Lady Sunshine

by Amy Mason Doan

  “How’d you find out about that? It was a lifetime ago.”

  “Your bio’s on your school internet page. Anyway, who cares about prizes? That was a thing of beauty.” He gets up and sits to my right on the bench. “And you can sing, not just play. You’ve been holding out on us. Interested in joining our little venture?”

  I shake my head more quickly than I intend to. “You don’t want my voice on your album. I wish you could’ve heard Willa’s. It was—” I stop myself.

  “What?”

  I answer with a soft trill of minor-key notes on the piano. I was about to blurt something I’ve never said to anyone, except her. That her singing was unearthly. It’s the only word I could ever find to describe it properly.

  “You two. You were close, weren’t you?” He peers at me from the side.

  “I thought we were close, the summer I stayed here,” I admit, looking at the sheet music.

  But perhaps we weren’t. And maybe Willa wouldn’t even like the adult me. She’d be happy about my teaching. She’d say she always knew I’d end up working with kids. But she’d scold me, in her soft way, if she saw how I was living in Boston. The fact that I only spend time with people like Paul, who I can keep at arm’s length. What’s happened to you? she’d ask.

  I go on. “Everything was so intense back then. You know?” I glance at Shane.

  He nods. “Angela only talked about her once. One afternoon, after I played ‘Angel, Lion, Willow.’ It was stupid of me. I was showing off, not thinking how it’d make her feel. I apologized, rambled on awkwardly—I’ve been known to ramble on awkwardly, if you haven’t noticed—Anyway, she got this distant look and she said... I remember what she said exactly. That Willa wasn’t meant for this world. It’s very sad, what happened to her.”

  “Yes.” I stare at the sheet music again. Oh please, Angela. How trite, how convenient. How wrong. Willa was more a part of this world than most people who live to be a hundred. But who was I to question what a mother had to tell herself to keep going after losing her child?

  Her only child, who couldn’t imagine living anywhere else, who planned to live here until she was an old lady with wild white hair—who’d run away without a goodbye and died two years later. Drowned off the coast of Mexico. Official cause of death: severe diabetic reaction coupled with surfing too far out given the day’s conditions.

  We hadn’t spoken once since that summer.

  I’ve never quite accepted it. Certainly never understood it. The Willa I knew managed her diabetes expertly, and she was as strong as a channel swimmer. The girl swallowed up by the bright water off of Rosarito wouldn’t have drowned if she didn’t want to...but why would she have wanted to?

  I’ll never get to ask her.

  “You know,” Shane says. “I play in the middle of the night, too. When I’m in that jangly mood.”

  I turn to him, grateful he’s changed the subject. “Jangly,” I repeat, liking the sound. It describes how I felt earlier perfectly. “So, how’s it going down here?”

  “I don’t know. Not great,” he says, downcast. “Maybe I’m trying to force it. Force what’s in my heart on them.”

  I’m surprised by how much it hurts to hear this. All the tiptoeing around they’re doing so they don’t disturb me can’t be helping their work. And I’m sure they’ll be just as cautious, as deferential, when I hand the keys over to Windward Realty. I feel like the resident killjoy. The suit. Like my father.

  “Anyway, Mat says I’m getting obsessive. I feel like we conveniently bust a part whenever he thinks I need a break.”

  I smile at this. “I’m on his side. Breaks are healthy.”

  “Maybe. But I can’t help thinking he’s more concerned about the fact that I keep forgetting to shower than my mental health.”

  I laugh. Though he smells good. Like Angela’s lavender-mint Castile soap, the way we all smelled back then. There are still bars of it everywhere. I must smell like it now, too.

  “You know,” I say casually. “If Mat thinks the group needs to relax, they can spread out. Use the place more. The hot springs, picnic tables, whatever they want.”

  “You wouldn’t mind?” He angles his head toward me.

  “I wouldn’t mind.”

  “Well. We may take you up on that. Hey, play some more, will you?” He shifts on the bench to give me room. “Please? I like how you play.”

  “Any requests?”

