My Sunshine Away (3 page)

I
t is important when I learned the word “rape.”

In the school year before the crime, Randy and I were sitting on his kitchen floor. It was a wide and open space with yellow linoleum tiles. We sat with our backs to the refrigerator and faced the wall some twenty feet away. We had caches of action figures in those days, primarily G.I. Joes and Star Wars characters, and I lugged mine around in large plastic tackle boxes my father had left at our house, while Randy kept his in see-through Tupperware containers. On that day, we’d spread the characters out on the floor before us; Boba Fett, Cobra Commander, and the like.

We were thirteen years old, and the only people who knew we still played with these toys were each other.

We shared many secrets like this.

For example, Randy’s parents, sweet-hearted people, never got the courage to tell him about Santa Claus, and so his fantasy lasted well past the norm. When my oldest sister, Hannah, told me, I was around nine, and I rushed over to Randy’s house to commiserate. It was the week before Christmas and, when I got there, Randy was
lounging on a swing outside, chewing the end of a pencil and working on his list. The document was three pages long, complete with simple sketches of the most coveted items, and I couldn’t bring myself to tell him. So I spent years like this, changing the subject every time he brought it up. It was no easy task. Randy eventually gathered the facts on his own, of course, and one day in high school, when we had become very different people yet found ourselves together at a classmate’s house party, he drunkenly asked me why I’d let him carry on like that.

“I don’t know,” I told him. “I guess I just didn’t want to spoil it.”

Randy shook his head and smiled. He put his arm around my shoulders.

“There’s just one thing I don’t get,” he said. “All those letters I sent to the North Pole. Where the hell did they go?”

“That’s a great question,” I said. “I have no idea.”

But Randy also had the goods on me.

The night my father left us, I snuck over to his house and cried like a baby. We were both ten years old then, up in the middle of the night during a school week and, I thought, the only two people awake in the world. I can’t recall what I blubbered to him. I only remember lying facedown on his bed, my head sopping up the pillow, and hearing a short knock on the door. I scrambled around to hide, thinking we’d been caught, and crawled underneath his bed. Randy opened the door and rubbed his eyes, pretending to have been asleep. On the floor outside his room was a plate of warm cookies. Two cups of milk. We heard footsteps going back down the stairs.

We were friends.

We had decided enough was enough with our toys, however, and so that day in the kitchen we made a game out of slinging them violently across the floor to crash against the opposite wall. Points were
scored if you broke a head or a limb off the figure, and we kept tally by drawing in erasable pen on the fridge. The toys made red and blue marks along the baseboards, I remember, and his dog, Ruby, swallowed the decapitated heads.

After several rounds of this, Randy’s older sister, Alexi, came in.

In college but living at home, Alexi was thin, blond, and followed constantly by boys. One particular boy I remember was named Robert, and he slunk around Randy’s house for a year. He looked perpetually wrinkled, as if he had slept in his clothes, and wore baseball caps even at night. He worked as a short-order cook in a restaurant near campus, where he and Alexi had met, and always smelled to us like fried onion rings.

When Alexi saw the mess we’d made she said, “What are you two idiots doing?” but didn’t wait around for an answer. She told Robert to make her a glass of lemonade, so he did. Then she walked directly to the telephone, attached to a wall near the den, and dialed a number. “Jenn,” Alexi said into the phone, “what’s this bullshit I hear about you not coming to Robert’s party?”

Robert stood over us and grabbed ice cubes out of the freezer.

He asked Randy, “Did you know your sister’s insane?”

“You don’t have to tell me,” Randy said.

We liked Robert, as he described nearly everything he saw as “insane” and made us wonder what type of revelations awaited us in college. We followed him outside to the patio while Alexi talked on the phone. We watched him smoke cigarettes and ash into a Dr Pepper bottle. Their dog, Ruby, then came outside through the dog door and trotted onto the lawn, where she vomited up the brightly colored heads of our action figures. Robert said, “That dog is insane.”

We laughed and slapped at the mosquitoes biting our ankles.

Robert then asked Randy a number of questions about his sister,
like what type of flowers she liked, what her favorite place to eat was, and if she had ever dated any fraternity guys. Randy, of course, had no idea. After a few minutes, Alexi stepped outside, holding the telephone at her neck, still attached by its cord.

“Robert,” she said. “Jenn wants to know what the score was.”

The subject was LSU football, as it often is in Baton Rouge, and this was a time of depression. “It was forty-four to three,” Robert told her. “We got
raped
.”

So there it was, burning for me.

