Lady Sunshine

by Amy Mason Doan

  Kingston was expected at the Gate Music Festival late that evening in San Francisco’s Polo Fields, along with Neil Young, Jefferson Starship, and other headliners. When he failed to arrive for his scheduled car service and searches around his property proved fruitless, authorities mounted a 1,000-acre search and rescue operation. Kingston was found, unconscious and dehydrated, by a scent dog, concealed in a fern-covered, narrow stone crevasse on the adjacent property, only 100 feet from where he fell.

  “Locals sometimes forget that these hills are still wild, and that our damp climate can make even seemingly gentle terrain slippery and unpredictable,” cautioned Humboldt County Parks Health and Safety Manager Sheila Newton. “This unfortunate event is a warning both to novices and confident hikers who are well acquainted with the area. We always advise...”

  Something has sprung loose inside me. Some final gate around my heart.

  It’s time.

  I planned to deal with Willa’s room while movers bustled around me, thinking it would make it easier. The organizing list I wrote the first week I came here, intending to stay only a week, is still taped to the parlor door. At the bottom it says—W room. While movers here.

  But I know now that nothing, no distraction or delay, will make it easier.

  I slip down the hall and sit at the foot of the stairs, gathering my courage.

  Toby pads across the hall, looks at me curiously, then loses interest and lies on his side, batting his white mouse toy.

  “Tk, tk, tk,” I call, craving his silky warmth, a quick hit of comfort before I have to go upstairs.

  But he’s too occupied with his synthetic mousie. It’s not rattling as it’s supposed to and the feathers have come off, but he’s ferocious—lobbing, chasing, clawing. He bats it hard and it slides far, gets stuck in the brass grill of the heating vent at my feet.

  I kneel, fish it out. But it’s not his toy, it’s a big dust bunny. Big, and pale, with a short fuzzy tail. Toby swats at my hand as I examine it, unroll it—A shoelace? No. It’s wider. With cutouts, an ornate design.

  A scrap of lace. Willa’s lace.

  Was it the piece I’d used as my diary bookmark, the Super Special Bravery Award she gave me for a few seconds of surfing? She had so many lengths of lace for tying her hair back, and this could be any of them.

  I tuck it into my pajama-top pocket and it calms me as I walk upstairs.

  I’m not sure what I’m more afraid of—that the room will be swept bare or that it’ll be exactly as it was—I only know that I need help to make it through.

  As I climb the stairs, I picture us sprawled on her rug, playing records, laughing. Willa sleeping on her bedroom floor after my birthday so I could have the bed, my well-meaning but exhausted nurse.

  And Willa hiding in her parents’ room, alone, after Graham’s accident at the falls.

  “I’m so sorry,” I whisper. “I wish I’d told you from the beginning that I didn’t have all the answers.”

  I walk down the hall, open her door, and flick on the light.

  It’s the same. Of course it is. So Angela couldn’t bring herself to change a thing. I guess that’s why she stayed here as long as she could, long past the time when she should have downsized. She’d wanted to preserve this shrine to her daughter.

  Willa’s quilt, lavender with delicate sprigs of white flowers. Willa’s ruffled pillow shams. The pale brown knitted bear cub with the stretched-out neck she’d called Acorn, because its eyes were made of acorn caps.

  On her dresser: Ambergris-Peach Essential Oil from the Nature Shed, amber and turquoise beads strung from a miniature brass tree with stained glass leaves. Stacks of surf wax: the brand called Sex Wax, chocolate-and peach-and bubblegum-scented. Willa’s thrift-store china teacups holding shells and sea glass.

  On the walls are her posters, just as she’d tacked them up: Joan and Joan and Joni and Judy. All the Js that meant so much to her.

  But no trace of this one. It’s as if I was never here. I take pieces of sea glass from a cup and arrange them to form a J on top of the dresser.

