My Sunshine Away (10 page)

T
he death of my sister split my world open.

This occurred on April 6, 1991, and marked the beginning of the end of me and Lindy’s year of dreadful silence. It also left my mom ruined.

My specific memory of this event, however, is hazy. This is not something I’m proud of.

All I recall is being home alone one Saturday morning. My mom was off at the mall, shopping for clothes, getting a haircut, who knows. I was barely sixteen years old at the time. I didn’t have a car. At approximately ten o’clock that morning, the phone rang and a woman asked me if my sister Hannah was home. She was not. Hannah was twenty-seven. She had an apartment on the other side of town. I told the caller as much. A series of subsequent calls then trickled in, all by a woman with the same voice who asked me if my parents were home, and how old I was.

I suspected a scam.

“Don’t call back here,” I told her.

“Please,” she said. “Just take down this number for me.”

I didn’t bother.

And since this was a time before cell phones, I have no idea how my parents received the news. I only remember one final call, from my father, who told me there’d been a car accident. He then told me he was picking up my mother to go to the hospital because she couldn’t drive herself.

“Is she okay?” I said. “Is Mom okay?”

“No,” he said. “It’s not your mom. It’s Hannah.”

“What’s going on?” I said. “People keep calling for her.”

“Just stay there,” he told me. “Don’t go anywhere.”

This was as much as I got.

The next few hours were spent in itchy solitude. The phone continued to ring, yet it was never my parents. The voices instead morphed into aunts and uncles and grandparents who were cagey and guarded in what they said to me, prefacing it all by asking what I knew. I told them the greatest truth.

I knew nothing.

When late afternoon came I saw my family drive up to our house, all sitting together in one car, and this remains to me the clearest image of the event. My father drove the Mercedes with two passengers in the backseat, and I watched them pull into the garage behind the house. It took me a long time to understand who these people were; such was the distance from the last time they had looked like a family. In the car sat my mother and my other sister, Rachel, a person I realize I’ve not even mentioned by name before now.

There’s nothing behind that. We simply weren’t close then. This is nobody’s fault.

A decade older than me, Rachel was already off to graduate school in Lafayette at that time, an hour away from Baton Rouge, and so a large amount of thought went simply to what she was doing back
home. It made no sense. I watched her help my mother out of the car, and this took some effort.

My mother looked like a stranger at that moment and, in truth, it would be a long time before I saw her beautiful again. Her back was hunched over. Her face was slack and wet. If I had the ability, I could draw her for you, her sad figure, still crystal clear in my mind. But I don’t. Just know that my sister was also disheveled and upset, and that my father looked composed as a robot.

This is what gave it away. I bawled before they told me the news.

My final memory of that moment is of burying my face into my father’s stomach and crying until I made his shirt wet. After this, a large chunk of time disappears.

When I think back about this scene, most of my thoughts go to why I chose
him
to cling to. What must my mother have thought? What did I say to console her? Was I so selfish that I thought only of myself? When I try to remember the specifics, it seems that I can only hear my mother in the background saying, “I’m sorry, son. I’m so sorry,” but why would she be apologizing to me?

This is a time I want back.

Yet I can only flash forward to that evening, when a stream of relatives began rushing through our front door. Old friends of the family. The people of Woodland Hills. And then, worst of all, there was Hannah’s inconsolable fiancé, a man we called Finally Douglas.

I didn’t really get this joke back then, likely because, as a teenage boy, I didn’t much care. But I understand now that the nickname Finally Douglas was a compliment to this man named Douglas, a sigh of relief on my mother and Rachel’s part that Hannah, after a number of bad relationships, had finally found a person who treated and loved her in the gentle way that all good people recognize. They were to be married in October of that year at a plantation called Magnolia
Mound, a beautiful stretch of land in the northern part of Baton Rouge.

And now this.

And to further establish my credibility, I will confess to you the unfortunate truth. I don’t remember much about Hannah. When I think of her now, all these years later, I think only of her death, and the details go like this:

On a bright and blue day, she was sideswiped by a gray pickup truck while backing out of a shopping center on Jefferson Highway. Her neck was snapped. She was pronounced dead on arrival. She didn’t feel any pain. I heard this phrase again and again.

