My Sunshine Away

by M. O. Walsh

  All I’m saying is this: if there are vibes in this world, I had sent them.

  So, it wasn’t that she’d busted me.

  It was instead the obvious way in which she didn’t understand what she’d uncovered.

  “Let’s go somewhere,” she’d said, as if it were as simple as that. “I know you want me,” she’d whispered, as if “want” was the same thing as “need.”

  I did what I could to stall.

  It didn’t go well.

  “No, I don’t,” I said.

  Lindy put her hands on my stomach. She leaned against me as if she was falling asleep.

  “Let’s you and me go,” she said again.

  “Lindy,” I told her, “I think you might be drunk.”

  This was the wrong thing to say.

  Lindy stood up straight and glared at me. She squinted her eyes as if someone had turned on the lights. She said, “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  Lindy then pushed herself away and wheeled toward the other kids in the room. I saw a purple hickey, the shape of a continent, on her neck. She looked furious and petty in this pose, and a blue vein rose in her forehead. She pointed at me. “This guy,” she told them. “This guy watches me all the time. You can’t trust this motherfucker.”

  “Lindy,” I said. “What are you talking about?”

  Lindy glared at me, and I wonder, even now, if she felt she’d finally cleared the air between us. If maybe the real reason she hadn’t spoken to me in all that time was not only because I’d spilled the beans about her rape, but also because my adoration had become too obvious for her to bear. There’s nothing worse, after all, is there, than having to endure a love that you don’t return? So maybe she thought outing me might do it, might finally cut me off from her completely, might end whatever admiration I’d held for her for so long. She stood before me after she’d said this, panting, and waiting for my defense.

  I didn’t get a chance to reply.

  In the background, one of the guys sitting on the sofa said, “Go home, you drunk bitch,” and the room filled with laughter.

  At this, my heart broke for Lindy—it died for her—for the first of two times that night.

  Lindy scowled at these guys, a couple of jocks who had long ago written her off as some skank, I suppose, some girl who deserved nothing but scorn, and she threw her cup across the room at them, splashing red juice on the pool table. This gesture had no effect. The guys just laughed more deeply and turned their attention back to the game.

  Lindy stomped out of the room.

  “Why do you talk to that slut?” one of the guys asked me.

  “Don’t call her that,” I said, and stood there energized, ready to defend her again.

  They had no interest in debate.

  So, with nothing left to do, I let my mind implode around what had just happened. I’d wanted to run after her, of course, to clear things up. In fact, I’d wanted the whole scene to be played over again. And the truth is, at that moment, when I was sixteen, if I could have done it all over again, I probably would have reshuffled the scene to end with me and Lindy kissing in the backseat of a car, in a bathroom, or maybe wrapped around each other on the very pool table upon which she had pressed me. I wondered angrily why I had let that opportunity slip out of my hands, and couldn’t fathom how another would ever appear. So I threw my pool stick onto the table and went into the bathroom, where I locked the door behind me.

  I raged in this place.

  I threw around inconsequential things like toilet paper rolls and toothbrushes, yet couldn’t bring myself to do any real damage. I stood for long minutes in front of the mirror, cursing at my pimpled and drunken face. I spat in the sink like a tough guy might do and recognized little about my own reflection. You fucking sissy, I called myself. You fucking loser. Yet I felt no connection to these words as I said them, no connection to anything at all.

  Eventually, this anger waned and I grew hopeful.

  After all, she had spoken to me, had she not? She had expressed some desire, no matter how drunkenly, how clumsily. Surely that must mean something. I began thinking about the number of guys at that party and why, out of all of them, she had chosen me. Even as a teenager I knew how alcohol was said to let loose your most sunken desires. So maybe there was something behind it all to believe in? This was not outlandish. Alcohol had also given me the confidence to play for her that night, to pick up a stranger’s guitar and let fly. This type of stardom was mere fantasy before this party, before the booze, and so maybe her display in the pool room was similar. Perhaps she had been watching, all those days, as I walked the sidewalks of Piney Creek Road. Maybe she, too, had just been waiting for the right moment to speak.

  Yes, I thought, all of that.

  I washed my face in the sink. I rinsed out my mouth. I tidied up the place. And when I emerged from the bathroom, the party was over.

  A few stragglers still lounged around on the leather recliners, but the only noise I could hear now came from outside, where I later learned a fistfight had broken out over Matt Hawk making out with somebody else’s date. So I stumbled through the filthy house, full of adrenaline, and ran into a guy I used to play soccer with.

  “Have you seen Lindy?” I asked him, and he laughed.

  “Last time I saw her,” he said, “she was standing over there, trying to make out with Chris Macaluso.”

  “What?” I said. “That’s impossible.”

  Chris Macaluso was an average kid. He sat the bench on the basketball team. I remember an anecdote about his parents not letting him drink Cokes. All this to say that he was nice enough, I guess, but a mere afterthought on the high school landscape. So this was no small blow. Surely my friend’s eyes had deceived him. Surely he’d mistaken some other drunken beauty for Lindy. Surely all was not lost.

