Lady Sunshine

by Amy Mason Doan

  “Willa.”

  “Yes. Willa. And Angela.”

  “You knew them back then?”

  “I knew Angela. We were sort of friends.” He goes on slowly, anxious to tell the story right. “Angela and I had a special stump.”

  It’s a cryptic, arresting opener, like the ones I favored when I used to spin my stories for Willa.

  “I was a lonely kid,” he says. “I used to hike over here to the Kingston land and hide in the trees to spy on everyone. The family, the never-ending parade of visitors. But especially Angela, in her garden, and the woods.

  “She looked like such a nice mother. My own was... Anyway, there was always so much laughter, so much music on this side of the ridge. I thought this place was heaven.”

  “They wanted it to be heaven.”

  “Yes, and I wanted in. But for a long time, years, I watched from afar. Not afar enough, because Angela was on to me from the beginning. Maybe she wouldn’t have noticed me if I’d used a spyglass.” He waits.

  “You’re him. You’re the boy who used to spy on us!”

  “You knew?”

  In spite of everything, I smile. “Yes. Willa called you the fan club.”

  He smiles to himself, shy. “I thought no one could see me. You were nice to me, remember? The toy motorcycle you bought me that day in the thrift store? With a tiny rider.”

  I hug my legs close to my body and concentrate, strain to remember until I can see it: the inside of that store. Dusty shelves, big bins, and wooden fruit crates packed with time-worn goods. I can picture a boy there. But I don’t know if it’s memory or imagination, if he’s painted the scene for me and I’m only a spectator after the fact.

  “I still have that motorcycle,” he says.

  “Do you?” I’m lost for a minute, dreaming, half in the past.

  “You were kind, Jackie. A good person. You still are.” He touches my hand.

  A twenty-five-cent plastic motorcycle I bought you when you were a kid, and you think I’m a saint. You don’t know me at all.

  “Tell me the rest,” I press. “About Angela. About why you lied.”

  “So...I used to spy on Angela,” Shane says. “And I guess the whole time she was totally aware that I was sneaking around these hills watching her. Because one day when I was seven she said, ‘Is there a little squirrel over there behind that tree? I wonder if it’d come out and make friends with me. I’m kind of lonely today.’

  “She started leaving me gifts in a burned-out stump behind the hot springs. Little surprises. Cookies. Clothes. Books. My family didn’t have much. One Christmas it was a portable record player and a stack of 45s. Talk about heaven.”

  “Did anyone else know?”

  “It was our little secret. Angela kept a lot of secrets.” He bites his lip. “So. After I left here I sent her a few of my band CDs over the years. But I hadn’t seen her since ’79, same as you. She’d...withdrawn. After Willa took off.”

  As I’d withdrawn from everyone I’d known here. Except Kate, who I could never disobey; I’d taken her occasional calls.

  “Go on,” I say.

  “Then, a year ago, right after moving out of here into the assisted-living place, she calls me in LA. Out of the blue.” He pauses. “Jackie. The idea for this album. It wasn’t mine.”

  “It was Angela’s.”

  He nods. “She says she has a special project for me and I need to come see her at Arbor View. I drove up that night.

  “She says she’s sick and not going to get better, and offers up this idea. A last wish. She gives me Graham’s song notebook. But she refuses to put anything in her will about it, and has me promise I’ll tell you it was my idea, not hers. And that I won’t say I grew up here.”

  “But why?”

  “She wanted you to decide on your own. She said, ‘If it’s meant to happen, it’ll happen.’”

  I close my eyes.

  “You don’t believe me. Jackie, I know it sounds nuts but I swear—”

  “No. I believe you.” I sigh and open my eyes, look straight at him. “It sounds exactly like something a Kingston would say.”

  “I wish, god, you don’t know how much I wish I’d told you everything from the beginning. I tried a few times.”

  “A for effort,” I say softly.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “That’s why you knew Graham’s nickname for me.” Lady Sunshine.