  “Hmmm. Give me a medley. Or...were you looking under here for some more sheet music?” He knocks the glossy wood between our bodies.

  “Oh, no. Just trying to take an inventory of everything that’ll need packing. Just being thorough,” I lie, not willing to share the existence of this sacred relic from the past. “Okay, black-tie concert audience.” I play, jumping from Joni Mitchell to Styx to Mozart’s devilishly fast “Turkish Rondo,” anything that comes to mind.

  He grabs his guitar to teach me a song—a love song he wrote in college that no label wanted. I haven’t played a duet with anyone except my students in a long time. But it’s easy with him. He’s gifted on the guitar, his fingers fast, notes and chords twining casually around mine.

  I’m facing the piano and he’s got his back to it now so he can play, but our hips are separated by only a little space on the bench. A foot, maybe ten inches of glossy cherrywood—the smoothest of surfaces, perfect for sliding closer to someone. For a moment I wonder what would happen if I did.

  He sings, and I know why he’s got Bree doing lead vocals on the album. His voice is worse than mine, growly and even more narrow in range—it struggles on anything above the lowest bass. But it’s unapologetic, and even if his voice isn’t pleasing, his joy in the music is:

  Let them rush over and surround us

  Let their colors blur around us...

  I play my best. I realize, as we finish, just how much I want to impress him. I like the fact that he read my school bio online. I like his bad voice, and his beautiful song. How his right elbow grazes mine a couple of times.

  I like how he nods, anticipating my choices, encouraging me as I fudge my way through this unknown tune. He’s attentive, sensitive. Everything about his playing says—trust me.

  * * *

  It’s after one by the time I settle on the daybed.

  “Tk, tk, tk,” I summon Toby. He’s a spiral of fur in the moonlight, curled on the rug. I wish he’d stretch and hop softly onto my feet like he does in Boston, but he only lifts his head sleepily and blinks at me.

  He’s been like that for days; he only wants to stay right there, on that small patch of rug.

  I get out of bed and lie next to him, stroking his warm flank. “You okay, buddy? You miss home?”

  He’s vibrating. Not purring—vibrating.

  No, the floor is. There’s a steady throb from below, from the studio. So Shane’s still awake, playing. There must be a post or beam that transmits vibrations up to this particular spot. I press my ear to the rug and close my eyes.

  Mystery solved. So that’s why Toby favors this patch of floor to my feet. It’s a comforting feeling, that sustained temblor from below. A diffuse massage. I hum Shane’s sweet, rejected song and nuzzle my cheek against Toby’s soft back.

  It seems we’ll stay like this for my remaining time here. Shane and his group will lay down their songs, and I’ll fill the rest of my boxes, and we’ll work on our separate levels of the house until I say goodbye in a week.

  But this place has other plans.

  Just like Willa once said.

  July

  11

  Outside of Reason

  1999

  “So you are coming back,” Paul says. “I was worried I’d lost you to the Moonies.”

  Decent, sweet Paul. He sounds so far away that I close my eyes and rest my head on the warm Plexiglas of the phone booth by the custard s
hack. (Though I shouldn’t call it that. General Custard’s is now a frozen yogurt shop. Twenty flavors, fifty toppings.)

  “The Moonies are up in Oregon, Paul. Not California.”

  “Well. I was able to change the dates for Cape Cod to next weekend.”

  “Cape C—Oh, right, great.”

  “You forgot,” he says flatly.

  A tall, touristy-looking man in a straw fedora is waiting impatiently for the phone booth, glaring at me, and I feel doubly scolded. I turn my back to him, nervously clinking the change dispenser. “No. Well, okay, I did, but I’ve been so busy, finishing up.”

  “Sure. Well.” Paul sighs. “I’ll see you at Logan tomorrow night at nine. Flight 646, right? Maybe we can grab a bite if you’re not too zonked.”

  “I’d love it!” I try to make up for forgetting about our long-planned trip.