  I did what I could to erase this image from my mind and walked outside to smoke the last crumpled cigarette in the pack I’d bought earlier that night. Here I saw the swimming pool, shimmering and littered with garbage, and at the far end of the pool, I also saw Lindy. She was sprawled across a lawn chair, passed out cold. Nobody else was around.

  I figured this was my chance.

  I walked over to her and pulled up a seat.

  There, with just the two of us, I was finally allowed to study Lindy’s body.

  Her legs, still muscular and lean from her years of running track, from her former joys on Piney Creek Road, from youth, were strewn to the sides of the chair. Her arms were flung over the rests. She looked as if she had been dropped there from a great distance, and her hair covered most of her face. As I scanned her body I noticed that the hem of her dress was lifted well above her knee, exposing her inner thigh, and I saw in this place the tail end of what looked like a scar.

  I checked the area around me to make sure I wasn’t being watched, that this wasn’t some dubious setup, and it was not. My only company was the Jack Russell terrier, who was now turning in circles on the edge of the diving board, waiting for a party that wouldn’t return. So I looked back at Lindy’s thigh, the ripe muscle, the soft skin, and, in an act I’m not proud of, I leaned forward and nudged her dress farther to the side with my hand.

  It was there I saw a series of razor-thin scars, whiter than her already white skin, which stopped just an inch or so below her black panties. What kind of pain causes a person to do this? I wondered. In what room of her house did it happen? On what day had I seen her walk out her front door with perhaps a small hitch in her step, a thin line of blood on her shorts?

  Without thinking, I began to touch the scars gently with the tips of my fingers, and they felt like twine in her skin. They were softer than all else I knew. So I petted them. I counted them, and the number was four. I then began to wonder what these thin scars might taste like, what their texture might do to my tongue, and in a moment of sheer terror I looked u
p at Lindy. It struck me again that this might be a trap. That soon people would come out of the bushes: my mother, her parents, the cops. It struck me that she could still be awake.

  She was not.

  Instead I noticed that she must have been passed out for some time now, maybe from the moment she’d left me upstairs. I knew this by the way people had had fun with her, shoving empty bottles and spent cigarette packs in the top of her dress, where they had undoubtedly taken pictures for posterity.

  But there was something else, too.

  In their fun, someone had written in black marker on Lindy’s face. I could see the edges of it beneath her mussed hair and immediately knew this wasn’t the good-natured stuff we’d done to one another at sleepovers, where kids drew clown noses or whiskers on the first person to fall asleep. It was nothing as innocent as that. Instead, after I gently brushed her hair from her face, I saw that it was just a simple word, scribbled in all caps across her forehead that read:

  FAKE.

  Upon seeing this, my love for Lindy multiplied itself in brand-new ways. I felt sorry for her and I felt destroyed by her. I felt angry at whoever did this and guilty that I’d only just now noticed it. I wanted desperately to continue touching her and yet I also wanted to laugh at her, to say something cruel like Look what you got by not loving me. Instead I pulled the dress back over her thigh.

  I felt ill.

  Behind me, I heard a kid crank up his car stereo in the driveway. I heard teenagers laughing and drunk, singing along to the song that I recall as being “Fuck tha Police” by the rap group N.W.A. Soon, Artsy Julie came around the corner and looked at me. She seemed to find nothing strange, nothing meaningful, in the way I hovered over Lindy. She merely relayed to me the fact that our ride had left us and she was going to walk home. She said a neighbor had just come out in their bathrobe and told us they were calling the cops. She said the whole thing was stupid.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll catch up with you.”

  I looked back at Lindy, knowing that if no one else intervened she would be nudged awake when the cops got there, that she would be described in police blotters as “unconscious” and “underage,” and so I tried, to no avail, to rub the black marker from her forehead. I licked my thumb and scrubbed at the ink like a parent. I used my nice dress shirt, my tie. Nothing I did could erase it, and nothing I did woke her up. So I lifted Lindy by her shoulders and dragged her behind a large clump of azaleas blooming hot pink at the far corner of the yard.

  I laid her softly on the lawn and saw the moon show up on her eyelids, still painted a glittery silver, and as I stood there watching her eyes move frantically beneath them I imagined that she was busy watching the stuff of an entirely different world in some deep and restless dream, and then I went home.

  I ran home.

  22.

  What followed Hannah’s death and the Spring Bash was a summer of visitors, the clearing of Bo Kern’s name from Lindy’s rape, and the arrest and public scandal of the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Also, the heated sound of Lindy’s breath on my telephone.

  The visitors came mainly in the form of remorseful and well-intentioned family members who, like my sister Rachel, I suppose, sensed some invisible SOS coming from my mother that I was too young to pick up on. When I think back upon it now I can see it, of course, the way it took all of my mom’s energy to act happy in my presence, the way she, too, had become more religious and more shy. The way she now drank coffee from a chipped mug with the words “Today is the first day of the rest of your life” on it. But, I didn’t appreciate nor even understand it all then. I was just a simple American teen at the time. I was in love with an unlovable girl.

