Lady Sunshine

by Amy Mason Doan

  I think for a minute, then beckon him to follow me. “Come on.”

  Inside the Rec Room, I hand him the album.

  “Oh. No.”

  “Take it. Please. You’re doing me another favor. One less thing to catalog.”

  He holds it up carefully, reverently, by the edges. “God, he’s so young here. But he looks immortal, doesn’t he?”

  My eyes avoid the back cover. I’ve had enough haunting images for one day. Instead I come around to his side of the album and show him how the light bubbles obscure the sides of the raft on the cover, and make it seem as if Graham is closer to the water than he is, that he trusted magic to hold him aloft and keep his favorite guitar safe. “The raft used to be much wider than when you got to it. So don’t feel guilty about not bringing your number one guitar.”

  “I do feel better, even if the illusion’s somewhat shattered. Ever the teacher, huh?”

  “I guess. Though my classroom feels a million miles away. I miss them, my kids.”

  He looks at me, nods. “I’ll bet you’re a good teacher. You were so calm today.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Well, thank you. I’ll treasure this. It was Angela’s favorite of his, she told me at Arbor View.”

  I’m so glad to know this that I beam at him. So his outing wasn’t about the great man, the immortal Graham. At least not entirely. It was also for Angela.

  “What?” he asks.

  “Oh. I like the way you talk about Angela. How fond you were of her.”

  “Ah.”

  “You know, she’s the one who found this place. Not Graham.”

  “Was she? I’ll bet not a lot of people know that.” His voice... He may be a lousy singer, but when he speaks, it’s smooth and deep.

  I force myself to hold his gaze, moving my hands in the finger stretch that’s become a nervous compulsion around him. Widening them in front of me. It’s an exercise designed to stretch the finger span. I have the kids say Abracadabra when we do it during warmup. They love that.

  He reaches over to me, but before his hand can touch my temple, I dodge.

  “Sorry. You have a little pond gunk there, over your right ear. That’s all.”

  “Oh.” Embarrassed, I swipe at the wet leaf stuck to my skin. “Well, I should go change.”

  “Me, too. Sorry I keep inflicting personal injury on you. Shock, that first day. Now glacial water exposure...”

  “Not quite glacial,” I say, smiling. “We’re only a little above sea level. But you did expose my ear canals to pond amoebae.”

  “That’s a risk people seriously underestimate. Thanks again for rescuing me.”

  “Any time.”

  18

  Slipstream

  A few days later

  Paul isn’t happy about my sudden decision to stay here through August. He’s hurt and confused and he has every right to be, since I’ve given him no explanation. Just a hasty message a week ago, the day he’d planned to pick me up at Logan. I’d left it at ten a.m. Boston time, when I knew he’d be teaching summer school.

  “What’s going on?” he asks quietly. “Just what kind of pack rat was this long-lost aunt of yours?” He tries to laugh, a sad little sound.

  “I’m really sorry, Paul. I’ll send you a check for the Cape Cod deposit.”

  I wait, the receiver cold against my ear, the crackle of our bad connection as loud as the skids and whacks of the skateboarders doing their tricks outside the phone booth. Two cars pass on the highway before he speaks again.

  “A check. Great. You do that. I’ll look forward to receiving your check.” He hangs up—Paul never hangs up first.

  Funny. I keep trying to picture him, but it comes out as mental lists. Paul is tall, lean. He plays handball. Paul has blond hair and a silky blondish-red beard. He reads detective novels and his favorite food is shrimp fried rice. Once last year, after our hundredth fight, when I told him I needed space, he left a coffee table book about comets on my doorstep. Paul has blue eyes. But I can’t remember what it feels like to look into them.

  I buy a frozen yogurt for my lunch and carry it to the dunes, but it melts into chocolate chip soup, like the custards Willa used to buy only so she could talk to Liam. Liam. Angela’s detective tried to track him down after Willa ran away, but couldn’t. Someone thought he was surfing and teaching English in Bali.

  I sit, watching surfers, tourists picnicking, the slow rightward progress of a tanker far off at sea.

