Lady Sunshine

by Amy Mason Doan

  Are you a summer, spring, winter, or fall? Whoever’d taken the quiz before me was a Summer, but she’d crossed out her results and written, “I AM ALL SEASONS. I WILL NOT BE TRAPPED IN ONE!”

  I liked this girl. I wished she was here in person, instead of only scribbles.

  Pop-pop! Pop-pop-pop!

  An engine. Old and sputtering. I switched off my flashlight and looked out the window above my bed. A single headlight at the top of the driveway: a motorcycle.

  After a minute, a yellow flashlight beam descended the hill to meet it, like a fairy greeting another in the dark.

  Not Kate. I knew her brisk walk, and this welcoming glow of light was moving too slowly, swinging back and forth too languidly. The engine stopped and the motorcycle headlight went out.

  “Who’s that, the king of the castle?” the man on the motorcycle called. He was laughing, but his voice sounded tired. “Come out to greet the dirty rascal?”

  “Your words, good sir, not mine. Pray, how was the journey?” This voice, from the man with the flashlight, was an appealing, resonant baritone, booming and wide-awake despite the hour.

  So this was my uncle. Anyone else talking like that, in Old English witticisms, would have annoyed me. But his velvety voice saved him from sounding obnoxious, and it was clear this routine was a familiar joke to both men.

  “I hauled ass,” Weary Voice said. “Haven’t stopped since the city.”

  “You must be famished. Would sir care to partake of our local delicacy before he passes out in his cabin?”

  “Man, I’ve been drooling over Kate’s chili since Sacramento. Mitch and Sooz here yet?”

  “You know Madame Suzette. Friday might mean a week from Friday.” My uncle paused. “She’s bringing a new beau.” Then he dropped the fake formality and went on in a regular voice, sincere and tinged with pity. “Mitchell’s coming tomorrow. Alone.”

  A dramatic whistle. “Poor Mitch. He’s got it bad.”

  “He’ll survive. This is the best rehab west of the Rockies for the brokenhearted.”

  “You include yourself in that group?”

  “Easy, there.”

  “Daddy!”

  I hurried to my front steps for a better view of the field. My cousin, here at last. But I was too far away to see more than a mass of lamplit yellow hair.

  “We need help carrying tables,” she called.

  “Coming, boss!” my uncle yelled up to her, laughing. “Let’s get you fed. Wait’ll you see my Willow. She’s taller than you. And I’ve got to show you this tape gadget someone sent me from Japan. It’s a trip. Makes the music sound like an underwater kazoo, but what the hell do I know...”

  I strained to hear more but the voices faded, and my uncle’s swinging flashlight beam crossed the field, climbing back up the hill.

  I stayed on my dark porch, observing. For hours I watched, behind a curtain of leaves, as the hordes came. Three cars, another motorcycle, and something long and groaning—a bus or camper. Once they parked, the visitors ascended the hill, heading for the main house. These were happy invaders; their calls, as they got out of their cars, stretching after their long drives, were full of joy.

  Laughter rang out across the field, car doors plunked, names were tossed.

  “Put on a few pounds, Kip!”

  “Hey. Hey, take it easy.”

  “April here yet?”

  “...coming with Max tomorrow night...”

  “Seen Kingston?”

  “Yeah, up at the house. In fine form...”

  I was curious whether Suzette would arrive with her mysterious beau, and if Mitchell’s voice would sound as broken as his heart, but I didn’t hear their names again that night. I heard many others—and many fragments of other dramas.

  It wasn’t simply entertaining, listening in the dark to strangers. It was mesmerizing. An intoxicating feeling of control—because I chose when to turn the drama on and off, unlike in my own life—and escapism—because I was out of my head, away from my own problems. Hovering over another world. I was a veteran eavesdropper at home and at school. But I hadn’t heard anything as interesting as this before. These were adults, yet they sounded like kids on the first day of summer camp. Anticipation was the undercurrent. I imagined faces to match the disembodied voices, stories to fill out the hints.

