My Sunshine Away (16 page)

So I left my room and walked toward the den, where our TV was also on. In those days, it was not a strange sight to see my mother up late. Whenever I would venture through our dark home to raid the pantry, thinking everyone asleep, I’d often find her standing alone in her nightgown, milling around in different rooms, quiet as a ghost. And if the glow from the open refrigerator lit her up, or if I’d ask her what she was doing, she would just tell me that she had forgotten to lock some door or turn something off and would kiss me on the
forehead and go back to her bedroom. “Good night, Mom,” I would say. “Good night, son,” she would say. And we wouldn’t mention it again.

That night, she sat on the couch with a blanket on her lap. The room smelled sour. In the soft light of our television her eyes appeared dark and expressionless, and I couldn’t tell if she was looking at me. The TV was tuned to CNN and, as had become common, a mug shot of Jeffrey Dahmer took up most of the screen. It surprised me that she would be watching this.

“Mom?” I said, and sat next to her on the couch.

I saw a wastebasket on the floor, a wet towel on her wrist.

“What are you doing up?” I asked her, although I knew.

In the months since Hannah’s death, Rachel told me that she had often heard our mother, late at night, throwing up by herself in the bathroom. This image of grief was so devastating to me that I didn’t believe her. I made up excuses to explain it. I told her that Mom had mentioned to me she was feeling sick, maybe coming down with something. I said that Mom was fine, and she was probably just hearing things. Rachel told me that I wasn’t hearing anything at all.

Sitting beside me on the couch, my mother closed her eyes.

“Do you think it’s better?” she asked me. “Do you really think it’s better that they caught this guy?”

I looked at Dahmer’s picture on the TV.

People often remark, after their initial arrest and scandal, about how much serial killers look to them like “regular people,” like any random guy you could meet at a bar one night, anyone working a cash register. This was never the case with Jeffrey Dahmer. The more we stared at his mug shot that late summer—on our television screens, in our newspapers and magazines—the more obvious his
guilt became. His eyes were, to everyone who saw them, a stranger’s eyes. His mouth was, to everyone who heard it, a dirty one. Even his mustache looked crooked and pasted on, like part of some devilish disguise, and simply by staring at him for a while we knew it was true, what he had done to those men. We could see it. This person was not like the rest of us. His lips were made to kiss people, yes. But his tongue was made to lick their dead skin.

So, I didn’t understand my mom’s question.

“What do you mean?” I asked her. “Of course it’s better that they caught him.”

“I meant for the families,” she said. “Do you think it’s better that they know what happened to their kids? All these details on the news? Is it better they found out?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think it’s probably hard either way.”

My mother looked over at me and seemed to suddenly surface from whatever hole she’d been in. She held up the remote control and turned off the television and touched my face and neck with her hands as if she had just found me, as if I had been missing.

We then sat quietly in the moonlit room and looked at each other a long time, and I began to feel as if we hadn’t spoken in months, although we saw each other every day. I also recognized, perhaps for the first time in my life, that there were many fundamental ways in which I looked like her, in which I was a part of her, ways in which people could have deduced that we were related. It was something about our noses, the set of our eyes. We looked so obviously kindred in that moment.

After a while, she palmed my forehead as if checking my temperature. She moved my hair away from my eyes. “Are you doing okay?” she asked me. “Are you doing okay about Hannah?”

I felt my throat tighten up.

I didn’t know what to say about Hannah. I never did.

So instead I leaned over and put my head in my mother’s lap. She placed her hand on my shoulder and then, for a long time, she rubbed it.

“You know I’m here, don’t you?” she asked me.

“I know, Mom,” I said. “Me, too.”

I meant this when I said it. But I wonder now if she believed me. If so, why? What had I done for her in those years? And, if not, how? What more could I have said to let her know?

Is there ever a love, any love, made of answers?

A
fter this, July became August in 1991.