  I push aside the floral window curtain and kneel on the window seat, looking down at the field. It’s a calm, cloudy day, but I remember so well that windy, bright one. I picture a seventeen-year-old girl down there, so out of place in her starched white eyelet blouse and I. Magnin culottes. She’s dragging a yellow Samsonite suitcase. Her shiny brown shoulder-length hair, cut to look neat and frame her heart-shaped face, whips every which way in the wind. She chose to come, but she doesn’t want to be here. And she’s so angry. Her anger radiates off of her so furiously, it’s as if she, not the breeze, is making the ripples in the grass.

  She is angry. She is afraid. She asked to come, but now that she’s set everything in motion, she’s not sure she wants to be here. But of course that changed the minute her cousin invited her into her treehouse.

  I open the door to Willa’s small closet, brush a hand along her clothes. Her soft, flowing blouses, skirts, dresses. The rainbow of bandanna-print sarongs she favored for throwing over her swimsuit on the beach.

  Gently, I push the hangers to both sides, exposing the bare lathe-and-plaster slats of the back closet wall. One board near the top of the wall is not nailed in—it’s only resting on the board beneath it. I pull it out to reveal an opening, like a mail delivery slot cut into a door. But the diary isn’t there. I replace the board and shut the closet door.

  I look in the dresser, Willa’s desk, under the rug and bed.

  But the diary isn’t in this room, either. Just as it wasn’t twenty years ago. Willa must have taken it with her to Mexico. I suspected as much back then, and now I’m certain.

  It’s a comforting thought. That she wanted something of me with her.

  I test the waterbed with one hand, and though by some miracle it hasn’t leaked, it’s half-full, so surely whatever liquid remains inside has gone brackish and fetid. But I lie on it. And I hug that deformed old stuffed bear tight for a long time. Imagining that he smells like peaches and fresh air, like Willa, instead of the mustiness of decades.

  I know that, eventually, I’ll have to move. I’ll have to carry boxes up here, fill them, tape them shut, and label them. Say goodbye to Shane, and to all these good people, and fly home.

  But for now, all I want to do is hug Acorn and lie perfectly still.

  * * *

  I can’t start packing Willa’s room yet. But the next morning, early, I go in the main bedroom with boxes.

  To my relief, it’s all Angela in here—nothing of Graham remains. Angela’s clothes, Angela’s gardening catalogs, Angela’s albums of pressed flowers, her medical gear from her last weeks in the house, before Arbor View. It’s a sad combination. I check under the bed.

  Her desk has been cleared—the important documents are on file with the estate lawyer. But there’s stationery. Stamps. Some old calendars.

  My hand seizes around plastic—cold, the right width, could it be? But I know before I pull it out that it’s the wrong weight. It’s not the diary. It’s a bundle of letters in a plastic file folder, marked Correspondence.

  So formal. Letters from Willa? Did she write to Angela during those two years, despite what I was told?

  My heart leaps, though Kate had said clearly, during her increasingly despairing calls, that Willa never phoned or wrote. Angela hunted high and low, hired private detectives on three continents, burning through money she couldn’t spare back then, but they couldn’t find her. Until word came from Mexico about her drowning.

  I pull the letters out. No, they’re not from Willa. They’re only requests from music people, written after Graham got popular again four or five years ago. Asking to use the studio, to cover his songs.

  Graham would find the gushing amusing—and highly gratifying. When he released Three in 1970, the few critics who bothered to review it dismissed it as “pr
etentious” and “treacly.” When he came back in favor again, it was suddenly “pure” and “groundbreaking.”

  Some of the letter-writers are names I recognize; Shane would love to read these.

  I thumb through the requests, and I realize that Angela tucked carbons of her typed responses in with the original letters. Fastidious Angela. She kept an orderly garden and, apparently, orderly business correspondence. Her responses are polite, brief, and repetitive—

  “I’m sorry, I’m unable to say yes to your request to lodge in the studio, but thank you for your interest and your kind words about my late husband.”

  “I’m unable to agree to your request to take pictures in front of the house, but thank you for your interest.” Over and over and over. She should have run off Xeroxes.

