Lady Sunshine

by Amy Mason Doan

“Jackie?” Willa asked.

  “Yes?”

  “Will you sing to me?” Her voice was so childlike it shattered me.

  “You don’t want to hear my lousy voice right now, Wills.”

  “Please.”

  I gathered all my strength and sang “Sunday Girl” for her, as her eyelids drooped and closed. I sang, and stroked her hair, and we waited.

  It would be hours before the third fact crystallized, but not long enough so that Kate and Angela could return. Not long enough so that a loving, familiar voice could deliver the news to Willa.

  She had to hear it from the deputy sheriff—Graham had fallen.

  37

  The Point of Pain

  Willa spent the miserable week after her father’s death in Graham and Angela’s room with the door closed.

  Willa, who couldn’t stand to be indoors for too long.

  During that week Angela lived in the garden. Tending her tidy rows, weeding. She even slept out there on the bench, covered up by a quilt Kate brought her when she refused to come inside.

  And Kate and I spent our time hugging each other, keeping up the house, dealing with the outside world’s occasional intrusions. It was understood that I was Willa’s designated attendant, and Kate was Angela’s.

  But Willa wouldn’t let me attend to her. All day, I sat on the hall floor outside the bedroom into which she’d retreated, hoping she’d emerge to cry on my shoulder, or scream.

  If she’d asked me to shave her head, or mine, like those grieving women in documentaries, I’d have agreed, gladly.

  “She’ll talk to you when she’s ready, sweetheart,” Kate said. “It’ll be okay.”

  Gruff Kate, calling me sweetheart. It made me cry.

  Everything did. Graham’s shirt in the laundry, his jar of sour-plum jam in the fridge. Me, the tough cousin. But I didn’t hear a single sob from Willa.

  I slept in her room, left her trays of food she didn’t touch, and, periodically, knocked softly on her parents’ bedroom door, calling her name.

  “Willa?”

  Not a sound.

  But I listened, waiting for a breakdown that didn’t come.

  Willa came out only for the memorial service.

  It was on the beach at sunset, and it was well attended, with a hodgepodge of readings from est and Buddhism and Judaism and Graham Kingston lyrics. The ceremony was beautiful. Someone made a design on the sand out of wildflowers, swooping around in spirals and paisleys.

  Willa still wasn’t speaking to me, but Kate told me she’d made a single request—that someone find her a black dress to wear to Graham’s nontraditional ceremony.

  “I’m wearing black, too, then,” I insisted, and no one argued.

  Some friend of Angela’s offered a few to choose from and Kate took them in, hastily, with safety pins. At the service, one kept scratching my waist. As Graham’s friends sang and spoke of him, I was grateful for the point of pain on my right side. It was something else to focus on.

  Willa let me stand on her left and hold her hand. It was so cold, so limp in mine—when I squeezed it, she didn’t squeeze back. But I kept it in my grip, wiping my tears with my left hand.

  I could hear Angela, close on Willa’s other side, crying softly. I hoped Willa felt comforted by her mother’s warm body beside her, since she couldn’t derive any comfort from mine.

  I let the mourners’ words wash over me. I wasn’t interested in metaphors about waterfalls. And there were many. Time was a waterfall, life was a waterfall, beautiful and powerful, never-ending. The beauty of nature would purify us, heal us, after this tragedy, and eventually Graham’s meditation spot at the falls would be celebrated for the creation, not the loss, that happened there.

  I was only interested in what wasn’t being said about Graham’s life and death and his cherished wife and daughter.

  And this fear that maybe Willa wasn’t speaking to me because she blamed me.

  We hadn’t gone through with the plan, but I knew she felt guilty that she’d considered it, let the thought in—inviting nature to betray her father. Because I felt guilty about that, too.

  After the speeches, everyone left the beach but me and Willa. We sat so close to the water, ignoring the creeping tide, that the skirts of our too-large black wool dresses were soaked to the hip.

