The Sunshine When She's Gone: A Novel

by Thea Goodman

  “That would be great. I need to get some things.” John gathered Clara’s tiny ankles in one hand and wiped her clean with the other, careful to do so in the right direction.

  “What’s her name?” Derek asked.

  “Oh, this is Clara.”

  “She’s beautiful,” he said. “You can follow me when you’re ready.”

  When John was done, he followed Derek up over the small dunes and into a red Toyota Corolla that smelled like pot and ripe bananas. There were no seat belts. Derek quickly wiped sand off the seats. When John was settled and the door shut, Derek offered him a joint.

  “Thanks,” John said, surprised by his own failure to hesitate. He usually claimed to dislike pot, or rather the laxity of spirit it seemed to produce. Derek lit the joint for him, and he inhaled, thinking of the name Lancelot Drugs. There was something refreshing about the way it called itself Lancelot Drugs and not Industries or Pharmaceuticals. They were developing a new sleep aid, but testers reported fitful dreams. John worried briefly about Miller’s cool appraisal of his empty seat. Yet almost immediately his anxiety dissolved. He thought of Ines and Art and that blue glass ashtray they used. Ines was such an unlikely pothead. He was always slightly put off when Veronica smoked—she became remote and usually went straight to sleep—but at this moment he could not imagine an offering more comforting, more essentially good, than this one.

  He passed the joint back to Derek and hugged and kissed his daughter. He saw himself momentarily, saw what he was doing, but Clara was clean and well again. They sat for a few minutes while the baby played with her toes, bringing them all the way up to her mouth.

  Without warning, she lurched forward in his arms. He turned her around and saw that her cheeks were flushed dark red. Then came the milk, like a geyser, shooting out of her mouth onto his chest. Fool, he cursed himself, muttering as he tried to wipe off the mess with his bare hand. Fucking idiot. It had taken only about forty minutes for her to get sick from the cow milk. He opened the car door and she kept going, vomiting onto the sand. The two small bath towels he’d brought from their room were soaked.

  “She doesn’t feel well,” Derek observed.

  “No, she doesn’t,” John said, kissing Clara’s head.

  “Hi, little girl,” Derek said. He handed John his own towel, a thin but clean one covered in black and yellow stripes. John wrapped her in it and she looked like a bumblebee. The heaving finally stopped; she lay exhausted in his arms. Derek looked worried. “Is her mom here? Breast milk, they say, cures all.”

  “Ah, the tyranny of breast milk! Her mother isn’t here,” John said. This sounded rather grave and final, so he added, “She couldn’t come.” Derek furrowed his brow. “Listen, can you drive me to the store you mentioned? For goat milk.”

  On the way there, Clara’s body felt loose and light, depleted. John was shaken by her illness. Paranoia saturated him in waves. What had he done? He couldn’t be high while she was sick. Fleetingly, a dreamy hope prevailed; clusters of goats brayed at the car, as they had on his way to Lord Harrington’s Castle, encouraging in their abundance. There were so many goats, there had to be goat milk somewhere! Just as quickly, the snug, suffocating fear resumed.

  “Who was Lord Harrington, anyway?” he asked, to break the silence.

  “He was some English guy with a lot of money, a hemophiliac with a very pale wife and a daughter who drowned.”

  A daughter who drowned. John was stricken by the very phrase. A warm breeze came in and soothed his face. His high canted into little crests of pleasure, and for a moment the hemophilia just heightened Lord Harrington’s glamour. The trees bent in almost complete arches, and the earth rose and fell in gentle hills. Giant white clouds spread above him. They passed through a small village with rows of pottery stands. Bowls, bowls, one after another, like all those bowls—some lovely and some useless—that they’d received as wedding gifts. Clara cleaved to his chest. “Why can’t you sell your pottery here?” John asked, pointing to the roadside stands. He enjoyed the fact that the baby was letting him cuddle her. Usually she was too busy twisting away, investigating the world.

  “I can, but I wouldn’t make anything, or not enough. I make more in other ways, different jobs. I’m extremely poor, but I don’t feel like I am,” he said matter-of-factly.