  I cross the highway and hike up the trail to the house. Fast, until my heart’s pumping and I’m sweating. I don’t want to think about Paul in the shabby teacher’s lounge, looking wounded. It’s strange. I’ve only been gone for three weeks, but it feels like so much longer. This place is a riptide pulling me from everything sturdy and clear—Paul, my real life in Boston. The sooner I get back, the better.

  It’s my last day.

  This morning, I bumped into Shane in the hall and asked how it was going.

  “Better,” he said.

  Over the past week, the group’s made themselves at home. They’ve dragged the picnic tables together, not far from their old spot in the center of the “face” Willa imagined. Beach towels get strewn farther afield each time I venture outside. I saw some near the hot springs late last night. I found someone’s underwear, too. Vivienne will purse her lips at the clutter when I hand over the keys tomorrow morning.

  The campfires have started, too. A second surge of life after the sun goes down, when they finish their work in the studio. “Join us!” they call if they see me hurrying past. I always smile and shake my head.

  Bree calls from the fire circle now as I’m crossing the field from the parking lot. “Jackie!”

  The “come join us” is unsaid, but evident in her tone, chiding me for trying to sneak past them again. She’s poking the fire, and there’s an unclaimed stump to her right, and her broad smile tells me it’s my seat, waiting for me. Shane’s on the other side of it, looking up hopefully.

  “C’mon, one goodbye drink?” Mat says.

  I don’t have time to socialize. Since I’ve procrastinated so much on the second floor, my plan is to pack it all night, all morning before my noon flight—the boxes are ready, at the foot of the stairs. I’ll be a zombie by the time I arrive at Logan tomorrow night, but I’ll be done. Maybe it’ll be less painful this way. No time to think.

  “C’mon, Jackie, take a break!”

  “One teeny break!”

  Kauri—“Please, Jackie?”

  “For the kids, Jackie,” Piper says. They all echo her in a raucous chant: For the kids. For the kids.

  I know what waits for me in the house. Upstairs bedrooms that feel like museums. Cold and lonely and full of things I haven’t had the courage to touch.

  Here, by the warmth of the crackling fire, they all look so happy and excited. So eager to make me laugh.

  I sit.

  Bree Lang smiles, satisfied, but doesn’t speak. Mat, who’s directly across the fire, opens a beer, and it quickly makes its way around the circle to me.

  Piper speaks first. “We knew we’d lure you to our nightly fire ritual in the end.”

  “Did you have a bet on it?” I sip the cold microbrew.

  “Yes,” Piper says. “I think I had the evening of July 2 at 8:06 p.m., right? I win the pool! Pay up, losers.”

  Everyone laughs. Everyone except Shane, who looks at me, concerned. He’s worried that I’m only socializing to be polite.

  It’s okay, I mouth.

  Bree introduces me to the ones I don’t know. Two rhythm guitarists here for the week, someone helping Mat out with the finicky analog mixing equipment, someone else who just sat in on drums for the day. There are fourteen of us total, staring at the fire as it begins to catch and grow. There is something about campfire that frees people: you don’t have to look at faces. Only the fire’s constant changes.

  No pressure to perform at this campfire, though. I must be giddy from my first swallow of alcohol since Boston, because I smile to myself, imagining what they’d do if I suddenly busted out my teenage Saturday Night Live bits. It would be worth it to see their shock. I wonder what Shane, sitting next to me picking at his beer label, would think.

  “So you’re leaving tomorrow, huh?” Mat asks. “Long flight?”

  “Yeah. Middle seat, too.”

  Sympathetic groans; these are middle-seat veterans.

  Bree tilts her head at me curiously and I realize I’ve goofed. Now they’ll wonder why I’m not living like an heiress, with first-class plane tickets, and I don’t want to get into that. How I’m not keeping any of the money.

  Why I’m not keeping the money.

  “How’s the recording?” I ask no one in particular, to change the subject.

  “Magic,” says Mat. “Finally, after the standard nightmarish, tear-your-hair-out, puke-under-the-mixing-board-when-no-one’s-looking beginning, magic. Come down for a listen tomorrow before you go.”

  “No time,” I say. “Thanks, though.”