  My uncle didn’t reappear; he stayed up at the main house. The traffic flowed uphill, to him. Footsteps tromped in the gravel, beer tabs plinked in the night air, more fairy flashlights danced in the field, and bursts of laughter rang out from the main house.

  Around midnight the cars stopped coming, around one I heard splashes and hoots in the pool, and by two most of the cabins were aglow.

  From Plover, the cabin nearest me, a baby’s wail soared high over the trees, but it stopped almost immediately, the desperate sound replaced by a man’s soothing bass singing “Mockingbird.”

  I couldn’t see my new neighbors, but the father’s voice was clear, and lovely:

  And if that diamond ring don’t shine...

  I went inside and curled under my quilt made of old shirts and neckties.

  * * *

  In the morning, I crept outside in my nightshirt, peeking out at the field from the trees. Color everywhere—bright beach towels and picnic blankets, print dresses, sun hitting hennaed hair.

  Back inside, I brushed my hair with my round brush, coaxing it into the neat curled-under Dorothy Hamill style I usually wore. Then I remembered where I was and messed it up. My clothes were a bigger problem. Everything was too new, too tailored. Matching blouses and culottes from the Young Miss department at Saks, which kept my measurements and family account number on file. I wished I’d armed myself with Levi’s so worn they were nearly white, prairie skirts, concert T-shirts aged to limpness.

  I crumpled a dry-cleaned green blouse and knotted it at my waist, rolled up my white Jordaches.

  Time to study the hordes up close.

  But first I pulled my suitcase from under my bed. The only things I hadn’t unpacked—both gifts from Patricia—would be good insurance. I needed something to do with my hands, the only decent advice I’d heard in therapy. Everyone else’s seemed busy with guitars and berry baskets and other hands and other people’s long hair.

  The first prop was a yellow hat Patricia had found antiquing and framed for my room. She wanted me to rip down my concert posters and let her “spruce up” my walls in proper Nob Hill frilly style. Instead, I’d hung it right between Donna Summer and Debbie Harry to bug her. But when I was packing and Patricia passed my doorway to offer a train case she wasn’t bringing to Europe, I’d impulsively grabbed the frame off the wall and pried out her gift. She’d watched this impromptu surgery in shock.

  “It’ll be perfect for the beach this summer,” I’d said, smiling.

  I’d planned to throw it away, not knowing it would come in handy here. I could tilt the brim down, fan myself with it, tilt the brim back up. But I drew the line at baby’s breath; I plucked it off the hatband and threw it out the window.

  My next prop—the other gift in Patricia’s “yellow series”—was a diary. Patricia thought that buying me cheerful yellow objects would transform me into the sunny stepdaughter she deserved.

  I grabbed the diary, threw on the hat, and ventured outside.

  4

  BlueHour

  1999

  Late, the night of Jackie’s arrival

  I wake with a jolt.

  Music. The sweet sound of a guitar, someone playing far away, outside. The tricky run at the end of Graham’s “Three,” the last song on the album of the same name. I’d been humming along with the melody in my half sleep, my right hand tapping the piano accompaniment on my left.

  I’d been dreaming about the Kingstons. The three of them sitting together in the sunny field. Graham, playing, with Will
a on one side and Angela on the other. My uncle was like a lion, so hulking and proud. So adored. Willa was smiling at him but reaching out to me, inviting me over.

  But it’s quiet now. No sound except the rustling leaves. Even Toby, draped over my feet on the stiff parlor daybed, is silent. He seems as content as he is at home in Boston.

  Unlike me.

  I don’t know what I’m doing here. Or why Angela chose me as her heir.

  We hadn’t spoken in decades. Surely there was someone else she could have picked. One of her old theater friends, or Graham’s music people. She must have known how hard coming here would be for me, that I wouldn’t want the money. And Angela was never unkind. At least not back then. It doesn’t make any more sense now than it did when the FedEx deliveryman rang my bell in Boston, asking in a bored voice for me to sign. As if its jaunty orange-and-white “Tear Here” strip wasn’t an explosive fuse, about to blast apart my carefully constructed life...