  “I’m sorry, but unfortunately I’ve been unable to locate the lyrics my late husband was working on in 1979. But thank you for your interest and your kind words...”

  Unable to locate?

  There’s another like that: “Sadly, I’ve been unable to find the notebook of songs my late husband was working on in 1979.” And another: “I’ve searched high and low but I’m unable to locate the notebook you mentioned seeing Graham with during your visit, which I remember fondly...”

  Of course Angela could be lying in the letters. But if so, why the change of heart last year? Because she knew she was running out of time? Because Shane was dear to her, and she wanted to help his career?

  Shane. The source of all my information about the project. I don’t want to think about the possibility that he hasn’t been truthful from the beginning. But he did fail to tell me he grew up next door. He could have bought the notebook off of some black-market vintage music dealer, who’d stolen it from here years ago. Or could have stolen it himself. Maybe he forged the dedication in the notebook.

  On the beach the other day, he’d tried to bring up his dishonesty. He’d said he’d never lie to hurt someone.

  Maybe he has the diary, and I’m the world’s biggest dupe for believing his stories, falling for him. Him and his pained eyes.

  I run downstairs. “Shane?” I whisper, touching his arm. “Hey, Shane, wake up.”

  “Ahmmm? Up.”

  “I need to show you something.”

  He sits up, bleary-eyed. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. I found something. Look.”

  He rubs his eyes and reads. “‘Couldn’t locate’... What the hell...?”

  He reads all of the carbons Angela kept—seven variations of the same claim. That Angela didn’t know where the lyrics notebook was for years. The last letter stating that is only a year old.

  “You’re sure she never told you it’d been missing for a long time until recently, anything like that?”

  “No way. I remember everything we talked about.”

  “So. Either she was lying in these letters, or she was telling the truth, and found the notebook pretty recently.”

  “Or I’m lying about how I got it. Except I swear Angela gave it to me. You believe me, right?”

  “Of course.”

  “God, this is so fucked up.”

  He holds me as we reread the old onionskin copies together. “You think she found it when she was packing to move to Arbor View?” he says.

  “Or maybe she had it all along and just wasn’t ready to revisit Graham’s music until she knew she was about to die.”

  “That makes sense. That she’d be torn about it, because of...”

  “What?” Again I wonder just how much Shane saw from the trees. The little squirrel boy, Angela’s secret friend.

  Shane speaks gently: “Jackie. Angela wouldn’t say much about the past at Arbor View. She’d...conveniently drift off...close her eyes, if I brought things up that were too hard to talk about. But she did say once that Graham could be difficult. No, inconstant was the word she used. She said his love was inconstant. Did you ever get that feeling?”

  He watches me, waiting for my reaction.

  “Inconstant,” I say. “A romantic way of putting it.”

  “Putting what, exactly?” he says.

  “That he had a wandering eye.” This is a euphemism, and I’d scolded Shane for using one about Willa’s drowning before. But it’s the closest I’ve come to the truth.

  “And that Angela...had a hard time with it?”

  I nod.

  “You think because I respect his music that I have illusions about him,” he says. “But I don’t. I did this for Angela.”

  “I know. Now. But why did Angela want you to? Why was she so cagey?”

  He shakes his head, rubs his already messy hair. “I don’t know. I don’t know what it’s like to be a woman on her deathbed, with a husband and daughter already gone in the saddest way. I guess we’ll never know what was going on in her mind.”

  But however it got here, maybe the notebook’s mysterious reappearance is a sign that the album was meant to be.

  I’m sounding like Willa. It’s the kind of flower-crown-y wishful thinking I used to tease her for. She saw signs in a gust of wind, in a skinned knee, in a song playing on the radio. She thought it was a damn sign that I’d been sent there for three months rather than two, or four. A sign that I was meant to stay here with her forever, because three was the most powerful number in nature.

  I’d told her that she lived in a fantasy, seeing signs everywhere.

  But now I want, more than anything, to believe in this one. That Angela found the notebook after it had been lost for many years, and I may never know how, but it has brought Willa and me together in the only way possible now.

