My Sunshine Away

by M. O. Walsh

  That’s not what I mean, they’d say.

  We knew what they meant.

  And, truth be told, we took it hard for a while, our wealthy and poor alike.

  Our mansions, apparently, lacked character. Our garden district was some cheap knockoff of their garden district. Our finest eateries were no Antoine’s, no Commander’s Palace, nothing like the luxury you could find in the French Quarter. Our casinos, our amusement parks, our zoo, well, they were depressing. And on the dark streets of old Baton Rouge the poor had their differences, too. New graffiti sprang up that our kids hadn’t seen before. Our area code was 225, yet someone had carved 504 into the hood of a local gangster’s Cadillac. This was the beginning of gunplay, turf wars. Three men—just boys, really—were murdered on the stoop outside of their grandmother’s house in broad daylight. Several different gangs claimed responsibility and so nobody was sure of the meaning. As months passed, alarming reports came out of our high schools: increased improprieties in the bathrooms, more confiscated weapons, threats against teachers. We were told that this was a form of post-traumatic stress disorder, what these children were going through. We were told not to be alarmed, not to rush to judgment. We were told that it was impossible to blame people who were so distressed, so displaced, so confused, and we understood this.

  We thought they were talking about us.

  As these weeks turned into months, even more advice poured in.

  If we really wanted this to work, the pundits said, it was time for Baton Rouge to make some big decisions. It was time to grow up. The city would need to be reorganized: all two-lane roads turned into four, entire intersections scrapped and reengineered, trees cut down to widen a boulevard. We were told to lock our car doors, roll up our windows, and that we probably should have been doing this anyway. The world, after all, is not as simple as football games on fall Saturdays, a bunch of friendly people being friendly. Everybody knows that. Life in a real city is difficult and complicated and terrible things happen to wonderful people. Like they say, if you want to mature, if you want to expand, you have to be prepared to invest. And, of course, you have to be prepared to lose that investment.

  So, we did.

  We put shovels in the ground. We opened old office buildings that had been condemned for years. We built new strip malls that didn’t really suit us, because we felt the demand was high and immediate. We took giant leaps of faith and opened niche grocery stores that sold things we thought would appeal to our new residents. We then threw open the doors of these places and stood there, breathing heavy, still trying, after all this time, to impress them.

  And then they left.

  Those with the means either went back to New Orleans to rebuild or retired in sleepy towns like Natchez, Mississippi. Young professionals took off to Dallas. Many of the displaced restaurateurs found footing in places like Gulf Shores and Destin.

  The street gangs, however, decided to stay put.

  And the woman named Jennifer, I should mention, had her child in Baton Rouge as well. The contractions hit her in the middle of the night while she and my friend were sleeping in my bedroom, which I’d let them use so they could have privacy. I was living alone then, and didn’t mind sleeping on the couch or staying at my mother’s house. I was entering my thirties, and my mom, although she had begun to age in obvious ways, remained independent and proud and now lived in the same neighborhood as Rachel and her family (a Christian man and two toddling girls, all of whom I love), and I visited her often.

  I was at my mother’s house, in fact, when I got the call. My buddy was a mess and I could hear Jennifer yelping in the background. They didn’t know any doctors in Baton Rouge, he told me. There was some confusion about insurance. He thought maybe the contractions might pass. He admitted that nothing, nothing at all, was going as planned. This was after midnight, and I drove back to my place, where her water had broken by the time that I got there. I rushed them both to the emergency room, my buddy in the backseat of the car with his wife. I did her small favors on the way, like adjusting the AC blowers and running through red lights, and I felt for some reason as if I myself was having this child. Who knows why? The emergency room was packed with Katrina victims when we arrived, although we were already weeks removed from that tragedy, and these people were belligerent with us as we carted Jennifer to the front of the line. After only a few minutes, the two of them were ushered away and I used my buddy’s cell phone to call his and Jennifer’s relatives, who were scattered all over the country.