Still, I have to wonder about the accuracy of these things.

How much of the truth was I spared? In turn, how much truth am I sparing you?

If she was dead on arrival, for instance, why were they at the hospital so long? Why didn’t they call me? The common rumor passed around at her wake was that she had been pulling out of an ice-cream parlor when the accident occurred and that she still had a bit of her favorite, double chocolate fudge, on her lip when she passed. She died happy, people said. It’s hard to imagine a better way.

I clung to this for years.

But now I think about the time of the first phone call, ten a.m., and wonder what kind of ice cream is sold at that hour. I understand that I could easily flip through the phone book and call the place where it happened. I could casually ask when they open. I know this.

But I refuse. I want
to rely on my memory. It’s important that you understand this. What else, besides love, do we have?

That said, when I think deeply about Hannah, only a few scenes arise from the rummage. They are of no obvious consequence. One from when I stayed the night at her apartment where she and Finally
Douglas made us veggie pizzas. We played Sorry! and watched
Dune
. I didn’t understand a bit of it. I recall no particular conversation. Most vivid to me is that she had a small table in the corner of her living room that doubled as a chess set. You could lift the top of the table and store the marble pieces beneath. It was made of a dark lacquered wood. There you go.

Thank you, memory.

Another time, in her senior year of high school, when she was listening to music in her room. I was only seven years old, yet I remember walking in to see her staring at herself in a full-length mirror, wearing a green cap and gown for her upcoming graduation. The record she was playing was by a band called Madness, a song titled “Our House (In the Middle of Our Street),” and the album cover, which she had tacked to her wall, depicted the band members all huddled together and smiling, their heads framed behind the rack of a billiards table. The song was loud, and Hannah was smiling. She saw me in the mirror and turned around. She held out her arms.

“Hey,” she asked. “Does this thing make me look like a wizard?”

I wish these memories were more vivid. I wish there were more of them.

The one I cherish most took place in a time I can’t quite finger, though I now imagine it to be during the Finally Douglas days. I was in my room, where Hannah had come to sit on my bed and ask me something. A favor, perhaps, a question, an invitation; I don’t remember. All I know is that her hair was long and dark brown. It was straight, unlike mine, but she had done something to curl it this day. It twisted in soft columns on her shoulders, and she fiddled with it as she spoke. She smelled of perfume and wore a white cotton sweater with blue jeans, a turquoise necklace. The sweater was made of thick braided ropes and hung loose around her neck and shoulders. I’ve
since gotten the impression from my family that Hannah was somewhat of an artist, a freer spirit than the rest of us, and so I imagine this sweater being fashionable at the time. I have no idea what information was exchanged between us.

I only remember that when my sister got up to leave my room she was happy, and her life was good. I know this by the slight flourish she gave to her exit, reaching up to tap the top of my door frame as she entered the hall. I clearly recall the playful little hop she gave to this gesture, the way I heard the thin bracelets on her wrists jangle, and the obvious manner in which I loved her.

So, after she died, I endowed this scene with great power.

When I would sit alone in my room in the year that followed, pretending I didn’t hear my mother and sister sobbing in the spaces adjacent to me, I would stare up at that spot on the door frame. I thought about the impulse that makes a person go out of their way to touch a thing like that. It must be joy. It must be some sort of deep satisfaction. It must be peace.

Don’t tell me any different. I am happy with memory here.

The reality, however, is that this event laid waste to my family.

My mother became a person whom I could no longer understand. Yet she was never neglectful of me in the years that followed. She instead became overly gracious and forgetful of nearly all my flaws, and, in truth, she may have erred in this way. With everything else turned sour in her life, I suppose she needed to believe me an angel. I only wish I could have provided.

What else is there to say?

