Lady Sunshine

by Amy Mason Doan

  We collapsed onto the sand after “MacArthur Park,” and when we’d stopped laughing, Colin said, staring up at the hills, “Who’s up for a little hike?”

  “Where?” I asked. The sky had gone hazy, but maybe that was only thanks to Angela’s blue-ribbon crop.

  “The falls. I’ve never gone after sunset.”

  I glanced at Willa; we all knew this was the hour Graham would be up there. Right after campfire, which we’d skipped tonight.

  “Let’s go on the swing instead,” I said, shooting Colin a fierce look.

  “C’mon, I want to see genius in action,” he said. “Willa, you’ve watched him up there before, haven’t you?”

  I was sure she’d object. But instead she didn’t answer, just stood. And, without a word, led the way up to Graham’s private ritual spot.

  It was a steep hike, and the four of us hiked silently: Willa, Liam, Colin. Me.

  I’d never been higher on this hill than the fork where the path up from the beach split—the left trail heading to the Kingstons’ gate, the right looping up past the ponds to the falls.

  The climb was steep and I was winded, but I kept the others in sight as we got closer to Graham’s special place, winding around the wooded hills in the fast-fading light. I heard the falls before I saw them. First a whisper, then a trickle, then a rush.

  And then I glimpsed him through thick branches in twilight. Graham. Sitting shirtless, with his back against the falls. His hair was wet and he was soaked, but his notebook sat on a dry rock nearby. Closed. His eyes were closed, too, chin tilted up, and his ring fingers were pressed to his thumbs, his hands raised shoulder-level in front of him. Like he was a vessel waiting for inspiration to pour down from above.

  This was genius in action? It was too absurd. The water had parted his hair down the middle and pasted it on either side of his head so he looked more like a grade-school kid about to take a bad school picture. I’d expected to find him scribbling in his notebook. Ripping out pages, fighting through ideas, fighting to master his doubts and write something brilliant. But he looked so...passive. I had to clap my hand over my mouth and nose to keep from snorting out loud. I hated to give Colin the satisfaction, even foggy from pot and worn out from hiking.

  But then Graham rose and left the falls pool, walked to the ocean-facing cliff. He stood between two thin young tree trunks near the edge, held them, and leaned forward.

  I was about to burst through the greenery and pull him back, but Willa stopped me. She shook her head, pressed her finger to her lips. So this was normal. This was part of the ritual. Now I had the answer to Colin’s question. She’d come here many times to spy on her father.

  Graham, tilting thirty degrees over the ocean, had stilled himself; his wet hair, whipping wildly, was the only part of his body that moved. I felt as I had once at an elementary school field trip to the de Young Museum, when the docent had ushered my class into the sculpture hall, and I’d stared, mesmerized, at a marble of an Etruscan man charging into battle. His mournful eyes made it clear that he would fail, would die, but his body soared forward anyway.

  If Colin had brought me here to show Graham up as a fraud, someone not worth worshipping, he’d failed.

  I looked at Colin and found, to my relief, that his expression was serious, that the moment had moved him, too, in spite of his fondness for needling Graham. If he’d still been laughing, I would have resisted my attraction to him. Colin faced me for a minute, contrite. Then we both turned our attention back to my uncle.

  A twig cracked under someone’s foot, Graham turned his head sharply, and we scattered.

  It was disorienting at this elevation. You couldn’t distinguish the roar of the waves from that of the falls, and I got separated from the other three. I looked up—Willa had tried to teach me stars—but I’d been a distracted pupil and the sky told me nothing. Blurs, blinking lights, blobs that could be airplanes or nebulae or Skylab leftovers—it all looked the same.

  I glanced down and noticed a bright mound gleaming in the dark, at my feet. Twenty feet away, another. Graham’s shell cairns. Everyone knew about them—piles of white shells that marked his path. Once, years ago, Graham had stumbled, high, off into the thick woods, and it had taken hours for him to find his way home. He added the cairns so it would never happen again, completing the project the summer before he got the idea for the Sandcastle’s shell spire.

