Shine Shine Shine (23 page)

How could it be the right thing to kill something that’s alive? How could Rache know anything, when Sunny had been lying to her from the start? But she put that thought in the box, and she closed the box. And the screaming, and the tearing at herself, and the crawling under her bed to wait for death, all was packed into the box, and the box was shut, and taped shut, and she would not open the box, or think about the box.

“She was alive, and now she’s going to die, and it’s my fault. I did it,” she said.

“Ridiculous,” thundered Les Weathers. With one hand wrapped tightly around Sunny, he picked up a chocolate-chip scone in the other and gesticulated definitively before putting it into his mouth with a flourish. “You’re not some criminal. You don’t go around killing people. You’re just a woman. A bald woman. And you just do what you have to do.”

Chewing the scone, he warmed to his topic. “We all do hard things, Sunny. Losing my wife Teresa was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But it had to happen. Did I abandon her? No, she ran away from me. Did you kill your mother? No. Through your inaction you allowed her to die. But everyone told you to do it. The court, the doctor, even your own husband. You did the right thing. It was for the best.”

19

In the winter of the year when Sunny was eight years old, Maxon was nine. She and her mother wanted to take Maxon skiing but his father said no. They were going to go skiing, wrapping up in parkas and snow pants, fuzzy hats, goggles, scarves, until no one could distinguish Sunny from a regular child with a regular head all full of glossy ringlets or straight layers. Maxon, they felt sure, would benefit from going skiing. From getting out of the valley. They all would. They were going to drive to Vermont. But his father said no.

Nu also said no, said they were crazy, freezing to death in the snow, but Emma was adamant. She had bought a pale blue ski jacket for herself and goggles for both the children, which they wore while pulling each other on disk toboggans around the yard. Paul Mann said the boy was needed at home. Needed at home, when there were five other brothers, all older, all working on the property in their various capacities: lumberjack, bulldozer, meth cooker, etc. Why this one small other brother was needed so greatly when they could never remember to feed him, the Butcher women could not comprehend. But he was not allowed to go and Sunny was very angry about it.

*   *   *

I
N THE WINTER THERE
was no bicycling, no trail ride, and not even any time for play after school, because it got dark and cold so early, so they both rode the bus to Sunny’s house, where they ate, then walked through the valley to Maxon’s. Then Sunny ran back, Maxon-style, brushing the trees with her hand, climbing and clamoring up the hill in a rush while Nu stood at the back door worrying and waiting. She went with him that night on his walk home; they left right away after school with hot sandwiches in their pockets, so Nu wouldn’t worry. They cut a wide angle through the valley, not a direct route. It was cold, the pines were shrouded in ice, every little branch a glass filament, and the wind brought the boughs tinkling down around them, raining crystals. Their boots crunched in the snow. The creek, frozen at the bottom of the valley, was an ice sculpture of a creek, frozen in motion, all the little waterfalls. They stopped there, by Maxon’s stump cache, which they had turned into a fairy throne.

“All hail the king the fairy!” cried Maxon.

“Come all the fairy come to king,” yelled Sunny. “Die the enemy the fairy evermore!”

“A feast the fairy come!” shouted Maxon. He brushed off a log where they often sat to talk or pretend fairy courts, and they sat down to eat.

“The wolf tribe come the feast,” Maxon said through a mouthful of ground beef. “The hawk tribe say death to the wolf tribe.”

“The hawk tribe bring the penitence,” said Sunny. “Bring ten penitence the feast, keep all the wolf tribe cold the snow.”

They went on like this as they ate, doing their pretend in their own words, garbled and fast. It was all wound in with the tribes of the forest, the wars they were in, the plots they had played out, the characters they had invented. Maxon had it all worked out in visuals around a particular stand of trees, like a data map. Sunny tried to understand him when he talked fast, tried to talk back, faster. She was the one who was reading a whole lot of children’s literature, so she had a fair amount to offer, even though she wasn’t of the forest as he thought he was. They both sensed it getting darker. They threw the last bits of their food into a crook of a nearby huge bent tree, as an offering, and they knew it was time to move on.

“Maxon,” she said finally, slower. “You so fear the father.”

“Not fear I the father,” he said, still in the play speak. “Fear I the mother.”

