The Destiny Seeker Ch. 06

Wendy lived on Lamma island, a small community near Hong Kong that had the distinction of not allowing automobiles. Lamma had the reputation as a very convenient place to live if you wanted to get "lost" from the rest of the world while still enjoying a connection to life's necessities such as running water and internet service. Her family had purchased a house near the top of the highest hill on Llama years before she was born. They had many places like this around the world. There was a time when Wendy simply accepted this without question or comment. As she approached the end of her fourth decade of existence, she found that she was asking (at least to herself) many questions about what her family represented and how it came to be. Her grandmother and her cousin Jessica were the only two family members that she both knew and had the ability to see destinies. She had been told that there were others. This information came from her grandmother, Lucy during the first real discussion that they conducted when Wendy was 13 years old.

Wendy had been living with her grandmother for about 6 years after the death of her mother, June. Her father, William, had left them when she was only three and had never reappeared in her life. She had no memory of him and had seen only one fuzzy, faded picture that showed his face. He was a powerful, tough looking man with short legs and a long torso. Her mother had told her during one of the few times that she talked about him that he reminded her of a bulldog, and that she had affectionately called him the same. He had worked overseas and was frequently gone for months at a time. On his last trip, he simply never returned home. He had been a quiet man, not prone to long conversations. When he went on his tripos, he would call home once or twice a week to ask how they were doing. Her mother had said the calls rarely lasted more than 5 minutes. He would never say where he was. he would ask how they were doing, request a report on how "the systems at home were functioning...", give his own report on the day and amount of money that would be sent to their shared bank account and then send his love and say goodbye.

My mother told me that she had no idea where he went or what he did. She just assumed that either it was something for the government or perhaps he was in construction. He always packed his own suitcase (always only a single, battered leather bag), but his entire wardrobe consisted on khaki pants, T-shirts, work boots and a worn leather bomber jacket. He was a simple man, although my grandmother told me once that he had an advanced degree in some sort of engineering. She had not approved of their marriage.

When I asked my grandmother if she thought it was odd that my mother didn't know what he did, she just looked away and said quietly that my mother had her own ways of dealing with life's puzzles and mysteries. She simply ignored them.

I asked her one time if my mother had the abilities to read destinies. My grandmother had simply smiled and said "no." It is the only time that I have been certain that she was lying to me. Four years after my father left, my mother took her own life by swallowing a large handful of pills. There was no letter, no message, no final words. Like my father, she simply went away.

"Your mother kept a lot inside of her. Of course, you know that." My grandmother told me the day after the funeral. "I think that she simply ran out of compartments to hide the things that were troubling her."

I was still confused and unsure of how to feel. I didn't cry at the funeral. To this day, i have not cried about the passing of my mother. We were not particularly close, and I always had the feeling that she didn't trust me. I was never even sure if she liked me. Most of the time it was as though I was never even in the same house with her. "She kept to herself and spent a lot of time in her bedroom." Is what I would tell the adults who would casually interrogate me for clues about what had happened to my mother. "But she loved me and took care of me the best that she knew." I would add, because it seemed like the right thing to say.

It was my grandmother who found her. She lived right down the street from us and often visited my mother, especially after my father left. In one of life's great ironies, no one in my family had seen or taken note of my mother's destiny.

It was the week after my thirteenth birthday that my first period happened. I wasn't shocked or scared. My grandmother had been preparing me for the previous year and of course there was health class at school. I was brushing my teeth on a Sunday evening preparing for bed when I felt a drop of blood run down my inner thigh. I lifted my nightgown and stared at it as it coursed its way down to my knee. It was soon followed by another.

I still had my toothbrush in my hand when I quickly walked to my grandmother's sitting room where she would always be at my bed time, reading and sipping tea. The front of my nightgown was still bunched in my left hand and my toothbrush in my right. My grandmother new immediately what had happened. By that time the blood had reached my ankle.

Grandmother walked to me carrying her paper napkin that she always had nearby and wiped the blood from my inner leg before it could stain the hardwood floor. Then she straightened before me and gave a long hug. We are not huggers in my family. We don't show a lot of emotion at all. It was the first time that she had hugged me since my mother's funeral.