  The trail was cut into the hillside in a long, gradual spiral, and it was astonishing how helpful the little shell piles were, guiding me in the falling dark, like neon. Like magic.

  The hill had helped me, Graham had helped me; by the last hundred feet, when I could hear the waves and my friends’ voices, I was ecstatic.

  I made it to the beach only a few minutes behind them.

  “We were just coming back for you!” Colin said. He sounded sober, and genuinely worried. A little repentant, too, after his failed mission to dethrone Graham. He hugged me and kept his arm around my waist.

  “I followed the cairns.” I was still amazed that I’d made it.

  We talked late into the night, passing a jug of Almaden, cheese, two entire loaves of bread. Willa told us what it was like here in fall and winter, when there were fewer guests, when it rained, and sometimes snowed.

  “It’s perfect,” she said. “The deepest quiet.”

  Liam opened up about his favorite surf spots and secret camping spaces and the food in Costa Rica. Colin described everywhere he’d worked over the past year—five states, a dozen jobs.

  And I, who usually told the stories, this time mostly listened.

  Tired, relieved that Graham hadn’t seen us and that the hill had guided me back safely, I reclined against Colin’s chest, letting the others’ voices wash over me. When the wine jug came my way I didn’t sip, but pressed its cold neck to my hot one and passed it on. I wanted to hold on to my exhilaration, to the sense of clarity I felt tonight.

  I kept picturing how regal and brave Graham had looked, leaning forward between those two trees, trusting that they’d bear his weight. I knew why he stood on the edge of his cliff. It wasn’t just a cheap high, or ego. He did it to remind himself that there were scarier things than trying to make music.

  Li and Willa went quiet, except for the occasional rustles and muffled sighs from their shared tarp.

  Colin bent over me, dipping his head low to kiss me upside down, his hands on my knees, trailing up my thighs. A few months ago I’d have taken his hands in mine before it started to feel too good, led him behind the grassy dunes. Looking for reversal, control. But I was braver now. Here, I found I didn’t want to do that. It felt all right with him, to lie back, to be the one tended to.

  To let fate take its course.

  20

  Running a Pound

  1999

  One week after Jackie found the key

  “Beer break?” Mat lifts the lid of the cooler. “You’ve been working hard all day, and it’s a hot one.”

  I smile but shake my head. “It’s two, and a beer’ll make me so sleepy I won’t get anything else done today, but thanks.” I’m on the front porch, labeling the boxes of kitchenware I’ve filled for tomorrow’s Goodwill pickup. My doily head kerchief has become a sweat mop, wadded in my back pocket.

  Mat’s relentless: “It’s five, East Coast time. C’mon, Jackie.” Mat has taken charge of the cooler, an ancient green metal Coleman from the pool equipment shed. He’s the only one who can lift it. “Okay, if you don’t want beer, there’s also a local pear cider I picked up. Oregon pears. Only six proof, pure fruity refreshment, excellent work fuel.”

  Shane, who’s marking up some sheet music in the porch hammock, says, “Leave her alone, Mat. Not everyone has your tolerance.”

  “You’re just jealous, Cuzzy Bro,” Mat says good-naturedly. To me: “’Cause I’m pure muscle.”

  “I’l
l take one of those ciders,” I say, figuring I’ll have a few polite sips before returning inside to work.

  Mat sends Shane a triumphant look, cracks the cider open barehanded on the porch rail, and offers it to me.

  I take a sip, then a long swallow. “That’s really good,” I say, surprised.

  Mat toasts me with his beer and Shane laughs. “You’re a corrupting influence, Mat.”

  “Who, me? I’m a force for pure good, Chook.”

  “Then give me one of those.”

  I’m laughing at the two of them, pressing the cold neck of the beer against my own damp neck and surveying the busy field. We all fixed up the Doughboy pool together yesterday during their break, scrubbing and cleaning it. I personally taped the rusty ladder. It’s an eyesore, but it’s a pool again.

