My Sunshine Away (25 page)

So, “Jewels,” I said, “I need to tell you something.”

Julie rolled over on her side to face me. At seven months, this took some doing, but she didn’t seem to mind. She held a pillow between her legs and wore an oversized T-shirt with a cartoon Tyrannosaurus rex on the front of it. The dinosaur was lying facedown, its mouth and feet on the ground, while its short arms flailed around uselessly. The caption read “I hate doing push-ups!”

She smiled.

“Are you going to tell me that you used to be madly in love with Lindy Simpson?” she said. “Because I already knew that.”

“No,” I said. “That’s not what I was going to say.”

“It was nice to see her, wasn’t it?” Julie said. “She looks good, don’t you think?”

“She does look good,” I said. “I mean, you know what I mean. She looks happy.”

Julie smirked. “What else could
you mean, young squire?”

She gave me a playful little pinch under the sheets, and I pulled the covers up to my shoulders. I closed my eyes.

“Do you remember what happened to her?” I asked.

“Of course,” Julie said. “She was like Little Red Riding Hood in my house. She was my cautionary tale. It was how my parents told me to be careful, you know, even in our neighborhood.”

The idea of this bothered me.

“But Lindy was careful, wasn’t she?” I said. “And our neighborhood was safe, wasn’t it?”

“Who knows,” Julie said. “I’m sure my parents just used her as an example because she was the only one they knew about. Who knows how many others there were.”

“Other what?” I asked. “You mean victims? In our neighborhood?”

“Sure,” Julie said. “In our neighborhood, or anywhere. Who knows how many more there are out there. That’s just not the type of thing women go around talking about.”

I thought about this. It seemed to me a horrible version of the world I love.

“I would die if that ever happened to you,” I told her.

“Who’s to say it hasn’t?” she said.

I sat up in bed and looked at Julie. My heart started pounding. I felt frantic.

“You would tell me,” I said. “Wouldn’t you?”

“I guess I would if I wanted to,” she said. “But that would really be up to me.”

Then, after a while, she touched my arm.

“Relax, Lancelot,” she said. “We’re just talking.”

I lay down again and looked at the ceiling. I had this painful lump in my throat and was so afraid, already, of becoming a parent.

“If you were Lindy,” I said, “do you think you’d want to know who did that to you? Whether you found out now or back then, do you think that would change things for you? Would it make it better, if you had someone to blame?”

“I think a lot of women know who did it,” Julie said. “I think they might rather not. Still, it’s not like either one is a good option.”

I kept staring at the ceiling as Julie watched me. She saw that I was close to crying. I know she did.

“They never arrested anybody, did they?” she asked me.

“No,” I said. “But they should have.”

She took a moment. I could feel her still watching me.

“You’re the one who told everybody at school, aren’t you,” she said.

“I was,” I said. “I am.”

I then turned to look Julie in the eye and beneath the covers she took my hand and placed it again on her belly. “Hey,” she said. “Before you tell me that thing you were going to tell me, will you do me a favor? Will you think about whether or not it will help us? Will it help the baby? I mean, even in the long term. I know how you are. Even if you’re thinking about big-picture stuff like honesty and trust, will you also think about how good things seem for Lindy now? And think
about how good they are for us? And think about whether or not what you say will help that goodness continue?”

I didn’t understand what she was getting at.

“Are you suggesting that the point of the truth is to help people?” I asked her. “Isn’t it more complicated than that?”

“Just think about it, okay?” Julie said.

So, I did think about it.

I’m still thinking about it now.

But on that night, Julie rolled back over to her other side, where it was more comfortable for her to sleep in those days. It wasn’t personal that she turned her back to me. I understood that. I reached out and adjusted the crease in her shirt. I straightened the covers on her legs.

“Hey,” Julie said. “Can I tell
you
something?”

“Yes,” I said. “Anything.”

“It doesn’t bother me that you used to be in love with Lindy, or that you got arrested trying to save her like some comic-book hero.”

I smiled at this.

“Why not?” I said. “Shouldn’t you be insane with jealousy?”

“No,” she said, “because you are in love with me now and we are going to have a kid and you will be our real-life hero.”

“Ouch,” I said. “No pressure.”

Then, after a minute, I said, “You’re right about that, though. I am in love with you.”

“Plus,” Julie said, “I’ve got like forty pounds on her now. I’ve got a ninja in my belly. If Lindy tried anything, it could get ugly.”

I lay there and smiled for a good long time.

