My Sunshine Away

by M. O. Walsh

  “Who cares what those idiots say?” I’d always tell her. “They don’t really know you.”

  “Nobody knows me,” she’d say.

  “I do,” I’d tell her.

  “You think you do,” she’d say.

  She was right. I thought I did.

  But my knowledge had a certain disorder.

  I knew, for example, that at that exact moment, Lindy was sitting Indian-style on a white wooden chair with her hand outside her bedroom window. I could see the cherry of her lit cigarette through my binoculars, a silhouette of its smoke. I knew that her bicycle, the banana-seated Schwinn, now had weeds growing up through the spokes. I knew that she would likely sleep late into the afternoon the next day, opening her window to sneak a cigarette while her mom tidied up the front porch. I knew, also, that I wanted to be with her.

  “Anyway,” I said. “I just wish you would have told me you were going.”

  “Poor little kitten,” Lindy said. “You should have come. Artsy Julie was there. Aren’t the two of you, like, lovers or something? She’s always walking that big-ass dog in front of your house. I saw you watching her at the dance. I figured y’all must have weird Dungeons and Dragons sex all the time. Are you her dungeon master?” She laughed. “Do you put your magic wand into her boiling cauldron?”

  “What are you talking about?” I said. “We got set up for that dance. My mom made me take her. I had nothing to do with it.”

  “Relax,” Lindy said. “I’m kidding. Plus, I know all about that.”

  “You know all about what?”

  “The dance, idiot,” Lindy said. “Your mom asked me to take you, too.”

  I watched Lindy put her cigarette out in a cup on the windowsill and suddenly believed myself at more of a disadvantage with her than I had ever been before. I suppose now that I could have interpreted this news as a positive, perhaps the final piece of evidence that my mother did trust me with Lindy, after all, that she always thought I was innocent. However, I didn’t even think of it then. The simple idea that the two of them had shared information about me, that they had corroborated, was humiliating. I imagined a touching scene between my mother and the Simpson women, all sitting around a table drinking tea as if embarking on some philanthropic enterprise, and I grew furious.

  “Are you fucking serious?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “It was right after your sister died.”

  “I know when it was,” I said. “I can’t believe she did that. What did she tell you? What did she say?”

  “Why are you freaking out?” Lindy said. “It was kind of sweet. She was all worried about you. She thought you were depressed or some shit. But, you know, Matt Hawk had already asked me.”

  “Awesome,” I said. “Isn’t that great. Congratulations. Lucky you.”

  “Don’t be a shit,” Lindy said. “I probably would have gone with you otherwise. I felt bad.”

  “For who? Me or my mom?”

  “Both, I guess,” Lindy said, and her tone softened up a little. She sounded genuine for a moment, even a bit wistful. “I always thought your sister was so cool, you know? I totally worshipped her when we were growing up. She had those big sunglasses. She had those big boobs. She made me want a sister so bad. I couldn’t believe it when she died. But then, on the other hand, I totally could. She was cool. She seemed nice. It made sense. Nobody gets what they deserve.”

  It is funny to think back about your life.

  Whenever I do it, scenes like this baffle me now, the way I was always listening to the wrong thing. Maybe that’s all a childhood is? When Lindy was telling me Meagan’s secrets, for instance, or when she was idolizing Jeffrey Dahmer, I wasn’t really listening to her at all. All I was thinking was, Okay, so how does this affect me?

  As another example, I can remember a short time after my parents’ initial separation, when they attempted to get back together. This was the fall of 1985 and I was ten years old and, earlier that day, Randy and I had made a bet about who could score the highest on a computer game we both owned called Bruce Lee, played on the Commodore 64. We would call each other after each round, two kids in heaven, and compare our performances. That evening, my father came over to the house unexpectedly and he and my mother gathered us all into the kitchen. They sat us down at the large oaken table and they looked uncomfortable, almost shy, standing there before us. My father said, It’s not going to be easy, kids. But we’re going to give it another shot.

  Hannah said, Mom. Is this really what you want?

  My mom said, Of course, honey. We love you kids so much. You know that, don’t you?

  I said, Can I go now?

  Or another time, much later in life, when my mother told me she had been feeling a little confused lately, and that she had almost gotten lost in her own neighborhood. She was living alone, then, and I had briefly moved out of town for work. I was in my late twenties and, like most, considered myself busy. My mother and I still spoke often and visited on the holidays, and yet I secretly believed that she was so devastated by my departure from Baton Rouge that she was conjuring up ways to get me to return to her. Small guilt trips about some downed limb in her yard. Strange symptoms that matched vague illnesses she’d heard about on TV. She was not yet sixty years old, often had lunch with friends, and looked great, so I thought she was making it up to reclaim me. Every child, I hope, thinks this highly of themselves.

  And so I would say things like, “I don’t know, Mom. You seem pretty sharp to me.”

  “Thank you, honey,” she’d say. “That’s sweet.”

  She was right. That’s all it was.

