Lady Sunshine

by Amy Mason Doan

  I looked at Willa and for once she met my eyes. The firelight danced across her face as she held it perfectly expressionless, her mouth a straight line. When she rose and walked into the dark, I went after her.

  She could have lost me within seconds if she wanted to. But she stayed in the center of the clearing, heading straight downhill, and I was able to keep up. That’s how I knew she was ready to talk.

  I followed her across the parking lot, down not the pretty, private trail, but the gravel road. A route we never used.

  When we reached the highway I stayed close, ready to yank Willa back from a speeding car. I’d been wrong about her cutting herself behind the treehouse, but this Willa was unpredictable, and no one else was going to keep her safe.

  But she seemed in control. She looked left, then right, then left again, before crossing. Past the custard shack, down the steep trail to Glass Beach. Around the tide pools, past a touristy-looking older couple on a picnic blanket.

  We walked past the spit, climbing over washed-up kelp and other debris to a long stretch of sand that was deserted except for a single log: this seemed to satisfy her.

  She sat, leaving me space on her left. I settled next to her and for a few minutes we were quiet, watching the moonlight stippling the dark waves, listening to the wind and the slow, steady breathing of the tide. Off in the distance were a few surfers, the glow-rings around their necks floating and gliding, but I couldn’t make out Liam’s familiar shape.

  “It’s starting again,” Willa said, shivering.

  “What is? The night surfing?”

  She shook her head, that awful clearing-out gesture of Graham’s. “I guess Liam’ll be hitting the road for Costa Rica soon.”

  “He’s desperate to see you.”

  “Did you tell him anything?”

  “No.”

  “Thanks.” She shivered again.

  “Here.” I started to take off my cardigan.

  “Then you’ll be cold.”

  So I took my right arm out of its sleeve. I drew her close and folded her inside the body of the sweater, wrapping the thick wool around her, pinning the empty sleeve tight under my left elbow to keep us both warm. Now I was the one who was rocking, the slightest of side-to-side motions.

  “That’s nice.” She leaned her head on my shoulder and her body softened. “I’ll bet you’re sure glad you came here.”

  “Of course I am.”

  “You don’t want to split?”

  “No.”

  “But your place sounds perfect...even the address. Number Eight Pleasant Avenue. Nothing ugly could ever go down at Number Eight Pleasant Avenue.”

  Continuing to rock her gently, I spoke with all the patience, the lulling, hypnotizing reasonableness, that we used to calm the kids. I tried to sound as soothing as she had been when Cecilia was howling about the wasp sting she’d gotten on the cove trail, and the time in July during one of our hikes to the mud flats off of Glass Beach, when Rhys had stumbled onto a grackle with a broken wing:

  “You think you know about Number Eight Pleasant Avenue?” I said. “Let me tell you about Number Eight Pleasant Avenue. Everyone stays in their pleasant rooms, hiding away from each other. The pleasant man and the pleasant woman have twin beds and their own pleasant, separate, luxurious bathrooms with brand-new pale yellow tile. The cream-colored carpet is pleasantly thick so no one has to hear a single footstep. The walls are thick, too. But it hardly matters because they never, ever raise their voices at each other.”

  “Never?”

  “Of course not! They discuss. The father wears a tie to breakfast, even on Saturdays. The wife wears a full face of Elizabeth Arden and pearls and one of her hundred-jillion pairs of beige I. Magnin pantyhose that she keeps in her second dresser drawer, lined up on their sides. Like file folders.”

  This got a tiny smile out of her; I felt it in the way her cheek moved against my chest.

  Encouraged, I went on. “They’re always on their best behavior. It’s a museum, Wills. A quiet, cold, freaky museum. The Robert Morrison Pierce Museum of Repression and Depression. I’d rather be here than there, or anywhere else. Because here it’s messy, and loud, and colorful, and real. And here has you.”