And then a couple of years went by and our child was healthy and bright and everything I believed I knew about love and humanity deepened in ways I could have never predicted. Still, I understand
that we are just getting started, Julie and I. Our daughter is three years old now, and every leap she makes, even the simple sound of her singing in her room when she thinks that no one is listening, it fills me with an irreplaceable joy. It does this to Julie, as well, and so we are happily crushed, like so many others, by parenthood.

But just the other day, as my daughter and I were playing around outside, drawing chalk figures on the driveway, washing the car, and picking a few stray weeds from the flower beds, a small group of neighborhood kids came by. They range from around my daughter’s age up to maybe nine years old or so. They are polite and energetic and we see them in the neighborhood often. We wave at them when we pass by. I recognize each of their parents. I hope that Baton Rouge will always be this way. Still, this was the first time they had come to our house in a group to ask if my daughter could join them a few houses down, where they were doing things like riding their bikes in a circle, building an igloo out of milk jugs, and eating popsicles.

I looked down to ask my daughter what she thought of this idea and the look in her eyes was so hopeful that all I said was, “Okay.” She ran to the patio to grab her tricycle, a pink getup with a basket on the back, and she was gone. The older kids were kicking off on their skateboards and rip-sticks, the younger kids still with their training wheels, and in that scene I saw what felt to me like the entirety of my life. The plump kid on the Big Wheel, that was Randy Stiller. The older kid on the skateboard was Duke Kern. The girl on the bike, pedaling hard to get to the front of the pack, was Lindy. I did not know who my daughter was yet, or if she would ever be like any of us. I only knew that, whoever she might be, I would love her.

And then a number of things made sense to me—the research I’d found myself doing lately, the old photo albums I’d been looking
through, the way I kept steering the conversations with my mother and sister toward Lindy and Hannah and the old days, and even the conversations with my father and Laura, who are now married. These past few years, ever since we had our first child, our daughter, I understood, I’ve only been trying to say this one thing.

I
was up in the tree that night.

It was June and it was hot and I was young and turned completely inside out by what I thought at that time was love. And on that night I had finished supper and helped my mom with the dishes and without even the slightest bit of hesitation I lied and told her that I wasn’t in the mood for television. I said that I was instead going to my room to play video games, maybe fall asleep a bit early. And these were the days when everyone I knew was alive, remember. My father was gone, yes, but Lindy and Hannah were untouched. We were all young. So, I knew that my mom would do what she always did in the young summer evenings of 1989 and sit at the dining room table to call Rachel in her dorm room in Lafayette, call Hannah at her apartment on the other side of Baton Rouge. If she got hold of them, they would chat pleasantly for a few minutes and tell each other they loved each other and my mom would then walk the phone back to the wall to hang it up. She might then have called her father or perhaps a friend to reconfirm a lunch date, but not much more, though I am sure she wanted, at times, to call my dad. I am sure she wanted, at
other times, to knock on my door and say,
Hey, you, come visit with me. It’s barely eight o’clock.
But she did not. She instead walked through the house turning off the lights and picking up little odds and ends like socks and discarded food wrappers until she got to her room, where she began the long process of undressing and taking off her makeup before she would lie in bed and fall asleep reading a self-help book about how to parent through a divorce.

Meanwhile, in my room, I watched the clock.

The thing was, I knew the routine of the Simpson girl.

So when I heard my mother’s door shut at eight o’clock, I waited fifteen more minutes and then opened my window to sprint across our darkening street. Lindy would return from the track at eight-thirty, and this gave me enough time to run from one yard to the next while making sure all of the neighbors were inside. I had done this a few times since I learned how to spy on her from the water oak and the results had been tremendous. I saw her, once, talking on the phone and painting her toenails. On another occasion, I watched her fold some laundry and put it away and I honestly never imagined there would come a time when I regretted this.

But that night, as I made like a cat across the street, I couldn’t help but look a bit farther down the block to where that broken streetlight looked so peculiar to me. It was still new to us at that time, maybe a couple weeks old, and as I sprinted toward the tree, I saw someone beneath it. I did not
think
I saw someone. I
did
see someone. It was a man, I thought, or perhaps a boy, and the truth is that it was impossible for me to tell because I was running. In other words, I did not get a good look because I did not stop to get a good look.

What I did see was a shadow working hurriedly, moving back and forth from the pole to the azalea bushes, and I thought it was
perhaps Old Man Casemore, or maybe some utility worker who’d come to fix the light. I did not care as long I was not seen.

I cannot go back and change this. I cannot go back and fix this.

