My Little Shadow Sister

Some people exist in one's life only through the corner of one's eye. Their story pops up in one's life as somehow related but never really affecting one's existence. This is how it is with someone who I will now call My Little Shadow Sister. She lived through only one full cycle of the Moon's Nodes. I only saw her once while she was sitting in a car about age 5. She had remarkably beautiful long straight black hair. She was a rich lawyer's kid who was supposed to have maids and ponies and fancy clothes but I only heard stories about her bad luck. She is how I choose to learn about the cycle of the Moon's Nodes.

The Nodes of the Moon are hypothetical points in the sky that show a harmonic union of the energies of the Sun, the Moon and the Earth. They are thought to show a person's special spiritual purpose and the points where his soul may struggle to evolve in his lifetime. They take about 18 months to travel through a sign and they return to the spot where they were when you were born every 18 years. How a person responds to this energy is completely personal depending on the house and sign placement of the nodes in his chart along with the planets that aspect it. I have no idea what the birth date of the person who I'm writing about is, I don't even remember her name. I never talked to her. I do know that we had parallel lives; we raced around a track that was set out for us like two phantom horses. But, she left the track at age 18 and somehow I'm still out limping around many years later.

When I was 14 my parents divorced. My father's lawyer was already divorced. His daughter is the girl I call my Shadow Sister. I only heard a handful of stories about her, all tragic. Her mother had abandonned the family when she was a baby and had never returned. She had wanted to play the harp but at too early an age so the teacher who I later studied from had refused to teach her. Failures like this in an Upper Middle or Upper Class community can wreck a kid. You're better off successfully stealing bikes than working at something honest and failing. I ended up taking lessons from the same harp teacher. Once she mimicked how this little girl had been unable to play. She winced with her fingers from an almost fetal position and said that nothing was coordinating between head and hands. This was a cheerful, hardy, stable woman who rarely spoke negatively about anyone. She didn't like to watch a small child struggle. She was a serious musician and probably didn't understand the cost of failure and rejection.

The next story I heard when I was in college. My mother had visited with some friends who had brought this girl along. The girl had sat silently through the visit until she began to talk about how her father beat her. The friends explained to my mother later on that the girl was mentally ill. As her father had been my father's attorney, though, and not my mother's attorney, my mother was skeptical and tended to believe the girl.

Her father, the Lawyer, was known to wreck divorced women's lives through financial ruin. He spoke with an electronic sounding lawyers' voice and was so tall and skinny that when he turned to the side he almost disappeared like some sort of aquarium fish.

Much later when I was visiting my father he told me that the Lawyer's daughter had moved to San Francisco and had died. She was 18. The lawyer had told everyone that her long dark hair had got caught in the drain of the bathtub and she had drowned. My parents hadn't given the story a second thought and retold it just as it had been told to them. I pointed out that I thought there was something more to the story, the "S" word, perhaps.

My father and his wife glanced at each other and didn't say a thing. They had sent me off to San Francisco to live on my own when I had had my nervous breakdown and they had probably suggested that their lawyer do the same.