My Sunshine Away (20 page)

My mom squeezed my hand.

“Don’t open it,” she whispered.

He rang the bell again.

“Kathryn,” he said through the door. “I think there’s been a misunderstanding.”

I looked up at my mother. She stared at the door as if it required her attention to remain shut, and her hand was hot over mine. She motioned for me to watch the door as well, and when I did, I saw Mr. Landry trying the knob, turning it gently from side to side. When this didn’t work, he reached to the top of the door frame to check for a key. We heard him bend and look under the mat. Woodland Hills was a generally safe place, remember, and so the key was indeed out there. We kept it in a fake birdhouse, a small replica of our own home that hung maybe ten feet from where Mr. Landry was standing. What luck, I think now, that he didn’t think to check there. What blessing prevented him from seeing it? How much of our lives, when we think back upon them, are owed to these minor miracles?

Are any miracles minor?

My mom leaned over to me. “Lock the back door,” she whispered. “I’m going to call your father.” She then turned and ran to her bedroom as I watched the large shadow move past our door and across the porch. I followed it to the side of the house, where I could eventually see Mr. Landry from around a corner, shading his eyes to look in through our kitchen window. He had a bandage on his hand and stood there for a long time. He did not appear angry or passionate or vengeful, and so I had no idea the source of our panic, yet I also did not doubt it. My legs were shaking. I could smell myself sweating. As soon as he left my sight, I ran to the back door and flipped the bolt and laced the chain.

I hurried to my bedroom after this and grabbed a baseball bat that I had not touched since Little League. I crouched next to my window and raised one of the blinds to see Mr. Landry, dressed in slacks and a short-sleeved dress shirt, plodding back across our lawn. He walked past the Stillers’ and to his house, where he climbed into his old Jeep Scout and drove away. When I got to my mom’s bedroom to tell her that he was gone, she was on the telephone and nearly hysterical.

“What do you want me to do, Glen?” she said. “I know what I saw.”

We then heard the gate to our back patio swing open, and my mom looked at me as if her life had drained away. I readied the bat and peeked through her bedroom window to see Rachel walking in from the carport, fumbling with her keys.

“It’s just Rachel,” I said, and my mother began crying.

“Hurry,” my mom said. “Go let her in.”

For reasons that make sense to me now, I was kept out of the loop that night.

Rachel had run to my mother when I explained to her what was going on, and they had a conversation I was not privy to. Although it may seem odd that I would have been all right with this seclusion—that I wouldn’t have demanded to know what was happening—it only seems that way because I am an adult now and then I was a kid. And as a kid in my house, even as a teenager, whenever I approached my mother’s bedroom and saw the door closed like it had been so many dozens of times since Hannah’s death, when she and Rachel wept themselves to exhaustion, I did what all children do and fell into the pattern of grieving that we had already established. None of this was my mother’s fault. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. It was merely the path of least resistance, and that is the nature of grief. I was being protected from something my mother felt that I was not ready for and the fact that I didn’t bust down her door and demand to know is evidence, I think, that she was probably right.

So, I sat on the couch and waited. And, in this time, I thought of Lindy.

I felt deeply upset about the violence inflicted upon her in her very own neighborhood those years back and now, when I was still fresh off the first legitimate feeling of panic I had ever experienced, it suddenly crushed me to think of her crushed. I thought, too, of the way it had hurt me to see my mother look so vulnerable when that shadow appeared, so scared when she heard those footsteps, and then of what Lindy must see every time she looks in her parents’ eyes. It made sense to me that this would destroy her, and that it would destroy her family.

Then I felt a sharp click inside of me, as if my heart and mind had come together.

It was simple, I figured. Lindy needed to know who did this to her.

And since I was the one who’d made it all worse, I needed to be the one to tell her.

That this was the first time the idea had dawned on me, nearly two years after her rape, is one of the greatest shames of my life.

After I’d gone through half an hour of soul searching, of planning, of nearly forgetting what planet I was on, our doorbell rang. My adrenaline cranked up again, and yet I sat still as a stone as my mother and sister walked into the living room. They held hands like a unified front and my mother motioned for me to join them.

We heard a soft knock.

“Kathryn?” she said. It was Louise Landry.

She sounded tired and worried, and spoke weakly through the door.

“Have y’all seen Jason?” she asked us. “He hasn’t been home in a week.”

My mom looked over at me and I shook my head no, that I hadn’t seen him.