All I can do is confess that a few minutes later, when I was up in that tree, I heard something happen on Piney Creek Road. The sound of it was quick and muted and has no other reference for me than that single event. So I have no way to describe it to you, no way to make you hear it. Yet I can tell you this. It was a sound that gave me a feeling. I immediately felt that something was not right and I knew that, whatever it was, it was happening around the corner. I also knew that Lindy, at that time of night, would likely be around the corner. I thought to climb down and go see. That’s what kills me. I thought to check on her. Yet I was so afraid of being caught that I decided not to.

So, I never really saw what happened. And I did not commit the act myself.

That’s the truth.

What I did see, however, was Lindy, a few minutes later, walking her bike up the sidewalk. Her face was as blank as the day of the
Challenger
, the day I fell in love with her, and I noticed that her shoe was missing. The scraping sound of her uneven walk up the driveway is as clear to me now as it was then. It is as clear as the way I saw her bathroom light turn on, the way I stayed in the tree against my better judgment and listened to the shower go, and the way I watched through my binoculars as she walked into her bedroom still wrapped in a towel, still wearing the exact same blank expression, and curled into a ball on top of her bed. It is also as clear to me as our street was empty, by the time I finally went back home.

So, I am guilty in the most specific sense.

I had an opportunity to help someone and I chose not to. For a
large part of my life, I’ve felt that this decision defined me and I’ve worn my guilt like a locket.

What am I trying to say?

After my mother’s stroke, a minor one that occurred in 2006, a year or so before my daughter was born, she told me that she kept a box in her closet. She was still in the hospital, doing fine but a little shaken and confused, and asked me to go retrieve it for her. When I brought it back to the hospital she unlocked it with a simple combination and opened it up. She pulled out a manila envelope.

“This is my will,” she said. “This is the boring part. The rest of this stuff, I figured we could take a look at.”

I imagine there is little need for me to describe the bittersweet exhaustion of that afternoon. My mother had a smattering of old photos, strange personal favorites she had collected that were pretty much evenly distributed between Hannah, Rachel, and me. She also had some mementos that didn’t mean much to me, but that I enjoyed hearing about. She had a dried corsage from her wedding to my father. She had a blue piece of silk that she told me was from her mother’s wedding to her father, both of whom had passed by then. She had letters that had been especially meaningful to her, one from my dad’s remorseful parents who had drifted away from us after my father’s adultery, another from Finally Douglas after Hannah had died. She had a photograph clipped from the newspaper that showed Rachel playing the wife in a kindergarten version of
’
Twas the Night Before Christmas
, and she had a poem that I had written to her for a Mother’s Day present when I was in the second grade that I had no recollection of. She also had a yellow Duncan yo-yo that my uncle Barry had asked her to give me.

“I’m sorry I never gave this to you,” she said. “Things were just so
difficult back then. Barry was so confused and I could tell how much you looked up to him. I don’t know. I was afraid of everything.”

“I know, Mom,” I said. “I was, too.”

Other people came to visit throughout the afternoon, like Rachel and her family, and although the crying jags passed through the room like weather fronts, the majority of the day, interrupted by nurses’ visits, was cheerful with memory. When visiting hours were over and we were packing up to leave, my mother pulled out a small notebook from the bottom of the box and asked me if I would like to take it home.

It was Hannah’s journal.

“You were so young when that happened,” my mom said. “I figured you might not appreciate this until later. And then, you know, time went by and I didn’t know what to do.”

I looked over at Rachel. I knew she and Hannah were closer than we had ever been.

“You can take it,” Rachel said. “Trust me. I’ve read it a hundred times.”

I got home that night to a series of messages on our machine from Julie, who had been at an academic conference in Chicago when my mother had her stroke the day before. I’d told her to stay and deliver her paper, and she had called me to say that she managed a way to deliver it early and get a flight that would have her home the next morning. She asked me to call her in her hotel room and I did.

After this I sat at the kitchen counter of our rental home, on a bar stool I rarely sat on, and opened Hannah’s journal. I’d never been so nervous. I imagine now it is because I was old enough to realize that I never really knew my sister and perhaps, at this moment, I was about to.

To my surprise, the journal spanned the entirety of her writing
life. The entries were sporadic and often undated and consisted of everything from poems to stories to songs to random observations about the happenings of our family from times both before and after I became a part of it. The tough parts that dealt with her disappointment with my father, her string of bad and even dangerous-sounding relationships with guys her age, these were difficult to read. Some of the pages were even glued together or blacked out in Sharpie so that no one could read them and I imagine that Hannah did this herself, for whatever private reasons she had, and that we all do this with our pasts. Still, the well-earned skepticism about men that I could see coming through, about their intentions, it reminded me of things Lindy might have said on the phone those years back. And yet the lighthearted stuff from when she was a kid, the tales of princesses and dragons she’d cooked up, it all seemed steeped with a certain unorthodox wisdom that reminded me of Julie. It was powerful stuff, all of it, and I couldn’t get enough.