  I didn’t care if my dress got wet to the starched collar. I wasn’t leaving until she was ready.

  Willa picked up a nearby daisy from the service and floated it in her lap, in the black pond her skirt held. “They’re costumes.”

  “Costumes?” I thought this was a metaphor. A comment on our earthly bodies as temporary shells or something. Costumes we shed when we died, was that where she was going?

  “These.” She wrung water from her dress hem. “I’m pretty sure they’re from a play. Wonder which one.”

  She meant the borrowed dresses we were in, the ones from Angela’s theater friend. Grateful that she was speaking to me, I ran with this. “The Sound of Music? Novitiates’ dresses, maybe?”

  She nodded vaguely.

  “Wills?” I asked.

  She turned to me.

  “I’m sorry. About everything. Your dad. How we... How things ended.”

  “I know you are.”

  “It just happened. You didn’t cause his accident in some mystical way, by simply agreeing to the plan, by tempting nature. You know that, right?”

  “But what if I had tempted nature?” she asked, so softly I could barely hear her. “Would you hate me?”

  “But you didn’t. And anyway, it was my plan. If anyone tempted nature, it was me.”

  She smiled sadly. “I feel so confused. So heavy. Like if I sat here and waited for the tide to come in, this dress would weigh me down to the seabed.”

  I reached for her hand. “It won’t always feel like that, I promise. It’ll get better. I’ll help. I’ll stay, just like we planned. We’ll go to that school in Humboldt together, and—”

  She shook her head. Stood, extricating her fingers from mine. “You should go back to the city, Jackie. Go back and be with your own family.”

  I was still taking this in, how unlike her it was, how uncharacteristically cold and cruel, when she said softly, “I think I’ll camp on the beach for a little while.”

  She walked away.

  * * *

  I thought she meant Glass Beach. I told Angela and Kate what she’d said, and the three of us decided to let her mourn in her own way.

  “It’ll be okay,” Kate said. “It’s just what she needs.”

  But, sometime that night, she took off. The beach—did Willa know, even then, that she meant distant beaches? Mexico, where she drowned, less than two years later?

  For once, Kate had been wrong. It wasn’t okay.

  38

  Almost

  1999

  “Oh my god,” Shane says. “I’m so sorry, I never—”

  “I was mad at her for so many years,” I say mechanically. “Willa. Mad at her for leaving without saying goodbye after Graham’s service. I couldn’t understand why she was so cold to me.”

  I’d thought Willa was wrecked over Graham’s death. But I could never understand her just vanishing, drowning in Mexico.

  “She did it, and she couldn’t tell me, and it’s why she left. Why she...” Willa had carried the burden of the shell trail, all alone, for two years. Until she couldn’t anymore. I’d never accepted her suicide, but now it made sense. “It’s my fault.”

  I wait for disgust, accusation. For Shane to judge me, because it was my idea. I wait for him to flee.

  Instead he pulls me close. “I’m so sorry.”

  But all I can hear is Willa’s voice, up in her bedroom, small and lost, asking me to sing for her as we waited for news.

  Willa’s voice on
the beach, when I told her she should banish any thoughts of guilt, mystical responsibility, of flinging the idea of Graham getting lost into the universe.

  What if I had tempted nature? Would you hate me?

  “She tried to tell me. She wanted to tell me.”

  And if Shane hadn’t told me about the little figure he’d assumed was Angela, up here all alone carrying her mother’s newsboy bag, hair tucked under her mother’s green hat, doing what I’d asked her to do, I’d never have known the real reason she ran away.

  She’d tried to protect me by keeping it to herself.

  “I can’t bear it,” I whisper to Shane. “Willa. I let her down.”

  He says all the right things, the comforting things. That we were kids, that it was an accident, that we never planned for anyone to get hurt. That he was to blame, too, for racing into the night and covering for Angela after he overheard the sheriff tell his father that people were trying to find Graham. Instead of telling the sheriff what he’d seen, that Graham was lost in the woods.