School was still two weeks away, and rumors of a new whitefly infestation had people tooling around in their yards. All this activity was made bearable by an unusual wave of cool air that came down the Mississippi River from the Ozarks of Arkansas, as if to blow directly onto the people of Woodland Hills. Temperatures dropped into the low eighties and neighbors felt friendly. I saw Mr. Kern and Mr. Simpson, for example, chatting casually across their driveway, as if their fight on the lawn that previous month was already forgotten. I saw my old buddy Randy, now a starter on the high school football team, helping his mom spray down her azaleas with Safer soap. I saw Artsy Julie walking her family dog, a standard poodle named Guinevere, up and down the sidewalk in front of our house. I saw Jason Landry burning anthills with a magnifying glass. I also saw his father, the enormous Mr. Landry, still stalking the woods for that stray. More important than all of this, though, I noticed that when people saw my mother out on the front porch, watering the potted ferns she hung from hooks, they would stop to ask her how she was
doing, and she could answer them without breaking into tears. So time was moving on. Things were looking better. The hot grip of summer pretended to loosen and, everywhere you looked, people were talking again.

None talked more than Lindy and me.

Our chats about Dahmer became nightly and, once established, quickly diversified and spilled into the day. Still, we never saw each other face-to-face. We never hung out. We instead holed up in our separate bedrooms, gabbing on the phone like retirees, and went to a great amount of trouble to act as if these conversations were totally unimportant, nearly meaningless, only one step above our excruciating teenage boredom.

I, of course, never believed this.

In the week she began calling me, when I first understood that the ringing phone in my house might actually be Lindy, my world became new. Nothing could bother me. In the stretches of time between our conversations, I felt good and beneficent. I stopped sneaking into the woods behind our house to smoke dope, stopped locking myself in my room, and instead began helping my mother around the house. We hung new curtains in the living room. We pulled up weeds from our backyard patio. I changed floodlights that had been out since my dad left. I was wired with energy. I felt so eager to please that I even helped Rachel do the dishes after supper. I watched
Full House
episodes in her bedroom and didn’t change the channel when she left. I didn’t give her a hard time at all. It was as if I hovered over ground in those days, grinning like an idiot while Rachel taught me to drive her old Honda, a stick shift, up and down Piney Creek Road.
Turn left,
she’d tell me.
Left!
What are you doing?

I had no clue.

I was entirely lost in romantic fantasies, the kind only teenagers
without experience can have. While sitting in the car with Rachel, for instance, I’d think about picking Lindy up on a date: a dozen roses on the passenger seat, the wild night ahead, maybe a kiss at full speed. “Remember,” Rachel would tell me as we drove, “God says everything happens for a reason. We have to trust that. Accepting Hannah’s
death
means having
faith
.”

“Yep,” I’d say, and grind the clutch. “I believe it.”

Or, while helping my mom in the kitchen, I’d think of Lindy and I in a domestic setting; already married by now and sweet to each other. Maybe her with a baseball cap on, a lazy ponytail tucked underneath. I could rest my hand on the small of her back and maybe help her stir something hot, and we would never be the mess that our parents were. Our lives would be easy, our home warm and spacious. All this as my mom would say, “I talked to your father yesterday. Did you know he’s moved in with that
Laura
?”

“Everything happens for a reason, Mom,” I’d tell her. “We have to believe that.”

“Oh, I do,” she’d say. “What on earth would I do if I didn’t?”

Then our telephone would ring and I’d be gone.

I’d drop the clothes I was folding. I wouldn’t even turn off the sink.

“Sure,” I’d say to Lindy. “I can talk.”

“No,” I’d tell her. “I’m not busy at all.”

On the average, our talks were uneventful. Lindy liked Camel cigarettes. Lindy hated group therapy. Lindy liked
A Nightmare on Elm Street
. Lindy hated Whitney Houston. Still, I always imagined that our next conversation might establish a real bond between us, might break down the walls. Perhaps we’d finally stop acting like superficial high school kids and talk instead about our deeper connections to each other, our youth together, our future. Perhaps I’d be brave and
just say,
Enough about Dahmer. Enough about music. Check this out, Lindy: I draw pictures of you when I’m bored. I’ve thought of several smart names for our children. I love you is all that I’m saying. Don’t you understand that? Don’t you know that we are meant for each other?

