Lady Sunshine

by Amy Mason Doan

  Willa and I exchanged a look. Silently and immediately, we agreed—deceit was the only option. The cape would soon be soaked, tumbling in the ocean, but what poor, crestfallen Dylan didn’t know was that her Ultra Special Bravery Award had a dozen copies lying on the floor of the treehouse, waiting to save the day.

  “I’ll just run down to the lower-lower pond and grab it, Dylan. Don’t worry. I’ll be back before you know it.”

  She stared at me in relief and surprise. A lower-lower pond? No one had mentioned it before. But she was happy to believe in this miracle.

  “See!” Willa crooned, rocking her back and forth. “Jackie’s going to take care of things. Jackie always knows how to take care of things.” This was for me, said gratefully as she looked up, with a slight twinkle in her eye.

  First I went downhill, but a cursory hunt in the fast-moving stream proved what we’d feared: the cape was beyond rescue, sailing out to sea. There was, of course, no lower-lower pond.

  I hurried back up the edge of the trail, slipping past the lower pond in the trees where the kids wouldn’t see me. I ran across the field, turning left as if to go to my cabin, but taking my customary route up to the treehouse instead. It was adult nap time, and all the kids were with Willa, so no one would be there to follow me. But my sneaky, indirect route was a habit at this point.

  I fished the rope ladder down with Willa’s shepherd’s crook branch, climbed up and pulled the rope inside after me. Another habit—I wouldn’t be here more than a minute. I grabbed a piece of fabric off the floor, inspecting it for any telltale marks that would distinguish it from the real thing. But Dylan would want to believe this was original, that her cape had swum back to her. I counted on that.

  The first piece I picked up was the right size but the wrong shape. I hunted for a more rectangular one. As I was crumpling it to simulate wear, I looked idly out the treehouse window, down at the garden. Two people stood near the fringe of the trees.

  I grabbed the spyglass.

  Graham and Serena stood close together near the edge of the woods north of the house, holding hands. Then Serena pulled back with a smile; Graham, heading toward the house, tugged her to him for a kiss. They had come from the woods, from the direction of Serena’s cabin, which was near mine; it was obvious they were saying their goodbyes.

  Serena, Dylan’s mother.

  Serena was wearing denim overalls with nothing underneath and fumbling to clip the left strap onto the button. Graham casually bent and rubbed his face back and forth between her breasts while she laughed. Then he clipped the strap in place for her. As if he’d done it a million times.

  Serena said something to him that I couldn’t hear. They were too far away. But it was playful; she was still laughing as she swatted at him, trying to leave for the woods, her cabin. Soon it would be four, the hour that Willa and I usually returned with the kids. Adult nap time would be over and they were cutting it close.

  I’d never seen them speak, had only heard Graham complain about Serena “sabotaging the work,” so they made a strange pair. A strange movie, framed by the gold-painted ring around the toy spyglass lens that brought me right next to them. Wow—20x Magnifying Power!!

  But they were as oblivious to my presence as the loved ones you’re trying to save in a nightmare.

  Then Serena looked past Graham, at something in the garden.

  She stopped laughing.

  She pushed his head away, fumbled with her other shoulder strap to cover herself.

  Graham turned to see what she was looking at, and I swept the spyglass left, a blurry circle of fast-moving greens and blues rushing before my eye as I searched, moving the spyglass around, up, down to find what had startled them.

  Angela.

  She stood alone behind the garden shed. She wore her canvas newsboy bag, the front compartment bulging, dandelions poking over the edge; she’d been weeding. She’d told me last night at dinner that she was thinking of expanding the garden to make room for fall herbs. There was a lemon balm leaf that grew well here, if you tended to it carefully. But she was supposed to be at a friend’s matinee in Forest Grove; I’d heard her talking about it with Willa.

  She didn’t say a word. She stood perfectly still, her face amused. Amused. Her actor’s skill on display. I sat in the upper balcony, but even without the spyglass I’d have felt what she was projecting.