  I did a similar thing on the phone with Lindy that night. Drunk or not, there she was, talking to me about my dead sister, recalling her in specific ways that become so much rarer with time. Yet I barely even listened. “Do you remember all those gold bracelets she used to wear?” Lindy asked me. “Those big pink hoop earrings? I used to beg my mom to buy me that shit.”

  “Is that why you would have gone with me to the dance?” I asked her. “Because you liked Hannah?”

  “I don’t really know if I liked her,” Lindy said. “It’s not like we hung out. I just saw her. I just worshipped her. You know how it is. And your mom, my God, she looked so fucking sad.”

  “So, is that what Melinda’s was about, too?” I said. “You felt sorry for me?”

  Lindy groaned.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe. Why do you have to analyze everything?”

  “I don’t,” I said. “I just think about it sometimes, about that night.”

  “Well, you should stop,” she said, “because all that night was really about was drinking way too much vodka and about how much people fucking suck. My date made out with some skank in the laundry room. I passed out in the goddamned grass. It was horrible. I had to walk home. I fell asleep on the stairs. When I woke up, my dad was crying. I didn’t know that shit was written on my face.”

  “You should have gone with me,” I said. “Matt Hawk is such a dick.”

  “No,” Lindy said. “Matt Hawk has a dick. A great dick. That’s his problem.”

  I wanted to vomit. I wanted to jump off a cliff.

  “Why do you say stuff like that?”

  “What?” Lindy said. “I can’t talk about dicks? Guys talk about tits all the time.”

  “I don’t.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “I forgot that you’re a saint. I probably should have gone with you to that dance, now that I think about it. I probably should have been dating you forever. That way I wouldn’t have any problems. That way I’d just be this happy person with an assload of brownie points.”

  “I’m no saint,” I said.

  “Right,” Lindy said.

  “I’m serious,” I told her. “You have no idea what I’m capable of.”

  “O
kay,” Lindy said. “Prove it.”

  27.

  The game that Lindy chose was Truth or Dare.

  How many fates, I wonder, have unraveled this way?

  “All right,” Lindy said. She was still drunk. “Let’s test your sainthood. Which will it be?”

  My answer, of course, was Truth. It was all I’d ever wanted between us.

  “Okay, Truth,” she said. “Are you watching me right now?”

  I picked up my binoculars and looked across the street. I knew that Lindy couldn’t see me, even if she was trying. I had studied my own house from her oak tree so often that I understood the look of it with my bedroom lights on, my bedroom lights off, the porch lights on, the porch lights off. I knew the orange glow from the lamp on top of our piano when Rachel had forgotten to turn it off before bed. I knew the look of the vent lights above our kitchen stove, the shadows cast by our rooftop dormers in both the waning and waxing moons. So I also knew that my bedroom window, the place where I was watching her, was just a dark square from her vantage point, barely even visible due to the fortunate angle at which our homes had been constructed before Lindy or I were even born. I adjusted the binoculars to get a clearer look. When the lenses focused, I saw that she was sitting at her open window and flipping me the bird.

  “No,” I told her. “I’m not watching you.”

  “I thought this was Truth or Dare,” Lindy said, “not bullshit time for little boys. I know when somebody’s looking at me.”

  “I just told you I wasn’t a saint,” I said. “That doesn’t mean I’m a freak. There’s room between being an angel and being, like, a pervert.”

  “You think so?” Lindy said.

  “I do.”

  “You know what I think?” she asked, and set down the phone.

  Lindy then stood up from her chair and looked directly at my house, directly at the place she knew my room was, and lifted off her shirt. She tossed it out of sight and stood there. She put the phone back to her ear. She lit another cigarette.

  “I think you’re full of shit,” she said.

  Of course I was.

  From that great distance I could see only her forward-most features, lit up by floodlights the Kerns had installed outside their garage those two summers prior, and I stared at her unadorned outline. Her skin appeared yellow and smooth in this light. Her bra was dappled by leaf shadows, and her stomach looked taut as a board. She still had the form of a distance runner, Lindy did, although she hadn’t competed in nearly two years. She had the waist of an athlete, of a sportswear model, of every fit seventeen-year-old girl that even upstanding men of middle age—through some pull of nostalgia, perhaps—remain drawn to. I watched her stand shirtless in the dim light. I had little to say.

  And the strange thing is, I had actually seen Lindy in this manner of dress before: in bikinis out in the yard, in sports bras as she cruised the track at Perkins, in nothing but underwear as I sat in the water oak. I’d seen even more intimate angles as well, the back of her bare neck as I stood behind her in the lunch line at school, the curve of her knees as the gang of us ran through lawn sprinklers in what seemed so long ago. And I’d come close enough to touch her body as well, tackling her in the hot grasses of our neighborhood and running my finger over her scars at Melinda’s party. But this was something else entirely. This time she was looking at me. She was presenting herself to me. It was more than I could stand.

  “Hmm,” she said. “I wonder why you’re being so quiet.”

  Then, as if to torture me, Lindy held the phone between her neck and bare shoulder and placed her cigarette in the cup on the windowsill. She then reached down to unbutton the top of her jeans. She casually unsnapped the fly and flared it open, and I could see only the highest seam of her underwear, panties of a dark color that did not match her bra. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d spoken.

