MANA

The days from Tuesday night to Saturday night seemed to pass so slow, each minute like an hour, each day like a week. I called to made reservations at a restaurant I felt she would like, I also asked them for a special table, in a cozy corner of the restaurant. Saturday night was December 7th, Pearl Harbor Day, the day that the Japanese made the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States into World War II. How ironic! Little did I know at the time, that it was my Pearl Harbor Day also, it was the beginning of the destruction of my world. I had been too intrigued with her to notice when I checked her license that first night, that most if not all the photos in her wallet were of herself. I was too fascinated by her beauty and charm to notice that she was a little glassy-eyed, and sniffed a lot. Her lady-like demeanor concealed the fact that she drank a little too much. I was blinded by love, that would not allow me to see her, as anything less than perfect. I saw her as a beautiful lady, that carried herself well, was wonderful in every way, truly a dream of perfection. Instead of a self centered, possibly drug addicted, woman with a drinking problem. If I had known that behind those beautiful eyes and tantalizing lips, there was a brain full of dishonesty, deception, corruption, vindictiveness, and destruction, I don’t know if it would have made any difference. Underneath her beautiful full young breast was a heart, cold, callous and incapable of loving anything but herself. If anyone would have told me that first night that I would ever be ashamed to be in the company of this tantalizing woman, I would have thought them crazy. I had been a police officer, a detective, and a private investigator, I had recognized criminal behavior, deception and dishonesty at a glance. Why didn’t I see these things in Lana? Was I so fascinated by her, I was blinded to the truth, or was I so in love that I was in denial of what she really was? Lana was like an iceberg, in the North Atlantic, what you saw of her was calm, cool, serene, and oh so beautiful. But beneath the water hidden from view and just out of sight, was the much larger portion of the iceberg. The dangerous jagged outcrops of ice just below the surface just waiting for a ship to come close enough to tear a hole in it and send it to the bottom. Was I to be Lana’s Titanic? To be broken in half, and sent to the depths of the icy cold ocean waters, along with hundreds of innocent victims, or was I to survive, to witness and remember the pain and torment of the many people affected by her deadly and destructive nature?