as soon as she could.
She thought we should dance as often as we could.
She suddenly had this messy mix of pain and joy for feeling scared of dying; she realized her feelings about death had changed since she last thought of it. For the last few years she had had an apathetic stance on it, almost a relief at the thought of slipping out of this world.
Now she grasped at it like a drowning woman, she wanted to suck its marrow and stay forever. Now she wanted In, not Out.
An hour up the highway, she started to see hand-painted wooden signs for Harbor Bay Healing, and eventually she followed a dirt road down to its entrance, marked with a chipped red fence. The closer she got, the louder she could hear a banging in the distance. It was methodical, like the ticking of a clock.
Bang, bang, bang, bang, like time’s second hand ticking away the moments of our life, or, like the footsteps of someone approaching. The kind of footsteps you could almost feel, more so than hear. Deep within her, she could feel someone coming.
The sandy dirt road snaked down to a smattering of dozens of wooden cabins, with one large main cabin in the center. Horses, sheep, and cows grazed on the sprawling green hills surrounding a blue placid lake that sparkled in the early afternoon sun.
That banging echoed across those hills, and even across the water, where a small sunfish and two canoes, one red and one green, idled by the dock.
She put the jeep in neutral at the gate, stopped, the way people pause at thresholds, idling between one world and the next.
Suddenly she thought about turning back. She missed Danny. She missed Leanne. What if she never saw them again? It was still early, before the season, and she could still find a rental back on the island.
Why had she left a place that had taken her in so lovingly? And why had she left the two friends she had in the world? Who was she to go work at a healing center? It was she who needed healing. She wasn’t ready to offer it to others. When were you ready to heal others, she wondered. Did you have to be totally healed? Was anyone ever totally healed?
The butterflies swarmed in her belly, and she thought about a writing teacher of hers who said that if something didn’t give you that butterfly feeling, it wasn’t worth it, it was a waste of time. That the best things in life all caused butterflies. The butterfly feeling meant our life was about to change.
She picked up her phone and called Leanne.
“Give a gal time to miss you,” Leanne answered.
“What am I doing?” Amy asked. “Why am I doing this?”
“Right now? You’re second-guessing your instinct. Don’t do that. Never do that. Always go with the first instinct. First instinct is love. Second instinct fear. Never act on fear.”
“Okay.”
“I gotta go,” Leanne said. “And so do you.”
“Leanne,” Amy pleaded, “tell me something else.”
“That most people are so afraid to fail they never fly. And that’s a damn shame. We were all born with wings. Leap. You’ll fly.” The phone clicked, Leanne was gone.
Well, that answered that question. In the six hours since she had left the island, Leanne decidedly did not miss her. And Danny, Danny was preparing for summer season, swamped with birthing farm animals, scheduling workers and her clients calling her with summer garden plans. They had their own lives.
It was time for Amy to make hers. She wasn’t just making her own life for herself, she was doing it for everyone in her life. So she didn’t have to need them. So she could want them instead. So she could have something to offer them in return.
She remembered standing at Leanne’s doorway that day more than five months before, and she had the same feeling she had now, that if she walked in the door she wouldn’t be the same anymore, everything was about to change. But back then she had nothing to lose; back then, if everything hadn’t changed, she would have died.
She remembered this feeling of sweaty palms and the gulp in her throat, and the lead deadness in her body. This was called the crossroad, this was the moment of choice. To go backwards or go forward was always our choice, and if Amy had learned anything, we could never go back. Backwards would burn us, and forward would evolve and liberate us.
Without any warning, the wind picked up, and the sky darkened, just like the swift and sudden change of a mood, and the air came rushing from behind her, sweeping toward the farms, rolling through the hills and rippling through the grass like the hair on a cat’s back.
And that was when she felt something like a push at her back, right under her shoulder blades, and it pushed her body forward so deeply that it pressed her foot right down onto the gas pedal. As she felt herself driving toward the cabins, she could hear the banging getting louder.
She found herself parked right at the door of the big main cabin, right under the swinging sign that said Guest Check-In. She looked at her face one more time in the rear-view mirror, saw behind the mask of the grown woman, into the eyes of the little girl who used to look in the mirror and dream of a big, full, happy healthy life.
This was one more chance to give that to her. So she took it. She took one more chance. She stepped out of the jeep, took a big breath as the first few drops of rain fell from the gathering clouds.
The hammering vibrated through her body and she looked up, and saw a young man, younger than her by a few years at least, on a roof of a cabin to the right of the main building. He looked down at her and he stopped work for a moment. He had a guarded look, almost mean. Either mean, or cool. She didn’t know. She got them confused.
He had sandy blond hair that was being tussled by the wind, falling in his eyes that were shielded by dark black sunglasses.
“Hi,” Amy said.
He adjusted his work belt and tugged at a leather glove with his teeth.
“I knew I felt a storm coming,” he said. Then he turned back to the roof and began to hammer again, deeply immersed in his own world in the air up there, even as the rain started to pour and soaked his broad back through his black t-shirt.
Well, okay then, Amy mumbled beneath her breath. Then she looked back toward the Main Cottage. A medium-sized black and brown dog that looked like a miniature wolf sat on the front stoop, growling at the thunder that cracked across the sky. The sign on the front door said, “Welcome. We Are All Rescues Here.”
She smiled, and stooped to pet the dog and rub the soft dent between its eyes. The dog looked up at her, right into her eyes, in that unabashedly intimate way animals have.
Amy looked right back into the depths of the brown eyes, and then she walked through the door, the chimes above her head ecstatically screaming out in the wind, and the dog following her in, right at her heels, like a graceful, protective shadow.
This is an ongoing series from a forthcoming fiction novel by Sarah Durham Wilson of DOITGIRL.
Tune in weekly for the next chapter in ‘The Transformation of Amy Lunaro’.
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