If Lindy
only knew this basic fact that I lived with, then perhaps I could play all the songs for her that I’d written. I could ask her to a movie and she could say
yes
. I could open my palm and, without speaking, she could take it. I could tackle her, jokingly, and it could turn into a hug in the yard. I could finally tell her how sorry I was for that summer, for what happened to her, for my role in it, for how it changed her, and that as far as I was concerned we could forget it. We could move someplace else and build a life there.

I could say,
What do you think about that, Lindy?

She could say,
My bags are already packed.

None of this seemed impossible, but then a weird thing happened.

Near the end of that summer, I’d foolishly turned down a party invitation that Lindy had accepted. The party was thrown by a guy named Hanes Burke, a rich kid from Perkins who is probably doing well for himself now. He is one of those people who were born popular—the great-nephew of some long dead Louisiana senator—and, even at seventeen, he’d already established a reputation of being a good host, likely a Southern Democrat one day. There would undoubtedly be kegs at this party. Probably some light drugs if you wanted them. No cops to worry about. It was all a teenager could ask for.

Burke’s party itself, however, was not the strange thing. This type of A-list invitation had actually become more common for me since Hannah’s death, since I’d gotten wasted and played “Sweet Child O’ Mine” at Melinda’s. Still, my decision not to attend this
particular event was a no-brainer, since I was expecting Lindy to call me after dinner, as had become her habit. She would tell me about the predictable meal she’d eaten, the intolerable conversation her parents had made her endure, and we’d sit around listening to music until she got bored or took another call. There was nothing else to do.

This was 1991, remember. We didn’t have the Internet. So, as teenagers, we lived on the phone. There was no webcamming, no social networking. We dreamt simply of having our own personal phone lines one day, along with uninterrupted hours to talk, and we rarely got that. No matter who we were talking to, no matter how private the conversation, parents picked up the phone accidentally, siblings demanded their time. The introduction of call waiting made all of this even worse, as it allowed aunts and uncles and people you didn’t even know to butt in. This is part of why we talked so late in the night, Lindy and I, all of us teens. This is why we looked so pale in our grunge clothes. These night hours were the only times we felt we could tell the truth without danger, the only times we could live separately from our parents while still inside of their homes. There were no cell phones. No private text messages. It was simple one on one conversation and, if it was any good at all, you had to whisper.

But since the bulk of our conversations that late summer revolved around how much Lindy despised everyone at our school, including Hanes Burke, it never occurred to me that she would go to his party. More important, it never occurred to me that she would go without telling me. So when Letterman came and went and the phone still hadn’t rung, I realized what had happened and grew furious. I pictured Lindy standing around at the party with a drink in her hand,
laughing with people, and I felt like I had been made a fool of, like I had been lied to.

I took up a lonely post at my bedroom window and strummed heavy ballads on my guitar. I eyed the empty street like a parent. Finally, at around two a.m., I saw a car pull up to Lindy’s house and I panicked as it idled, wondering who she was with, who she may have been kissing, who she may have been allowing to touch her, and then I recognized the car.

This was good news.

The car belonged to Meagan Doucet, a large and unpopular girl who’d come to worship Lindy after her rape. Meagan was chameleon-like in her personality, almost fanatical in her pursuit of a social niche, and it was easy to despise her. She constantly smelled of patchouli oil, for example, but she was not a hippie. She did poorly in school, like many others, but Meagan did it without irony. She simply was not smart. As a by-product of this, she was perpetually cast in the smallest roles of our school plays—maybe some extra selling newspapers in a crowd scene, some secretary pretending to talk on a phone in the background—and yet she often bragged about being an actress. She talked about boyfriends in other towns that nobody knew and had twice faked suicide attempts for attention. I’d spoken maybe ten words to her in my life.

