The Sunshine When She's Gone: A Novel

by Thea Goodman

  Derek was there, behind the curtain; Monika had vanished. “Monika had to go to work,” Derek said, as if reading John’s mind. “She’s a masseuse at Turtle Cove. You going back to your hotel?”

  “Lord Harrington’s Castle? God, no. I need to go home. I need a phone. Mine’s been dead all day.”

  “Okay, we’ll get to one,” Derek said, as John paid at the front desk.

  As they drove out of Speightstown, Clara was happy, focusing intently, as she did after eating, on a shell she’d grabbed off the dash. She examined it from every angle, first with her fingers and then with her gums. John kept fishing it out of her mouth so she didn’t cut herself, and she kept putting it back in. Derek talked about how hard it was to get a license to sell his work and about being an artist in the States; John could barely listen while tending Clara, until Derek said, “Maybe I could come visit you and your wife. In Soho, right?”

  “What about Monika and the baby?” he asked, extracting the shell from Clara’s grasp and letting her cry for it.

  “You have a big place, don’t you?” Derek asked amiably over her wail.

  John laughed. Derek was probably imagining the home of someone who patronized Glittering Sands, and he was momentarily glad he was not that person. “No. I mean, it’s not that big. It’s all relative.” He paused, recalling the glossy treacle spread of Lloyd Miller’s duplex on Park Avenue. Derek had been so generous with him, but he just wanted to go home. He wanted to tell Veronica that he understood. He could forgive her. “Do you mind if I space out for a while?” he asked, to avoid refusing Derek an invitation to New York, and closed his eyes.

  On vacation ten years ago, he and Veronica had existed on piña coladas and grilled cheese sandwiches at the golf club. But that wouldn’t work anymore. Maybe it could work, maybe John could take her by the wrist and say, When in Rome, and she would get it. She would have to get it. She would have to buy Cheekies diapers and Pringles and regular baby formula. She could not have survived the thirty-hour labor and two surgeries to simply drift away from him, to shape-shift into a person who would eat only a farm-raised duck egg.

  * * *

  He opened his eyes as the car pulled to a stop.

  “Clara seems like she’s better,” Derek said, when he noticed that John’s eyes were open.

  “I think she is,” he said, sighing audibly with relief. “I need to call Veronica.”

  “Her mum?”

  The drugs from Tisbury were kicking in and he felt no pain, only a vague panicky sensation, as if he were late for an exam. “Yes—wait, why are we going to Laura’s? Can we go straight to the airport? I’m sure there’s a phone there, and I want to get on the soonest flight possible.”

  “You’re leaving today?” Derek clenched his jaw a little bit as he did a U-turn.

  “You don’t have to drive me there,” John said, but Derek had already joined the stream of traffic leading to the new freeway. “Thanks for doing this,” John added. They passed flowering trees, sugar cane, and cinder-block shacks on the sides of the road, punctuated by bright swatches of paint on some houses and by children—there seemed to be lots of children—playing in the dirty slits between the houses. Soon the domestic petered out, giving way to car dealerships and a massive grocery store called Rondo. John pictured Veronica picking her way through the aisles of Rondo in search of something fresh, something grown locally. Was this paradise? Hardly. He hadn’t noticed when he’d arrived, but the island had changed radically in ten years. In the middle of a roundabout, a huge statue of a slave breaking free of chains faced the sun with a plaintive grin.

  “We’re going back to Mama,” John whispered to Clara, his throat thick with tears. She took her little fat hand, shiny with drool, and batted at his mouth with it.

  He wiped his mouth and looked out the window. But Barbados could no longer help him. Cars were everywhere. Fluorescent trash danced in the gutter. Palm trees lined the roads, arching in mockery. Construction noise and dust surrounded them. The air was thick with a new smell that, at first, he couldn’t place: burning garbage.

  “She knows where you are?” Derek asked.

  John hesitated before answering, fairly stunned by the familiar fear of losing Veronica. “She has an idea,” he said. However erroneous, she did have an idea: Irvington. John’s contrition mixed with dread. At this moment, Veronica might be speaking to Muriel, discovering that he and Clara were not there.

  “She has an idea?” Derek persisted.

  “She was sleeping when I left.”