  The conversation moves on to food, movies, the Y2K bug that may or may not throw the world into premature Armageddon on January 1. A music festival down at Shoreline Amphitheatre that someone wants to check out.

  “You’re still selling right after this circus leaves town?” Bree asks on my other side.

  “That’s the plan.”

  “Well, good for you, giving this old place one last hurrah. It’s pretty country here. I needed this. Feels like I’ve been indoors for two years.” She looks up at the stars, and I do, too.

  We fall into an easy silence for a minute. I appreciate the lack of judgment in her tone, about me selling.

  “I’ve been thinking about your uncle a lot this summer, trying to figure him out,” she says, her chin still uptilted as she stargazes. “Living inside his lyrics too much, I guess. In one song, he’s generous and openhearted, and then in the next he’s...” She looks at me as she searches for the right word. “Inscrutable. Almost bitter. Sometimes he’s holding your hand, and sometimes he’s this cold, superior being casting his wisdom down from on high. I can’t figure it out.”

  I keep my voice light. “I doubt my lyrics would make a tidy package, if I were a songwriter. Would anyone’s?”

  Bree smiles. “No. Hell, no.”

  She changes the subject to my job back home, my students. “You miss them,” she says.

  “I do.”

  Bree is so open, so surprisingly approachable, that I raise the question that’s been needling me since I heard she was coming. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Ask away.”

  “I know your music pretty well, and this seems...well, like sort of a departure. Why are you involved?”

  “Sort of a departure?” Laughing, Bree rummages in the purse at her feet and hands me a miniature photo album, open to the first page. “This handsome gentleman is the reason for the departure. My dear departed daddy. Gone for twenty-two years now. He was once a session musician, never quite made it. He played rhythm guitar on Three. That was his only major-label work before he gave up. He used to sing the songs to me at bedtime when I was little. Playing that album became a habit. It’s good, don’t get me wrong. But the intensity of my love for it lies outside of reason, as they say. So here I am. You ever have anything like Three is to me, that you love outside of reason?”

  I tilt the picture toward the firelight and stare into it. Something—little-girl-Bree’s yello
w yarn ponytail bows, the way she’s looking up at her father—makes me want to meet her honesty with my own.

  “Yes. This old children’s book. My mom bought it for my nursery, when she was pregnant with me. Do you know Margaret Wise Brown?”

  “Goodnight Moon. Sure. And now I’ll have it in my head for days.”

  I smile. “She wrote another one, it’s not famous, called The Important Book. So I have this habit of saying, ‘The Important Thing about X is Y.’ ‘The Important Thing about Y is Z.’ I’ve done it all my life.”

  “And now you’ll start me doing it. Ever tell her about your important habit?”

  “Oh, no. I never got the chance to do that. I wish I had.”

  “She’s with my daddy, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  We listen to the wind sighing through pines, a charred log scraping against another as it settles lower in the pile. “Well, anyway,” Bree goes on. “That’s the reason I’m here. Aside from Shane over there being an absurdly talented and persuasive producer.”

  “Who’s absurd?” Shane asks, swiveling on his stump-chair to face us.

  “We’re not talking to you.” Bree waves him off until he turns back to the conversation on his right. “And a nice guy, to boot,” she says to me, privately. “Anyway, I thought I might find a little piece of Albert Bossou Lang down in your uncle’s studio. Call me a sappy old broad.”

  I hand her back the picture. “No. I understand it completely.”

  “It’s a shame you’re leaving tomorrow,” Bree says.

  “It is,” I say. Tomorrow at this hour I’ll be breathing the stale, chilly air of an airplane, surrounded by frazzled strangers. Then I’ll be in my dark apartment, alone. Or in Paul’s light-filled apartment. Feeling alone.

  Now that my departure’s so close, my return to real life imminent, I’m sorry I’ve taken in so little of the warm fire, crisp seaside air, and easy smiles here.

  I sip my beer and listen to them talk, sing, joke. Then the music starts, and I’m relieved they don’t sing anything by Graham. Instead, it’s a hodgepodge of bar songs, Woody Guthrie, a summer camp round Piper remembers fondly called “Black Socks.”