  He has a hundred reasons why I shouldn’t feel so guilty.

  But no words can bring Willa back.

  39

  Goodbye, Ray

  1979

  My father and Patricia sent a car for me the day after Willa took off. They hadn’t been able to get back in time for Graham’s service, but had shipped flowers.

  Numb, I packed up Slipstream, then went to retrieve my diary.

  I’d left it up in the treehouse’s live oak, in the nook between the big cuplike trio of limbs. I reached down for the damp canvas. I hadn’t opened it in a week, since I’d written the O.F. entry, and it had settled into the crevice. Still, when I tugged, it gave.

  But something was wrong. The thick rucksack was too light. Empty. The diary was gone.

  It wasn’t in any of my hiding spots. Slipstream, Willa’s room. Nowhere. It wasn’t in any other place I looked.

  I kept the town car waiting for more than an hour, but I couldn’t find it.

  40

  Spyglass

  1999

  I’m sitting in the treehouse. Alone. There’s no sign that anyone’s been back, though I’ve left the ladder out in full view. The sun’s coming up. I didn’t sleep, of course. I tiptoed out of the house last night after we returned from the falls and fell into bed, so Shane wouldn’t worry.

  I’ve been here all night, a blanket wrapped around me, rereading my diary from the beginning by flashlight. Trying to pinpoint where it all went so wrong.

  The last entry is covered completely in stickers. I run the pad of my index finger over the smooth circles, careful not to scratch them. A grinning peach, a 45 record with the fat, swirly words Keep On Groovin’! That one still smells, faintly, like vinyl.

  But what they hide is much darker.

  Below them is the plan for Operation Fairwhistle. Stickered over right after I finished writing the entry that day.

  I don’t want it in here.

  I rip that page out.

  On the next page, there are more stickers.

  Stickers I didn’t place there.

  They’re all flowers, with ecru backgrounds. I dig and scratch, peeling them off. The writing underneath reveals a sad, beautiful song about a girl who wants to move a galaxy.

  A spiral of stars, and she gives it a little push, to right it. But then she finds, after she’s done, that she can’t tell anyone.

  Still, there’s a little hope at the end. Because she’s created a new world for herself.

  There are even chord progressions, the key and melody. But these don’t interest me, not right now.

  Because the song is called “Spyglass, California.”

  The handwriting... It’s printed, not cursive, but enough like Willa’s...

  I climb down, run inside to the boxes in the hall. Where, where? The old California map from the parlor was one of the first things I packed—it was going to Goodwill. I dig through frames, chipped knickknacks, faded prints...and there it is.

  I sit back on my heels, half-afraid to examine the map, bracing myself for disappointment. But I can’t resist—I scour the words, starting at the top, near the Oregon border, and working my way down, down... There. Faint italic lettering that means it’s a tiny enclave on the coast, not even a town. Just north of Santa Barbara:

  Spyglass.

  * * *

  On the sunny porch steps, Shane examines the diary, the gummy handful of floral stickers I’ve peeled from it, the ripped map.

  “You found the diary in the treehouse. Three nights ago.”

  “Yes.”

  “And it wasn’t there before?”

  “I’m not sure,” I admit. “I hadn’t been there in weeks, and I know what you’re going to say. That it could’ve come from anywhere. Maybe our squatter found it on the property this week and stuck it in the tree. Or a fan got it on eBay. Or they’re a scammer. Someone’s toying with me, hoping to get a piece of Graham’s royalties. I know, I’ve thought of all the possibilities—”

  “But that’s not what you believe.”

  It must be on my face. It feels so good, so sweet, the first hit of a new drug.

  “You believe that Willa didn’t die eighteen years ago. That she only disappeared and has reappeared now, and wrote this in here so you’d find her in Spyglass, California.”