  “You left her?”

  “When you say it like that, it sounds like we were splitting up or something. It’s not like that. She had a cold and hadn’t been sleeping well lately, so I let her sleep in.”

  “You left with her girl, with her baby?” Derek turned and looked at him as he drove.

  “Can you look at the road? No. It’s not like that,” John insisted, flattening beneath his own longing. He was in love with her. He would never leave her.

  “Sorry, man, I don’t mean to pry.”

  “No. No, you’re right. Holy crap! I left.” Derek didn’t respond. John saw him play with the radio dial, the station mired in static. “I left her a phone message. She didn’t pick up. But—fuck! I’m in a major rush.”

  “Monika would kill me,” Derek said, accelerating, shaking his head as he spoke, then prodding further. “I take it you were in a fight?”

  “Sort of. Jesus fuck!” John flicked off the white noise of the radio.

  “Sorry, man.”

  “No, it’s not you. It’s me.” He gave a guttural moan.

  “I’ll get you there, don’t worry,” Derek said, as he shifted gears and passed a large truck on the two-way road.

  * * *

  They stood on the curb amid several sealed white minivans purring with exhaust. In the distance, John heard steel drums jingling, drowned out by the planes overhead. In a blare of noise and that white-hot Caribbean light, Derek put his arms around John’s shoulders and hugged him and the baby. “Wish me luck,” Derek said. “Monika.” And he gestured to form a huge belly on his skinny frame. He reached out and tickled Clara’s chin with a long finger. She grabbed it and playfully hung on. She was fattened and mobile now, curling her spine around John’s arms as if she might dive into Derek’s, irrepressible in her need to explore. John adjusted her in his arms.

  “Good luck, man,” John said. “We all need it. And thanks.” He took an old receipt from his wallet and wrote down his Crosby Street address and phone number for Derek. Maybe they would come. Maybe it would be better if they came. Hell, they should come right away.

  Derek took the address and tucked it into his pocket. He said, “I don’t mean to be a killjoy, but you can’t go traveling with it.”

  “With what?” John asked, oblivious, bouncing Clara as he began to perspire.

  “You don’t want to go to a Bajan prison.”

  They stepped aside as people got in and out of cabs and John remembered; he fished the dime bag out of his knapsack and gave it to Derek in a handshake. Derek searched his pockets for the cash John had given him, but John refused it. “It’s going to be great, this,” John said, kissing Clara. “Monika, all of it.” His eyes filled as if he might cry.

  “Wait,” Derek said, and pulled a stiff engraved card from his wallet. “Laura had her stationer make this for us.” In black script, the card said their names and the London address they would be moving to after the birth. It was a card Annalena Chase Edelson would have deeply approved of.

  “Fancy,” John said, turning it over.

  “You never know who’s fancy,” Derek said, and hustled back into his small red car. When Derek left, John felt an unexpected sting of abandonment. He wrapped his arms around the baby to try to quell it. Clara squirmed.

  * * *

  The last thing he remembered Veronica really wanting was her mother. It was after her “bag of waters” was broken, when the labor was still moving very slowly. “Can
you call her?” she’d asked. The request caught him off guard. Veronica never admitted wanting Annalena. But when he looked at his wife, he saw that thin, solemn six-year-old trailing behind her mother at Sotheby’s.

  He left the room to call Annalena, and he asked her to come. “Oh, I’ll wait at home until the baby’s born,” she said. Her voice was ashy and light as if she hadn’t understood the request. There was a long pause. John sat in the meaty air of the cafeteria and considered what to say.

  “She wants you here with her now.”

  “Well, I don’t know what use I can be at the actual hospital. What can I do?” Annalena asked.

  “She wants you to come. It’s not that you could do anything.”

  When Annalena spoke again, she was halting, as if her reserve was melting. Her voice was breathy, almost shaky. “She’s doing fine, isn’t she?”

  “It’s been a long day—or, no, it’s been two days—I don’t even know how long anymore, and she asked for you.” He heard Annalena laugh nervously in response. “Just come,” John said, surprised at the force in his voice, how her laughter had infuriated him.

