The Transformation Of Amy Lunaro: Chapter Thirty. {fiction}
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Sadie and Amy entered the door of the main cabin and that angel’s bell rang above them. Louis’ hulky form was hunched over his desk, and he spoke to her without looking.
“Well, well, well. How’d you sleep, madam?”
Amy hesitated with a smile. “Good…” she said, but she yawned.
Louis looked up and laughed. “Todd got you up real early, huh?”
“I guess so,” she rubbed at her eyes. “I smell that coffee,” she said.
He nodded and pointed down at Amy’s furry sidekick. “Her food’s out in the stable office. When you go meet Alba out there in an hour or so, you might want to feed her.”
Amy looked down at Sadie, who looked back up at her, patiently wagging her tail. Amy felt her heart leap at caring for this creature. She hadn’t realized she was so bored of only caring for herself.
“Happily,” she said.
“Now, you want some of Todd’s joe? And breakfast should be ready in the mess hall, too. Vegan, gluten-free, veg, you name it.”
Amy felt warmly at home, she could smell the breakfast cooking from down the hall as she received the porcelain mug of coffee Louis offered. He nodded toward the coconut milk in the fridge behind the desk.
“Help yourself,” he said.
Amy liked how he just assumed she was so healthy. Healthy was new to her since Leanne’s guidance, but she realized she liked Louis assuming she treated herself well. She used to find debauchery, and downing pills with red wine, sexy; now she felt sexy taking care of herself with green juice and kale.
Her body felt slinkier and healthier and more energized than ever.
She sipped at the coffee.
“Actually,” she said, “could I get one more?”
Louis stopped typing and looked up. He raised an eyebrow, but just said, “Sure.”
“Thank you,” Amy said shyly, blushing a bit.
She slipped past him to pour the milk into her cup, but before she poured it in the second, Louis said, “He takes it black.”
Amy put the carton back on the shelf.
“Oh,” she said, “thank you.”
“Everything about that man is straight as an arrow,” Louis said, handing Sadie a treat from the bowl on the check-in counter. Sadie took it gingerly, as if she was afraid to even let her teeth graze his fingers.
“Isn’t it amazing,” Louis said, “they can be treated so terribly but remain so tender?” He shook his head. “We’d close right up after trauma like that.”
Amy and Sadie pushed back out into the air and crossed the lawn to bring Todd his coffee. He reached down from where he stood, halfway on the ladder, took a long sip, then placed it above him on the roof. She leaned against the side of the cabin, sipping hers, not feeling like she had to entertain him.
Moments passed as he hammered, and Amy drank, watching the breeze bristle the water and move the trees. She tucked her chin deeper into her turtleneck sweater and pulled the sleeves over her hands.
Finally Todd said,
“So, Amy, tell me why you’re here.”
Amy shrugged. “I don’t really know.”
“People don’t just ‘happen’ to find themselves at places like this,” he said. “Events convene. There’s a convergence.
“I guess you could say I had a convergence,” she laughed.
“I just don’t feel like telling the story.”
“Oh, come on, indulge me,” he winked in his comfortable, teasing manner.
She couldn’t contain her laughter with him, and she wasn’t used to laughing around men. But with him, she giggled like a child full of joy. She was always so serious with them and about them. He had a sarcastic, brilliant silliness to him.
She couldn’t put her finger on it, but it was warm and thrilling and familiar that made her laugh as if she’d been seen right through, and she liked it.
She realized she didn’t really ever want to get away with anything, and that she liked being called on her shit. He made her feel so seen, like she was never wearing anything around him, just standing there totally naked.
He seemed comfortably drawn to her as well, even though he also seemed to be guarding himself against it. He cupped his mug with his thickly gloved hands and finished the coffee in one gulp.
She crossed her arms in defiance.
“Come on,” he said.
She kicked the grass under her boots, and then said it quietly, but she said it not knowing how it would land, “Okay, well, I guess I had a bit of an awakening.”
He was quiet, then he just started to shingle again.