  Graham said something quick and sharp to Serena and she left, disappearing into the trees.

  Then he walked over to his wife. Unhurried, his body already dictating calm.

  “Angel,” he said.

  They were closer now; I could hear them clearly. I no longer needed the spyglass but I kept watching them through it, holding my breath as if they were as near as they seemed, and might hear me.

  “Have a good nap?” Angela asked. “I know how badly you’ve been sleeping.” Her low voice was full of concern. She sounded so tender, so selfless.

  So false. It would have scared me less if her voice held a trace of real emotion.

  “Angel. It’s nothing.”

  “I know, darling.” She tidied her newsboy bag, carefully packing the dandelions down in the front, adjusting the yoke so that it hung more comfortably around her neck. She looked up at him, smiling sweetly. “I’m just curious about one thing. When she blows you, do you pay our daughter double time to babysit her kids?”

  And then it was Angela who laughed. Mirthless, frightening laughter.

  For one endless minute he stood frozen. Then his hand flew across her face. She flew to the ground.

  The spyglass dropped to my lap.

  I kept watching, trying to believe it. Graham was the gentle giant, everyone knew that. His van had bumper stickers that said “Choose Peace” and “Make Love, Not War.” But maybe war on a personal level was a different cause. Maybe he thought there were exceptions, if you’d had a run of bad luck.

  And maybe, later, he would tell himself that he had not hit her. That he’d only slapped her. Some other word to try to pretty up what he had done.

  I hadn’t seen his fingers; it happened fast and my viewing angle, from above, was not ideal for that detail. It was possible his fingers had been spread during the second they made contact with her skin. Maybe the sound of his right hand meeting her left temple was higher and hollower than it had seemed by the time it floated up to me.

  But what did it matter if his hand was closed or open? There were two hundred pounds behind it. And it sent her to the ground.

  And the saddest sight of all, more than Graham nuzzling between Serena’s breasts, more than the casual way he had clipped her overall strap back in place, even more than his giant hand flying across Angela’s face, or her small body hitting the ground, dandelions tumbling out of the newsboy bag, was this—the way she now crouched, her hands clasped over her head. A protective stance, like what they made us do in the city during earthquake drills.

  He loomed over her: he was smaller, now, through my naked eyes. His hand was raised, though his wife couldn’t see it.

  If he does it again you’ll run to her.

  I hope I would have. I’m not sure.

  But he didn’t do it again. He dropped his hand. Shrank back into himself and collapsed to the dirt next to her.

  “It’s stopping, Angel,” he said, his face resting between her shoulder blades, rubbing back and forth. “It’s stopping this second, for good. I was nervous about the show and I made a mistake. I’m so sorry. My beautiful Angel, I don’t deserve you. I don’t know why you stay with me.”

  His shoulders shook. He had started to cry.

  He picked her up and though I couldn’t see her face she didn’t resist, and hung limp in his arms. He carried her inside, through the back door, as tenderly as a new groom carrying his bride across the threshold.

  * * *

  I waited, staring out th
e treehouse window at Angela’s tidy plantings of summer herbs and vegetables, until Graham and Angela had been inside for a long time.

  When Kate clanged her dude-ranch triangle, the short signal that told us all it was time to wash up and get moving because the food would be out in ten, I folded Dylan’s substitute cape into a square and stuffed it in my back pocket. Legs shaking, I made my way down the rope ladder and used the shepherd’s-crook branch to push it up and hide it on a high limb, the way Willa had taught me.

  I would never tell her. That much I knew already.

  Except.

  “Willa?” I whispered.

  She was under the big cypress twenty feet up the hill and to the right, staring down at the garden just as I had been a moment earlier. As if her parents were still there. She sat with her chin on her bent knees, her long yellow flower-print sundress spread around her.

  Her frozen expression told me: she’d seen everything.

  I spoke more loudly: “Willa?”