“Please,” Louise said. “I’m worried about him. I’m worried about what he might have done. I’m worried about what he could do.”

I assumed that my mom would keep her distance from Louise the way she did with Mr. Landry. I imagined her lumping them both together, but she didn’t. Something sad was happening between a mother and son in our neighborhood, and my mother felt it. And so the real sound of parenting, for me, has always been that of my mother unlocking our deadbolt and clearing her throat, of opening the door to look at this woman and say, earnestly, “I’m so sorry, Louise. We’ll keep our eyes open, okay? I promise you. We’ll keep you both in our prayers.”

I
t did not take long to find Jason Landry. As if a figure from some urban legend, aware that we had spoken his name, Jason appeared at my bedroom window that same night. He drummed the glass and whispered, “Hey, Fuckhead,” until I opened the blinds. It was near midnight by then and I’d already had a strange evening of sleep. After Louise left, my mother and Rachel and I sat on the couch of our living room and stared out of the back windows like catatonics. My mom told us that our dad would come by the house soon to check up on things, that in her panic she hadn’t known who else to call. Her voice was monotone and lifeless, and she apologized for frightening us. She encouraged us both not to worry too much, said that she may have overreacted, and the next thing I knew we were all knocked out. I awoke with my neck craned to the side and Rachel’s legs slung over my lap. My mother lay stiffly toward the armrest next to me, as if she had been frozen in the sitting position and tipped over by some prankster. It looked like we were staging an accident. Rachel and I woke up at the same time, around nine o’clock, and nudged our
mother awake as well. We then shuffled off to our own private bedrooms without supper.

I couldn’t fall back to sleep. The fact that it had gotten dark while I was unconscious bothered me. I felt that I had lost an important stretch of time in my life and I tossed around in bed feeling restless and guilty. I worried that Mr. Landry could have returned while I was passed out, of course, but I was actually more disappointed in my inability to stay focused on Lindy. I was supposed to be thinking up ways to explain the crime against her now, piecing together some closure for her family, and I had already fallen asleep on the job. I was torturing myself about this when Jason arrived at my window and, as such, I first mistook the sound of his voice for my own conscience.
What are you doing?
it asked me.
Why are you just lying there?
These were good questions. Then Jason said, “Stop yanking it and come to the window, you perv. I want to show you something.” So I did.

When I lifted the blinds, Jason Landry turned up his palms like he had been waiting for hours. He may have been. I didn’t know. He was dressed in camouflage from head to toe, baggy pants and a T-shirt, and had a look of strange glee in his eye. “Christ, you hornball,” he said. “I thought I was going to have to come down the chimney.”

“What are you doing out there?” I said. “People are looking for you.”

Across the street, an automatic porch light clicked on. Jason ducked his head. “Open the fucking window, you stroker,” he said. “I’m trying to do you a favor.”

I unlocked and opened the window but kept my body in the frame so he couldn’t climb in. He looked around my room to be sure we were alone and I realized that, through all the years we’d known
each other, he’d never been inside of my house. I wondered how he even knew which window was mine, and then thought of the horrible likelihood that he had looked through all of them to find it. His face was dirty and streaked with mud, and he was sweating. His hair, white and thin, was longer than I had ever seen it.

“Either come with me or let me in,” he said. “I’m like a sitting duck out here.”

“Hold on,” I said. “Don’t move.”

I backed away from the window to pull on a pair of jeans, and by the time I turned around Jason was standing in my room. He was leaning over my desk, looking at my old Little League trophies and riffling through random scraps of paper. I could smell him. He smelled older than me, and he was. Nearly eighteen by then; the damp odor of Jason’s clothing, the rank sweat of an unwashed man filled my room as quickly as smoke might. He studied the posters I had on my wall: a couple of the bands Lindy liked, an advertisement for Rumple Minze liquor with a scantily clad barbarian woman on it, and a few miscellaneous sketches I’d done in art class that my mom had tacked up. He seemed quietly amused by it all. I watched him lean close to a framed photo of my seventh-grade soccer team and look for me in the group of us huddled together on one knee. He put his finger on the glass when he found me, clean cut and smiling in my pre-Lindy days. He then scanned the rest of the place, looking up at my ceiling fan, at my closet, at all the structural things I knew he had in his own room as well, and I could smell the mud of our local swamps on his shoes.

“Do you have any food?” he asked me.

I pointed to a half-empty box of Oatmeal Creme Pies sitting on my amplifier.

