Lady Sunshine

by Amy Mason Doan

  A second later, Fiona redirects her hose straight up, drenching herself under the shower, and the illusion is shattered. “Jackie! Come be on my side!” Kauri calls from behind the pool.

  “Yeah, c’mere, Jackie!” Fiona hides the hose behind her back. She’s already twitching with excitement; I’ll get it full blast if I join them.

  My heart lifts, and I kick off my shoes, and walk toward the pool.

  I wish Willa could see that there’s joy here, again.

  23

  “The Ballad of Ben and Rose”

  1979

  Willa and Colin and I huddled together in the dark, behind a stump, entranced by the pool we’d transformed with an otherworldly blue-and-gold glow. We’d stuck candles on little rafts—cork coasters from the thrift store—and set them afloat. Ten flickering votives—one for each year Rose and Ben had been married.

  Ben and Rose were general favorites at the Sandcastle. Both extravagantly beautiful and small, with matching long, dark hair and long-lashed brown eyes. They’d driven their beat-up brown Datsun here from New Mexico, where they ran a pottery studio, and had seemed so happy when they first arrived back in June.

  “They’ll come. I feel it.” Willa, always so dreamily confident that things would turn out the way they were supposed to.

  “Any minute,” I said. “Patience.”

  “A marriage hangs in the balance, you two. How can you be so calm?” Colin asked, half joking.

  Willa sounded proud—“She’s done this kind of thing before. She does it all the time.”

  I knew what she was thinking—Justice with Her Flaming Sword.

  Her grandiose title for me, because of my little revenge plots at school, like the one with Mr. Stengwatts’s Andes mint wrapper box. And the other day, when she and Liam told me his coworker at General Custard’s was stealing his tips from the jar. (I’d remedied that in ten minutes. One “I Know What You’re Doing & Will Contact State Labor Authorities!” note in the jar from “An Anonymous Observer,” written on a Monopoly ten, and tips were now, miraculously, split fifty-fifty.)

  This was the first plan I’d hatched at the Kingstons’—there was little need, when the atmosphere was so idyllic.

  “It’s just something I do for fun,” I said. Though Willa and I both knew I was lying.

  “Well, good luck. Let me know how it works out.” Colin caressed my bare shoulder as he left; he was seeing a college friend in a bar band in Eureka tonight. He’d invited us, but Willa and I preferred to monitor Ben and Rose.

  “He’s right over there,” Willa whispered. “Don’t move.”

  I thought for a second that she meant Ben, our unwitting target, but she was looking not at the pool but past me, into the woods at my right.

  I mimicked her, turning my head ever-so-subtly, keeping my body still so he wouldn’t know he’d been spotted. I could just make out a sliver of white T-shirt, a thin arm. The little neighbor boy again. Always on the fringes. I wondered what he thought of the unusual games we played here.

  Footsteps in the dry grass. “They’re coming!” I whispered.

  There, from opposite sides of the field. Ben on our right, Rose on our left. Walking toward the pool.

  Willa took my hand and we waited, suppressing laughter, to see if our elaborate plan would pay off.

  * * *

  It had started a few nights ago, as campfire was winding down.

  “I’ll come to bed soon, baby.” Rose, at my right, had reached up playfully, expecting Ben, passing behind her, to lean down for a kiss.

  But he’d muttered, “Don’t bother,” and stalked away. We all watched him disappear into the dark.

  “And, scene.” Graham swigged his beer and left for the waterfall.

  “Sorry, everyone,” Rose said. After a minute, she got up and left.

  Conversation resumed, but Willa and I slipped off to the treehouse.

  “Her hand was shaking,” I said. “Did you see?”

  “No. But he kicked a stump when he left. I know that sound.”

  “I wonder why they’re fighting?”

  We got our answer soon enough. They decided to have it out behind the stone well in Angela’s garden, believing, as so many others did, that no one could hear them there.