There have been other words like this in my lifetime, words so mysterious that I had to possess them, even if I didn’t understand their meaning. Diaphragm. Prophylactic. Swoon. I remember a day in the sixth grade when a boy named Chuck Beard, a redheaded kid, called me a dildo at recess. We had been playing Four Square along the brick walkways of Perkins and I’d sent him out of the competition with a lob that careened off the boundary line. He was furious. After school that day, my mother picked me up in the parking lot. She asked me how I had done on a project I had turned in to my teacher, Mrs. Williams, a woman who wore massive amounts of blue eye shadow. “I got a B,” I told her. “I think Mrs. Williams might be a dildo.”

My mother pulled to the side of the road.

“What did you say?” she asked me. “Do you even know what that means?”

She was beautiful and still young, my mother. She had a new haircut since the divorce.

“Of course I do,” I told her. “That lady is a pain in my butt.”

Cars passed as she composed herself.

The situation was more serious, however, when my mother called me out from my room in the days following the crime. I saw
Mr. and Mrs. Simpson standing beside her in the den, and it looked as though my mother had been crying. The three of them directed me to a chair that had been pulled out from the table and stood in a semicircle around me.

“Honey,” my mother told me, “I don’t know how to tell you this. I can’t believe I’m even telling you this, but Lindy Simpson was raped.”

“If you know anything,” Mrs. Simpson said.

“We’re not accusing you,” Mr. Simpson said. “Your mother’s already told us y’all were inside, finishing supper. But, please, if you know anything.”

I sat there looking up at them, unsure of what to say, and then I heard a soft clinking noise in the kitchen. It sounded like someone was milling around in there, perhaps using a spoon to stir a cup of coffee or tea. I knew that my sisters weren’t home and, by this point, my father was long gone.

“Mom,” I asked. “Who’s in the kitchen?”

“Sweetheart,” she said, and before she could tell me anything else, a police officer in full dress turned the corner from our kitchen to our living room and leaned casually against the door frame, still stirring his hot cup of coffee. He was tall and well built and looked indestructible in his uniform. The shining badge on his chest, the thick utility belt and pistol he wore around his waist, it all sent a panic through me. I wondered how much information he could draw out of me if he tried. Not just about the crime, necessarily, but about my relationship with Lindy in general. About the way I thought of her so often that she had become a figure not only alive for me in my waking hours but active in my dreams as well. I sat up straight as the officer looked me over.

“Don’t mind me,” he said, and nodded toward the Simpsons. “Just answer their question. Do you know anything about this?”

I looked at my mother, who in turn smiled at me so gently that I knew I could say anything, in those years, and she would believe me.

“Honey,” she said.

“Lindy was raped?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she told me.

“That’s terrible,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “It is.”

I thought about this for a long time.

“But I don’t understand,” I said. “Who was she playing?”

This comment seemed to confuse the adults in that room to such a degree that they began shifting the weight around on their feet and picking at the lint on their clothing as if they were the guilty ones now, because they had said a thing to a child that the child was not ready to hear. The police officer shook his head, sipped from his coffee, and walked back into the kitchen. My mother then walked over and kissed me on the forehead.

“Thank you, God,” I heard her say. “Thank you, Jesus.”

The police officer left a card on our refrigerator door and asked us to call him if we thought of anything. He then thanked my mother for the coffee and patted me kindly on the shoulder as he and the Simpsons, like unfortunate salesmen, walked back into the heat of that brutal summer. My mother and I returned to the kitchen, where she took the policeman’s card from the fridge and studied it before slipping it into a drawer by the phone. She then took out a carton of eggs, some sugar, flour, and a mixing bowl, and began to make cookies.

Later that week I walked into my room to find a pamphlet about
sex on my bed. There was no note attached to it, and when I opened it up a loose roll of condoms fell out. We have never spoken to each other about this, my mother and I, but I can remember her lavishing praise on me in this time. She made macaroni and cheese with every meal. She brought oranges to all of my soccer games. Things were remarkably good between us for a while, until she found a real reason to suspect me. It was hard for her, I suppose, to realize that committing the act does not depend on knowing the word.

T
he day I fell in love with Lindy Simpson was January 28, 1986.

This was also the day the Space Shuttle
Challenger
exploded, and seven courageous astronauts died. I was eleven years old and in the fifth grade.

Along with nearly every other school in America, the Perkins School had structured its entire science curriculum around this mission. We focused on stars and galaxies and made crude Styrofoam mobiles of the Milky Way that we hung with fishing line from the ceilings of our classrooms. In preparation for the
Challenger
’s liftoff, to be broadcast live on CNN, similar grades had been lumped together, fourth through sixth, seventh and eighth, et cetera, and ushered into rooms with televisions. This was exotic to us then, watching cable at school, and the TVs stood on carts that had been pushed in front of the blackboards. They had plastic knobs and buttons beneath the screens. To make additional space in the classrooms, our wooden desks had been stacked and moved out into the hallways and we were seated in long rows along the carpeted floor, organized by homeroom.

