My Sunshine Away

by M. O. Walsh

  He was outside, calling Jacques Landry’s name.

  I went to the window and nudged the curtain to see my father barreling down the street. Behind him, two police officers walked with my mother and sister, both of whom were in their robes. “Jacques!” my father yelled. “Where the hell is my son?” Mr. Landry stood talking to two policemen. He seemed totally unaware of my father’s presence until my dad broke through their huddle to confront him. He grabbed Mr. Landry by the shirt, and for one split second, before the voices all rose beyond comprehension, before the police pulled my father off Mr. Landry as easily as lint from a suit coat, it looked like my father was honorable. It looked like he was valorous.

  And hereabout came a change in me.

  Although it was dark outside and the lighting was bad, just a few rotating sirens, two streetlights lit and a third still broken, it looked like my father was invincible. If you could have frozen that moment in time, like we so often do in our photos, you would have seen my father about to reach into the throat of Jacques Landry and pull out his bullying heart. You would also see genuine fear in Mr. Landry’s broad face. More important, though, and what I am trying to tell you is that within this quick exchange I understood that it is inside all of us men to be both menacing and cowardly. It is in all of us to have virtue and value and yet it is also in our power to fall into irrelevant novelty or, even worse, elicit indifference from the people we’ve loved. This is the challenge, I suppose, of fatherhood. And so I knew that, despite my father’s errors, he loved me. He loved us. I also knew that big and important parts of him were sorry because I knew that he was willing to fight. What more could I ask for? I will never apologize for loving him back.

  But it was my mother’s face that brought me out of the window.

  She stood to the side of the growing crowd as confusion, in general, began to bloom. She watched my father argue with Mr. Landry, but I could tell by her expression that she was not listening to them. My mother, instead, was in some internal place, looking around at her life. I wondered what she was thinking then, in the same way I so often wonder that now. Was she considering her time with my father? Was she wondering how it had come to this? What is the exact path from old wedding photos to a night of horror outside of your dream house? What are the odds of one child dead and another one missing? The truth is, of course, there are no odds for this, and that is when I realized what my mother must have been doing. She must have been preparing herself. That’s why, when everyone else was yelling and getting emotional, my mother stood quietly off to the side, as if doing math in her head.

  And me, I wanted to solve her problem.

  I lifted the curtain and stepped out of the Landrys’ house.

  For a second, I thought I was going to walk right through the yard, unnoticed, and into my mother’s arms. But this did not happen. Instead, I heard a policeman yell for me to stop. So I did. I imagine that he drew his gun and approached me, but I really don’t know. The only thing I saw was my mother’s face. She had not even looked up. I put my hands in the air and called to her.

  “I’m right here, Mom,” I said. “I’m fine.”

  The officer demanded that I drop my weapon, and I immediately realized how I must have appeared. I was sweaty and covered with mud. I had fistfuls of contraband. My mother finally looked up, and I still today cannot decipher the expression that broke over her face. I am not sure, in other words, if the lighting cast me in such shadow that she was trying to understand how her son’s voice came from this criminal surrounded by cops or if my voice on that night, so full of fear, sounded foreign to her coming from a shape she so obviously knew. If I had to guess, I’d think that my mother, in doing her private calculations, had likely advanced so far into the unfortunate algorithms of her future sadness that she had simply forgotten the possibility that I might be okay and that she would not have to suffer yet another loss. So the confusion on her face was not about my life, really, but about hers, and the idea that it might go on.

  I looked at the policemen.

  “I don’t have a weapon,” I said. “I have evidence in the rape of Lindy Simpson.”

  I suppose there are five things to know about the next ten minutes on Piney Creek Road.

  One: Jacques Landry had to be restrained when he learned I had been in his house. Two: my father had to be restrained when he saw that cop shove my face in the lawn. Three: the police thought I was Jason Landry. Four: unbeknownst to us, the actual Jason Landry was approaching the house from the woods. And, five: Lindy was standing in the street, watching all of this.

  This was not good.

  Lindy’s parents were out there, too, as was nearly the whole neighborhood. This type of entertainment was not typical on Piney Creek Road and so everyone wanted answers. Lindy’s father, for example, began frantically swooping up the photos I’d dropped on the ground. Lindy’s mom, on the other hand, put her arms around Lindy as if attending to a person in shock. I heard my father threaten a lawsuit, Mr. Landry demand my arrest. The police, of course, were totally unprepared for the totality of what they’d stumbled upon in Woodland Hills, and when the officer finally pushed me into the backseat of the patrol car, I began to understand why.

  Past our houses, way off in the distance, I could see an orange light.

  The Perkins School was on fire.

  And although I later found out that Jason had spray-painted his name all over the school chapel and thrown his father’s business cards around the manicured quad before he set the place ablaze, I could not yet empathize with his desperate need for attention in the way that I do now. I could instead only watch this colored sky become a backdrop as Lindy walked toward the police car I was sitting in. It was obvious she had been crying, and I thought, for a second, that she might be grateful for what I had done. I smiled at her as she put her hands on the glass of the half-open window.

  She yelled at me.

  “What the fuck is your problem?” she said.