  They were all happy to hear of the contractions, the impending birth, but wondered if it was even possible to travel to Louisiana at that moment. They wondered if we were still underwater, if the National Guard was still there, if people were still looting and murdering one another, and I told them no, we’re okay. I told them that although it is a common misconception, Baton Rouge is actually not New Orleans. By mid-morning, my mother and sister and the woman who would soon become my wife had shown up at the hospital. They wanted to make Jennifer feel special, although they barely knew her, because she was special, the moment was special. They brought her flowers and a soft blanket, and we gathered around her like an oracle after she had birthed the child. It was a girl that they would name Marigny, she told us, after one of the most fabulous areas of New Orleans, which they believed was the most fabulous city in the world.

  “It’s a beautiful name,” we told her, and I know that I for one secretly wondered how long I would be expected to help raise this child. I wondered how attached I should get. It sent a panic through me, the reality of it. I was not ready for a baby, I thought, and suddenly worried that I might never be.

  And it is not until times like these, when there are years between myself and the events, that I feel even close to understanding my memories and how the people I’ve known have affected me. And I am often impressed and overwhelmed by the beautiful ways the heart and mind work without cease to create this feeling of connection. It is like the way Lindy always reminds me of New Orleans, when I think of her now, although together the two of us never stepped foot there.

  29.

  The final suspect in the rape of Lindy Simpson was the psychiatrist Jacques P. Landry. He had a private practice out on Harrell’s Ferry Road, a little house with his name on the sign that my mom would mention to me whenever we passed it, if only to question whether or not any cars were parked there. He also had the large home in Woodland Hills, the walking stick that he stalked our back woods with, the mop of black hair, the thick eyeglasses, and, along with his wife, Louise, he had fostered approximately twelve children in the time that I knew him on Piney Creek Road. And although his family was always regarded as an unpleasant force in our pleasant neighborhood, Jacques Landry came under increased suspicion in regard to Lindy Simpson only when one of these children, the adopted son, Jason, disappeared.

  A little more about Mr. Landry, who I’ve tried to sequester in my memory:

  His size was outlandish. At six-foot-five and three hundred pounds, the man was a giant, an ogre. Yet there is something awesome to me about the truly enormous. I can’t help but stare at them, the size of their fingers, their thighs. Even those mountainous men that I am afraid of, that I find despicable, I can’t help but pity in some ways. I wonder how difficult the most ordinary tasks must be to accomplish in a world that was not built for them. Getting into a compact car, for instance. Touching the push buttons on an outdoor stereo. Finding clothes that fit. Listening to any other viewpoint. Not simply taking for their own, perhaps, what could so easily be taken. It has to be hard for them. Any denial, to a man that size, has to be confusing.

  As was he.

  Although his name is French and common in South Louisiana, there was something of the Eskimo in Jacques Landry as well. Something of the Huns. He had a broad and tan face with high cheekbones. His thick black hair adhered to no particular style. I imagine now that his wife Louise must ha
ve cut it, using a bowl that she had just rinsed free of some spare ingredient her kin alone still used in those days: unrefined cornmeal, maybe, the dust of some country root. Perhaps on Sunday mornings, by way of truce, after Mr. Landry had been so mean to her the night before, she would place the bowl on his head and scissor his hair and, when done, gently smooth those thick eyebrows that always looked cross when he spoke, unless lifted by a wide smile that no one else knew the meaning of. Perhaps she would then clip his toenails and brush his teeth, perhaps hold his hands that were like bear paws and say, It’s okay, my giant. I know you don’t mean to hurt anyone. How else could she have lived with that man? I do not know.

  Jacques P. Landry also had trouble with the law.

  In additional knowledge that came to me later in life, in random and separate conversations with my mother and father about our pasts, our years spent on Piney Creek Road, I learned that Mr. Landry had on more than one occasion had his license to legally practice psychiatry suspended due to what my mother vaguely called improprieties and my father called prescription issues. This didn’t surprise me. After all, I’d seen him lean a little too close to the girls in the neighborhood when they still had soft hair on their legs and jelly jewelry on their wrists. I’d seen the way his own adopted son hated him. I had also seen a case of syringes and box full of vials in the darkest room of his house, in a time that I’ve not told you of yet.