As a class project, the sixth grade, Lindy’s grade, had written a letter to Christa McAuliffe. She was the elementary school teacher chosen from more than twenty thousand applicants to accompany the astronauts into space, and she was a national hero. Their letter to her was simple, written in pencil on lined paper, and it thanked her for her bravery. In the weeks before takeoff, Mrs. McAuliffe had returned to the sixth-grade class an American flag and signed publicity photo of the entire crew, both of which were now hanging on a large bulletin board lined in red, white, and blue crepe paper. Our teachers gathered in front of it and chatted energetically. The whole place had the buzz of a holiday.

We drank fruit punch and ate cookies shaped like stars. We wore flag pins and sang the national anthem. We felt good, all of us did, and I had no way of knowing that the image of Mrs. Knight, my homeroom teacher, singing along in front of that flag would never leave me. She was a young woman with a bob haircut, although all teachers looked immensely old to me then, and she was a brunette. This was her first year teaching at the Perkins School, at any school, and it would be her last.

I remember that it was cold and dry that morning, oddly enough, as even January offers no promise of winter in Louisiana. I’ve spent Christmases in T-shirts, Thanksgivings in shorts and sneakers. On this day, however, we all wore pants and long-sleeved button-downs, and two rows across from me, sitting Indian-style on the carpet, Lindy Simpson wore a navy blue sweatshirt over her jumper.

I paid her no mind. I wanted to see the rocket.

When it came time for the countdown, our teachers turned up the volume on the television and asked us to pay attention. We stared like tourists at the shuttle in its launch position, filmed at long distance by a handheld camera. I remember the Kennedy Space Center
looking completely deserted but for the craft: a white shuttle perched atop three cylindrical rocket boosters, the middle one some fifteen stories high and blood red. This was a good time in America. We were dreamers, teachers and students alike, all aboard that mission by patriotic proxy.

So, as the countdown began, we joined along. Our chorus swelled at T minus eight as smoke released from beneath the rocket in purposeful plumes. We then bellowed out the final “one” and watched the
Challenger
take off, heavy and miraculous, breaking away from the launch pad and burning everything beneath it. Our teachers applauded. The announcer said “Liftoff! We have liftoff!” and told us we were witnessing history.

We believed him, and watched the shuttle rise atop a column of fire.

Seventy-three seconds later, it ended.

Due to a massive amount of wind shear, along with the failure of the right rocket booster’s O-rings, a flare breached the external fuel tank of the
Challenger
and destroyed the integrity of the ship. From the ground, all systems looked normal. We could hear the joyous cheers of people standing behind the camera, the excitement in the announcer’s polished voice. We had no clue. Even Mission Control was unaware of the problem until the very end, as was evidenced by the last transmission made by NASA to the crew. It came ten seconds before the explosion and said, “Roger,
Challenger
, go at throttle up,” which means
Everything’s okay, you guys. Give it all you’ve got.

After a federal investigation into the event, and public disclosure of every detail, we learned that there was a bit more to this story. The disaster was not a complete surprise to everyone. It turned out that an additional transmission had been made, one second before the explosion, from the crew of the
Challenger
back to the ground, when
Pilot Michael J. Smith, while either reading something on the gauges or feeling something in his heart, said, “Uh-oh.”

Often, in times of tragedy, there is a delay period, a moment of collective disbelief.

Not this time.

I immediately heard shouts from the halls.

Our teachers reacted first, clutching their chests and screaming as the shuttle burst into flames, and so chaos had us before the first piece of debris splashed into the Atlantic. Mrs. Knight scrambled to turn off the television and Mrs. McElroy, a parental volunteer, tripped over a boy curled up on the floor and fell against the snack table. When the punch bowl broke and spilled red juice all over the carpet, we hit maximum hysteria. I heard people running up and down the hallways. I heard the worried voices of eighth graders in the adjacent classroom. I heard the squealing of pigtailed girls. I didn’t know what to do.

So, I sat on the carpet and watched this. I tried not to get stepped on.

Across from me, Lindy Simpson sat on the carpet as well.

When a space cleared between us, I saw that her sweatshirt was covered in vomit.

Lindy looked over at me and pressed her lips together, not out of any form of embarrassment, I don’t believe, but rather as if she were merely glad to see someone she knew. She did not smile, necessarily, and she did not cry. Instead she had a look on her face that still haunts me. It was as if Lindy had unplugged herself completely from the event.

This was a look of hers I would see later in life.

