My Sunshine Away (12 page)

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 up 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.

W
hat 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 forties 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.”

He did a lot for me, though, during this time, and maybe that was his mission all along. I’ve never asked my mother about this, if maybe she’d secretly called him to duty the way she’d done my father the year prior, and I won’t. But he quickly became a friend of mine that hot summer, when I’d drifted away from so many others and still wasn’t speaking to Lindy, the one I thought of most often.

From the moment my uncle Barry walked in the door, I felt the two of us to be in on a secret together. There was something about his face, I suppose, his enormously blank and unassuming smile, that attracted me. He made me feel unafraid of the world and, in this feeling, let me realize how afraid of the world I truly was. When my mother was tense and unapproachable, for example, he’d do things like joke with her that he and I were stepping out for cold beers when all we’d really do was sit on the front porch and talk. I’d watch him unfurl his Duncan and let it spin an inch above the ground without ever pulling it up and I felt older around him, without feeling the discomfort that I did around other men of his age, like my father. When I later told my mother about this, after he’d left and I
complained to her that I wished that he’d stayed, she said this was likely because Barry himself had never grown up, that he was still probably about my age in his mind.

Her evidence to this effect went unspoken, unexplained, but I saw it in the way she rolled her eyes whenever I recounted an anecdote of his, like the time he ran a friend’s car into a ditch in El Paso and then, trying to pull it out, crashed a forklift on top of it. Or the time he said a parakeet followed him around for a year, perching on his shoulder and being protective of him for no discernible reason. Or the winter he spent in Alaska, where he said the dogs were all beautiful and the women all rabid. These were just a few of his improbable stories, mind you, yet my mother acted unimpressed by it all.

Still, my uncle Barry had lived what seemed to me this enormous and unpredictable life, the exact opposite of what a teenager feels, and I came to idolize him. And although my mother told me to take everything he said with a grain of salt, I never doubted his tales the way I did those of people like Tyler Bannister or Jason Landry or even my own father, really, because he was not trying to be funny or cruel or impressive when he told them. Instead he recounted these stories as if they were still as surprising to him as the day they had happened. “I couldn’t believe it, either,” he’d say, “but there I was.”

Yet there were some days on the porch when a car would pull into our driveway and Uncle Barry would leave me to go talk with the man that drove it. Often for only a minute or two, sometimes laughing, other times exchanging what appeared to me to be only a handshake, and other times banging his fist against the car as if in pain. When I asked him about this, he shrugged the visit off as being that of an old friend, somebody telling him about a possible job.

And since Barry was
a handyman of sorts, he often disappeared
for days, working on “construction jags,” as he called them, because the suburbs of Baton Rouge were booming back then. I spent those days without him feeling especially lost and confused, like the only sane man in a house full of crying women. What made this all worse was that when Barry returned from these jobs he would always act more philosophical and resigned. A woman would drop him off in our driveway, never coming inside the house, and I’d ask him who she was. “Who, her?” he’d say. “That was mistake number three hundred and eighty-four.”

I laughed at this until I realized that the next time it was mistake number three hundred and eighty-five, then eighty-six, and so forth, and I got the feeling this was an accurate count. And during these times our jovial talks on the porch would stray from the visible things around us to questions that had no obvious origin or answer. He would sit for long minutes, crickets calling out in the distance, and utter what seemed to me to be impossible truths. One, I remember, about sleep and love.

“Do you like to sleep?” he asked me. “I mean, do you like to just lie in bed all day? Maybe spend a whole weekend just sleeping?”

“Not really,” I said. “I mean, I don’t think so.”

“Me neither,” he said. “So, here’s the deal: what you need to do is get you a woman who loves
to do that. Because if you like to sleep all day and so does she, then y’all won’t ever get anything done. But what’s worse is if neither of you like to sleep, if both of you can’t stand lying around idle.”

“Then what?” I asked him.

“Then you’re never in bed at the same time,” he said. “Then you end up like me.”

I had no idea what he meant by this, as being like him appeared to me a wonderful possibility. Still, at that moment he seemed to be
working out some problem in his head that had nothing to do with me or my mother or Piney Creek Road, and he looked sad. So, I said naïve things. I tried to be encouraging.

“I’m sure it’s different for different people,” I told him. “I mean, I’m sure sometimes everything works out all right.”

“Nope,” he said. “That’s the thing. Love is always the same for everybody.”

This, you must understand, was the opposite of all that I’d heard. I’d watched movies where the goodhearted got together. I wrote love poems to a girl who wouldn’t speak to me. I believed, without sarcasm, in soul mates. I was a private-school kid in America, by God, and felt that nothing was off-limits to me if I tried. True love and happy marriage and healthy children were inevitable.

“Love’s the same for everybody?” I said. “That’s depressing.”

He sat around thinking about this.

“I think you might have misread me,” he said. “Let’s put it this way: are you in love with a girl right now?”

I smiled, or maybe I grimaced, and this gave it away.

“Okay,” he said. “All I’m saying is this: that girl you’re in love with right now, you’re
always
going to be in love with her. In some way or another. Her or someone else just like her. Love never changes. You might be fifty years old and find yourself doing the craziest things for a woman who you think is nothing like that first one, but she is. There will always be some connection, I promise. Love
never
changes. So the trick is to pick a good one to start with. If you do that, then there’s nothing depressing about it.”

I leaned over in my chair and thought about this. I put my elbows on my knees like an old man on a fishing pier.

“But what if you
don’t
pick a good one?” I asked. “What if the person you base all your loves on is the wrong one?”

“Well, then,” he said, “you end up being what they call the vast majority.”

I looked at the house across the street and two doors down from us and didn’t say anything for a while. My uncle handed me his old Duncan yo-yo.

“Go ahead, man,” he said. “Talk about her. I’m listening.”