  She did arrive about half an hour later, looking small and scared, her mousy face emerging above a white blazer. She wore a red grosgrain headband. Who wears a headband in 2004? Ines always wanted to know. It was deliberately out of date, an announcement to the world that Annalena was not present.

  “I brought some linen I’m embroidering for the baby. How is she?” Annalena said. They stood at the information desk on the maternity floor.

  “She’s hanging in there.”

  Inexplicably, Annalena had blushed. What the hell was she embarrassed about? “Should I wait in the lounge?” She gestured with the ridiculous linen sampler toward some seats. She didn’t seem to understand that she was Veronica’s mother and should not go anywhere. John resisted an urge to grab her tiny shoulders and shake her.

  He took a deep breath. “No. Okay, um, no. You should come into the room. Right away. I’m going in. Come when you’re ready.”

  When he got back, Veronica was sitting in a chair as two people changed the dressing on her bed. She stood to let them peel the damp gown off her naked body and untangle it from the tubes, then put her and all her tubes into another fresh gown. Ignoring him, she moved back to the freshened bed, as if sleepwalking. He squeezed her hand when she was settled. She opened her eyes. “Where’s my mother?”

  “She’s here, honey,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “She’s in the lounge.”

  “Why?”

  “She said she’s not sure what she can do in here.”

  “Did you tell her I need her?” she asked, tears streaming down her face.

  He’d failed her; he had failed to bring her the one thing she had asked for. Why had he not forced Annalena into the room? “I did. She has some, um, sewing she’s doing, but she’s here in the building. She’s—she loves you,” he blurted, desperate to comfort her. Veronica’s eyes lit for a moment; then she hid her face as if ashamed. She turned and faced the wall.

  “Your mom is here for you.”

  Veronica did her best to curl her ungainly body into a fetal position. She pulled the covers up to her chin.

  “I’ll ask her to come in again,” John said, but it was futile. He felt his wife’s disappointment. What could he do about it? Wanting Annalena wasn’t rational. She wasn’t a woman who could be had.

  “Don’t you get it?” Veronica said. He’d become the despised messenger. And then the door opened tentatively. Veronica sniffled and looked up with expectation. John felt a wave of relief before Muriel’s face appeared in the doorway.

  * * *

  The two-fifteen flight to JFK had already left. There were no more flights until the next morning, an eternity and a thousand dollars later. He looked around the airport aimlessly, as if there’d actually be anyone to help him.

  As a child, he’d been lost once at Wolman Rink around Christmas. Bravely he’d circled the ice, then went around again. Couples zoomed past. Bits of ice sprayed into the air. Next he tried staying in one place, to see if his parents would appear. Eventually it was too cold to remain outside. He found his parents in the café, cooing over Irish coffee. When he appeared, they asked casually if he wanted to taste it. But I was gone, he wanted to say. He’d sipped the fiery drink and it scalded his throat. He was then offered a hot chocolate. Perhaps only a few minutes had passed, but in the time he’d been missing, unnoticed, a desert had expanded in his chest. He’d stood alone on the ice, the crowd of skaters zooming past. The loss was his alone.

  He wanted to call Derek and looked at the engraved card; it listed Derek’s London number only. In the cacophonous airport, he was homeless. Clara was hot and cranky.

  “Dadooooo!” she babbled loudly, with anguish and tears in her eyes. Little red huts sold refreshments and souvenirs in the impossibly bright sunlight. Even in the late afternoon the sun was unrelenting. It was an amazing thing to have a home. To be able to go there and take off your shoes and put your keys down on the counter.

  John went to one of the huts and ordered a Banks beer and sat at the bar, holding the cold bottle against his hot forehead while Clara wiggled. She arched her tiny back and grunted stiffly, wanting to be set free, then leaned down as far as she could toward the ground. How he needed to keep her from that ground, where she might eat the cigarette butts and lick the floor.

  He bought two of the squat Caribbean bananas from a pruned woman selling them off her head. He fed Clara some from his fingers, which helped somewhat, but then she flapped her arms and feet frantically, wanting more. He bought fried chicken at one of the little huts, eating it himself and giving Clara a bottle of goat milk. When she was calmer, he set out again—he had to, for he was her home—over the hot tarmac to a white stucco airport motel.