  I had no idea how to answer.

  “Are you trying to ruin my life?” she said. “Is that your goal?”

  “No,” I said. “What are you talking about? I was trying to help you. I thought if maybe you knew.”

  Lindy did not want to hear it. She turned in a circle. She was beside herself.

  “If I knew what?” she said. “If I knew what his face looked like? How would that help me, you sick fuck?”

  “You don’t understand,” I told her. “Mr. Landry has all these pictures of you. He has all these twisted pictures of everybody. He has all these drugs. I think he might have done it.”

  She looked over at Jacques Landry, who was now surrounded by police, by Lindy’s father, by Old Man Casemore, by every male out there. “That fat ass?” she said. “He didn’t do it, you idiot. The guy was skinny. He was bony. He felt like a goddamned skeleton on my back.”

  “He did?” I said.

  The last couple years of my life appeared pretty naïve to me then.

  I thought, for instance, that explanations healed scars, when they didn’t, and that the way I wanted life to be was more important than the way life was, which it wasn’t. In fact, I think I honestly believed in those years that if I could get Lindy to again be who she was before her rape, rather than admitting to the fact that she had been raped and was now different because of it, then maybe I could get the entire world to go back to how it was when we were little, when my father was around, and when my sister was alive.

  “I didn’t know that,” I told Lindy. “I didn’t know that he was skinny.”

  Lindy cut her eyes so sharply in my direction that I understood, despite my years of trying, that I didn’t know a thing about her. Our talks about Dahmer. Our idle gossip. Our misguided phone sex. They had nothing to do with her real life. That had nothing to do with her heart.

  She again leaned toward the open window.

  “Does it
make you feel better to know that he was skinny?” Lindy asked me. “Is that why you talk to me all the time? You want to know some more details? You act like you’re my friend, but that’s total bullshit. You just feel bad because you told everybody and now you want to make it better, but you can’t. That’s why you act so interested in me. So you can be a little detective and solve the case and feel better about fucking up my life.”

  I noticed people looking over at us. I saw Lindy’s mom coming our way.

  “Lindy,” I said, “that’s not true.”

  Lindy slammed her fists on the roof of the police car. “Yes, it is,” she said. She stood on her toes as if wired with energy. She was so angry that she couldn’t even look at me. “Let’s get it over with, shall we?” she said. “What else do you want to know? Do you want to know that I get sick when I see a man’s sweat sock? Like in the gym or in the road or anywhere else. Some idiot loses a sock and I fucking puke because I taste it all over again. Do you like that? What else? Do you want to know that I remember hitting the ground and smelling ink and I have no idea why? That’s why I got a fucking C in Ms. Price’s class last semester, by the way, because she counts off for not using a goddamned pen but every time I smell one I am right back on that sidewalk and it is happening again right now and not in the past but right now and I want to fucking kill myself.”

  Lindy beat her hand against the window.

  “What else do you want to know?” she said. “Let’s get it all out so you can feel better. You want to know what he said to me before I blacked out? That’s a good one. Everybody acts like I don’t remember, but I do. I felt his body and heard his voice and I still don’t know whose it fucking was, no matter how many times you or a cop or my fucking dad might ask me, but I do know what he said. Do you want to know? I bet you do, you sick shit.”

  At this point, Mrs. Peggy put her hand on Lindy’s shoulder.

  “Lindy,” she said. “You’re upset, honey. Let’s go home.”

  “Leave me alone,” Lindy told her. “I’m talking to my friend here. He wants to know all about me.”

  “Sweetheart,” Mrs. Peggy said. “He was only trying to help.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I really was trying to help.”

  Lindy broke away from her mother and turned toward me. We looked into each other’s eyes, both sober and clear, for the first time in years. And, as she stood there staring at me, I knew that I had hurt her. I truly felt it, for perhaps the first time.

  “Do you want to know?” she said.

  “I’m so sorry,” I told her.

  Lindy put her mouth to the crack of the window.

  “I’ll tell you what he said,” she whispered.

  Lindy then lowered her voice to a grunt, to a growl, and it sounded like neither a boy nor a man but some feral animal given power to speak.

  “You think you’re so pretty,” she said, and then Lindy walked away.

  I let my head fall against the window and watched the scene before me dissolve through tears that had built up for a long time before this. It was Lindy, yes, and her shredded heart and my self-deception and my parents bearing witness to the person I’d become. And it was also, of course, my own bearing witness.

  But I did not get much time to dwell.

  Soon Louise Landry tapped on the glass. She was still wearing her thick and knitted nightgown. “Why did you break into our house?” she asked me. “Did Jason ask you to do this? Did he help you?”

  I wiped my cheek on my shoulder. I nodded my head.

  “I should have gotten us out of here a long time ago,” she said.

  I looked up at her, and, in her remorse, Louise Landry appeared a thousand years old.

  “Do you know where he is now?” she asked me. “Please. He needs help. He needs real help. I never planned for things to turn out this way. I hope you know that.”

  I knew that she was telling the truth.

  In my experience, nothing ever turned out as planned.