  What on earth could it have been about?

  “I mean, if you’re just sitting there and not looking at anything,” she said, “I wonder why you’re not talking?”

  Lindy bent to remove her jeans, and when she stood back up her face was a rounded shadow that I could not see the expression of. With her right hand, she reached behind her back and unsnapped her bra, and I watched it fall down her arms like a dream. I could now see the sides of her small breasts in the low and yellow light, and this vision became a touchstone of my permanent memory, despite what happened next between us.

  Lindy walked away.

  Without a word, she turned and disappeared into the dark of her room and all I could see through my binoculars was the smoke from her forgotten cigarette, left to burn in a cup on her windowsill. Yet I could still hear Lindy there, her breathing close to the receiver, and so I put all of my energy that way. She was crawling into bed. I knew that sound from our previous talks, when she’d flopped down to tell me some awful thing about group therapy or serial killers or her parents. I heard the mattress creaking beneath her slight weight. I heard the tick of the ceiling fan spinning above her. Then, once she got settled, I heard Lindy herself make a noise. It was a mature and pleasurable sound, a deep and satisfying sigh, and it was a thing I’d not heard from anyone before.

  “Okay,” Lindy said. “Now it’s my turn. But no more Truth. I want a Dare.”

  Every idea I had was weak-minded.

  I had played Truth or Dare only sparingly in life and, previous to this occasion, it had always been for low stakes. Once, for instance, back in the neighborhood days, when Arsty Julie dared me to kiss her dog. “How are we supposed to know what animals are princes,” she asked, “unless we kiss all of them?” Another time at a high school party when, out of boredom, I halfheartedly dared a guy named Judson Vidrine to stick a sewing needle through his forearm (he did it) and then only once more, when Jason Landry dared the circle of us on Piney Creek Road to drink a whole jar of pickle juice. When we balked at this idea, and the Kern boys told him to go away, Jason said, “Okay, truth, then. Have your parents ever made you drink a jar of pickle juice?”

  Some unfortunate things are so clear to me now.

  Yet I’d always considered Truth or Dare a juvenile game. It was not at all sexual to me until Lindy undressed in front of her window and said the word “dare,” and from that moment on I could think only of the way that her tongue touched the roof of her mouth as she reclined in her soft and cold bed to say it. I suddenly saw no other way for this game to operate. It was all about sex. There was nothing else, nor had there ever been.

  But I was inexperienced.

  How could I offer Lindy a dare bold enough, I wondered, to erase the errors I’d made with her since the Challenger fell into the ocean? How could it be powerful enough to erase my guilt over letting her secret slip out? How, too, might it be provocative enough to get her to do the favors I wanted? How could it be honest enough to let her know that behind our strange friendship, I believed that there were important things like true love and perhaps, one day, the physical making of that true love? In other words, how could I craft a dare so powerful that it might rip the siding off Lindy’s house, turn Piney Creek Road into an escalator, and deliver her body to me?

  I didn’t know.

  Before I could even try, though, I heard Lindy on the other end of the line, grunting softly with her throat. The air came to her in irregular bursts as if she were involved in some small task. It reminded me of the way people breathe when tying their shoes or threading a needle, when struggling to remember a thing that should be obvious, and I immediately knew what she was doing.

  After watching her undress, I’d begun doing the same.

  “Lindy,” I whispered, “I dare you to tell me what you’re thinking.”

  She let out another long sigh. She said, “I’m thinking that you’re not very good at this.”

  “Why?” I said. “It’s a good question.”

  “It’s als
o a Truth, idiot. Not a Dare.”

  “Okay,” I said. “You tell me, then. What would be a good dare?”

  She didn’t even have to think about it.

  “A good dare,” Lindy said, “would be, like, I dare you to come over here and fuck me.”

  I sat quietly on the phone and, to this day, there has only been one other time in my life that I felt so worked up. It was a memorable night in the early years of my marriage, more than a decade after I had this talk with Lindy, when my wife and I discovered that she was pregnant. We’d been lying in bed for an hour and crying sporadically because our deepest-held anxieties had become so obvious to us. The feelings we shared that night were enormous and strange and, as this panic turned to excitement, we moved closer to each other beneath the covers. We said silly and honest things like, “I hope it doesn’t look like your aunt,” and, “You know I’m totally going to screw this up, right?” all while my wife allowed me to touch the back of her thighs in a gentle way I had done thousands of times before. There were patches of dry skin there, some wrinkles I’d grown so accustomed to, and yet when there was a long, quiet moment between our laughter, when I thought she may have fallen asleep, my wife parted her legs and exhaled in a manner so deeply satisfying that I went crazy. She reached down and placed her hand on top of mine and, as she moved her hips against me, I knew more clearly than ever before that I was doing a thing that another person wanted. I also knew that my touch alone would be the one to give her pleasure and that her physical offering to me was one of tremendous love to be born out of her body in the months to come. And I understood that everything that had happened in my life before this event had been in preparation for it.