Lady Sunshine

by Amy Mason Doan

  The albums were still in cellophane, emblazoned with round yellow Tower Records New! stickers. That meant they were at least $3.99 apiece. A lot of money for a poor wanderer, for a joke.

  “My contribution to the Rec Room,” Colin said. “But only if you give your blessing, of course. Otherwise we’ll toss them in the fire. A ritual purification.” Colin snatched the top album from the stack in Graham’s hand and stood. He held it over the snapping flames, looking right at Graham and smiling.

  He had a great smile. I was besotted enough to register the thought, though it was a strange moment.

  “They’re just teasing,” Willa whispered, sensing my tension. “They’re always like this, because Colin says my dad is a music snob. Watch, it’ll be fine.”

  Sure enough, Graham held his hand out for the album, smiling indulgently. “Always good to know what the kids are twitching to these days. Thank you kindly, lad.”

  It was the first time I’d seen someone come close to disrespecting Graham. But the moment passed so quickly. Graham smiled at me, cracking open a new beer. “We don’t burn albums here, do we, Lady?”

  I shook my head, honored to be singled out.

  The rest of the night went as normal.

  Colin got picked by the bottle and sang a raucous sailors’ tune he’d learned canning. Graham clapped louder than anyone.

  When Colin and I were walking down to our cabins that night, he said, “So, Graham seems to be in good form this summer. I’m glad, for Angela and Willa’s sake.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, that he can be...you know.”

  “What?”

  “Oh. Nothing. I’ve known Graham and Angela forever. I’m like the son they never wanted. And you? Known them long? You and Willa seem tight. You’re always disappearing together.”

  I shook my head, but this pleased me. “I hadn’t met any of them before this June.”

  Colin nodded thoughtfully. Then he smiled, looking up at the sky. “Weird to think of it watching us.”

  Skylab—he didn’t need to say the name. We were all aware of Skylab that summer. You could be talking about it in broad daylight and you’d still have to look up at the flat blue sky. It was always up there. A threat, a joke, a shining symbol of governmental arrogance and human fragility.

  “It’s not coming down in our part of the world,” I said.

  “No?”

  “I saw it on the news.”

  “Well, okay then. I guess I can sleep soundly tonight, Jackie of the trustworthy eyes.”

  I was halfway up Slipstream’s steps when he called, “Hey. Why do you and Willa disappear all the time? You always look so eager to get away.”

  “Oh, you know.” I jiggled the right handrail; it was loose, but I kept fixing it with gum. “She’s teaching me about local flowers, berries. Stuff like that.” So much for trustworthy eyes.

  “Ah, right. Well, sleep well. If you get any updates on space debris, you’d better knock on my door first.”

  “I will!”

  I liked Colin. I half wished I’d tugged him up my cabin steps; I’d almost done so.

  But the fact that Willa and I stole away to work on our songs every chance we got was our secret.

  So were the spots where we found our privacy—the dark treehouse, the warm hollows in the beach dunes we carved behind sheaves of seagrass, the buzzing, milkweed-shaded banks of the Far Pond.

  She had her budding flirtation with Liam from the custard shack and I might soon have Colin—he was hard to read.

  But those places were only for me and Willa.

  17

  Lovedrenched

  1999

  Shane keeps asking me how I’m doing. How I feel, knowing about the songs.

  It’s a reasonable question.

  But the answer changes hourly. Sometimes I’m overcome, in disbelief that Willa has reappeared after so long in such a strange form. Sometimes I’m proud of us. Of what we made together. Then I’m furious with her for disappearing, for throwing away her voice, her talent. Her life. For leaving so many mysteries behind, and turning her back on me. Just as quickly as it comes, my anger dissolves into sadness.

  And then simple gratitude—to Willa, for transcribing our work so it wouldn’t be lost forever, for the fact that she must not have hated me during those minutes. She wanted to be close to me inside those lyrics and chords and melodies, at least.