“Of course you do,” he said, and put the box beneath his arm. “You live in paradise.”

“Jason,” I said, “it’s the middle of the night. What’s going on?”

“Just a little war, a little vengeance, a little mayhem,” he smiled. “You know, the usual stuff.” I didn’t understand. “Okay,” he said. “Let me put it this way. Do you still like that Simpson chick?”

I wasn’t sure what to tell him. The question seemed inappropriate. The answer was complicated. Jason then motioned at my bed, where my mom had left the black-and-white photo of Lindy earlier that afternoon, and I guess that told the tale.

“What I’m saying,” Jason whispered, “is that old picture is nothing. Nothing. That’s just scratching the surface.”

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“We’re friends, right?” Jason said. “I mean, we’re on the same side in this. It’s us against him.” He searched my face for some sort of agreement. “Shit, man,” he said. “You know how much trouble I could have gotten into for showing you those pictures? You know what that asshole would have done to me? Do you know what he’s already done?”

“Take it back if you want,” I said. “I never even look at it.”

“I don’t want that stupid picture,” he said. “What I’m looking for is justice, maybe a little revenge. I thought you might want some, too.” He nodded again at the picture on my bed. “You know,” he said. “For her.”

“Jason,” I said, “do you know something about what happened to Lindy?”

He looked at me and raised his eyebrows and, with that small gesture, I knew that my life was going to change.

“What do you know?” I asked him.

“I know that we’re wasting our time jacking off in this room,” he said. “Put on some shoes and come with me. You’ll see what I’m talking about.”

“Okay,” I said.

Once outside, we traced the dark fences of my enormous backyard like burglars in the shadows. I was familiar with this area, as it is where much of my life had taken place: romps with the neighborhood kids, football with Randy, the first time I ever saw Tyler Bannister smoke a joint, and the first time I walked from this place to Lindy’s water oak. I knew all the frog sounds, the occasional rustling of branches by squirrels or birds of prey, and had seen the random opossum or coon scuttling toward our garbage cans for dinner. But as soon as we ventured past the reach of my backyard floodlights, I felt transported. I no longer recognized anything I saw, and I panicked. Everything my mom had said about the Landrys came roaring back, and I worried where he was taking me. Part of me wondered if I would arrive at some pagan circle to find Lindy bound and gagged, all of the neighbors chanting around her—Randy and Artsy Julie, the Kern boys—each a part of some sinister reality I had been sheltered from. Bonfires, nooses, rituals: all of human life from any era of history, I imagined, is possible in the dark Louisiana woods.

We picked up the pace as we sloped down a hill and were jogging by the time we left my property. We crashed through a screen of weed trees and flimsy saplings and were soon romping past oaks and river birch with trunks the size of our own chests. I could feel my arms and face being cut by thin branches and had no idea what I was doing or why we were running or why I had made any of the decisions I had made in my life. So I concentrated only on the running itself. I counted my footfalls and enjoyed the deep breaths. I leapt over small and moonlit obstacles like roots and limbs and felt
suddenly and without warning like I did when I was a child and, in that feeling, I understood that it was a terrible thing that events had taken place in our lives to make it appear as if Jason and I or any of the kids on Piney Creek Road could ever be anything but children.

We splashed through slow-moving rivulets of water that made their way to a larger canal that Jason crossed by walking over a fallen tree. I stopped at the upturned roots of the tree, breathing heavy, and could see him only in silhouette, balancing himself with the box of Oatmeal Creme Pies in one hand. When he got to the other side, he turned around and looked at me. “Get your hand out of your pants and come on,” he said. “It’s not far.”

I walked that fallen tree as if over a canyon and I could not see the bottom. I knew in my heart it wasn’t deep, yet all the playful joy I had felt just moments ago was replaced by childish fear. The oak branches beneath the moon were now monster arms, a curved shadow before me a snake, the canal below an abyss. Although I understood that it was likely just mud and bracken and faded Coke cans and buried arrowheads a few feet below me, all like a wonderful novelty in the daylight, this was not daylight.

When I reached the other side of the canal, Jason was gone. I heard him making owl noises up ahead, and I followed what looked like a trail. As the path narrowed and the vegetation thickened, my baggy jeans got stuck on a series of briars. I scratched up my forearms pulling them loose and fell into the clearing where Jason had made his home. He stood at the base of an oak tree and looked down at me. In one hand he held a white bedsheet. In the other, the large Rambo knife he had shown me in his room nearly three years before. It had a compass on the hilt, an empty handle to stash matches and fishing line, and both a sharp and serrated edge for cutting and sawing, perhaps gutting. He was grinning like a kid.