My sister Rachel was also changed. She dropped out of graduate school and moved home for a year. And although, as a family, we’d always been quietly Catholic (going to Mass on the holy days,
attending Sunday school if nothing else was going on), my sister Rachel found Christ in bold and permanent ways when Hannah died. It was infuriating to me at the time. The random death of an innocent person seemed to prove to Rachel that God had a plan for everyone, while it poisoned for me the idea that there could be a God at all. So, I antagonized her by picking fights about all the obvious religious hypocrisies, like how a Christian God could doom people to hell because of where they grew up, like how he could unleash disease and war on those who had not sinned against him, et cetera, and although I was mainly just trying to pester her, although I was mainly just jealous of the way I would see her and my mother hold hands to pray at the dinner table, I believe I was also teetering on the brink of true faithlessness in those years, as many teenagers do, and it scared me.

Sensing this, Rachel began to leave little prayer cards on my pillow. She hung a poster above our breakfast table that had a lone set of footprints in the sand and began to speak almost exclusively in religious clichés. She talked about God “closing doors while opening windows” and “carrying us through the hard times,” while her favorite phrase of all became “everything happens for a reason,” and I found her impossible to talk to. I think now, of course, that I was simply afraid of her faith and the strength it took for her to have it. It was much easier for me to be angry about Hannah and about God and about the state of my family, which, in those years, seemed to be shrinking.

And then there was my father, as well.

He had not been on good terms with my sisters, Hannah especially, since the divorce, and this made the timing of her death, from his point of view, particularly torturous. And even though this always
made sense to me in a generic way, the way the two of them didn’t get along, I didn’t find out the real reason until many years later when I learned that Laura
was an acquaintance of Hannah’s, and a member of the same sorority Hannah had quit. This cleared some things up for me. Although I’d always understood that Laura
was young, it was not until I received the image of her possibly standing beside my sister in that same green cap and gown that I felt it sink in. Perhaps they had chemistry class together. Perhaps they once shared a whisper about the same handsome guy.

Worse than that, when my mother pictured my father with Laura, when she thought about their sex, perhaps she could muster only a version of Hannah still in her diapers, some hard candy stuck to the front of her shirt. How deeply my father’s character must have changed for her. How strange he must have looked. What kind of man could be with a girl, after all, who would let an old man like him touch her? Worse, even, what kind of woman could my mother be, who’d let this old man back into her bed?

Such were the troubles on Piney Creek Road.

All told, Hannah’s death had made each of our faults obvious, and in the end, this ate my father up. Years after this, once my father and I could drink together and he considered me a man, when we grew to be friends, he would sometimes lapse into a deep and momentary despair. And it came only upon the mention of Hannah.

“I can’t even talk about it,” he’d say, and then he’d ask me how often I spoke to Rachel.

“Just like you,” I’d assure him. “Mainly on the holidays.”

“I don’t understand it,” he’d tell me. “Why won’t she love me like you do?”

What was I to say? The man asked only answerless questions. He still does this.

So, I have always considered him punished.

But the ultimate truth of this event, I suppose, the real reason I’ve led you here, is to explain to you the most unexpected consequence of Hannah’s death.

It brought Lindy closer to me.

T
he event was called the Spring Bash.

This was still 1991, the month that my sister died, and I’d been out of school for two weeks, dealing with funeral stuff and moping around the house in black T-shirts. Hannah’s death had provided me with the ultimate excuse, I suppose, to act as selfishly as all teens want to act. I ate Burger King every day. I stayed up late watching pornography that came fuzzy and scrambled through the small television in my bedroom. I slept at odd times, sprawled out on the sofa, and I imagine from the outside I probably looked troubled, perhaps even depressed and devastated, but the truth is, I didn’t feel that way. When I look back upon that version of myself, a lanky kid in ripped jeans watching
The Price Is Right
, a kid annoyed at the voices of neighbors visiting with my mom in the kitchen, I think that little was deep in me then. I was just lonely. I was just lazy. I just didn’t want to deal.

Still, my mother insisted I go.