  She became quiet for a minute, as she always did when I finished a long story. Then she said, “I don’t know what I’d do if you hadn’t come here.”

  “But I am here. And it’ll be okay.”

  It had to be okay. Willa needed me; what I’d seen from the treehouse had made that more clear than ever. I had to hold it together for her, help her. Who else would? Angela couldn’t even help herself. She’d just split.

  “Now that your dad’s realized how wrong he’s been, and his career’s looking up with the show and all, maybe things’ll go back to how they were before.”

  “No. You’ve got it backward.”

  “What d’you mean?”

  She turned to face me. Bound together as we were inside the sweater-cocoon I’d made, she was only inches from my face, so close I could feel her breath on my cheek—little puffs of warmth the wind couldn’t steal.

  “What, tell me?” I asked. “I mean, I’m not excusing what he did. Especially... No way. But he’s been convinced nobody would ever want to hear his music anymore, I mean, outside of here. That’s heavy stuff. It had to do a number on him. I’m sure that’s why he messed around with Serena, and why he... What?”

  Her eyes were so sad. So cynical.

  What, Willa? What?

  It finally clicked.

  “Oh, Wills. I’m so stupid.” That’s what she’d meant by It’s starting again. I’d thought she was talking about the night surfing. This wasn’t the first time.

  “You’re not stupid,” she said. “You just haven’t known him very long. You know Uncle Graham. Graham the host, the dad. You don’t know Graham Kingston.”

  “So it’s happened before. Other summers.”

  Willa’s voice became dreamy, a singsong: “Yes. Other summers. Winters, too. Falls, and springs.” She crooned to herself as if it was one of our sweet tunes about nature, and not her beloved, traitorous father.

  “I should have seen what was coming,” Willa said. “If I’d seen he was going to get a taste for it again, maybe I could’ve helped him.”

  It. I wasn’t sure if Willa meant only a taste for fame, or the pain that came along with wanting it. Women who weren’t Angela and long swigs of Uno D’Oro.

  And what he’d done in the garden.

  I was afraid to ask about that part, but I had to know.

  “The hitting,” I said softly. “It’s happened a lot?”

  Willa smiled a vacant smile, a you-sweet-thing, you’re-still-not-getting-it expression. How weird to feel our roles reversed; in this moment I was the naive cousin and she was the worldly one, the cynic. It was heartbreaking to see her like that.

  “She’s good at hiding it.” Willa arched her back to pull away from me and raised her hand to my face.

  I flinched, instinctively protecting myself, my body fearing for a second that she was about to imitate how Graham had hit Angela.

  But this was still Willa, in spite of her sadness, so of course she wasn’t about to strike me. Even in her darkest moment she was a gentle creature. Slowly, she brought her index finger to my forehead, a butterfly alighting. She drew it around my left eye, tracing across my eyebrow, down along my cheek, and back up along the bridge of my nose.

  She wasn’t imitating her father, but her mother. Reminding me of that sunny day at the picnic table, when Angela had let us play around with her stage greasepaint, when she’d demonstrated how to make ourselves up to look like fairies and crones.

  “I should have known it had started again,” Willa says. “That day when she came out with the face paint. But they seemed happy...”

  Angela’s treasur
ed old sticks of stage makeup, the exaggerated faces she sometimes put on far from any stage.

  This stuff can hide anything, Angela had said about freckles.

  The occasional black eye? The odd bruise? Yes, it could hide those, too. It could hide them, while reminding the person responsible what was underneath. I’ve used it for decades. Everyone thought the makeup was Angela’s quirk, her bit of fun. It wasn’t unusual in this place, where eccentricity was the norm. Anything went—though hadn’t I heard someone whisper once that it was her attempt to upstage Graham? This struck me suddenly as incredibly unkind. And sad.

  Angela’s greasepaint, Graham’s master tape spool rolling down the hill, the way she’d abruptly left the picnic tables when he announced he was agreeing to the show. They were related; it was some coded, grotesque conversation between the two of them.