  * * *

  “Jackie!” Kauri runs up to me the second I’m through the gate. “We found something important!”

  “I found it,” Fiona corrects him. “He was scared of the raccoons.”

  Proudly, Kauri waves something like a homemade maraca, releasing a high, bell-like sound, and hands it to me: it’s cold and smooth in my hand. A small mason jar with the lid rusted shut. The smallest of Kate’s jars, the size she used for her strongest relishes and chutneys.

  I shake it, rattling the key inside, echoing the music Kauri made.

  “It was under the steps of one of the big cabins no one’s using,” Fiona says. She points to the trees flanking the field downhill on our right, on the north side of the property. “There’s a whole raccoon family living under there. A colony. We saw a baby go in...”

  I nod and look where she’s pointing, though I don’t need her explanations.

  I’m the one who hid the key under the steps of Slipstream cabin. Twenty years ago.

  “We thought it might be important,” Kauri says. “Like a key to someone’s safe.”

  “It’s too teeny for that,” Fiona says to him. To me: “Do you know what it opens?”

  I trace the raised grape design on the smooth glass. “No. But I really appreciate you braving the raccoons and getting it for me. Those raccoons must have known you were people to trust.”

  “Can we show you where we found it?” Kauri asks.

  “Please.”

  I let them lead me. I’ve avoided it, but I’m ready now, and it’ll be easier with these two along.

  Into the trees, left at the stump that’s like a giant guitar pick. It doesn’t look like a guitar pick anymore. It’s crumbled, hollowed out in the center.

  “Giant’s Cup,” Fiona says as we pass.

  So they’ve found their own favorite places here, made up their own fairy-tale names.

  At Slipstream, we peer in at the darkness under the porch steps: eight sets of yellow eyes peer back. I make the expected sounds of appreciation, commend them on their bravery for grabbing the key from the raccoon’s compound.

  I gaze up at my old cabin. Padlocked. Windows boarded up. The right handrail, the one I was too lazy to nail in place and fixed with gum, is gone now.

  “It’s abandoned,” Kauri says with relish. He must not realize that his family’s cabin on the other side of the field looked just as forlorn a few weeks ago, until I unlocked it, pried the boards off with a crowbar from the shed, swept and cleaned.

  “Should we go in?” I ask.

  “How?” Fiona says.

  I reach into my back pocket and pull out my big key chain, shaking it. A rattle of the sticky doorknob, a hip-bump against the thick wood like it’s my disco partner, and we’re in.

  No condoms or drug needles on the floor, thankfully. Nothing on the walls but bare pine. I wonder what happened to the Blondie poster I stuck to the door with yet more wads of gum. No more dresser, and the bunches of lavender Angela gave me the first day we talked have been removed from the mirror frame, too, or crumbled to dust. No sign that I was ever here.

  But the bed frame is still by the window, covered with a tarp, and as the kids are looking out the window, I feel behind the chunky wooden bed’s legs. Of course there’s nothing. I may have the key now, but I haven’t been able to find what it opens.

&nb
sp; So many nights I slept here. At first it had felt unfamiliar, being the only one under this little roof (though eventually Willa had crashed here sometimes after we’d had an evening beach outing). But gradually I’d come to love my solo cabin, surrounded by the sounds and life of so many other families.

  And then Colin had come, and he’d joined me on this bed, or I’d joined him in his. Angela and Graham, technically, temporarily, my guardians, had seemed unfazed by how much older he was than me, or what he would tell me. They didn’t care where Willa and I slept or if there was a roof above our heads. I look out the window at Plover—no more sign on that one. How Willa and I had howled when a branch had dipped over it, transforming the name to “lover.” Colin runs a small organic farm in Maine—I saw his ad in a newspaper circular once, and he looked happy.

  Fee and Kauri are chattering about what a fine playhouse the cabin would make, about who might have lived here once.

  “The giant!” Kauri says.

  “It’s too small,” Fiona says.

  “Maybe it can be the giant’s dollhouse,” Kauri says, with less conviction.