She brought me to my bath and cleaned me proper with a damp cloth. Then she reached under the sink and brought out the box of pads I that she had placed there months before. She unpackaged one pad and showed me how to place it on the clean pair of cotton panties that she had brought with her from my dresser. She removed the pad and had me replace it with a fresh one. She inspected my work and seemed satisfied with my work.

"In the morning, or if you get up in the middle of the night, come see me before you remove the pad." With that she patted me on the head and turned to leave. When she reached the door, she turned and repeated her instruction to see me the minute I got up. Then she smiled and told me I was fine and had done well. As I said before, we were not a sentimental family.

At 4:05 AM I woke up with an uncomfortable wet feeling between my legs and a cramp in my stomach. I didn't hesitate. I had my instructions. I marched to my grandmother's bedroom and tapped firmly on the door. It opened instantly, almost as if she had been waiting for me.

"Come with me." She said and turned to walk into her own bath while she clasped her robe in the front.

I followed her to her bathroom. She stood just outside her door and handed me a plastic baggie that contained a fresh pad, a clean pair of panties and a dry washcloth.

"Clean yourself and then put on the clean things. Place the soiled pad in the baggie and then bring it to me when you are done."

I did as directed without a word. When I emerged from the bathroom, I handed her the baggie and stood motionlessly. She took the baggie and said "Follow me."

We walked into her reading room. There was a full moon that night and we didn't need to turn on any lights to find our way. When we reached the far wall of the room, she turned on a small reading light that was next to her desk. I thought that we were going to sit down so I went to the side chair at her desk where I often sat when she helped me with homework. She looked at be briefly, put on her reading glasses and said "no, over here." She then turned to the wall shelf where the cactapus sat. She motioned for me to come over beside her.

"It's time that I tell you a few things about our family, and about you." She said. "I need for you to watch this carefully. It's been a long time since I last experienced this and sometimes it feels like maybe I made it up in my head."

With that she picked up the pair of tweezers that were always on her desk. She was constantly plucking stray hairs on her or wood splinters from me. She used the tweezers to extract the crimson pad from the baggie, and then lifted it carefully over the arm of the cactapus that she had told me was mine many years before. She slowly lowered the pad until it was barely in contact with the highest thorn on the I noticed she was trembling slightly. This startled me more than anything that had happened in the past 24 hours. Grandmother never trembled.

As she held the pad, I noticed that the color of the arm at the point of contact was changing from dull green. First to dusky brown and then to bright read. And the color was spreading from the point of contact until eventually the entire arm was red. I didn't see one drop of blood fall.

"Look at the pad." My grandmother instructed. I had been so fixated on the cactapus arm that I had not noticed the pad at all. The pad was losing color. First it became a light red, then pink, then light pink and then is was lily white. My mouth fell open.

I looked back at the arm and saw that the color was beginning to change again. The red was changing back to brown, and patches of green were starting to emerge.

"It won't change all the way back." She said while still watching the arm. "There will still be patches of brown. I don't know why." She said, as if she understood the entire process except for this fun fact.

"And it has to be fresh menstrual blood. Regular blood does nothing. I've tried." Knowing grandmother as I did, I'm sure that she had tried many times.

She turned back to me and offered me the white pad. "Here, want to reuse this one?" She said without a hint of a smile. I just shook my head. I think my mouth was still open.

Then she smiled. "Probably a good idea." And then dropped it into the wicker trash bin beside her desk.

"Okay." She said. "It's time we had a long talk. Go to your room and change into your play clothes. You aren't going to school today. I think we can find a good excuse. You just became a grown woman, after all. Oh, and on the way, close your mouth. You look like one of the sea bass I get at the fish market."

As the sun rose in the east and we drank tea and ate dry toast, I learned I was a destiny seeker. I learned how in about a year the cactapus arm would fall off the plant and we would slice it with a filet knife and dry the pieces in the sun to become the wafers I carried in my silk purse. I learned about the other destiny seekers. I learned about the "others" who were determined to use their destiny seeking abilities to create chaos and confusion for their personal gain and enjoyment. And I learned that there would someday be a special destiny for me.