  Shane nods.

  It hurts. I’d thought of us as two people thrown together randomly. Equally confused to find ourselves here, in this strange place. When all along, he’s had the upper hand.

  “Jackie? I was trying to keep a promise to Angela.”

  We’re both quiet, and I’m sure he’s thinking the same thing—And now it’s broken.

  “So it was some kind of test, whether I would agree to the album or not?” I ask. “I wonder if I passed or failed.”

  “I think you passed. Angela wanted it to happen. That’s the only part I know for sure. I could see it in her eyes.”

  And maybe she did know Willa would be on the album. Willa and Graham.

  And me.

  A happy ending. One big happy family. On CD and vinyl, at least.

  We lean our heads against the tree trunk, not speaking, for a long time.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing here,” I say quietly.

  “Here, at the house this summer? Or here, out in the woods in the middle of the night with me?”

  “Both.”

  “I’m glad you’re here. Both.”

  “Thank you.” I squeeze the little key tightly.

  “Well. Feel like going back for some midnight pancakes? I’d say we’ve earned them.”

  “Tempting. But I may stay out here a little longer, if you don’t mind.”

  “Sure.” He stands, stretches, and I watch him go, trying to get used to the fact that he grew up here. That he knows these hills as intimately as Willa. And that he lied to me.

  A few feet away, he pulls his flashlight from his pocket, comes back.

  “In case you need it for anything.” He glances up at the treehouse, presses the flashlight in my left hand. He knows I’m clutching the key in my other hand.

  And he must have guessed what I’ve been looking for so obsessively.

  I wonder how many times he watched me here writing in it. Locking it up. Stuffing it down my waistband before clambering up the rope ladder after Willa.

  And I wonder what else he saw, spying in these woods.

  I listen to Shane go. When the studio door creaks open, then shut, I stand. I flick on the flashlight and sweep it around the ground. Searching.

  There, five feet away. The perfect branch. Long enough, curved at the end. Not Willa’s old shepherd’s crook limb, but it’ll do. I reach up with it, poking at the rope until it swings free. I tug it. Tug it again. It feels secure.

  But still my heart thuds. I know where this ladder leads.

  I hold the tiny key under my tongue and the flashlight in my teeth, reach up, and climb. It’s not easy, barefoot. After the first difficult hoist, my body, though twenty years older, remembers. Cling, grab, cling, grab.

  It’s dank in the treehouse. Creaky. The floor, never perfectly level, tilts away from me at a ten-degree angle, a funhouse. But as I edge onto the platform, it holds.

  I take the flashlight from my mouth and cast the beam around. The fabric remnants from the thrift store are still on the platform, but they’ve stiffened. The posters stuck to the stripped branches are torn, rippled, faded.

  What would Patricia think if she knew how much I wanted to get my hands on the diary now, after the way I’d acted when she gave it to me, the four-beat pause before my thank you a masterpiece of teenage condescension? She and I developed a decent relationship over the years, afte
r everything. She and my father live in San Diego, enjoying their plush retirement. She’s always said that I came home to San Francisco at eighteen—“after that unfortunate summer”—more “mature.” I was certainly more respectful toward her and my father. The truth is, I returned to them pliable, quiet, little fight left in me, and this suited them both. It seemed pointless to torment them, to waste time on jealousy, small hurts and slights and losses, when I’d lost everything that mattered. Maybe that is maturity.

  Gingerly, I cross the plywood floor and sit near the eastern edge, set the flashlight down. I take the key from my mouth and wrap it in a piece of fabric, placing it in the center of the platform so it won’t get lost. Lying on my stomach, I reach over the platform, fumbling blindly, plunging my hand down into a damp crevice where two big branches split off.