  Shane and I told everyone about the music. I was worried that they’d think it was some kind of trick, that maybe I’d even been in on it, sneaking our work in with the great Graham’s.

  But they were all so full of compliments about the songs, how much they add to the album, that I felt ashamed I’d worried. Bree had sensed all along that the songs were written by more than one person—“inscrutable,” she’d said of the collection at campfire—and now we all know she was right.

  They asked me this morning, yet again, to come down and listen.

  “Not yet,” I said. I’m not ready. Whether I’m grateful Willa included them or not, it won’t be easy to hear them.

  Instead I’m in the Rec Room, organizing the albums I tossed during my rampage last week. It may be in worse shape than when I arrived, but I have time on my side now. A little more than a month to pull myself together. I have a lace kerchief on my head made from an armchair doily, and my bare arms flutter with Post-its I stuck there so I’d be ready to sort—garbage, recycle, Goodwill, Pop Culture Museum. I thought if I looked like a serious organizer I’d act like one.

  I’m doing the classical albums first—they’re safe, impersonal. Heaped in a corner where I’m unlikely to come across a song title I remember from campfire, or a radio tune that Willa and I danced to at the beach.

  Then I turn to my right, and pow. A picture of seven-year-old Willa, playing in the mud at the Far Pond, right at eye level. Propped against an orange corduroy cushion on top of the waist-high cubby shelf, like it’s the featured title in a record store display.

  Or a viper waiting to strike.

  It’s the back cover of Lovedrenched, Graham’s third album, written in the glow of the year he and Angela first moved here, when Willa was a toddler.

  I take it and sit back on my heels, setting it on my lap. Willa’s in black and white, but even so her smile is dazzling. Her thin legs are streaked from knee to toe. She’d been looking for the butterflies that lay their eggs in milkweed leaves, by the pond’s rich soil, she’d told me. She looks so happy. So young and free.

  The room’s a mess, but I’m sure I didn’t leave Lovedrenched like that, upright, on top of a pile. Someone’s been poking around. The kids, maybe.

  I turn the album over. There’s Graham, lying on his back in the pond, holding his guitar with his eyes closed. He looks like he’s levitating, a god. The sunlight’s rainbow bubbles hide the raft under his back, so it seems like an act of great faith and daring, a miracle: my uncle trusting that he and his dear Gibson won’t sink into the opaque green water.

  I wonder if the raft is still on the bank, waiting patiently for a passenger. It’s probably rotted to splinters by now. I wonder if it still feels like magic at the pond, if the milkweed butterflies still cluster there, laying their precious eggs.

  Windward Realty would want me to clean the raft up...

  I set the album down, peel the Post-its from my arms, and go outside.

  * * *

  I remember the way: Willa showed me. Start at the old logging road north of the house...

  From there I head farther north, the afternoon sun on my left. Spruces and evergreens cool me as I walk; it’s shady on this side of the property, shrouded in mystery. I remember these soothing sounds. The high chatter of crickets, even in daylight. The chirps of the small birds that nest in the inland reeds. They’re more gentle-sounding than the shore birds.

 
The Far Pond is where Willa and I became fledgling songwriters. A whole afternoon could pass without more than a scrap of music we liked, but we didn’t care. It felt so good to team up—me in charge of lyrics, Willa the music—and make something that hadn’t existed before. After years of feeling weak, worthless, songs were little worlds I could control, but they didn’t leave me hollow like messing around with my classmates had. And after saying things I didn’t mean for so long—to my father, Patricia, whoever—the words poured out. Words that matched the inside me. Willa accepted all of them without judgment. She didn’t just hear me, she transformed the scattered outpourings of my heart into music. Into things with strength, structure. Things that were lasting.

  Magic, isn’t it? Willa had whispered to me when she first led me to this pond so that we could write without anyone knowing, or bothering us. She’d closed her eyes, tilted her chin to the sky.

  When I’m almost there, something snaps sharply to my right. I stop and fiddle with my shoelace, listening for Fiona and Kauri.