It had been arranged, unbeknownst to me, that I would escort Artsy Julie. In the years since our early youth, in the time since she’d
so blissfully tossed clovers at the bed of moss, Artsy Julie had changed only in physical ways. This was not a bad thing. Still, she’d gained some weight to become a girl that people would backhandedly compliment as “big-boned,” but she was not at all unattractive. Her only failure was that she seemed to have been birthed in the wrong decade, as she was clearly a hippie in bloom. She put flowers in her hair at school, drew things like unicorns on her notebooks, and read thick novels of heroic fantasy. I saw her once, for example, sitting in a circle of pimply boys at school, playing Dungeons and Dragons at a lunch table. She pumped her fist when she rolled a certain number on the ten-sided die. She pretended to sprinkle magic potion all over her mashed potatoes. She seemed to be having some genuine fun. We were in high school at the time, though, and this, of course, was social suicide. If she had been popular, I suppose that all this independence may have looked hip to us. But she was not.

She wore the wrong type of shoes with her uniform, made excellent grades, and told what seemed to be inside jokes that nobody shared. Her hair was black and long and often unwashed, and her hairbrush left tracks where she combed. Her sole earrings, I remember, were green plastic butterflies. She gave us so little to work with. Artsy Julie, however, had also become buxom in the turn of her freshman year, the top of her plaid jumper suddenly chock-full, and so she was not altogether ignored.

She picked me up for the dance in a green and ruffled dress, more uncomfortable than even I seemed to be in my blue blazer and polka-dotted tie, and we gave each other corsages. Our parents made a big deal of this, taking our picture in various poses both in and outside of the house, and we made faces to screw up the photos. My mother still has these pictures, framed and hung up on the wall, and it’s like I travel back in time when I see them.

When Julie and I arrived at the dance, a band was already onstage playing cover songs like “Brown Eyed Girl” and “Mustang Sally,” and she acted as if she’d landed front-row tickets to the Stones. She left me alone and danced wildly by herself in front of the stage for hours. She took up a massive amount of space, moving dramatically, as if summoning up some tribal god. In times the music swelled, she would be joined by more popular boys and girls who danced with irony, but she never engaged them. This was a personal thing for her and, despite the way she was skewered for it socially, or perhaps because of it, I always admired her for this. She was a person who, as long as I’d known her, seemed able to do what I could never do, and simply not give a shit. Her hair, done up by her mother in sparkly braids and green barrettes, was fallen by the fourth song. She had sweat stains on the belly of her dress. I finally spoke to her during the intermission, where she was guzzling punch at the snack table.

“You having fun?” I asked her.

“I’m so thirsty,” she said.

That was as much as I got.

As soon as the guitarist finished up his cigarette outside the auditorium and climbed back onstage, Artsy Julie was gone, using her high heels to play air drums before the music began. A few guys came up to me as she did this and patted me on the shoulder. “Smart move,” they told me. “Those ta-tas are amazing.” So, in this way, I learned that Artsy Julie wasn’t unwanted. She had her own thing going on and, truth be told, I was not unaffected by it.

What’s most important here, though, is that I learned something about myself at this dance as well. Apparently, the death of my sister and my ensuing absence from school had granted me some type of celebrity. Guys who never spoke to me much before this, good-looking guys who played football or ran for student government, gave
me a thumbs-up. Girls who rarely acknowledged me behind them in hallways or in Latin class asked, “Are you coming back to school on Monday?”

I told them, “I guess so,” and they said things like, “Good.”

I imagined a couple of reasons for their change.

The first arose from the strange look in their eyes when they approached me. I could tell they were dealing with unfamiliar emotions here, unfamiliar emotions for teenagers, anyway, all headlined by a feeling of pity. In each of their awkward handshakes or polite questions, I felt that I could see right through their eyes and into their kitchens, their dining rooms, where their parents had told them about what happened to my family. And when they first shook it off as something completely irrelevant, I could see their parents slowing down to emphasize the tragedy, perhaps pointing over at their own siblings, or maybe even attempting to explain to them the devastating depth of parental love and what the loss of a child would do to them personally. And then, through the earnest timbre of their voices, I imagine these kids got it for a second. I think that perhaps there was a minute or two when their young hearts collapsed heavy inside their chests. Not for me, necessarily, but rather for the glimpse of their own mortality as a thing they’d not considered before, a wobbly house of slick cards. Still, since none of these friendships stuck around, since none of them galvanized into anything more than that initial gesture at the dance, I’ve come to suspect a different reason for their concern toward me during this time.