  She started and looked over at me in surprise, but didn’t say anything. I walked up to her; the hill was so steep here that I practically had to crawl.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  She nodded, but took her hands out of her lap to hug her legs close to her body.

  Her wrists and forearms were bright red.

  Blood, I thought, somehow blood, she’d done the worst. It made no sense, to think she’d done that; there hadn’t been time or opportunity. But that was my first thought as I dropped in front of her, fumbling with her slippery, bright red arms, examining her wrists, hunting in vain for the wound. “What did you... Where did you...”

  She unclenched her hands, showing me what was inside them. Not a cut. Strawberries. Garish clots and seeds from the handful of bright berries she’d squeezed. “Dylan’s cape has that big stain,” she said mechanically. “I wanted to make the new one match. I was worried I wouldn’t find you before you gave it to her.”

  Relieved, I sat next to her and tried to get control of my breathing. “That was good thinking, Wills. That was smart of you.”

  “I left her in the kitchen with Kate. She’s giving the kids ice cream.” She hugged herself tighter and began rocking back and forth.

  “Yes. Good.”

  “We have to use a piece that’s the same size. If it’s not the same size, she’ll know.”

  “It’s okay, I found one.” I took the fabric from my pocket and unfolded it, draping it gently over her knees. I guided her palms down to it. “Here? Show me where.”

  She stopped rocking and focused on the task I’d assigned her, wiping her hands on the lower right corner of the cloth, carefully pressing and rubbing the crushed berries in to replicate the stain.

  “I’m so glad you remembered,” I said. “Dylan’s lucky that you did.”

  “She’s frantic.”

  “I know.” I squeezed her hands, staining mine. “But what about you? Are you okay?”

  She nodded, looking down at her lap, where the berry juice had streaked her yellow floral-print dress red.

  “Don’t worry, we can get that out. Let’s rinse it before it sets.” I led her down the hill to the pump behind the garden shed, took Dylan’s cape from her and set it on a sunny patch of grass. I bunched up the stained part of her skirt and held it under the water, careful to wet only what I had to, rubbing at the red splotches with the bar of homemade lavender Castile soap Kate kept hanging inside an old stocking knotted to the handle.

  “Look, it’s coming out. See?” I lathered and rinsed, squeezing the cloth until the only traces of strawberry juice on Willa’s dress were a few pale peach shadows on the yellow background.

  I washed her hands for her, cleaning mine at the same time. The white lather turned red, then pink, then white again, the water running clear, but no matter how much I scrubbed I couldn’t remove the angry U’s of color from our cuticles.

  “Have a drink.” I caught water in the cup of my hand and made Willa sip. “A little more, Wills.” Obedient as a child, she let me tip water into her mouth. I turned the rusty pump handle to shut it off.

  “Wait,” she said. “Dylan’s cape.”

  “What? It’s okay, it’s right over there, remember?” Maybe this was shock. I should splash her face with cold water, or no, keep her warm—it had been foolish to get her dress wet. I’d take her to her room, bundle her up...

  “It wouldn’t be dry,” she said. “You just saved it from drowning.”

  Relieved that she was making sense, I turned the tap back on and held the fabric remnant under it so that it would look as if I’d just rescued it from the stream. “There. See? A perfect copy. She’ll never know.”

  She nodded.

  “Willa—”

  “She’s waiting. We have to bring it to her...”

  “Dylan’ll be all right. Kate’s good with her. She can wait a few more minutes. I want to talk to you.”

  She shook her head, a quick, clearing-out motion, totally unlike her. It took me a second to remember where I’d seen it before.

  Graham. It’s what he did whenever he was disgusted with something he’d written and needed to erase it, to pretend it had never existed. He did it right before crumpling up his scrawled-on pieces of paper and tossing them into the water.

  Kate’s dude-ranch triangle sounded again from the front porch: a cheerful clatter of tings that would carry across most of the Sandcastle’s four hundred acres. Time to come together, children.