  On the way to the store, John imagined some exotic genius herbalist, an old, bearded black man selling “remedies.” The store would be all smoky, and there’d be anise and all Veronica’s weird herbs and the essential goat milk. Instead, they pulled up to a cinder-block shack decked out with Coca-Cola signs and filled with as much primary-colored plastic as possible. Cases of beer lined one wall, and above them were posters of bikini-clad Bajan beauties reclining on the rocks. Another wall displayed beach buckets, umbrellas, and lotion, and a third had a low-humming freezer that opened from the top to reveal Tombstone frozen pizza. A glass-doored fridge was filled with orange soda, Coke, and some mangy celery. The aisles held canned things like peas, corn, and yams in olive-green packaging that looked like it had been shipped from England in the fifties.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a tall, dark-haired woman examining a pair of blue plastic flip-flops. She had the same purse as Veronica, an ungainly vanilla leather satchel with a massive brass buckle, and was clearly disappointed with the store. The purse, he knew, cost eleven hundred dollars. He knew because he had bought it for his wife, at Ines’s suggestion. What could be dumber? What could be grosser than a purse that expensive? He had fallen into another life, another world. He averted his eyes as she approached him. “Do you have any idea where to get any decent diapers around here?” she said with a conspiratorial hush, and gestured to a package of Cheekies, the local diaper brand.

  “Those are diapers,” John said, grabbing a package off the shelf; soon they’d run out. He stepped away, wanting to ally himself with Derek.

  “You can’t get anything around here,” she murmured to no one in particular, and wandered off. John had been disappointed in the store too, but now it seemed perfectly adequate. He was high, and time was slipping away from him.

  “Derek, I’m looking for goat milk. Do you see any? Do you know if they have any? That’s what bumblebee here drinks.”

  “The dairy section,” Derek said, making air quotes for some reason as he pointed toward the back of the store. John peered into a jumbled fridge, but the faces of cows were printed on all the cartons. Cows everywhere, on each container he picked up. Cows with huge black nostrils and misleading sweet eyes. It was scary. A cow conspiracy was poisoning his daughter. “I don’t think anyone really drinks goat,” Derek ventured.

  “No, only insane, affluent, overeducated American women,” John said.

  Derek brightened. “I know: Laura will have some.”

  “Who’s Laura?” John asked. He was holding a container of formula, thinking this would make it easy. Veronica wouldn’t know. But—he hadn’t imagined this would happen—Veronica’s judgment had become intrinsic to his own.

  “She’s my fiancée’s mother. She’s everything you described—except she’s not American, she’s Bajan. A crazy old white lady, but she’ll have it or at least know how to get it.” John bought some formula, just in case, and the package of Cheekies and followed Derek to the car to go find Laura.

  He felt fine again, cozy and cared for in the bucket seat as he looked beyond the parking area and down into a valley that was much greener and dewier than Lord Harrington’s side of the island. It was raining lightly, as the driver from the airport had warned, and John squinted through the mist, straining to see what Derek said was a rainbow.

  “Oh, right, I see it,” John said, even though he didn’t.

  As they sat there, Derek opened the glove compartment and showed John two different kinds of pot and explained the prices for each. Clara, damp on his chest, slept during the transaction. Evan was obliterated. And Veronica—well, she certainly would have understood this moment. Feeling suddenly com
passionate, he wanted to tell her he could understand, he, too, could understand moments like this. He would call and tell her everything and she would get it. And she would get him. Clara gurgled and blew spit bubbles. She felt better. John stuffed the small plastic bag into his knapsack, full of hope.

  As Derek drove over the hill approaching the west side, the landscape grew even softer and greener. John saw the golf course at the Glittering Sands, where Veronica’s father, David Edelson, had once crushed him. John had scored a hundred and six in a round. No, he had not wanted to try golf; he’d rather have lolled on the beach with Veronica, propped up on their sides as they read novels and paused to read each other passages or to kiss. His girlfriend had become his wife and then a mother. It was amazing to realize that this was all Veronica. She permeated his whole adult history. The thought shook him, for there was essentially no adult version of John Reed—they’d met through Art when John was just twenty-five—without her. Here, he was stunningly singular, and it was both strange and elating. “Have you ever eaten here?” John asked Derek casually. He gestured toward a sign for the club, gilded letters on a white painted seashell.