  “It sounds ridiculous, I get it. But you didn’t know her. How much she wanted to live apart from the modern world. And how can you explain these lyrics? They’re about what she did with the shells!”

  He nods, as if this is rational. The expression in his eyes says it’s anything but. “You don’t think you’re reading into them because you want to believe—”

  “No.”

  “You haven’t slept, you’ve been forced to relive an intensely painful experience. I’ve thrown all kinds of new information at you, about the past. Naturally—”

  “No. Not naturally. I know how it sounds.”

  “But—”

  “I’ve seen her.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve seen her. Here, this summer. At first I thought it was a trick of the light. You know how the light changes so often here?”

  “Yes.” His voice is so reasonable, it’s frightening. It’s how you’d talk to someone about to have a breakdown.

  I’m sure I’m worrying him as I lay out my outlandish theory, but I can’t help it. Can’t keep the thrill from my voice.

  “She looked just the same. I know how it sounds, but it was her, and she’s left me clues. Not just the diary. The album out with her picture facing the room, right where I’d see it. An old piece of lace she gave me that Toby just happened to find. She’s been sleeping in the treehouse.”

  “Jackie. After what you’ve been through this summer, it’s perfectly understandable that you’d start to wish...to even half believe that Willa’s—”

  “Not half.”

  “Okay. Okay. I’m not saying you didn’t see somebody. Piper’s blonde, around the same size. Couldn’t it have been her? Or, we had that session player in July, she was blonde—”

  “No. I remember that woman. She was fifty and her hair was dyed. Practically orange. This was Willa.”

  “But it was...a trick of the light, like you thought. A trick of the light and wishful thinking from one cousin who misses the other very much.”

  “So explain this.” I gesture at the diary entry with the song.

  “She could’ve done it twenty years ago. Like with the notebook. Or, say it is new... There are grifters. Fakers. You know how psychics research people so they can offer them a few tidbits to make them believe their dead relatives are communicating with them? It’s not hard to do. You find some mementos, root through a few garbage cans...a little public records research. It happens all the time—”

  I s
ay it softly: “I don’t want to make this into something that happens all the time.”

  I’ve given him an out. Maybe he’ll leave me the phone number of a grief counselor or therapist before he speeds off for LA. I wait for him to sigh, and go.

  He sighs, but stays. “So, what now?”

  41

  All the Answers

  Two days later

  Spyglass

  Two hundred forty miles down the coast

  When we left, the map was a clean, starched rectangle. Now it’s grubby, as limp as cotton. For two hundred thirty miles, I’ve gripped it with my sweaty hands, unfolded it and draped it across my lap like an afghan, refolded it and wedged it in the glove compartment. Taken it out immediately. Stared at it, just to see the word again, to confirm that it’s not just a memory Willa and I shared, but a place: Spyglass.

  “You doing okay?” Shane asks again.

  I nod, too anxious to speak. We’re close. Only ten miles away.

  Shane is having second thoughts, and he’s worried about me, but he’s driving me where I want to go. Maybe he’s only indulging me until he can figure out his next step. How to talk me out of what I believe, find someone who can help me.

  He still buys the official paperwork, the official story. It’s what everyone else believes. And what I never wanted to accept, but had no choice to: that Willa has been dead for nearly twenty years.

  I no longer think that.

  “Don’t be disappointed,” he says, yet again.

  “I won’t be.” Because I’m right. I have to be right. But I run my tongue along the scar inside my lower lip, my old nervous habit.

  He starts to say something, stops himself, and sighs. He’s afraid that whoever’s been lurking around wasn’t Willa, but some twisted fan. He made me read blogs about Graham’s death so I could see how much information is on the internet—and how many lies and conspiracy theories there are. Some of his fans think he killed himself, dismissing the detailed medical report of fractures and sepsis. One claims he was pushed downhill by a jealous rival, a sort of Salieri–Mozart scenario.