Still, I knew her story because she was Lindy’s best friend in those days, one of the few remaining at Perkins. The two of them drove around in Meagan’s blue Toyota and smoked Camel Wides. They bought glow-in-the-dark skulls and ironic bumper stickers with curse words on them at a place called Spencer’s Gifts in the mall. They looked, at all times, like they were conspiring. Yet, like so many other students, Lindy often ridiculed Meagan Doucet behind
her back. She complained about her desperate personality, her stringy hair, her rich parents who gave her anything she wanted. She said that Meagan had “hellacious halitosis.” She said that she was only friends with her for her car. In other words, she said a lot of stuff that high-schoolers say. Sometimes, though, Lindy took it further.

Whenever it got late and Lindy seemed bored, she would tell me personal and embarrassing details about Meagan that I’m sure she’d been trusted with: sexual experiences she’d had with guys that were then mean to her, private concerns Meagan had about her body, her weight, her feminine odor, her dark nipples.

“She has dark nipples?” I asked.

“Ugh,” Lindy said. “They’re disgusting.”

I knew these things must have been blood oaths between Meagan and Lindy, pinkie swears, and yet Lindy’s betrayals didn’t bother me then. I was happy to talk about anything she brought up. I thought she was confiding in me. I figured we were getting close.

On the night Meagan dropped her off, Lindy was staggering drunk. She stumbled up the sidewalk and through her front door in an obvious way that I would never attempt at my house. I always thought it would crush my mother to see me drunk, to see me stoned, or even to see me smoking a cigarette, although I’m sure she knew I did all of these things. She was no idiot. She had seen the contents of my hidden box, after all. She’d heard my music, read my strange poetry, smelled my dank clothing. She’d also, I knew, considered deeply the idea of me being a violent criminal. She’d thought of me unbuckling my pants, hurriedly, in the heat of a Louisiana night. She’d imagined me forcibly taking sex from an innocent girl, shoving her face into the grass and knocking her out, right outside the home she had made for me, the one I was raised in. I wonder now how often she thought of these things, how realistically she entertained them,
and how much this aged her. These thoughts could be no small deal for a parent.

My awareness of this, even then, may be why I continued to hide relatively insignificant things from my mother, well into my late teens, in order to spare her feelings: half-empty cigarette packs in the molding above my closet door, mediocre grades on algebra exams. I was careful about everything. I stashed joints in old cassette cases. I never once brought a roach inside our house. It all felt very natural to me, squirreling things away from her, protecting her from her own child.

Lindy felt differently.

I watched her ramble through her house, clicking on the overhead lights in each room. I could see it all from my window, her home like a waking yacht at sea. The foyer lights first, then the den. After a while, a dull hue from the refrigerator, maybe, an open microwave. Another long pause and then the bathroom light upstairs. A lamp, I imagined, in the hall. Eventually, her bedroom. A television set. Finally, the glow from her telephone keypad and then some darkness, to my delight, as Lindy pressed the seven numbers to call me.

I didn’t even let it ring once.

I picked up the phone and watched through my binoculars as Lindy opened her second-story window. She pulled up a chair and lit a cigarette.

If I was up in the water oak that night, you understand, in the full bloom of summer, Lindy still would not have been able to see me. That’s how good a spot it was.

“My God,” Lindy said. “Te-quila.”

I wanted to slam down the phone. I wanted to break something.

The joy I’d felt upon seeing her with Meagan was gone. I was instead enormously jealous that she was drunk without me, jealous
she had gone to that party, jealous that other people had spoken to her, that other people had seen
her. This was an emotion I had no handle on then. If Lindy talked about smoking pot I got jealous, although I smoked pot all the time. If she talked about going to the mall I felt jealous, although I had no desire to go to the mall whatsoever. If she talked about other schools where she knew people that I didn’t know, other towns where she vacationed as a child, other streets besides the one we lived on.

Worst of all, if she talked about boys.

I couldn’t stand it.