  “It’s time to go back,” Ben said. “Enough. Aren’t you sick of it here? When’s the last time we had a meal alone? One goddamned meal.”

  “I like it here. Taos is dead right now! What’s waiting for us there?”

  “The shop. Tourists, with money to spend.”

  “Just another week or two and we can leave together.”

  “I never see you, anyway. Maybe I’ll go by myself.”

  “I guess you should, if you hate my friends so much. I’ll hitch back.”

  But after he left, Rose’s shoulders crumpled and she sobbed like an animal in pain.

  “This business is murder for couples,” Willa said softly. “I can’t even tell you how many breakups we’ve had here...”

  “Let’s help them,” I said.

  “How?”

  * * *

  We’d laid a trail of shells and flowers from the pool to the van, which had a radio playing KGLD, Slow Gold, and a picnic basket from Kate waiting—she’d outdone herself, despite how sour she’d acted to our faces, how she’d said we were being busybodies and shouldn’t play with other people’s lives.

  “There!” I cried.

  Ben and Rose, crossing the field from different directions. They came to a stop by the ladder, but we couldn’t hear what they were saying to each other; sound didn’t carry here as it did when we were up in the treehouse.

  “Do they look happy?” Willa asked.

  “I can’t see. He’s blocking her face.”

  “Let me look. Don’t bogart the spyglass.”

  I passed it.

  “She’s smiling,” Willa said. “They’re following the trail!” She handed me the spyglass, but there was nothing to see by then except the trail of shells and flowers we’d laid.

  The next day at breakfast, Rose and Ben appeared smiling, hands in each other’s back jeans pockets.

  We’d received Graham’s blessing for the plan, and he told them what we’d done. My cupids, he’d said, swooping his arm toward us at the picnic table.

  Up in the treehouse after, basking in our success, I tried to write a song called “The Ballad of Ben and Rose.” But the lyrics wouldn’t come. Maybe I wasn’t tortured enough to write anything great.

  I grabbed the spyglass and wandered over to our window as Willa, still on a high, continued to rave about what we’d accomplished. “That was perfect. They just needed a little nudge...”

  I moved the instrument around—I could now position it where I wanted with a few wrist flicks. The green blur of trees, blue sky, trees again, bright garden, the pale stucco house. There. People taking a break from the dungeon.

  Rose and Graham.

  Rose stood with Graham outside the studio door, smoking. A regular cigarette—nobody let Angela’s perfect joints burn out between their fingers like that. Graham said something, pointing at Rose playfully, and she ruffled his hair, standing on tiptoe because he was so much taller.

  It was nothing. Except the gesture looked so confident. And everyone knew Angela’d left for Marin for a few days, for some festival. Would Rose have done it if Angela was yards away, spraying her tomato leaves with tea tree oil?

  But people got close in the studio. The long hours, the intensity.

  “What are you looking at?” Willa asked.

  “Nothing.” The answer came out automatically as a breath.

  And I could make it true. A slight shift of the spyglass to the right, and Rose was gone, so it looked like Graham’s hair was only blowing in the breeze. A slight shift to the left, down a little, and all I could
see was his smile, as if he was recalling an amusing incident from their morning session.

  “Jackie?” Willa asked. “C’mon. You haven’t budged from that spot.”

  Just your dad and Rose joking around. For all I knew, Angela had a theater pal who tousled her hair the same way. I didn’t know what the rules were between Angela and Graham—if they had any. It would be naive to compare their standards of behavior with the ones on Snob Hill. Their marriage wasn’t like any I’d seen.

  “Who’re you staring at, ’fess up.”

  “Just that session guy who came here yesterday,” I said.

  “The bassist? Have you replaced Colin already? Give me that for a sec.”

  I stalled, pretending I was obsessed with the new arrival. I held the spyglass out of her reach. She tussled, grabbing it.