  “At the Glittering Sands? No way. Private club.”

  “My wife’s family used to come here—I was here once. With them. They’ve got a great lunch buffet, and I’m sure they have goat milk—they have everything—or can get it. Should we stop and eat?”

  “Man, this is the citadel, the fortress. You can’t just go in and eat.”

  “You don’t understand. They were members. We were. I’ve been here before. They have the best piña coladas in the world.”

  “You have, like, a card or something?”

  “A card?”

  “A membership card, to enter.”

  “It’s not like that. I know the guys who work here; it’ll be fine.” John directed Derek through the first set of gates, flanked by huge bushes of pink bougainvillea. He wanted that club sandwich they had, a British type with an egg in it and too much mayonnaise; he wanted to take Clara to the kidney-shaped pool with the fountain in the middle. Driving through the gates was comforting to him, as if he had not gone away but had come back.

  The world was getting smaller and smaller as wars teemed and connections stretched. These days, Arthur’s favorite word was globalization. New York to the Caribbean was one cloth, when there was all of the Middle East to consider, the war in Iraq, natural disasters in Asia. In many ways, he and Clara hadn’t really gone that far.

  Derek drove slowly. Armed guards stared at the beat-up Corolla as it approached the next set of gates. The flowery scent, the essential hope that emanated from Derek, Clara’s babbling—all this propelled him. “Man,” Derek said, nearly stopping, “I think we should turn around.”

  “Don’t be crazy, it’s fine; the concierge can get me the goat milk in, like, a minute, and you and I will have a nice lunch.” John remembered David Edelson with his six faxed newspapers every morning, how the concierge had delivered them to him on a silver tray while he sat at the beach. John’s tiny column had been in that pile, in the Journal, and he had sat with his future father-in-law with a mixture of anticipation and fear as the older man sifted through the stack and eventually found it. It was embarrassing and wonderful. His own father never would have done this: As Veronica and her mother busied themselves with their hyper-conscientious applications of sunscreen in the shade a distance away, Veronica’s father, known as “the Edelson Oracle,” read aloud the words John had written.

  “Rich families are odd,” John had told Veronica later that night when they were alone. “You can do anything—make clay pendants of your genitalia, go to clowning school—and, because the stakes are so slight, anything you do could be a source of celebration.”

  “That’s completely untrue. It’s the opposite. I have to work to get their approval,” she’d said. She gestured to her bedside table, piled high with books—The German Expressionist Influence, The Dream of Chagall, and a fat notebook with a mess of papers tucked into it that would become her thesis.

  He’d reached for her nude waist and embraced her. “You’re doing great,” he said, understanding she needed to hear it. It was less than a year into the relationship, and he could find no flaw in her. He kissed her velvety ribs, her small hip bones.

  “I have to do more. I have to prove myself. Don’t you see that?” Laughingly, she boxed him on the head. And she had done great. She had published a chapter of her thesis in a prestigious journal and been offered a teaching job.

  Later, he thought it had all been for pleasure, an entire degree because she wanted to, because she’d abandoned the field and moved on to public health. She said he was judgmental about this, but she’d misunderstood; he was envious of her ability to wander, to seek a career that satisfied her.

  Someone was approaching the car. The guard’s beige uniform was there, stretched tight around his crotch, framed by the car window. Derek opened his wallet to reveal his driver’s license. “You have business here today?” John heard the voice ask.

  Derek said, “My friend here is a member; I’m his driver.” John bent down and waved at the guard. Then he revealed Clara’s sleeping face from under the towel. She was warm but peaceful. The driver waved them forward a bit hesitantly. John could see him writing something down in a little pad as they drove away.

  “You’re my driver?” John asked.

  “Well, I am driving you. It’s no big deal.” Derek shrugged.