  “Second dinner bell,” Willa said.

  I tried to put my arms around her but she stood stiffly, evading my hug, not my floating cousin but some graceless impostor.

  * * *

  It was like this for six days. She pantomimed the real Willa, and no one but me seemed to notice. Maybe Angela would have seen the change in her daughter, but she was gone again. A Lillian Hellman festival up the coast. A last-minute trip.

  Whenever I tried to talk to Willa about what we’d seen in the garden, she’d find an excuse to change the subject. If I pressed, she’d leave. Or she’d surround herself with kids, throw herself into entertaining and soothing them.

  I tried to at least keep track of her whereabouts, but she vanished for hours. Willa knew how to shake me; she was as skilled as a wild animal in that way. I guessed that she was rambling around the woods, venturing onto the neighbors’ land, over the ridge to where the family of “satyrs” lived—land where I didn’t know the terrain and would get lost immediately if I tried to find her.

  She went to campfire, continuing to share our low stone seat as if nothing was wrong. She watched politely. But she did not clap or laugh, and she disappeared off to the woods as soon as Graham stood and stretched, the nightly ritual that always preceded the private one—his hike up to the waterfall.

  Willa stopped meeting me at the treehouse at night, claiming, mechanically, that she was too tired. She certainly looked tired; I wondered if she was sleeping at all. She didn’t go to the beach or bathe, and her body began smelling different, a sour-fruit smell. Grease darkened her hair to dirty-blond, and instead of floating around her in its usual bright nimbus cloud, it became snarled, and hung in hanks down her neck.

  Liam showed up one night after campfire for a date, holding wildflowers, and Willa hid from him.

  “She’s not feeling well,” I said. “A little summer cold. But I’ll give her these.”

  He looked crushed. “I’m leaving in a couple weeks,” he said.

  “I know. I’ll remind her.”

  But when I did, she only nodded and gazed off at the tree line.

  For everyone else, life went on much as it had all summer. Smiles, skin, sun. People driving up, people driving off.

  We were awash in music, as always. Audible music—the constant, unhurried playing around the field. Discussions about music. The awareness of music bein
g created in the dungeon, evidenced by the purposeful coming and going through the studio door—it had given me such a thrill, just a week ago, to know what was happening down there.

  But for me, the joy had been drained from all of it.

  Even the light had changed, making everything seem starker, shadowed. Maybe this was only because it was late August and the sun rode lower in the sky.

  Maybe it was because I was alone again.

  Within hours after Angela caught Serena and Graham together, Serena and Dylan had left for good. Dylan hardly got to say goodbye to me or Willa, and although there were many reasons to be angry at my uncle, and Serena could hardly have stayed after what happened behind the garden shed, her little girl’s sudden and undeserved exile from paradise stood out, that awful week, as an especially vivid cruelty.

  I imagined Dylan in the way-back of her mom’s wheezing Pinto wagon, crying and hugging her substitute cape, pressing her chubby hand to the glass as they pulled away. She would have watched as the spire of the Sandcastle got smaller and smaller, then disappeared behind the trees.

  32

  The Peloponnesian War

  Like Willa, I went through the motions. Six more babysitting sessions in which I added up the minutes we’d given Graham for betrayal. Six more campfires, with him holding court, laughing. The generous host, the gentle giant. It seemed impossible that what we’d seen was real.

  Instead of acting contrite, he was buoyant, floating on excitement because the “little gig” at the polo fields in Golden Gate Park, the one he insisted was no big deal, was coming up soon.

  “Grace is playing. I don’t know who else is gonna be on the lineup, Bill’s full of surprises, as always... But you shouldn’t waste a whole weekend on it. It’s such a haul down to the city...”

  To the right of me on our shared stone seat, Willa sat stiff and mute.

  Silently, we watched Graham laugh and carry on, proving with every denial and self-deprecating joke, every casual use of a legendary first name, how huge this was for him.