  This came about in a peculiar way.

  It was two weeks before the fall semester of 1991, my junior year of high school, and Lindy and I had not spoken since that night of Truth or Dare on the phone. She’d hung up on me after her mention of suicide, and I’d sat at my window for another hour, spiraling through a series of thoughts about our relationship that left me lower than I had ever felt. I thought about calling her back, of course, I thought about our erotic conversation, but what was really taking place inside me was the belated realization that nothing romantic was ever going to spring up between us. I also understood, perhaps for the first time, that I was not the only person on Piney Creek Road who was unhappy in life, and that my particular level of unhappiness, in comparison to Lindy’s, was more like joy.

  Not that my life was uncomplicated.

  To be fair, I’d had a statistically difficult childhood. In fact, research suggests that adolescents who lose a sibling experience a wide range of long-lasting effects: survivor’s guilt, shame over their own immaturity at the time of death, remorse over their selfishness during the grieving process, and so on. But the interesting thing is, there is also data suggesting that positive outcomes arise from these family tragedies. New studies note increased creativity, productivity, and innovation in the surviving siblings, as if they are motivated to prove something beyond what their peer group feels the need to prove. Such as, I would imagine, their basic value on Earth. These surviving siblings often grow to cultivate other positive traits as well, mature things quantified in categories like “involved parenting” and “increased empathy.” The same can actually be said, in some cases, for the children of divorce.

  Yet in all the research I have done to try and wrap my head around both the Lindy I thought I knew and the Lindy that may have actually been living across the street and two doors down from me in my youth, the outlook is less hopeful. There is little talk of positive outcomes while the negative symptoms for victims of sexual violence are abundant and diverse. You name it and a group of women have suffered through it. Yet there is one phrase that reappears in nearly every study I’ve come across, a description that breaks my heart when I see it and think of Lindy, when I think of anybody. It is a catch-all category that scores off the charts and, as the data suggests, often does not lessen with time. The symptom is called “the decreased capacity to enjoy life,” and, for some women, it is a killer.

  I didn’t understand it all then, of course, but after Lindy’s mention of suicide I was beginning to feel it. This feeling is commonly known as “having perspective,” and it is no small deal for a teenager. It changed me completely. So, on the day we had our annual pre-semester orientation at school, a three-hour meeting to get ourselves acquainted with our new responsibilities and classrooms, to meet our new teachers, to roll our eyes, I found myself acting out of body.

  Standing in a line outside the Perkins gymnasium, waiting for my turn at one of the intolerable community-building games that had been set up for us (things with names like the Trust Fall and the Family Circle), I noticed Chris Garrett a few places behind me and I casually let some people skip ahead so that I could be next to him. He had a spot of acne on his cheek and smelled like Ivory soap. He had brought with him from home a milk jug full of water to stay hydrated before anyone had ever thought to bottle water for profit and, around his tan neck, he wore a wooden crucifix likely earned on some mission trip. He was, I could see now, so obviously handsome. And after a little small talk about our summers and homerooms, our boredom, I found myself asking him what he would think if, let’s just say hypothetically, I may or may not have heard that Lindy Simpson liked him.

  He looked confused.

  “Lindy?” he said. “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  He squinted his eyes and stroked at his chin. He made a face as simple and innocent as that of a person choosing between french fries and onion rings. “Well, for one thing,” he said, “she’s not very good at Spanish.”

  “What?” I said. “Who cares about Spanish?”

  “In twenty years,” he told me, “we’re all going to be speaking Spanish.”

  Chris Garrett lifted and grabbed his foot in a way that allowed him to stretch out his quad. He then did this with his other leg and I must admit that it was difficult for me not to assault him. But I was just jealous. I knew it even then. He was tall and fit, and by all normative measures likely a much better person than me. I also knew that without even trying, he could probably have all that I’d ever wanted. This injustice, however, did not enrage me in the way it did with Matt Hawk or any of the other unworthy thugs I had seen Lindy with. With Chris, I found myself dwelling on benign thoughts such as, Will Lindy go to his track meets? and, What will his parents think of her? I was suddenly experiencing an idle curiosity without pain and I was unsure of what to do with it.