“Jesus,” he said, and began cutting the sheet into strips. “What did you do, stop to jack off a couple of times?”

I got up and surveyed the area, which was lit dimly by a fading clamp light Jason had hooked to a car battery. The place looked like a hoarder’s paradise, like a beach after a storm. I saw buckets, bottles, dirty towels, stacks of lumber,
Playboy
magazines, fishing poles, lawn equipment, chairs, and a bicycle. Then I saw more peculiar things like a shovel, a long-poled net to clean swimming pools, and a remote- control car, all made the more peculiar because they were mine. I also recognized Randy’s tackle box, noticed a pair of shears with the name “Kern” on the handle, and saw a miniature trampoline that Artsy Julie used to jump on. The webbing of the trampoline was broken and most of the springs had been removed, and so Jason Landry, I understood, like the opossums and coons, had been visiting our trash while we slept. He had pilfered our open garages and carports, taken advantage of our presumed safety, and hauled away cartloads of our forgettables in the night. Yet I saw no blatant purpose to the items he’d chosen. A box of chlorine pellets, a rusty watering can, a bag of golf clubs. I walked around as if at a yard sale. And then, in the middle of this clearing, I saw Jason’s shanty home in the branches.

“Not too bad, huh?” he said. “Is that how you pictured it?”

That this was the same tree Jason and I scouted those years ago uncorked a new sadness in me. The thousands of hours I had spent since that time falling in and out of things like love and mourning, Jason had likely spent by himself in these woods, bringing our childish vision to haphazard fruition. I walked around the base of the tree and studied it. Cradled between two of the strongest-looking branches, about ten feet off the ground, was a rickety shelter. It had plywood walls and a slanted wooden floor and was held together by
nails, duct tape, and rope. It looked like it could fall at any moment. The roof was made of blue tarpaulin and sagged with enough stagnant rainwater to birth generations of mosquitoes. On each wall, crude circles had been cut through the plywood with hand tools and Jason had spray-painted phrases like “Fuck All!” and “No Survivors!” beneath them. Yet I didn’t see a ladder leading up to it. I didn’t even see an entrance.

“How do you get up there?” I asked.

Jason was now kneeling in the dirt, a small flashlight tucked beneath his arm, twisting the strips of bedsheet he had cut into what looked like small sections of rope with a knot on each end. He kept referring to a black book on the ground next to him, and in his diligence it was easy to imagine Jason earning a living one day, having a productive life in suburban America. But this would never happen.

“You’ve got to be skinny,” he said. “And you’ve got to be able to climb. It’s fat-ass-proof.”

I walked beneath the fort and looked up. There was a space in the floor near the trunk, barely a foot wide. As thin as I was, I’d have to hold my breath to get through. And on the trunk itself, I could see where the bark had been scored, maybe knocked a couple times with a hatchet, and I fit one of my hands into the grooves. Jason opened up a box sitting next to him. It was full of brown glass bottles, the same kind Old Man Casemore used to bring to our Fourth of July parties, the kind that he would fill with home-brewed stuff like strawberry- and molasses-flavored beer, and it felt to me a strange breach of etiquette for Jason to steal from someone so old and benevolent. I suppose I was naïve in this way. I watched Jason carefully remove the bottles, one by one, and drop a piece of handmade rope into their mouths.

“They don’t teach you how to do this in your bullshit high school, do they?” Jason said.

“How to do what?” I asked, but he didn’t answer me.

I looked up at the fort.

“Mind if I go up there?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said. “Just don’t whack off all over the place.”

I put my hands and feet in the trunk’s hatching and made my way up to the fort. It wasn’t easy, as this particular tree was not meant to be climbed. It didn’t offer itself up in the way the knotty water oak by Lindy’s driveway did and, because of this, I understood that Jason had chosen well. Plus, I was a different guy now than the kid who used to own these trees back in the days of moss, and the act of climbing a new tree felt as unnatural to me as anything I’d ever done. My shoes kept slipping out of the grooves. My hands hurt. A chain on my rock-and-roll jeans got stuck on a nub in the bark, and by the time I was able to grab hold of the opening in the floor and pull myself through it, I was breathing hard and sweating.