  The visitors to my house were mainly cousins, aunts, and uncles, and old friends of the family who came over in shifts to have long grave talks with my mother in the den. They would often stay the night, the weekend, some part of them glad, at the least, to be giving my mother something to do. My father had been generous, or court-ordered, depending who you ask, by leaving us the house and paying alimony and tuition, et cetera, and so my mother had gotten a part-time job selling purses at a department store just to keep busy after the divorce, but she quit this job when Hannah died. She now woke up only to look forward to going back to bed, it seemed, graciously providing me with meals in the interim, and spent her afternoons sitting alone in odd rooms of our house as if trying them out. Still, she never complained to me. She never asked for my help.

  Yet I would be reminded of my mother’s sadness, her poor state, when the women who visited would call me to their sides and touch my shoulders, compliment me, and tell my mother how handsome I was becoming. Or when the men who accompanied these women would sit next to me on the sofa, watch some television, and finally say what seemed to take an enormous amount of courage for them to utter. Something like, “She was a special girl, your sister.”

  Or like when my grandfather, my mother’s father, once said to me, “It’s not natural, you know, burying a child. It makes me worry.” This was a man who had lost his own wife, my grandmother, to a massive stroke when I was only a toddler. This was a man who’d seen half his squad die in World War II and tattooed their first names on his bicep. “What you need to understand,” he told me, “is that your mother really needs you now.”

  “I know,” I said.

  But what was I to do? Wash the dishes? Mow the lawn?

  There was no putting back what had been taken, and it was perhaps only this specific knowledge that the increased bustle in my house afforded me. Because, more than anything, what these people made clear was that the tragedy my mother was suffering through was unattainable and unknowable to me, no matter my close proximity to it. It was something not even the visitors could fathom, they told me—the loss of a child—and they were parents themselves. And, ultimately, this sense of futility made me feel more separate from my mother than close to her.

  So, I thought, what chance did I have to fix her?

  However, this summer was not entirely without promise or excitement. I found myself forever affected by my uncle Barry, for instance, my mother’s brother, who I had seen maybe once before in my life. He showed up at our door unannounced one hot Friday with a beat-up suitcase and Dodge Charger and said he only planned to stay for the weekend. Yet in the month that he lived with us, confusing our quiet house with his frequent laughter, with the classic-rock albums he played in our living room, I grew up in complicated ways.

  This was the stretch of time from June to July, when the heat of Louisiana bears down on all living things, and I had not spoken to Lindy since the dance back in April. Some part of me hoped she would call me, would thank me for not taking advantage of her, and would confess that it wasn’t just drunk talk that made her want me that night. I was afraid that if I approached her, however, I would find out the opposite of all this was true. I therefore spent my days inside mainly, playing Super Mario Brothers and strumming my electric guitar with the amplifier turned off. And when darkness came I spent the evenings in my sister Rachel’s room watching shows like Blossom and Full House on a small television she’d brought home from Lafayette.

  She was now only watching things with “good Christian values,” she said, and so whenever she’d leave the room, I’d switch her small television over to trashy shows like Married with Children or Geraldo just to annoy her. I suppose I wanted her to worry about me at this time, to pray for me. If not that, I figured, what else would we talk about?

  Hannah was not an option. We talked enough about her without words. She was what Rachel dropping out of school to live in her old room said, what my sitting beside her watching TV said. What our mother shuffling past us down the hall said, and what the quiet closing of her bedroom door said. That was enough conversation for both of us.

  Yet we had plenty to talk about when my uncle Barry arrived, and, in this way, he was a welcome distraction. In his early fo
rties at the time, my uncle Barry was mysterious to me, as were his actions in general. He was a handsome man, as I remember him now, but he did not comport himself in this way. He kept a blond stubble on his chin, had an unkempt thatch of the same color hair on his head, and always looked to me as if he had just stepped in from the rain, like the wind was blowing where he had been. I remember him wearing nothing but khaki shirts and blue jeans, like the perfect mix between a big-game hunter and an out-of-work carpenter, and I also remember that he carried with him an old Duncan yo-yo. It was a sturdy yellow thing that he often took out of his pocket to care for like ancient gentlemen did their pocket watches. This only added to the mystery.

  Yet all I knew for sure was that he’d married a woman a few years prior that none of our family knew very well. She’d come into his life and assumed control, my mother said, in the way a business manager does when trouble arises. They’d moved out to Utah, Nevada, and then Arizona, following her work as an assistant professor of drama. And since Barry had never been one to hold down a job himself, this type of life suited him. In fact, he seemed agreeable to nearly any situation.

  When we showed him the small room in our house where he would be staying, for instance, my father’s old study with a pull-out couch, he kicked up his feet and shut his eyes and said, “When I close my eyes, it’s like I’m at the Windsor Court.” Or when my mother initially asked him why Sharon, his wife, hadn’t come along, he just smiled and said, “Now, Kit-Kat [his name for my mom], there’ll be plenty of time for that later.” Yet I never heard him bring it up again. He also, as far as I could tell, didn’t bring up Hannah’s death. There may have been conversations about Hannah that I wasn’t privy to, of course, heartfelt and adult stuff that passed between him and my mother, but somehow I doubt it. Just his presence alone was his condolence, it seemed, as if to say, “Hey, sis, you know it’s bad if I’m here.”