  I will try to appreciate that story. It’s beautiful, even if parts of it are missing, and I have to fill them in, or leave them blank.

  30

  The Golden Lady

  1999

  One week later

  It’s the hour I like best. We’re all outside, spread apart but linked together invisibly by our plans to rejoin soon. Family dinner.

  I’m picking wild mint with Bree and Fiona in the sunny patch by the garden. We’re having proper Cuban mojitos tonight at our barbecue. Our nighttime get-togethers have lengthened, often stretching to one or two a.m.

  Shane and Piper are playing their guitars on the porch to escape the heat, their strumming interrupted by passionate discussions about the greats’ styles, strings, humidity tricks that kept their guitars in prime sound. “Geeking out on their music history esoterica again,” Bree calls it.

  Mat and the rest have gone for a little hike.

  “C’mon, you don’t even want to hear your own songs?” Bree asks me.

  “No. Not yet.”

  “Well. They’re good.”

  “Of course, because you’re singing them,” I say lightly.

  “I’ve heard all of it,” Fiona says, her mouth full of mint. “It’s pretty good. For old-people music.”

  “Well, thank you, Miss Fee,” Bree says. “I’ll take that as your highest praise.

  “I’m going to keep hounding you ’til I leave,” Bree says.

  We go quiet. Even Fiona.

  We rarely talk about leaving, though only a little polishing is left on the album, and Bree’s Asian tour starts on August 25. In a week this place will be just as deserted as when I arrived.

  “Jaye-kee!” Mat is calling from the woods behind the house. There’s an urgent, un-Mat-like edge to his voice.

  I drop my mint bouquet and hurry toward his voice. Everyone else does, too, thinking the same thing as me—Kauri’s hurt.

  “Jaye-kee!”

  Mat again. His call is impatient, but not panicked, so Kauri must be all right. I follow Mat’s voice, and realize he’s not far from the treehouse. Maybe he and the other hikers have discovered it? Looked up at just the right time? I love them all, and it makes me
happy whenever I see Fee and Kauri using my old cabin as their private playhouse.

  But the treehouse is different. It belongs only to me and Willa.

  I’m relieved when they come into view just south of the live oak tree. Mat, his wife Belinda, Kauri. Unharmed.

  “Kauri thinks he saw a trespasser,” Mat says.

  “Oh yeah?” I kneel before him. Bree, Shane, Piper—everyone—comes up panting behind me. “Did someone scare you, Kaur?”

  “No. I’ve seen her before. It was your golden lady.”

  “My golden...”

  “I don’t know what he’s on about,” Mat says. “Didn’t mean to spook you. Just thought you should know, in case someone’s climbed the fence.”

  “You saw a woman up here?” Shane asks Kauri. “Where?”

  “There.” He points at the base of the treehouse.

  Shane and I exchange a quick look and he places his hand on my shoulder. I’m grateful for the warm, reassuring pressure, but have to will myself not to run over and look up. At the treehouse platform, the mostly hidden rope. Whatever else I might find.

  Flax behind leaves.

  “A blonde woman, is that what you mean, Kaur?” I sound so calm, so in command. My teacher-in-a-crisis voice. But inside I’m unstrung.

  The FedEx, Willa’s writing in the notebook, the album with her picture that Shane left out, the too-clean lace, Angela’s onionskin copies. Each shock has softened my resistance, blurred my certainty that some things just aren’t possible. Each has prepared me for this moment—Kauri announcing that a golden lady haunts the treehouse.

  Kauri shakes his head. “No. It was that golden lady we saw before. That day.” He points downhill, toward the ocean.

  Everyone else is mystified; I breathe out slowly. “You mean that day we all went on the Flying Swing.”

  He nods. He means Vivienne, my real estate agent, with her gold jewelry. Of course that’s what a kid would remember about her. There’s always, always a logical explanation. I am relieved and disappointed at once. Perhaps a grain more disappointed—and Willa would be proud of that. Of how this place can still make the most grounded person believe in the unearthly. At least for a fleeting moment.