  12

  Saturday

  Veronica

  Veronica was back at Grand Central for the second time in one day; it made her feel homeless. Her bra dug into her back in the way it did when she was overtired, as if her body were melting. The train ticket was in her hand. She stood eagerly on the platform. Soon. Soon she could hold Clara, the baby’s body draped warmly over her chest and shoulder. She and John had joked in the early weeks after Clara’s birth that they wanted to take turns being put into slings, rolled into flannel blankets, and carried in each other’s arms. It was one of the tragedies of adulthood: that one was simply too large to be lifted by another person.

  John had supported her full weight once during early labor. She would have to remind him: Pain was something they could get through together. She’d been so alone, but she needn’t be anymore. They needn’t be alone.

  Nearby, a teenage couple, underdressed in matching blue fleece, waited near the track, kissing. The boy held the girl’s face with both hands as if it were breakable.

  On board, Veronica unwrapped and ate a very useful egg sandwich—it had been so long since she’d last eaten from a diner—and had a coffee. No, it was not a farm-raised duck egg; no, it was not a fair-trade macchiato. The cheese on the sandwich was a bright yellow American square. The bread was not whole grain but white and fluffy as a cloud. Mendelsohn’s wife, Jamie, would be appalled. But the sandwich was so good. It was greasy. Had anything ever felt cozier than the egg sandwich and her own window seat on this train? She had a good view across the aisle, where the young couple in fleece had planted themselves to make out. And she enjoyed it—yes, she liked seeing the happiness of others, as if in John’s absence she had suddenly become, or was perhaps once again, magnanimous. She wasn’t sure why, but she felt wiser, seasoned, and even a little taller.

  The teenage girl caught Veronica’s eye and blushed. Veronica actually winked. There she was, an entirely new incarnation, an older woman capable of dispensing affirmation and comfort.

  The train rumbled through the Bronx. She watched a man across the aisle from her as he dozed off—he was a boy, really, stuck insid
e a pin-striped suit. John, too, was simply a boy. It seemed perfectly understandable that John had had no answer for her about the reasons for her hysterectomy. Was there truly a dangerously low level of amniotic fluid? Was it really necessary to induce labor? In the intervening months he’d failed to come up with an answer. But how could he have? And how could he or she ever know if things might have happened differently? Life after the birth had been a lot; it had all been a lot for John too.

  She licked ketchup off her thumb, aware not only of the high-fructose corn syrup that was its main ingredient but that John had felt helpless. The man in the suit awoke with a start and pulled a slim cellphone from his pocket. He stared at it with apprehension, then hope.

  She would never have another child.

  But as she sat on the train, the reality of Clara finally eclipsed that fact. Clara was a baby and would be a girl and might someday make out with a boy on a train. She would sneak out of the house at night and have a life Veronica wouldn’t know about.

  The young couple kissed, but the girl kept looking at her watch and giggling as the boy lunged for her. The faint odor of skunk slipped through the doors at one station: The city was receding, growing distant. Crosby Street seemed like another continent; the loft, a mere stage. The skunk odor grew stronger. There were animals in the woods, doing their animal things; there were trees and crackling branches and warm houses, perfuming the air with wood smoke. There was no parallel reality, no other way things could be. This was it; a single cold night in January. She had betrayed John. She would not tell him, but the fact was there, for her to know and to live with. Soon she’d see his house, the small Tudor one he’d grown up in, with the modest boxwoods and the amazing climbing tree. She had the comforting but also unsettling sensation of moving backward through time. She was almost there.

  13

  Saturday

  John

  The inside of the new hotel room was stucco like the outside, a white cave of rough walls, and Clara wailed within it. John held her and paced, and this quieted her somewhat, but if he dared to stop she screamed. He longed to be free from her, to be alone. There had been that moment of morning glee as he dressed her for the beach, that sense of his own ability. He’d considered himself pretty capable as a father, but he was realizing now that he hadn’t spent very many consecutive hours alone with her. He had scoffed at Veronica’s fatigue. He had not fully believed it. She had been recovering from surgery, been post-partum, and had begun working full time. She spent almost all of her free time caring for the baby. His smudged reflection in the dirty mirror above the dresser showed that he was now experiencing a small fraction of her fatigue.