Mrs. Knight eventually noticed her, too, and rushed over. In one expert move, she pulled the soiled sweatshirt over Lindy’s head and
balled it up so that no one would see. Then Lindy, coming to, began to cry. Mrs. Knight helped her off the floor and ushered her out of the room, stroking her hair. As they passed in front of me, I heard Mrs. Knight say, “I know, honey. I know.”

I’m not sure why this ignited my heart. I suppose it was the fact that I, myself, was not crying, that I hadn’t even had time to react. Or perhaps it was the sight of Lindy’s bright pink vomit that did it, strangely enough, so full of candy and sweet punch. Was she so sensitive that this was always inside of her? When I saw her running carefree through our neighborhood, or eating a sno-cone on the curb of Piney Creek Road, was it possible she was this tender and vulnerable? How deeply did she feel what she saw? How intensely can one experience life? Were all girls like this? The idea broke over me. These were separate creatures altogether, I realized, these girls. If not, then how could Lindy have felt so immediately the panic in the classroom, the concern over the death of our heroes? How could it make her sick before I even got off the floor?

So say what you will about men, our massive failures on Earth, but some understanding flickered inside me at that moment, something hardwired came alive. I was just a boy, not even a man, and yet I suddenly felt it my warrant to defend this particular girl from there on out, against any vague threat that might arise. In the days that followed this event, I got into arguments with other kids my age, boys who said they, too, had seen Lindy throw up, and tried to gain an audience to laugh at her expense. I threw fits. I denied it vehemently. I raged against an unchangeable history, something that would later become a habit of mine.

In a curious turn of events, many years after this, I ran into Mrs. Knight at a local restaurant. I was in college then, and she still looked young and lovely. She now worked as an assistant at a contracting
firm, she told me, and had given up teaching completely. But she remembered me well, she said, from the day the
Challenger
exploded. She introduced me to her husband and explained to him the nightmare it was, having charge of all those shell-shocked children, and how she still revisits the day in her head. Then she told me a story I didn’t remember.

After Mrs. Knight had taken Lindy to the restroom and rinsed out her sweatshirt in the sink, she led her back into the hall. Apparently, I was standing there waiting for them, she said, and had taken off my long-sleeved shirt to give it to Lindy. Embarrassed and upset, Lindy ran off in the crowd without acknowledging me. Mrs. Knight said that she still remembers the lump in her throat at that moment, how ill-prepared she was for pandemonium, and what I told her as Lindy ran away.

“Do you remember what you said?” she asked me.

I didn’t.

“You came up and took my hand,” she said. “You told me, ‘I guess it’s true what they say, Mrs. Knight. When it rains, it pours.’”

I smiled at this small memory, as did she.

“I never forgot that,” she said. “You seemed so mature. I don’t know. You were like an old wise man in a little kid’s body. It stuck with me. I always wondered how you’d grown up.”

“Well,” I said. “Here I am.”

“And the Simpson girl,” she said. “I felt so sorry for her, too. Are you still in touch with her?”

“No,” I told her. “Not anymore.”

So on the day I fell for Lindy, school was canceled by noon.

There was a line of traffic in the carpool lane, and even our parents were distraught about the shuttle, thankful to have been let out
of work to come get us. Randy and I rode the short distance home in my mother’s car, and he kept making crashing noises with his mouth. My mother begged him to stop. We saw Lindy walking home alone on the sidewalk with her sweatshirt in her hand. She looked cold and sad, and my mother pulled to the side of the road. I hopped out of the car and let Lindy sit in the front. She didn’t say a word to me. I was crushed.

Later that night, my mother called me into the living room to watch Ronald Reagan on TV. “Honey,” she said. “It’s the president.”

I remember it clearly.

Reagan sat in the Oval Office, his face placid and genuine. He wore a dark blue suit and fiddled with a paper clip in his hand. The credenza behind him, barely visible, was covered in family photos. And instead of delivering the State of the Union Address, which he was scheduled to do, President Reagan mourned our nation’s tragedy and mentioned each of the fallen astronauts by name. My mother broke out in quiet tears as he spoke of them, something she did with regularity in these years. She then put her arm around me and pulled me close to her on the couch. We sat in the darkness and listened.

The president said, “And I now want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle’s takeoff.”

My mother looked down at me. She ran her fingers through my hair.

“I know it’s hard to understand,” he told us, “but sometimes painful things like this happen. It’s all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It’s all part of taking a chance and expanding man’s horizons. The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted,” he reminded us. “It belongs to the brave.”

I looked up at my mother. She was already broken, I realize now, and had yet to even face the greatest tragedies of her life. She dabbed a soft handkerchief at my eyes and held my head in her hands.

“Were you listening, honey?” she asked me. “Do you understand what he’s saying?”

This was my first day in love. I didn’t understand anything.

I put my head on her shoulder.

She covered my eyes with her hand.