  I’m about to tell him what a good idea this is—Fiona can be so harsh—when she says, “That’s a good idea, Kaur.”

  They exchange a look of disappointment when I lock up, but I pretend not to notice.

  When we’re back at the main house, drinking lemonade on the porch, I say, “Tell you what. Want to trade keys?” I pull Slipstream’s off the ring and hold it out. “I’ll take the teeny one and you can have this one. Then you can visit any time you want. But promise not to go near those raccoons again, ’kay?”

  “Okay!” they chorus. Fiona hands me the jar and they fly down the field back to their giant’s dollhouse.

  Shane and Mat come around the corner.

  “So the kids showed you their latest discovery,” Mat says. “Kauri’s convinced it’s the key to Thumbelina’s treasure chest.” He’s proud of his son’s imagination.

  “Maybe it is,” I say.

  Mat laughs, but Shane’s quiet, watchful. As they eat their lunch and talk about the afternoon’s session plans, he keeps glancing over at me, and the jar with the little brass key inside.

  In the parlor, with the shades drawn and the door shut, I struggle with the aluminum lid, trying to wrench it open to get at the key. I wrap it in a T-shirt, hitting the top with my hairbrush like it’s a stubborn mustard jar lid. I have red welts on my palm, but the lid is stuck tight.

  Do you know what it opens?

  No.

  It’s been a long time since I lied to kids.

  19

  The Giant

  1979

  Six days after Colin arrived

  Dear Ray,

  Colin helped us build a slide for the kids this morning. Entertaining them cuts into our songwriting, I guess, but maybe I’m becoming like Willa—I need less sleep. This place gives me energy. We find time for everything important...

  We built a waterslide running down half the field, taking advantage of the slope from near the house down to the center of the bowl. It was my idea—I’d always wanted a Slip ’N Slide after seeing the commercials, but hadn’t grown up in a Slip ’N Slide household.

  “It was more of a Sip-n-Sigh household,” I told Colin and Willa after lunch, as we staked the huge roll of Angela’s gardening plastic in place. Willa laughed appreciatively along with Colin, but mouthed Sip and Sigh to herself when he’d turned his back. I knew she was thinking that “Sip and Sigh” could be a song.

  “Poor Jackie,” Colin said. “At least you’re making up for your deprivation now.”

  We slicked the plastic with detergent and water and took turns shooting down, and within five minutes every kid there was begging for a turn. The angles of the bowl did the work for you. You started out slow, and then you picked up speed, then you were flying, and then, just before it got too scary, the field leveled out.

  Even the hordes used it. Even Graham.

  “Every castle should have a slide,” he said, launching his huge body onto it, singing one of his obscure English ballads all the way down, something about the castle keep, dark and deep.

  I could just imagine how Patricia would’ve wailed if I’d tried something like this in our patch of groomed side garden in the city. Robert, we’ll have to resod!

  As we watched Colin climb back up the hill after his third ride, dripping and laughing, shaking his long hair, Willa murmured, “He never stays this long.”

  “Never?”

  “Never. I’m telling you, it’s because you’re here.”

  True, he sat by me at meals and campfire, talked to me, sought me out. But we hadn’t kissed.

  Willa thought this was irrelevant; she had decided it was preordained that Colin and I would come together. I dismissed this, but yesterday morning, when she and I were in Slipstream talking about Colin and Liam—with whom she’d had three private surfing dates—we’d looked out the window at his cabin. A branch had dipped over the burnt wood sign that said Plover, covering the P, and we’d burst out laughing.

  Now Willa said casually to him as he walked up to us, wet from his slide, “Hey, Col. Me and Jackie and Liam are camping on the beach tonight. Want to come? The stars have been amazing lately.”

  “Sure!”

  When he left to buy food for our camping expedition, I turned to her. “Why, Willa Kingston, you crafty girl.”

  “I think you’re rubbing off on me.” She laughed and flew onto the slide, graceful as an arrow.