“Hey,” said Amy. He kept shingling, studying the little nails he took out of his tool belt with an exaggerated intensity.
“Todd.”
“What?”
“Did that sound weird?”
He shrugged. “No.”
“Then what?”
“Well, just don’t be one of those people who… they get so spiritual they feel they have to be perfect. They forget how to be human. They end up studying life so much they never live it. My… I mean I know a girl like that. It’s like she can’t get out behind the glass and no one can get in. She just.. watches life.
It’s like somewhere along the line she didn’t feel worthy of just living and being messy and fucking up with the rest of us and just forgiving herself and moving the fuck on. Like she doesn’t deserve her own real life. She talks about life and reads about life. She doesn’t actually live it.”
He grimaced, angrily.
“It sucks,” he said. He laid a hammer hard into the wood.
Amy bit her lip. “That must be really hard for her.”
“It’s just painful to watch. She’s so self-conscious. She’s so fragile and in her head. And she doesn’t… she doesn’t feel real. It’s like she’s not a real person. Like a living ghost or some shit.” He wasn’t so much angry anymore, just frustrated and sorrowful and exasperated. Amy hurt for him, but she wasn’t even sure why.
She just knew she felt his pain, and somehow it felt good to feel someone else’s pain so viscerally. “She won’t…” He gestured to the water with his hammer. “… get in with you. She doesn’t know how. She talks about being present, but she doesn’t actually know how. She talks about letting go, but she doesn’t… let the fuck go.
I think she’s forgotten pleasure. I think she doesn’t really understand how to play or have fun anymore.”
Her stomach fell.
“Did she once?” Amy asked.
He shook his head. “I can’t even fucking remember.”
“I feel for her,” Amy said. “I’ve heard that before. The real thing…. that I wasn’t…”
But Todd didn’t seem to hear her. He was lost in thought about this woman.
“You want someone to be actually, present and alive. Like, intimate. And not telling you the definition of intimate or quoting Osho on it. But being it.”
Amy just nodded. The morning breeze picked up and she exhaled with it; she realized she hadn’t done that since Todd started talking about the woman who only talked about life, whoever she was.
She dumped the coffee that had gone cold into the grass.
Then she asked, “Why are you here?”
“What if I don’t feel like telling my story either?” he replied.
‘”I guess that’s fair,” she said, but she realized it probably had more than a little to do with the woman who had stopped living. And even though she wasn’t entirely comfortable with it, she realized that if he was in love with this woman, she really didn’t want to know. But it was true.
She didn’t want to know any more about the woman who only thought and couldn’t feel. She stared up at him and for a second he stared back, like he was reading her mind.
“Amy!” a woman’s voice called from across the fields and broke their silence. She looked up. A thin woman in her fifties, in mud boots, jeans, and a barn jacket, was waving at her from outside the stables.
Amy waved back.
“You better go shovel some shit,” Todd said.
Amy realized it must have been eight a.m., and they must have been standing there for an hour. Time had flown by, like entering a vortex, effortless.
“You ride?” he asked.
She coughed a little, clearing her throat. Then she smiled sheepishly.
“I did,” she told him. “Then I broke both my legs last fall.”
“Ah,” smiled Todd. “The convergence.”
“One part of it, yes.”
“Well, guess they call this getting back on the horse.”
He smiled gently at her, and she felt it like a touch. She shivered a little, even though the breeze had long since died down.
“Guess so,” she blushed. Then she dropped the mug in the grass by his ladder.
“Later,” she said, and she and Sadie took off running across the field.
“Hey!” he cried.
“What?” she called back, whipping around, and resting her hands on her knees, winded.
He paused. “Just… have fun.”
“‘Kay,” she said.
“‘Cuz it’s the whole point,” he said. “It’s why you’re here. Just…you know… enjoy yourself.”
She nodded. It felt like he had only said part of what he really wanted to say, but she just saluted him and then turned and jogged up to Alba, who took her in her arms in a warm embrace that smelled of coffee and French perfume and horse manure.
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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