“Maxon,” she insisted. “You are afraid of him. Why? What does he do to you?”

Maxon turned to her with a black look, and the revelation that loomed was terrible enough without showing itself. Simple enough, common enough, but it hurt her badly. She put her arms around him. “I love you, Maxon, the fairy king, the boy the forest, love you I forever.”

He grinned, not looking her in the eye, and pushed her off. He raced for home. “Do not follow, Sunny, the bird egg, the river rock! Get to the home! For safe! For tomorrow! Run!”

She watched him go, knowing they had lingered too long in the dusk, feeling the bone-chilling damp settling on her, inside her expensive mail-order coat. She knew she should turn around and run straight up the hill for home, but she didn’t turn, she followed him, slipping between the trees, boots soft on the snow. She saw him run up the hill, zigzag, touching the trees as he ran. As if he were blind and finding his way. She stayed at the tree line as he ran down the slope and across through the field, slipping through the layers of barbed wire, now a black spot against the glowing white field of snow. He went into the house, for a moment outlined in a yellow rectangle, and then gone, the bang of the ill-fitting screen door loud in the falling dusk. When she turned back to the trees it was darker still. She could make her way easily, it was familiar to her, it was the hawk tribe territory, and she knew the trees and the ferns and the old log where a battle had taken place over the remains of a long-dead doe.

The only place she had to be careful, in taking a more direct route home, was among the big rocks on the hillside. Where the mountain got steep on their Butcher side of the valley, there were huge rocks protruding from the earth, the product of some eruption millennia past, giant hulking things honeycombed with deep ravines, dangerous in the dark. As she skirted the rocks, she heard from within their labyrinth depths a small cry.

She thought maybe a deer had fallen into a crack, gotten trapped between two of the steep sides of the rock. A deer or maybe a bear. Her heart raced. A mountain lion could crawl out. A deer would be impossible to lift by herself. She would go back and get Nu. She should go back now, immediately, and get Nu. Her mother would say, “Yes, Nu. Go and see what it is.” Nu would go by herself and save or kill whatever was there. And yet, she had to be sure of what she had heard before she left, so she went down on her knees in the snow, and crept over to the edge of the ravine. Down there, something was moving. It was a man. It was Paul Mann. It was Maxon’s father.

“Jesus Christ, thank you,” he wheezed. Then louder, “You there! Who is that? Who is up there?”

Sunny said nothing. The man’s legs were twisted under him in the shape of a Z; he waved his arms, but clearly he could not move. He was covered in pine needles, from where he had pulled down the earth around him, trying to dig himself out. She smelled liquor on him, even from ten feet above him, and she saw he was wearing only a T-shirt and his filthy suspenders, his work pants.

“Who is that?!” he repeated, aggressively. “That you, Maxon? Get your ass home and get your ma. Get your brothers. I thought I was going to freeze to death in this shithole waiting for one of you shit-for-brains to stumble along here. Where you been? Over there sucking face with that bald little bitch? You go get your ma, right now. Did you hear me? Move your ass or I’ll make sparks on it!”

Sunny removed her head from above the hole. Her pulse was racing; she felt like her eyes were going to pop out from the way her blood was pounding in her face.

“What were you doing on our property?” she said very clearly, in her sternest little girl voice.

“Who’s that up there? Come back here, let me look at you,” he said.

She pulled off her hat and stuffed it in her pocket, unwound her scarf from her neck. The bitter chill of the advancing evening bit into her warm skin, but she let it, felt her ears tingling and her breath freezing in her nose. She stuck her head back over the lip of the ravine, and let him see her against the sky.

“Oh, ah, Suzy, Suzy, it’s you. Ah, I’m sorry I thought you was somebody else. Run and get someone now, you got to help me out of this hole, honey,” he crooned. She sat there looking at him for a few seconds, memorizing the sight of him in the hole, because she knew this was a moment she would never get back.