  I shiver, wrap the blanket tighter around my shoulders. It was probably a car stereo blaring outside the gate. One of the fanatics the estate attorney warned me about on the phone. That’s the word he’d used to describe my uncle’s devotees, the ones who leave flowers and engrave the waterfall sign with their messages. Not fans, fanatics. A few have tried to trespass over the years.

  Maybe it was simply a trick of the wind.

  But the next morning, as I’m unlocking my rental car, parked just outside the gate on the wide swath of gravel, I hear it again.

  I squeeze the key chain. It’s real. It’s no radio, no dream. Someone’s strumming the same fragment of song I heard last night. So beautiful—and so familiar. Graham’s sound remained consistent from song to song, decade to decade. A tiptoeing start in the key of G, the abrupt shift from major to minor a full two minutes in, later than you’d expect.

  “Hey,” I say. It comes out barely above a whisper.

  The sound gets richer, more intricate. Mesmerizing, fast as sudden raindrops against the window.

  A neighbor? No. The playing is too close. The nearest house is half a mile away, down the hill on Gull Lane.

  Of course. They’re in the meadow. The little poppy meadow just outside the fence, to the left of the road. I run across the gravel and scramble up the muddy, root-tangled path through the trees, toward the music.

  A man sits cross-legged, guitar on his lap. His eyes are closed.

  Mussed dark brown hair, stubble, black jeans, a faded black concert T-shirt under an old black suit jacket. He’s younger than me, maybe not even thirty. Lanky and angular—half the width of my uncle. His face is what Kate would have called “pretty before the first beer.” He’s got to be one of the many interested parties who have crowded my voice mail over the past week, one of the “intriguing offers” the lawyer said I should definitely consider: “Magazine walk-arounds, fan club visits, photo shoots.”

  I wonder which of these three this guy wants.

  Sensing my shadow looming over him, the stranger opens his eyes, hands frozen on the strings. His face cycles through emotions, expressions coming as quick as his playing—startled, confused, sheepish, worried. The worried look sticks. He knows he’s hurt his case, whatever it is.

  Like the sliver of cliff holding the trail to the waterfall and beach, this is officially state land, not the Kingstons’. (Correction: not mine.) But even without breaching the fence, it feels like he’s trespassed.

  He scrambles to his feet. “Jacqueline Pierce? I’m sorry. I left you a bunch of messages at your house. Nobody at that law office would give me your mobile number.”

  “Probably because I don’t have one.” I exhale slowly, still trying to control my ragged breathing from running. “Were you playing here last night?”

  “You heard that? Shit. I didn’t think the sound would carry. I’m really sorry.”

  “It’s okay.” I’m not sure if I’m more relieved or annoyed by the unasked-for serenade, but it explains my ability to replicate Graham’s song down to the eighth note in last night’s dream, even though I’ve avoided his music for two decades.

  “I’m staying at the campground down the highway and there’s not much to do, so I couldn’t resist hiking up... The field’s still exactly like the picture, the one inside Three, with the crew...in the liner notes? It must’ve been shot from a ladder or—of course you know it.”

  He frowns, unstrapping his guitar and setting it inside the case at his feet, as if it alone was responsible for offending me.

  “Mr....?”

  “Oh hell. I haven’t even introduced myself? I’m not normally so obnoxious, swear. It’s Shane.” He pats himself down for a business card, finds one in his pocket and hands it to me:

  Shane Ingram

  BlueHour Music

  100 Capitol Dr., West Hollywood, California

  “I’m sorry about Angela,” he says, looking me in the eye. “We were sort of friends.”

  It’s the first genuine condolence I’ve received since I found out my aunt had passed away. “Thank you.”

  “So. I’ve got this...interesting project I’d like to talk to you about. I sent the details to that lawyer but...look, can I buy you breakfast somewhere and explain? It’s kind of complicated.”