  “Darn, he’s gone back in,” Willa said, hanging the spyglass back in the little fabric-scrap hammock we’d made for it.

  “Darn.”

  The next day, Ben and Rose took off for home, Rose cuddled against Ben’s arm. We didn’t know what they’d done in the van—fight, make love, both—but all that was missing was the “Just Married” sign on their bumper.

  And I was glad I had lied to Willa about what I’d seen through the spyglass.

  24

  Adam’s First Wife

  1999

  Bree and I lie by the pool on rusty, avocado-green chaises, soaking up the sun. Piper’s in the water, drifting around on a raft, her Discman, protected in a Ziploc on her stomach, giving off tinny beats.

  This is an unscheduled break. Shane and Mat told everyone they needed to “have a discussion” so everyone should take five.

  That was five hours ago.

  Bree is going over contracts facedown, using the missing rubber slats in her chaise as a reading window, and we’re talking idly about music. Favorite album, favorite song, favorite album cover, favorite live recording of a duet, favorite song to slow-dance to...

  “Favorite song to regular-dance to?” I ask.

  “Marvin. ‘Got to Give It Up.’ What’s yours?”

  “Hmmm... ‘I Feel Love,’ Donna Summer. It’s got that one a.m. disco sound, with a little danger in it, you know? I’ve spent years practicing the synth bassline. It’s like a racing pulse.”

  She mimics the baseline with her highlighter on her stack of papers, beating out the rapid dum-dum-dum-dum, dum-dum-dum-dum. “Fast as a pulse while making love,” she says, low, so no one else can hear. “I’ve heard you playing it. That piano in the Rec Room is standing in for a person, Jackie. Poor thing, getting worked over night after night.”

  I laugh. “‘Heart of Glass’ by Blondie would be a close second...”

  We discuss artists, artistic temperaments. The conversation comes around to Graham.

  “You get this sort of smeared look around the eyes whenever anybody mentions him,” she says. “Like you’re intentionally wiping off any expression. Didn’t you like him?”

  “I love how you put things. You should make that into a song. ‘The smeared look around your eyes...’”

  “You’re changing the subject.”

  “Am I?”

  “You’ve done it before.”

  A white cloud-bank like a puffy figure eight floats toward the sun. “When I first met him, I liked him very much. Everyone here treated him like a god. But he was just a man. I guess he had his selfish side, when he got frustrated about not being popular anymore.”

  She says nothing in response and I lie quietly for a minute, listening to Piper’s splashes and metallic beats from the pool, the kids calling happily to each other, far off. “No. I didn’t like him.”

  “Thank you. I know it wasn’t easy to say.”

  If only it was that simple. No, I did not like my uncle.

  For a minute I listen to Bree’s highlighter squeaking confidently across her pages.

  “Bree?” I say.

  “Hmmm?”

  “How do you and James do it? Keep your marriage healthy while you’re traveling, or obsessed with a new project, and working night and day with other musicians?”

  “James is a saint. You’ll see when he visits. There’s nobody to touch him.”

  “So you’ve never been tempted?”

  “I’m human.” Squeak, squeak. Squeak. “But I don’t buy into that tortured artist bit. I mean, the torture is real, but it’s not an excuse for bad behavior.”

  “But so many people can’t handle it. Even enormously gifted ones. Did you ever consider walking away?”

  She stops marking up her pages. “Not in a long time. I guess I’m one of the lucky ones. It hasn’t sunk me, not yet.”

  I think of Willa, how she never had any interest in singing professionally. How much was because of her discomfort with crowds, and how much was because she’d seen how ugly the business was, how it had swallowed up her father?

  And yet the business had managed to sink her anyway, through him. I’m grateful for the songs she left in Graham’s notebook, a treasure, a miracle—no matter why she put them there. I know Bree’ll do them justice on the album. I just wish I had a recording of Willa singing them.

  “It’s a loss, though,” I say softly. “When someone gifted decides to keep their talent to themselves.”