  I remembered the way that Angela had dropped to the ground while Graham loomed over her, his hand still raised in a threat. Her gesture had been so practiced—an earthquake drill. Stop, Drop, and Cover! the cheerful poster in my grade-school classroom called it.

  “How long has it been since the last time?” I asked.

  “Three years... Before that they were always fighting, making up. Battle, cease-fire, battle, retreat. The Peloponnesian War. Did you ever study that?”

  “No.”

  “The tutor I had three years ago was big on it...”

  I was impatient, but let her drift back on her own time. This was how Willa dealt with problems. Floating above and around them. I wanted to get in and fix them immediately.

  “Once my mom was gone for a month...” She shook her head at the memory.

  “But the summer after I turned fourteen, it stopped. It was like a miracle. I heard them talking in the north hot springs, and he said he’d finally accepted that he was never going to be big again. ‘Graham Kingston had a nice little run but he’s dead.’ He promised he’d be Graham and focus on us...appreciate what he had and forget the rest. Radio play and sales numbers and charts and everything that tortured him. The stuff he calls ‘the circus, the numbers game...’”

  She went on, clenching her fists in a way I’d never seen: “He said, ‘I’m going to leave the circus in the past where it belongs and be happy.’ And we were happy! He didn’t need anybody else! Or anything else. There wasn’t any fighting...”

  She floated away to some private thought and came back to me. “You know that picture in the hall, of the three of us? It was taken after he made that promise. He looks happy in that, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought he was, and my mom was, too. She was happy, and she was here. And for three years, he was good. He was. He was. But now...” Her voice broke.

  “But now his old friend from his Bill Graham days has come through with an invitation to play the big show at the Polo Fields in Golden Gate Park,” I said.

  I thought of another way I’d betrayed Willa. Add it to the list—how Angela had bolted for the garden when she heard about the show, and I hadn’t said anything to Willa about it.

  “I can’t believe I didn’t realize before...what we saw. If I’d realized, I might have... I at least could have...” She shook her head. “I’ve been so busy...”

  She didn’t say the rest.

  “Busy with me,” I said. “Distracted because of me.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  And she didn’t know the worst part—that I’d seen the ugliness building up in him, but excused it, and chosen to hide it from her. That reel he’d sent careening down the hill. The way he and Rose had been together outside the studio. I should have known something was simmering.

  Graham seems to be in good form this summer, Colin had said. I’m glad, for Angela and Willa’s sake.

  But I hadn’t told Willa about any of that.

  Hadn’t even cared enough to ask her about it. Not for some noble reason, not to prevent her from worrying, no matter how I’d justified it at the time. But—I knew it now—because I hadn’t wanted to spoil things for myself. I loved it here too much.

  Foolish, reckless. Selfish.

  Graham. Willa seemed to have a little compassion for him.

  I felt only rage.

  All of the afternoons we’d babysat because he’d asked, had wanted Willa and me to do him a special favor. He’d been so charming, so skilled at recruiting us to assist him and making it seem like a whim.

  And while we were playing Red Rover with June or cutting the crusts off of Dylan’s sandwich or showing Crystal how to scoop a moat around her sandcastle, Graham and their moms were off screwing in some field, some empty cabin. It made me sick.

  As if Graham was doing his guests a kindness, giving them energy. When it was really him, draining love from their families to keep his worn-down ego going. He’d made us accomplices in his betrayal.

  And in his brutality with Angela.

  “Does your mom know that you know?”

  “No. The only reason I do is I saw her take her makeup off once when I was little...seven or eight... I’d been hiding in the bathtub, behind the shower curtain, and she had a purple mark under her eye. She said it was a blueberry stain.”

  “Oh, Wills.” I pulled her back into the sweater and rocked her fast. For a long time, the only sound was the ocean’s rush and retreat.