  Piper and her wife, April, and their friends who’ve come up from LA for a few days are in the water doing a synchronized swim routine to the Radiohead blaring from the speakers. Mat always drags them out on Sunday afternoons, transforming the bowl into a giant stereo.

  Fiona and Kauri and some other kids someone brought are at the picnic table, working on the old Farrah Fawcett Glamour Center head I found in a closet. They’re striping Farrah’s hair green and purple with homemade dye—Jell-O powder and water made into paste.

  Three bare-chested guys and a bikinied woman are playing a whooping game of Frisbee around the campfire circle. Another woman is sunbathing, facedown, lazily throwing a tennis ball for her yellow Lab.

  Other visitors, farther off, are engaged in their own Sunday afternoon diversions. Sketching, reading. It’s like a picture in one of those Richard Scarry books I loved as a child: happy activity everywhere. With more skin.

  That’s when I see him.

  He’s walking up the center of the field, in a navy sweater vest and navy button-down and black pants, a suitcase in his hand. The sun glints off his light hair and beard. He’s squinting. Of course he forgot sunglasses. Does he own sunglasses?

  I take in the scene through his eyes. The shirtless Frisbee players, the barebacked sunbathers, the raucous swimmers, the kids with their rainbow Farrah bust.

  And me. Standing on the porch barefoot, in a short yellow sundress I found in the sauna changing room this morning. Drinking at two in the afternoon and laughing with two strange men.

  “Who’s that, a traveling salesman?” Mat asks. “Census taker? Unnnndertaker?”

  Shane turns to see who he’s talking about.

  “No,” I say. “That’s Paul.”

  * * *

  “So you just forgot to mention that you’re managing some sort of...what? Commune here this summer? Boy, when I asked if you were running away with the Moonies, I had no idea how close I was to the truth.”

  “Paul. It’s hardly a commune.”

  We’re alone in the parlor after an awkward group dinner, the door and windows shut. It’s stuffy, but though everyone moved tactfully away from the house hours ago, I don’t want to take a chance on them hearing us.

  Mat and Shane may look shaggy, but they showed better manners than me. They offered Paul a beer and a seat on the porch swing, asked about his flight, tried to make warm conversation. At dinner, everyone tried to include him, tried to keep the shop talk to a minimum. Compensating for my halting explanations and obvious shock, my fumbling hostess job.

  Paul got the address from the school office; I’d given it to them so they could mail my lesson plan forms and fall class lists here. Instead he’d brought them personally, as a surprise. He took a red-eye with two hideous layovers. The cheapest possible flight, but a splurge on his teacher’s salary.

  “Not a commune,” Paul says. “Compound, then. On your dead aunt’s property. Which you now own, if I understand what your friends were saying out there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were you ever going to tell me?”

  “Yes, of course. It all just happened. I didn’t plan it, Paul. Like I said. There’s an old analog studio down in the basement. It’s a big deal to some people.”

  “And that’s who all of these people are, your houseguests. Musicians.”

  “Not all of them. Some are friends of the musicians, and, I don’t know, sometimes people just show up.”

  “Strays. So, not a compound. A pound.” He laughs bitterly.

  “That’s not nice.”

  “I know it isn’t. I’m sorry. And they’re making a record out of your uncle’s music.”

  “Yes.” And mine.

  Paul sighs and reaches down to scratch Toby’s chin. “Hey, buddy. Toby missed me, at least.” He’s trying to joke, to lighten things up, but it comes out childish. Paul is the most mature person I know. I hate seeing him like this, knowing it’s my fault.

  “I’m sorry, Paul. I should have told you.” I squeeze his arm. “And I’m really glad you’re here.”

  He pulls away and turns his back on me, touching the pattern of nudes on the stamped velvet wallpaper. “The house is quite something. It’s not what I pictured.”

  “You pictured a small house. An old-lady house.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you pictured me alone.”

  He nods and turns to face me, rubbing his beard thoughtfully the way he does.

  “Tell me about summer school,” I say. “How’s Rae Simmons, have you seen her?”