  “She is pretty, though,” Chris said.

  I looked up to see that Chris had spotted Lindy across the quadrangle, where she was standing in line for the bookstore. Her hair was dyed jet black, and it kept slipping from behind her ear. We stood and watched her as if she was a foreign exchange student just come to campus. She was dressed casually in a rock-and-roll T-shirt and shorts, and was apparently listening to the conversation going on in front of her, although she was pretending not to. It was a couple of jocks, Brett Manner and Curren Boyle, energetically telling a story that required the both of them to be put into headlocks. As their excitement escalated, Lindy scrunched up her face and chewed her thumbnail and was trying very hard, I think, not to smile.

  “Coach still talks about her all the time,” Chris said. “He calls her the best that never was. Why’d she quit running, do you know? I never understood that.”

  I watched Lindy crack a smile as the jocks in front of her began to wrestle with each other on the ground and I felt close to her in new ways. I was not, for perhaps the first time in my life, thinking up schemes to attract her and yet I still felt totally energized by her appearance. I still felt alive and involved. That had not changed. And although it angered me to hear people talk as if Lindy had made some sort of mistake in life, as if she had done something wrong, I was more interested in the idea that Chris might not actually know why she quit. I liked this idea, that Lindy might be the one to tell him, if and when she decided to, and that he might see her in a way that I had become unable to.

  I also enjoyed the possibility, of course, that, in this new dream world of mine, I hadn’t ruined her chances at everyth
ing.

  So I told him, “I’m not sure why she quit.”

  Chris looked at me and smiled. “She’s never spoken a word to me before,” he said. “You really think she’d talk to me?”

  “I know she would,” I said. “But you didn’t hear it from me.”

  “That’s crazy,” he said.

  “Yep,” I said. “It is crazy.”

  Chris hopped up and down on his toes as if working out his calves. He rolled his neck around on his shoulders. “Speaking of quitting,” he said. “Why’d you quit soccer, man? We suck now.”

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “I sometimes wonder the same thing.”

  After this, a teacher named Mrs. Kornegay came up to our line and blew a whistle and so we all shuffled forward into the gymnasium, where the pep squad was singing our fight song. I didn’t speak to Chris Garrett for the rest of that day and, when orientation was over, I walked home alone.

  When I got there, my mom was a wreck.

  I found her sitting in my bedroom, holding the confiscated black-and-white photo of Lindy that caused me trouble so long ago. Her hands were shaking and she had been crying, I could tell, but as this was a common occurrence since my sister’s death, I had no idea its source. She could have been crying about Hannah, of course. She could have been crying about Mrs. Simpson or Lindy, and it was also possible that she could still be crying, even all these years later, about my father. Or it could have been me.

  “Mom,” I asked her, “what’s going on?”

  She didn’t even look up.

  “I need you to tell me,” she said. “I need you to tell me about this photo.”

  So, I finally did.

  I told her in greater detail what I had only mentioned when she was first overwhelmed by the collected perversions of my lockbox. I told her about what had happened at Jason’s house that day, about how he had a stack of these photos tucked away in his closet. I told her how I saw pictures of other people from the neighborhood in there, as well, including her. People driving cars and playing in the yard. People watering their gardens and spraying for whiteflies. I said that most of the photos that I saw were of Lindy, though, and as I recalled this scene to my mother, it took on an entirely new meaning for me. Now that I was removed from that moment, now that I wasn’t maniacally focused on making sure Lindy didn’t find out about my secret, I began to understand how strange it all looked from the outside, this black-and-white photo of Lindy singing to herself as she walked, taken from the closet of a troubled household. It was not celebratory, this picture. It was not a snapshot to be shared among friends. It was not even, on the surface of it, lewd. There was by all conceivable measure no good reason for the photo to exist. I understood then that it was not for my eyes to have seen, nor any child’s, as it was not to have been taken in the first place. So the horror of it all simplified for me in the way it must have for my mother so long ago, and I felt sick with guilt.