  “A loss for who? Maybe they get plenty of joy from it, all alone.”

  “No, it’s useless!” Shane moans to Mat. Their “discussion,” which started as a private talk down in the studio, then moved up to the garden, has spilled around the house, onto the front porch. And it keeps getting louder.

  “It’s lousy, Mat. I wish we could start from scratch.”

  I can’t make out what gentle Mat answers, but it’s got to be something reassuring because Shane snaps at him. “Then you need to have your ears checked, Mat!”

  The fight surprises me. Shane’s seemed so confident about the work until now. Full of praise for how my and Willa’s songs came out, and on the rest, so sure that he was merely a conduit of decisions that the great Graham Kingston had already dictated from the beyond. That he was just shading in a few blank spots in the notebook. Like a lowly tech doing art restoration on a masterpiece.

  But he keeps changing his mind on the “pivot attitude,” whatever that is. He’s wrestling with how the album should end, if the second half should be big and happy or stripped-down and tender. It’s hard to get a sense of what the problem is. He says different things on different days.

  He and Mat move around to the back of the house, so I can’t make out their words, only yelling.

  “This sounds serious,” I say from under the damp white Bree Lang Magical Sistery Tour T-shirt shielding my face from the sun.

  Bree chuckles, undisturbed, and continues squeaking away with her highlighter. “Shane’d better get it together or he’ll lose his chance.”

  “Chance with the album? It’s that terrible?”

  “The album’s genius. I mean the other chance.”

  “Bree. Please. He’s barely out of his twenties.”

  “Well. Forget it. Forget I said anything, a thousand apologies. I didn’t know about the ironclad rule that someone who’s thirty-five can’t date someone thirty-one.”

  “I’m thirty-seven.”

  “Got it. Practically on Social Security, aren’t you? James is four-and-a-half years younger than me, you know, and I’ve never heard him complaining.”

  “You’re different. You’re Bree Lang.”

  For a few minutes the only sound is wind and the tinny beat through Piper’s earphones. When I think the subject’s closed, Bree says casually, “I had the same conversation with Shane a couple of days ago.”

  “Jesus, Bree!”

  “The age thing didn’t come up. I just said I could tell he had an itch for you.”

  “I hate that expressi
on.”

  She makes me wait.

  She’ll make me beg. Sometimes people need a nudge. Or a shove.

  “Okay. Tell me what he said.”

  “He said you were gorgeous, of course. His words—down to the of course part. Exact words. He said you were just his type. But that you’d made it clear you had zero interest beyond friendship. In case you were wondering.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “I know. You have too much to do here. How’s the packing going, by the way?”

  Mat and Shane have circled to the front of the house again.

  “We should just junk it,” Shane says. “I’m sorry I got you all roped into this mess.”

  “You’re breaking my heart. Have some faith, bro...”

  “Is the album going to be junked?” I whisper. Starting from scratch is not an option, not if Shane wants Bree on the record. She can only stay for three more weeks.

  She laughs at my worried tone and flips a page. “No cause for alarm. Your boy’s just having a regulation freak-out. We’re right at the murky middle. Five tracks laid down, five to go. So I figure he’s right on schedule.”

  “Please stop calling him my boy. He sounds really worried. He keeps quoting the Bible and Winston Churchill. This morning I heard him tell Mat that he’d been ‘weighed in the balance and found wanting,’ and he ‘thought he was up to the task but he’d failed miserably, alas.’”

  “Like I said, your standard freak-out.”

  “Shane saying alas is standard? It was kind of disturbing.”

  “It means the work’s going beautifully. Too beautifully.”

  “Huh,” I say, doubtful.

  The rubber straps of Bree’s chair bounce as she flips over, and I remove the wet T-shirt from my face to look at her. She faces the sky, gesturing with her pink highlighter, as she explains in a whisper, “It’s like this. He loves it so much he’s afraid to finish.”