  But I hear no one. I keep walking, alert to every sound.

  Twenty feet from the pond, where I can catch glimpses of the water’s shine, a little blue interlaced with the green foliage, there’s a series of cracks. Right behind me. I freeze. “It’s okay, guys,” I say. “I’m not mad. C’mout, c’mout, wherever you are. Kauri. Fee, c’mon.”

  Nothing—odd. Now that we’re friends and I’m their unofficial summer piano teacher, they usually giggle at this point.

  A ridiculous thought. If I turn, I’ll see her familiar gold hair, and she’ll emerge from the trees and smile and explain that it’s all a mistake. She’s been here all along, she left out the album with her picture on it so I’d come here and find her...

  And she’ll say that it’s the third sign. Angela choosing me as sole heir, our lyrics neatly transcribed in the notebook twenty years ago but not reappearing until recently... They’re not coincidences. They’re calls.

  Calls from her.

  I hold my breath and turn, but of course there’s no figure haunting these waters, no gold hair. Nothing but green.

  I’m angry at myself. A little frightened by what my mind is capable of here. I’m thirty-seven, a teacher, a reasonable person. Yet out of no more than an album placed where I don’t remember leaving it, I’d concocted a magical scenario in which Willa had left me greetings from the beyond.

  “Motherfuh... No no no no...”

  I spin back toward the pond and it’s Shane. In the middle of the water, flailing, his frantic slapping noises making a steady backbeat to his shouts: “No no... Fuuuhuuck!”

  I run to the shore. His back is to me as he straddles the sinking raft like it’s a horse and holds his guitar over his head and kicks, leaning wildly this way and that.

  I have to laugh as I slosh in. I can see the problem—one of the life vests Graham nailed under the crude raft has come loose and drifted off, so the raft’s sinking.

  Of course, I realize as I surge toward the capsizing craft, the cold water a whole-body shock. Shane was snooping through the Rec Room albums, found Lovedrenched, and, naturally, got inspired to hike here to re-create his idol’s legendary cover. The pond’s hard to find, a half-hour walk on the northeastern edge of the property, but he’s probably been roaming the grounds for days.

  There’s always a logical explanation.

  Shane’s muttering an impressive stream of profanity. “Fuck this fucking slime pit... Ow!”

  “Is that an official vessel distress call?” I yell as I sidestroke forward, now just a few feet from him.

  He looks over his shoulder in shock, eyes wide. Surprise gives way to relief that I’ve appeared, a miracle. But his sudden shift has thrown him off balance and he’s off the raft and trying to tread water with only his legs, his guitar hoisted overhead like a barbell.

  I swim up. “Here. I’ve got it.” I grab the neck of the guitar while he holds the other end.

  “Well,” he pants. “This isn’t. Embarrassing. In the slightest.”

  We kick our way to shore, each paddling with one arm, the guitar shaky above us.

  A minute later we’re on the muddy bank, dripping, wringing water from our clothes. I yank off my head kerchief and rub at the spattering of drops on the guitar. “There. Is the inside okay?”

  “I think so... Just feeling ridiculous.”

  “Don’t. I’ve always wanted to try out my ocean rescue technique from Girl Scouts. I’m just disappointed we didn’t need to blow up our shirts into flotation devices.”

  “I think you deserve a badge, anyway.”

  Glug, glug, glug—we turn at once. We survey the scene of the disaster, just in time to catch the raft becoming vertical, then bobbing valiantly. A second later, it’s gone. All that’s left are bubbles. And one ancient red life vest, floating like a dead fish.

  “I drowned the raft,” Shane says, his hand to his forehead. “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s okay. Hey, you’re bleeding.”

  “Am I?”

  I hold his elbow to inspect the V of blood on his right bicep, blot it gently with the kerchief. “I don’t think you need a tourniquet. Darn, another scout skill I can’t bust out.”

  “You’re ruining your pretty hat...”

  “It’s nothing. Let’s get you cleaned up. There’s first aid stuff in the kitchen.”