  “She’s been coming to the Bridge program.”

  “Good. Good! I’ve been thinking about her.”

  A pause. “Should I tell her you’ll be back by September?”

  “Paul. Come on. Of course I will. That’s why I asked Frances to send my papers. I’ve already got my ticket.”

  “So much for the Cape, huh.”

  “I’m sorry about that.”

  His silence is long and heavy with accusation. He clears his throat and says quietly, “Well. You just tell me your flight number in August, then. I’ll pick you up at Logan. If you still want me to.”

  “Of course I do!” I come to him and wrap my arms around his neck, squeeze him. After a minute, he kisses the top of my head.

  “So, where are we sleeping? Upstairs?”

  “No. I don’t sleep up—It’s a mess up there.” Though of course I have no idea if this is true or not.

  I still haven’t gone up there, to the main bedroom. Or Willa’s.

  I’m behind schedule. Every day, I wake up freshly determined to go upstairs and get it over with. I tell myself I’ll work fast, be ruthless and decisive. But then I don’t. I can run up and down the beach path all day, clamber around the bowl and the hilly grounds with my visitors. But I can’t seem to climb those fourteen carpeted stairs.

  “You’ve been sleeping in here? On a sofa?” Paul says. “Not even on a real bed?”

  “It’s been fine, see? It’s really comfortable.”

  But there’s no way the two of us can both fit on the daybed, so I drag some orange velour cushions in from the Rec Room to make myself a floor pallet. Paul, selfless Paul, insists on taking it, of course.

  I don’t even try to sleep. Paul tosses for an hour and then gathers his pillows and blankets.

  “You can still sleep in here, Paul. Even if you’re mad at me. Which you have every right to be.”

  “That’s not it. The floor’s shaking too much in here. I think you have plumbing problems. I’ll sleep on that porch hammock.”

  “No, I will.”

  “I’ll be fine. One of your new friends told me we should all be sleeping in hammocks, they’re good for the spine. Apparently the American mattress industry is one giant conspiracy against the spine. Anyway, I want to get the flavor of the place.”

  “You’re a good sport, Paul. I’ll make it up to you tomorrow. I’ll cook you a big breakfast. Your runny fried eggs and everything. The works. Even if we can’t go to the Cape, we can go o
n a little road trip around here somewhere. Mendocino, or Fort Bragg? Would you like that?”

  “That sounds heavenly.” He kisses the tips of his fingers and presses them to my shoulder before he heads to the porch.

  I watch him out the window. A long, agitated lump in the hammock—a restless chrysalis. He’s in a jangly mood. But finally his body stills.

  He came all this way to get treated like a party crasher. I will make it up to him tomorrow. Show him the grounds, take him on a romantic beach picnic. My real life is in Boston. Not in the netherworld I’ve created out of twenty-year-old memories. Paul has flown three thousand miles to remind me of that.

  But I pause on the rug to feel for Shane. The sweet, secret shaking has stopped; he’s finished.

  What am I doing? I kick the leg of the daybed, the wooden lion’s paw, in frustration.

  The little jar with the key inside rolls out.

  * * *

  I cross the garden, the damp soil cold under my bare feet. I’m in only my nightshirt, but I’ll be warm soon enough, after climbing the hill.

  Creeeeaaak.

  The studio door.

  I duck behind the stone well. It’s Shane. Not asleep, then.

  He’s come out for air. To puzzle over the grace notes of whatever track he plans to record tomorrow morning.

  He enters the garden, no more than twenty feet from me. In the orange circle of the garden lamp, he looks around, rubs his hair. He touches a tomato stalk so neglected I can hear its rustle from here.

  He pulls a flashlight from his shorts pocket and heads uphill, behind the garden. Purposeful; he has a destination in mind. Ten feet. Twenty, thirty.

  I follow.

  I have no flashlight, but it’s a full moon and I can see well enough. I track his bobbing light, just like Willa once tracked me. And though I’ve avoided these fir thickets behind the house until now, they’re still familiar.