  “I don’t want you to think you have to drive me around—”

  “I don’t. It’s all right,” he laughed. “I was going to this side of the island to see my fiancée, Monika, man. Remember? Don’t get all troubled on me. We’re okay.”

  “It’s all good,” John said, reassured. Derek was not his chauffeur, but John could not have gotten here so quickly without him. “Thanks for all this.”

  “Your girl seems better too.”

  “She does, I know.” At that moment Clara woke up, stretching her head out of the carrier like a turtle, then retracting it when a shaft of bright sun hit her eyes. John kissed the cushiony spring of soft cheek. The next checkpoint was a small house where two men sat. One emerged and stood on the passenger side of the car, holding his holster and baton, for a slow minute.

  He bent down eventually and addressed Derek. “Can I help you?”

  “We’re here for lunch,” John said breezily.

  The guard stood up and conferred for a while with his partner. He chuckled and took his time before he finally came back.

  “Are you staying at the hotel?” he asked.

  “I have before, and I’m back in town, so—”

  “Are you checking in today?”

  “No, I—”

  “What’s the name of the reservation?”

  “Edelson. It was—”

  The man turned away again and went into the little house. John saw him move very slowly, adjusting the buckle of his belt, laughing with the other man, and then, gradually, picking up the phone.

  “You booked a room?” Derek asked, unsure.

  “No, but these formalities—I mean, they’re just enjoying the minuscule amount of power that they have.”

  The other man, younger and skinnier, approached this time. “There’s no record of your reservation, sir. Is it perhaps under another name?” John could see the older man behind him, leaning back in his chair and lighting a thin brown cigarette.

  “Can you ask him to come back?”

  The young man looked worried and shook his head no.

  “Look, there’s no other name, but is this necessary? We only want to get some milk for my daughter here and have some lunch. I’ve stayed here before.”

  “We can’t let anyone in without a booking, sir,” he said. Beads of sweat broke out across his upper lip, which he’d probably just begun to shave.

  John laughed. They didn’t understand that he was coming back. Clara giggled too, as if he was playing with her. “Can I speak with
your supervisor, then?”

  “That’s him,” the boy said hopelessly, nodding toward the smoking guard.

  “Well, then, his supervisor, the manager, or someone?”

  When the boy left to speak with his supervisor, Derek said, “We can get the goat milk elsewhere, man. I’ll get it for you. Don’t worry.”

  “You don’t have to do things for me. It’s fine. Wait.”

  The young man returned with a cordless phone that looked ancient, the same oversize Panasonic from Veronica’s apartment in the early nineties. Clara lunged at it and held on while John spoke. It was a woman this time—disaffected, distant, and cool, as if they’d brought the same one from Lord Harrington’s Castle to disappoint him again.

  “If you have an appointment, a booking of some sort, you may enter,” she said. “Otherwise, you may not enter the premises.”

  “Fine, can you connect me with the restaurant, then? I’ll book a reservation.”

  Derek was laughing and shaking his head.

  “What?” John said to Derek as he was put on hold.

  “Amazing,” he said, smiling. “Americans. Actually, mainly New Yorkers.”

  “Trust me, Derek.”

  “Oh, I know you’ll get what you want.”

  Derek turned off the ignition, melting the car and the three passengers into the road as John spoke to the hostess at the restaurant, the golf pro (as if he’d take a lesson), and then, finally, the spa, which were all booked solid. Sleepy voices told him, one following the other, that it was not possible, that he had to call quite far in advance, that the hotel was very busy at this time of year. Desconsolately, he gave up the Panasonic.

  A cool betrayal rippled up through John’s belly and settled in his throat; he felt the way he had in tenth grade when his girlfriend, Maria Chimay, a not very pretty freshman, had dumped him unexpectedly for an upperclassman. That night he’d gone to lock his bedroom door to masturbate—with or without Maria’s rubbery hand jobs, he could still do this—and the lock, something from the hardware store he’d installed himself, crumbled off into his palm. Taking his chances, he’d done it anyway. He’d tried to summon Maria’s mediocre face, her smooth shoulders, as he worked, but she’d vanished.