When they left Burma, when they stood in Rangoon about to board the steamer to take them on the long journey to San Francisco, to Chicago, to this night under these stars, under this rising moon, over this pleading man, her mother turned her back toward the city, toward the strange harbor, and told her, “Look, Sunny. Look at what you are seeing now and then close your eyes and think it in your head, so you will never forget. You will never again see what you are seeing now, God willing. So take a good look so you can remember it. This is the place where you became you.” She could still remember, dimly, five years later, the outlines of the pagodas, the low flat government buildings, the walls of the harbor. And now she looked at this person in the hole, Paul Mann, and thought hard about his outlines, the shape of his body, locked in the stones. Then she removed her head again from the lip of the ravine, replaced her outerwear, and marched toward home.

She breathed lightly, even climbing the hill the rest of the way home. She breathed up in the top part of her body, her eyes wide open. The rising moon illuminated the whole of the fields around their house. The house lay nestled in the hemlock trees, beautiful cottage full of warmth and love and the welcoming arms of her mother and Nu.

Two days later they found Paul Mann. He had died of exposure after falling, drunk, into a small ravine. His last bottle was found beside him, smashed. His frozen face was lifted up, pointed toward the sky, features frozen in place. Later he thawed out, was buried, and allowed to rot. The Butchers took Maxon on the ski trip to Vermont; his mother was happy to let him go. She had a lot on her hands. He was not missed.

*   *   *

A
FTER THE CRAFT SHOW,
Sunny went home. Bubber was napping and the nanny was drowsing on the sofa, half watching
Oprah
. Sunny dropped her keys on the table. It was so peaceful; she could hardly believe it. When you are sitting on a three-legged stool and you’ve kicked out all three legs, but you’re still sitting upright, must you assume that you’re just so good, you levitate? Or must you assume that you were sitting on the ground all along? When there’s nothing left to burn, maybe you have to set yourself on fire.

What gruesome sight would it take for her friends to reject her outright, for them to recognize that she was foreign, unworthy? There’s a woman with a mole over half her face. There’s a woman who can’t stop talking about her therapy appointments. She had envisioned rejection, renouncing, she had envisioned being drummed out of the neighborhood, her cardigans cut to rags, her minivan repossessed, but she had not anticipated that what might happen was that they would sort of kind of identify with her. That this, the baldness, would make her more like them, not less. That she had not envisioned.

Her BlackBerry buzzed in her bag. She took it out and pushed the button to retrieve a text from Angela Phillips, the wife of another one of the astronauts on board the rocket. “Don’t turn on TV,” it said. “Call Stanovich.” She felt her heart race. She dialed the number for the Langley research center, got Maxon’s research partner on the lunar-colony project. He was crying.

“Sunny,” he said, “the rocket has been hit. It’s been hit by a meteor.”

“Is he dead?” she croaked into the phone.

“They don’t know,” said Stanovich. “They’ve lost communication with the rocket. Sunny, I’ll miss him so much. Are you going to be all right?”

As if she would be. As if she would not die without him. How could Stanovich know them, and still not know? But it was not uncommon. They were both so private. There were not a lot of love notes scattered about the house. People wondered, or asked her sometimes, how could she be married to Maxon? How could she keep on loving him in spite of his obvious deficiencies? She might say,
How do we love each other? We love each other like naked children in a strange jungle, when every stump turns into an ogress, each orchid into a lump of maggots. We didn’t say, “I love you,” just as we didn’t, after a day of wandering lost in the trees, turn to each other and say, “We are the only naked children in this jungle.” Everyone else was just a jaguar or a clump of dirt.
Sometimes it comes to that desperate state, when you have to cling to each other and be alone. When no one else can truly matter. She thought,
Ours is one of the epic loves of our generation. Possibly of all time. Who cares if no one sees it, walking by? This story is a love song. Who cares if history won’t remember?

*   *   *

T
HE SUN WENT ON
through the sky and down. Bubber went to sleep. But Sunny turned on every light in the house. She went to her wig room and stood in the doorway, her breath coming to her in rags. She had the same falling feeling of someone who has decided belligerently to climb a slate roof, and who has fallen off that roof, and is headed for the ground. She went to the wig that was closest to the door and slipped it off its resting place. This particular one was her go-to girl for all occasions, a masterpiece of blond waves and tresses, long and unstyled. She picked it up in her hands and quickly settled it on her head, felt its weight on her, felt it squeezing her head back into its regular, proper shape. She put her hands out and turned to the right, turned to the left. She walked slowly back out into the bedroom, into the hallway, and all through the house.