  I watched her. I didn’t want her to change too much. I liked her dreamy, gentle ways, her honesty. But she’d said it as if this talent of mine—for nudging and plotting—was so obviously a good thing. I couldn’t help but savor the compliment.

  * * *

  Before nightfall, the four of us had built a fire at the beach and set up our skylit beds.

  Willa and I had spent the night on the beach, just the two of us, five times now. First to check it off my list and then just for fun. I understood why she loved it—the steady surf washing away every worry, big and small. The contrast between cold face and cozy body, wrapped tight in a sleeping bag. My dreams on campout nights were vivid and expansive and restful, not the fitful, crowded dreams I often had indoors. “High-Ceilinged Dreams”—I’d played around with a song about them.

  But I’d only experienced these new pleasures with Willa next to me on the sand. I had no interest in sleeping outside completely alone, like she sometimes did.

  After the four of us set up our little camp, Willa and Liam went for a night swim and Colin and I sat by the fire, passing the last of his strawberries and one of Angela’s joints back and forth, listening to Wolfman Jack’s friendly rasp on Colin’s radio.

  “She should enter this crop...” he said, holding the weed so deep in his lungs that his stomach became concave under his jutting rib cage. He exhaled: “...in the county fair. Bless you, Angela. An invention born of necessity for Mrs. Graham Kingston, I guess. Here.”

  “Why do you say stuff like that?”

  “What?”

  “Hint that Graham’s so hard to live with.”

  “What? Oh. Just that Graham isn’t always such a jolly gold giant. Pass that back, will you?”

  I handed him the joint. “You mean he can be moody? All artists get moody once in a while. If they spent every second worrying about etiquette, what’d be left for creating?”

  “Sorry, but that...” He took a long drag, held it, blew a slow plume up at the sky. “...is grade-A horseshit. I hate that indulge the stormy artiste garbage. You wouldn’t be so quick to defend him if you hadn’t seen something interesting. Spill.”

  “But I haven’t seen anything. Honestly. The only time I’ve seen him moody is when you tease him.”

  “But he’s got you babysitting for him.”

  “
I don’t mind it,” I said, too quickly. “It’s fun.”

  “Hey, I’m sorry.” He nudged me. “Jackie?”

  I shook my head, staring at the fire and refusing to look at him, but he tapped my knee with one gentle finger, speaking more quietly.

  “He’s a brilliant man. I wish I had a hundredth of his talent. Maybe I’m a little jealous. And he’s helping people, offering up his studio, opening his home as a...waystation. It’s a kindness, really generous of him, I don’t deny that.”

  “How generous of you to admit it.”

  “Is this a fight?” He touched my hand. “Hey, look at me. I’m not trying to be a know-it-all. I like you. I just don’t want you to be...disillusioned. If you find out he isn’t perfect. He gets something out of playing the host, too.”

  Willa and Liam came in from the water then, dripping, laughing, shaking their hair on us, unzipping their wet suits. They exchanged a long kiss before sitting together across the fire.

  “Just be careful with the hero worship,” Colin murmured. “That’s all.”

  I watched Willa through the wavery air above the fire; she was preoccupied with Liam, winding one of his wet curls around her finger. “I know Graham’s not perfect,” I whispered.

  I thought we’d dropped it. We finished another joint and roasted marshmallows, and I taught the other three dances to the kind of pop radio music I loved and they pretended to hate, Willa and me sneaking a glance during The Hustle, which was on her list. Her Hustle was as good as it was going to get, but she kept putting off our disco outing, insisting she could improve. But prescribed group dancing didn’t suit Willa. Her body wanted to float free, to do its own thing; it rebelled at the mechanized twirls and claps of The Hustle and The Hot Chocolate and The Bump.

  Liam, usually so reserved, had the brilliant idea to make our own disco lights by bouncing a flashlight on a shard of abalone shell, through a pine cone. It wasn’t Teena’s DreamTraxx, and the sand made it hard to slide and hip-bump, to drop into a “dishrag” in Colin’s arms. But this felt better. Teena’s hadn’t been about connecting with other people, not really. Not for me. It only looked that way.