  I looked here before. I looked everywhere, that last awful day, before I returned to San Francisco. But maybe, in my grief and rising panic, I was careless. Even if the diary has decayed to near-nothingness, a bit of yellow plastic and moldy paper with smudges that were once my thoughts, at least I’ll know my secrets are safe in it...

  But it’s not there.

  * * *

  I wake at dawn, aching after an hour of sleep on the treehouse floor. I take the key bundle and the flashlight and climb down the rope, my body sore in so many places I feel like I have the flu.

  Paul is still out on the porch, snoring lightly, his long legs splayed over the hammock, a beach towel scrunched on top of his face as a makeshift eye mask. He must have had a miserable night. I gently pull his blanket up over his shoulder and go inside to cook him breakfast like I promised.

  Fresh orange juice, sliced bananas, sunny-side-up eggs. I’m chasing a shard of eggshell around the bowl with my index finger when the upper studio door creaks softly. A second later I look out the window and Shane’s in the garden again. Rumpled, hair unbrushed. He looks like hell, like he hasn’t slept any more than I have. As I pour the egg in the pan and start making coffee, he stretches and turns toward the kitchen window.

  Keep your head down. If you keep your head down and act busy until he’s gone, he won’t come in.

  Remember Paul. He flew three thousand miles for you. Breakfast. Paul. Paul has never lied. It’s all easy and clear with him. The way it should be.

  All smooth edges, nothing to snag on, nothing to cut you.

  Nothing to hold on to, either.

  I look up. Shane smiles at me, waves. I can’t help it—my arm moves on its own, lifting the coffeepot in invitation.

  “Saving me once again,” he says as he comes in through the back door to the kitchen.

  “Not much sleep?”

  He rolls his neck and yawns in reply, settles on the stool across the butcher-block island from me. I pour us each a big mug of coffee, and we don’t speak until we’re on our second.

  “Thanks. So. Was it there?”

  He means the diary. I shake my head. I’m still processing the fact that Shane grew up around here. That he watched Angela, and me and Willa, too, sometimes. It’s unnerving, but there’s comfort in it, too.

  I thought I was the only one left who knew just how special this place used to be, who remembers what I was like here at seventeen.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I think Willa took it with her when she left for Mexico.”

  “If so, then she wanted you with her, in a way?”

  “I guess. But maybe that’s wishful thinking. Maybe she threw it in the ocean.” As soon as I say it I wish I hadn’t—I’m tired and it slipped out. It makes me think of her in Rosarito, sinking into the sun-strewn water. That’s how I picture it—a clear, beautiful day, though I wasn’t there.

  “Why would she do that? I used to watch you two together, and you looked happy. I would’ve given anything for a friend like that.”

  “But at the end, right before she left, things changed. She’d barely speak to me. I don’t know why. Those last days here were...chaotic. Confusing.”

  He nods, sips his coffee. “Natural. Where’s...you know?”

  “Paul. Still asleep.”

  “Red-eyes are the worst. They screw me up for weeks.”

  “You travel a lot, huh?”

  “This is the longest I’ve stayed in one place in months. Started the year in New York, helping a friend out with an EP. Then London, a fill-in thing. LA. New York again. Chicago, somewhere in there. Are you and...?”

  “Paul.”

  “Paul. Are you two going on any trips while he’s out here?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  He nods, a little too rapidly. And I think he knows Paul’s name.

  “And you two are...it’s serious?”

  I hesitate. “I’m not sure about that, either,” I murmur.

  Paul comes in. Not still asleep, then. He’s dressed, his hair and beard hastily combed, but there’s a diamond hash mark pattern on his forehead from the hammock. It looks like he got beaned by a waffle iron.

  I’m not sure if he heard, but he’s a gentleman, and probably wouldn’t show it if he had. He kisses me on the cheek and I try not to shrink from him. I try to banish the unkind thought that comes with the first whiff of his Pepsodent and wintergreen rinse—He’s performing. Marking me his.

  Shane rises, his voice too loud, his smile too fixed: “Well. You two have fun today! Back down to the dungeon for me!”