  I’m hungry—the remains of my ham sandwich from the airport didn’t do much for me this morning—but I don’t need West Hollywood breakfasting across from me. Turning on the charm, working on whatever it is he’s working on. Me, it seems. “Thanks, but I have a lot to do and not much time. I’m sure you can explain your project here.”

  “Right. Of course.” He breathes deep and gives me his pitch. “I’m hoping to record an unusual sort of...tribute album to your uncle. Here, in his old studio.” He turns to face the house.

  I follow his gaze; the white tip of the shell spire is just visible over the tree line.

  His voice is reverent: “Where we can do it right. A special album for the thirtieth anniversary of Three coming up next year. Something really beautiful he would have been proud of.”

  “Covers?”

  He turns back to me. “Yes, a few. But most of the tracks would be new. Eight brand-new Graham Kingston songs after all this time.”

  With the pride of someone presenting a VIP ticket, he reaches inside his guitar case and hands me a pale yellow notebook. “His unrecorded lyrics.”

  My breath hitches—Graham’s idea book. It was always tucked into his jeans. He was never without his guitar and the notebook, the way I was never without my diary, the summer I spent here.

  “Angela gave it to me. I visited her to ask if we could do some Three covers, and she offered this, too. Look, she inscribed it.”

  I flip the notebook over and there on the back is Angela’s loopy handwriting:

  Dearest Shane,

  With my love and gratitude,

  A. K.

  “The thing is, Angela went downhill so fast at the end...I don’t have anything else in writing.”

  Relieved, I hand the notebook back. Ticket denied. “I’m sorry, then. It won’t be possible.”

  “Don’t you even want to look inside?”

  I shake my head.

  “Just to see one or two songs? Why not? Angela loved the idea.”

  Because this is hard enough. Coming here. Opening the gate, opening the door.

  He continues his pitch, something about how these lyrics are poetry and can’t stay buried forever, but I’ve tuned out. He needs to go. Every minute I spend here in the field listening to his pleas is a minute I should be packing this place away. Saying goodbye for good.

  He stares at the sky, searching there for the perfect words. “...Graham even put in some chord progressions...and the unfinished music practically wrote itself. I’m not kidding myself that what I’d make is anything more than...a...a frame.”

  At last, he’s done
talking. In spite of everything, I pity him, standing here holding the notebook gently as a sacred text.

  And even though I don’t want to, I believe him. Angela was always mercurial and trusting. This seemed just like her.

  But that didn’t mean I had to go along with it. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I can see that you care about my uncle’s lyrics. But I really have to go now.”

  I head back down the narrow path through the trees.

  A minute later he’s at my heels, a sharp snap-snap-snap as he hastily shuts his guitar case. “Please!”

  I pick up my pace, trying to block out his voice by running through a mental list of everything I need to do this week, when I hear skidding sounds behind me, twigs cracking. He mutters, “Shit.”

  Shit.

  I slow and look back at him. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine.” He emerges from the bushes unhurt, mud on his jeans, a cluster of salmonberries on his chest like a boutonniere. “Please let me buy you a coffee,” he says.

  “I don’t have the time. I only have a week to pack up the house.”

  He stops in dismay. “So you’re selling. You’ve already decided. By fall this place’ll be some god-awful housing development.”

  This stings. I’ve been trying not to think about what will happen after I hand the keys over to the real estate agent Saturday. I can’t let him see. “Maybe you should buy it. Then you can keep every stick in place. Interested?”

  “I don’t have that kind of money. I’d buy it if I could.”

  He sounds so disappointed that I can’t look at his face. I turn away and continue across the gravel to the car, faster now, though I feel myself softening despite how much I resent his judgment, and his presence. I should go up to the house and find some memento to hand him as a consolation prize. A button pried off of the dusty mixing board. A knot of fringe snipped from a studio rug. He could put it on an altar and worship it. And then leave.

  I don’t want any Kingston music memorabilia. It can all go to fans like him, to people whose link to this family is as uncomplicated as it is imaginary.