The Perkins School was a private school, I remind you, a small community, and we were seen by the rest of Baton Rouge as some sort of paradise. In this way, we were often scorned by outsiders as spoiled kids who had no idea of reality, even by those parents who would have sold their homes to afford their children a shot at this
haven. So it was important that we lived up to the hype. To sit in a classroom with a desk left empty by a kid in some sort of turmoil, in some deep depression, did not fit the brochure. The silence that followed my name during roll call, for instance. The empty space on Mr. Taylor’s wall where my history project was due to be tacked up. All these things were unacceptable. It was therefore critical I get back to school on Monday, you understand, so they could forget what my tragedy had tempted them to learn.

Yet not everyone played this game. Lindy, for instance, offered me no condolences.

She arrived late to the dance with a guy named Matt Hawk. He was a senior at McKinley High, a public school known to be rough and tumble. It was the type of place we Perkins School students made fun of, not out of snobbery, necessarily, but simply to assuage our own fears about how long we would last at a school where fights broke out at recess, where smart kids got jumped in the bathrooms.

And since McKinley had no sort of dress code, our own private-school attempts at rebellion seemed foolish in their presence. I was big trouble at Perkins, for example, because my bangs fell over my eyes. I had a hole in my left ear. Matt Hawk, on the other hand, had a silver bolt pierced through his eyebrow. He had a black ring through his nose. He was punk in a way that no Perkins kid would ever have the courage to be, and even his hair, thick and tall and unkempt, looked as if nothing could tame it. And at the far end of his muscled arm, the arm of a future mechanic, perhaps, a woodworker, he had a series of black leather bracelets. Beside these bracelets, he had a strong-looking hand mapped in veins. And worst of all, on this night, inside this hand, he held Lindy’s.

Lindy wore a dress I can best describe as gunmetal blue, and she was stunning, although she’d done her best to hide this fact. She
wore dark eyeliner, combat boots, and had her hair pulled back tight and severe like some depressed artist. She had regained a little weight in the recent months, though, and, thankfully, no longer had the look of a bulimic waif. Still, her jaw was sharp and defined. Her anger was striking and impenetrable. Her supremacy was, to me, so obvious.

She and Matt Hawk spent the evening standing in the corner of the auditorium like judges. They looked much older than we did. And I suppose the other girls, although they made fun of her behind her back, were jealous of Lindy for this catch. I watched random groups of them approach the couple cautiously, to shake Matt’s hand, to remind him that they’d met before, but he acted aloof. The chaperones, you could tell, were as displeased as I was by his presence.

How did Lindy even meet this guy? I wondered. How much of herself did she give him? How much of her life had I lost that past year?

I couldn’t keep my eyes off her.

In a break between the music, she and Matt snuck outside with the band, and when they returned, they giggled with each other as if stoned or high on cocaine. A group of Perkins School jocks soon became aggravated by Matt’s attendance, as well, and circulated the idea of beating him up in the parking lot, as if letting him know about territory. This fantasy was short-lived, however, as even the strongest among them likely imagined being caught alone in a movie theater parking lot by vengeful public-school gangs. In this place, we knew that there would be no survivors. Still, we talked tough, as kids do.

The rest of the Spring Bash was uneventful.

I pretended to have a nice time while watching Lindy. (She tried, once, to get Matt to dance to a Guns N’ Roses song. She went to the bathroom three times. She hugged him around the waist, which he
shrugged off.) The only other thing I really remember about this dance is seeing Randy, whom I had since drifted away from (he’d become preppy and athletic), slinging his date over his shoulder during a cover of “Pretty Woman.” He looked happy in this pose, and I was pleased for him. I wished him well.

Then, before the dance was officially over, the cool kids began filing out. We, Artsy Julie and myself oddly included, had been invited to an unchaperoned after-party and, as is the case with everything in high school, this is when things got interesting.