  “Don’t leave on my account,” Paul says.

  But Shane goes, fast. As if we’ve done something wrong.

  “You poor thing, Paul.” I force a laugh, hopping off of my stool. I touch the grid pattern on his damp pink skin, trying to summon tenderness instead of pity. “Coffee’s ready, and the eggs won’t take a minute.”

  “Jackie.”

  “And we don’t have any rye bread, but there are some sourdough English muffins. Then, after breakfast, I’m going to show you the prettiest spot on the beach.”

  “Jackie.” He shakes his head. “Don’t.”

  I toy with the twist tie from the English muffin bag, straightening it on the butcher-block counter, fitting it into one of the deep knife marks that scar its top.

  His voice is flat. “Say it. Say what you’re going to say to me at that pretty spot on the beach.”

  I shake my head.

  “Say it. It’s no good, is it? You and me?”

  I look up at him.

  He nods. Leans down over the countertop, pressing his forehead to it.

  I touch his shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Paul. I’ll pay you back for the flight.”

  He huffs at this, waving me off.

  “I knew,” he says, looking up. “Maybe I came out here because I knew. So this Shane. You’re with him?”

  “Oh. No.”

  “Then what is it? You want to play groupie for the summer with these...” He gestures wildly at the window behind me, at the empty field. “These musicians?”

  If he’d lain awake in the hammock all night thinking up how to make this easier on me, he couldn’t have landed on a better way than choosing these dismissive words.

  “That’s not how things are,” I say quietly.

  “Then what? What are you looking for out here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  * * *

  I walk Paul to his airport van down by the fence. When I hug him goodbye, the tenderness I couldn’t summon in the kitchen comes rushing back. Especially when he squeezes me and whispers in my ear: “I hope you find whatever you came here for.”

  After, I wander down the trail to the beach, kick off my shoes. It’s a warm afternoon, but the water’s ice-cold. I wade in knee-deep, until my legs are numb. I hunt for sea glass but it’s high tide and I can’t find any.

  I walk back at dusk, uphill through the trees on the left side. I avoid the field, but when I exit the
trees, hoping to slip into the house without them noticing, Piper calls, “Jackie!” She and Fee are playing with the hose they’ve attached to the porch faucet.

  They all summon me. “Jackie!”

  “Come swimming!”

  “It’s too hot to work!”

  “C’mon, the water feels amazing!”

  Shane’s voice, as usual, is not among those calling me. His silence, his cautious handling of me, stands out. But he’s watching me from the pool. I can feel it all the way from the porch. He knows Paul’s gone. I can feel that, too.

  The day’s shot, anyway. I won’t get any packing done.

  I turn toward them, anticipating the feel of cool water on my skin.

  Fiona is chasing after a squealing Piper with the hose, her thumb making a long jet, and the mist from the arcing rope of water creates a shimmering wall in the center of the field. It’s a rainbow curtain of light, a slight warp in the air. Like the waves you sometimes see on a hot day at the gas station. It gives everyone behind it a dreamy, iridescent appearance. Even no-nonsense Piper, in her big nylon shorts and clunky sandals, seems to move as gracefully as a spirit.

  Behind Piper, the woods seem half-enchanted, too. It’s still beautiful, this place. Still magical. A magic scrap of the world.

  What are you looking for out here? Paul asked.

  I don’t know.

  Liar. Because I know.

  Who are you looking for? he should have said.

  As I observe my houseguests from across the bowl, at the sun dancing on ferns behind the hose’s fine spray, as I squint just so, I see flax behind the leaves. Gold hair moving through the woods, a young, peaceful face. Willa.

  Watching from afar. I wish for it. She’ll cross the field and take my hand and explain everything. Why she left, why she wrote our songs into Graham’s notebook. If she took my diary to remember me, or dropped it in the sea because she wanted to erase my existence.