But two specific entries were of particular note.

One was dated from the early summer 1989, the summer of Lindy’s rape, when Hannah must have been home visiting or stopping by for a swim. The setting seemed to be a window at our house, facing Piney Creek Road, where she was composing a love song about Finally Douglas, called “This Lucky Heart.” On the margins of the page, Hannah had scribbled details from our neighborhood as she saw them outside. Perhaps they were for future songs. Perhaps they were just practice. I am sure, however, that she had no idea of what they might mean to me all those years later.

Some of the lines read awkwardly, like:

A missing Mercedes / can’t hide the pain

Oak trees drop / what will be theirs again.

Maybe this is where I’d gotten my bad taste in poetry.

But then, near the bottom of this page, I saw this line:

A skinny boy slinks / tattoos blue as night.

His head as bald as the street / he throws rocks at the light.

And there it was.

Tyler Bannister. It had to have been him. He was the only kid with tattoos and a shaved head that Piney Creek Road had ever known. He must have returned to the neighborhood after leaving the Landrys’ and knocked out the light. He must have planned the whole thing. I felt sick to my stomach as I recalled the day that Tyler, Jason, and I stood in front of Lindy’s house talking about the water oak, the way we pretended to be fiddling with a remote-control car as Lindy’s father pulled up and smiled and asked his daughter, yet again, to remind him of what time she was to return from the track. It would be eight-thirty, Daddy, she told him, the same as every day, and in this way the whole awful thing became obvious to me.

The fact that Tyler Bannister had moved out months before—that he no longer lived with the Landrys at the time of the crime—meant nothing, because the simple truth is that there was a stretch of time in his life in which Woodland Hills was his home, and a home, no matter how wonderful or menacing, is a thing you don’t forget. Ask anybody.

So, my mystery was solved.

Yet I didn’t feel any better.

I had my reasons.

For starters, how had we not stumbled upon this connection before? Although Hannah lived across town at that point, although she was busy with her own life, hadn’t my mom or Rachel or perhaps
even the police spoken to her about Lindy’s rape? Hadn’t everyone given their best effort, discussing simple clues like a busted streetlight or the reappearance of suspicious boys? I’d always thought so. This made me wonder if there was perhaps another, darker, reason that we’d missed this. It made me wonder if maybe my mother or Rachel, knowing what they did about Hannah’s history with men that was just now unfolding for me, felt it better not to mention to her what had happened to the Simpson girl in our very own neighborhood. It made me wonder if perhaps this was the reason my mother took that police officer’s card off the refrigerator and slipped it into the drawer that day, if maybe she didn’t want her daughters seeing a thing like this, being reminded of realities like this, every time they wanted a little something to eat.

This type of care, I understood, would not be dissimilar to the way people had been so wary to mention Hannah around my mother after she had died. I then began to wonder what Julie meant, exactly, when she said that rape is not a thing that women go around talking about, and this made me wonder what other dreadful knowledge is passed silently among the hearts of women and I suddenly had a hard time understanding men, in general, and the damage we can do, and how it is even possible that I am one of them.

So, from the time I read that journal until now, a period of a few years, I’ve buried what I’d learned about the rape of Lindy Simpson. I didn’t tell anyone about it. Yet I went so far as to look Tyler Bannister up and, unsurprisingly, found out that he was already in prison on various other charges, including sexual battery. This didn’t make things easier on my conscience and so I began to take strange and nostalgic trips back to the old neighborhood, wondering if I should track Lindy down and tell her what I’d uncovered. I suppose this is why I felt so awful after I ran into her that night at the football game.

It was the first time I had seen her since I knew, or at least believed I knew, who had changed her life so dramatically, and since I’d come to grips with my own cowardice on that night of her rape, and yet I didn’t even think to apologize. So, in an awful way, I felt again like I was in on the crime.

Maybe I was.

That’s why I am so lucky to have Julie around now, and to have had my mother and Rachel around for so long, to make me realize that life is not always about me and the unloading of my conscience. The story of Lindy’s rape, for instance.

It is about Lindy. And that is all.

However, what is about me, and the reason I am talking to you, is the other entry in Hannah’s journal.