  “I just want things to be like they were in that picture in the back hall,” Willa whispered against my collarbone. “I want to go inside that picture and live.”

  “I know.”

  “And I wish... You know what I can’t stop thinking about?”

  “What?”

  “Friday night. How it’s going to be watching him offstage... How I’ll have to clap and smile, as if everything’s fine...as if it’s not going to send us all back to how bad things used to be, as if, as if—”

  “So then we won’t go,” I said into the crown of her head. “It was too much to ask of you, anyway, braving those crowds. We’re not going.”

  Willa lifted her head from my chest and looked at me. These three short words had put a glimmer of hope back into her eyes.

  “No, we’re not going,” she echoed.

  Settled. Willa’s face softened in relief that I’d made this decision for her. That there would be consequences for what Graham had done. Even if they went unnoticed by anyone but us.

  Even if the punishment was pathetically mild.

  “My mom’s not watching, either,” she said. “She asked my dad if he minded her going away for the weekend instead, up the coast to some friend’s pantomime in Trinidad.”

  If he minded. As if he was doing her a favor by allowing her to miss it.

  “My mom said she didn’t want to hurt his feelings, but she was worried that she might make him nervous by being there. Because she hates the city and crowds. She always has, almost as much as me. And he said, ‘Maybe that’s for the best, Angel. I don’t want to put you through that. Go, and have fun...’ But I wonder if...”

  “You think by not going she’s protesting, in her way?”

  “Maybe. I just wish...” She looked over my shoulder into the dark, at some imaginary sight.

  “What, Willa, tell me.” I grabbed her hands. Don’t disappear on me again.

  “I wish he wasn’t going.” She said it so quietly. So strained and exhausted that even though she was still only inches away, I could barely make out the words over the wind. It must have taken all her reserves of courage to form them. The rest was unspoken, but I understood her perfectly: I wish he would feel punished instead of rewarded. So maybe he would go back to how he was in the picture.

  “Me, too.” The important thing about this moment is to keep talking. “So maybe he won’t.”

  She looked at me.

  “Maybe he won’t go.” The important thing is to keep her att
ention. “Remember when I was telling you about the most effective way to discipline kids, that thing I read in that old parenting book? ‘Appropriate punishment is designed to show that someone’s watching, and someone cares.’ The right punishment says that someone has noticed.”

  “What are you talking about?” Horrified: “Not the police, please, Jackie. They’d just make things a thousand times worse, please—”

  “No, shhh, I know, of course not.” No, we wouldn’t go to the police. Or Angela, or some social worker with a clipboard, or a spaced-out, well-meaning friend who’d just returned from an est consciousness-raising weekend. Not even Kate.

  I’d seen Graham at his smallest, his most human, but even so he still loomed huge in my mind.

  He would never listen to a mere person.

  But a place? A world?

  I spoke slowly. “He’s not heading down ’til pretty late Saturday. I heard him say so to Augie. Maybe he’ll miss that fancy car service he was telling everyone about.”

  “But how?”

  I was formulating as I went, molding images and instinct and memory into something resembling a plan.

  The important thing is to be decisive. The important thing is forward motion. “Augie was begging him to stay in a hotel in San Francisco Friday night because it’s such a long drive from here, but your dad’s insisting on going up to the waterfall right before he leaves. For good luck or something.”

  “Yes. In the old days he always went up there right before he left for a show or a trip,” Willa said, remembering. “It used to drive Augie nuts, how close he cuts things.”

  “Yes. He cuts things too close,” I said.

  The whirl of images spun faster before my eyes, Willa’s hopeful, trusting face a bright background. She was so sure that I could fix this. Jackie knows how to make things right. It was my fault. I’d come here, and I’d selfishly hidden things from my sweet cousin. I had to make it right.

  She looked so hopeful that I began to hope, too, and what had a minute ago been me weaving another tale, merely a way to comfort and distract her, began to feel like a reasonable solution.