  Except, perhaps, for Jason Landry on this one night, for whom everything had turned out perfectly. After all, what more could he have wanted? The Perkins School was on fire. His father was being investigated. His mother was pleading for forgiveness. And, meanwhile, Jason himself had walked unseen from the dark woods up the hill to face the back windows of his abusive suburban home. He still had a couple of bottles left in his backpack. He had his lighter. He had his aim. Nobody even knew he was there.

  Yet we all heard the glass shatter.

  We all heard the woof of his fire, the sound of his laughter.

  It was only a matter of time.

  34.

  I did not see Lindy Simpson again until 2007, nearly sixteen years after that night, outside of an LSU football game. We were both settling into our thirties at that point, only memories to each other now, and we had our own separate lives. To tell you anything more romantic would be dishonest. Not that I didn’t try to stay in touch. After the insanity of that debacle on Piney Creek Road was sorted out (the fires extinguished, Jason caught and arrested, Mr. Landry permanently stripped of his medical license and arrested, my name cleared of all charges at the request of Louise Landry), I made several attempts to call and apologize to Lindy. I wanted desperately to see her, to tell her that I knew there were many ways in which she was right about me, and that I was sorry, but she was gone. Whenever her father answered the telephone, he always sounded grateful that I had called, but then told me that she and her mother had still not returned from Shreveport, where they were visiting an aunt. I am not sure if he knew, then, that they would never come back.

  I found this out a few weeks later when I learned that Lindy, like scores of other kids, had transferred out of the Perkins School after the fire. Since the damage to the main school building was so extensive, and our semester pushed back and abbreviated, other places had opened their doors to us, extended their generosity, and a number of parents accepted. Randy Stiller, for instance, spent his last two years at Parkview Baptist, where he became a football star. (On the day after I was arrested, by the way, Randy came over to my house. He’d stayed that previous night at a friend’s whom I didn’t even know and therefore missed all the action. Yet when he entered my room to see if I was okay, we hugged and laughed as if we were best friends again and to this day there is not anything I wouldn’t do for him.) But not everybody transferred out of Perkins.

  Artsy Julie and I, for example, we stayed. This was a good thing.

  We spent that next year walking to school together, where we would shuffle through plywood corridors to find our new lockers made of plastic milk crates with our pictures taped to them. We made up funny nicknames for the men who walked around in asbestos-proof space suits behind the orange caution tape and we practiced our Spanish with the carpenters who showed up by the truckload. We sat through half-empty classes in double-wide trailers, where it was impossible to hear the teacher over the sound of the hammers and saws being used to create a much bigger, much better Perkins School for the future. But we didn’t care. For once, we enjoyed the present. We ate lunch out of brown paper sacks in the gymnasium and I found out the soccer team was low on athletes. She heard the pep squad was low on dancers. So, we both said what the hell and joined up and therefore became successful and popular deals in this alternate and burned-down universe. We never forgot how good that felt.

  The year 2007, as we later grew to know it, also felt good, and when I ran across Lindy Simpson it was almost midnight on the Parade Grounds of the LSU campus. The date was October 6, and LSU had just defeated the hated Florida Gators in a dramatic and improbable fashion that included five successful fourth-down conversions. That type of thing, if you don’t know, just does not happen. This win would vault us into first place in the national rankings and so fans of all ages walked around the campus as if hallucinating. Occasions like this surpass the Rapture where I’m fr
om and I would not be surprised if every living person I knew was in attendance.

  But even in a crowd that size, after all those years without her, Lindy was easy to see.

  She was dancing in the bed of a pickup truck, at the edge of a large group of people our age. Around her, beer and champagne shot off like fireworks. In the middle of the Parade Grounds, a band had set up a stage and played funk music at full blast and the only lyrics were celebratory chants so earnest that you couldn’t believe the game could have ever turned out differently. Lindy’s hair on that night was red and stylish, and she wore a purple shirt and fitted blue jeans. She was, as she had always been, gorgeous, and I was thrilled at the sight of her. When she spun around in her dance and saw me standing there, she doubled over and put her hands on her mouth. She jumped out of the truck and ran toward me.

  I suppose I should have been terrified at what she might say to me, but I could see in her face, already, that time had been good to us.

  “Oh my God,” she said, and hugged me around the neck in the same drunken way she had those years before. Her breath, too, was as sweet and smoky as I remembered it, but she was not out of control. She looked happy and fit, and I hugged her back with both arms.

  “Can you believe it?” she yelled. “Can you believe that we won?”

  “I know,” I said. “It’s crazy. It’s wonderful.”

  It was so loud and chaotic around us that it was difficult to hear and so we just stood there smiling until Lindy pulled me over behind a screen of trees to talk. “It’s good to see you,” she said. “Jesus, it’s been so long. Do you still live here?”

  “I do,” I said.

  “That’s great,” she said. “What are you doing these days? I mean, like, for a living.”

  It was a strange thing but, on that occasion, I felt none of the anxiety around her that I did as a boy. I felt no need to impress her. I had no agenda. Instead I felt as simple and clear as the evening itself because Lindy and I were, perhaps for the first time in our lives, exactly what we looked like: just two people among many, glad to see each other.