  He looks back once more at the spot where the raft was, and I know what he’s thinking.

  “Shane. Leave it.”

  “I can probably still find it. The raft’s part of this place. I feel horrible.”

  “It’s a bunch of two-by-fours and a rotting life vest. You did me a favor by sinking it.”

  * * *

  We sit on the sunny porch steps, wrapped in musty quilts I unpacked from a Goodwill-bound box in the hall—his, yellow-and-white check, mine, purple paisley. Though the long walk back was warming and now only our tennis shoes, lined up side by side on the grass in front of us with the tongues lolling out, are still wet. We were both quiet on our return hike, but it was an easy silence, one that gave the forest’s big and small glories—evergreen trees so triangular they looked like children’s drawings, chittering squirrels spiraling up trunks, holding still until we passed—their due. I was glad Shane didn’t feel the need to fill the time with chatter.

  We’re dry and warm, but we linger, lazy and comfortable after our adventure.

  Shane adjusts his quilt around his shoulders. “So,” he says, mischievous. “Aren’t you going to ask?”

  “Ask what?”

  “What I was doing in the pond?”

  “I already know. You were re-creating Graham’s raft stunt from the Lovedrenched cover.”

  “Yeah. I saw the album in the Rec Room this morning. Sorry, did I mess up your system? I didn’t mean to—”

  “No, don’t worry about it.”

  “Anyway, I bet I looked pretty foolish out there,” Shane says.

  “A little.” I think of him flailing in his sopping green shirt and laugh. “Like a frog whose lily pad betrayed him.”

  “So. She can laugh. It’s a nice sound.”

  I’m defensive: “I laugh all the time.”

  “At home, maybe. Hard for you to laugh here, I guess.”

  His comment has stopped my laughter instantly. I brace myself for what’s to come. He has an anxious look in his eyes that tells me he wants to talk about the Kingstons.

  “Stunt,” he says.

  “What?”

  “You said Graham’s raft photo was a stunt. Interesting choice of words. I guess he could be a little much, huh?”

  I stand, tighten my quilt around my shoulders, and go up the steps to the porch.

  I reach high to touch a little brass hook screwed into the roof beam. It’s the hook that held Kate’s dinner-bell triangle. I haven’t fo
und the triangle itself, which hung on a leather strap.

  I remember that sound. Solid, commanding, comforting, like Kate herself. Dear Kate, who decamped to become a state park host in Arizona in the eighties after everything fell apart here, then died peacefully in her trailer at age eighty-one a few years back. She and I wrote for a long time.

  It’s probably about six o’clock right now. Willa and I would be dashing across the field from wherever we were writing. The pond, the beach. “Cornbread!” she would shout to me as we ran. “With lemon-marionberry tarts and zucchini fritters!” Her sense of smell was as keen as an animal’s.

  A little much. Yes. Graham was everywhere. He took up all the space here—the great songwriter. His genius and struggles and needs left no room for anyone else’s. Willa and I hid our songwriting away, tucking it into corners. I bet Graham had never written or played a single word at the pond before that photo shoot; the album cover was a fraud.

  Finally, I answer Shane. “Sometimes he could be a little over the top.” I turn to him and lean against the porch railing. “So, was your field trip today worth it?”

  “Hardly. I clearly wasn’t able to re-create the cover. But to be fair, that photo shoot was so elaborate. Really big-time. Graham was ecstatic about it.” Something passes over his face then—embarrassment about how much he worships my uncle, I imagine. How he’s inserted himself into the past like one of Graham’s intimates. He quickly amends: “Looks ecstatic on the cover, I mean. I read that in an article. About how happy he was, wrapping Lovedrenched. I sound like a fanatic.”

  “Not at all.”

  “I’m lucky you found me. Though I have a confession to make.”

  “What?”

  “This is only my second-best guitar.” He thumps it and grins. “If I’d been a true fan, I’d have brought my best onto that raft.”