Lady Sunshine

by Amy Mason Doan

  “And the Golden Lady was walking around here just now?” I ask. “Alone?”

  “She was with a man. They were looking down at the house, then they walked up there.” He points up at the ridge. “They were snooping.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  He nods; he would know.

  “I’m really glad you told me, Kaur. Thanks for looking out for this place.”

  I lead them uphill toward where Kauri pointed, taking a slightly indirect route to avoid going under the treehouse.

  We all troop up. Me and Kauri and Shane, flanked by the rest of the crew.

  I look over the ridge, at the eastern vista Willa once showed me from high in the treehouse. The light is fading fast but I can still make out the neighboring property, past the few remaining trees on this side of the property line. The land behind the Kingstons’ wasn’t much to look at then, and it still isn’t. A few decaying structures, scrubby fields, downed animal pens.

  But in the distance, near the road, there’s a bulldozer, scaffolding. A pit that will soon become a swimming pool. An expensive renovation will replace the old shack with an impressive mini-estate. This land has become highly sellable in the last twenty years, as Vivienne and Rand Whitman have told me many times. Even without views and beach access and natural amenities, like the Kingstons’.

  Two voices drift up from behind a cluster of nearby coast firs:

  “...we could push for a fast escrow if it suits you. You’d have six hundred acres, including ocean frontage. Impossible to find around here now.” Vivienne. The little sneak.

  A strange man’s voice: “And why is it we can’t go on the actual property in question yet?”

  “The current owner is working on some kind of rock album there before vacating.”

  He must make a face or mutter something sarcastic, because Vivienne says, “I know, I know, and you’ll want to raze all of those structures, of course. But the lower acreage of the parcel is special, really incredible. I’ll work on her...”

  Vivienne’s chatter gets louder, a little strained from exertion; they’re walking north along the hill-face, coming closer to us. “...truly sought after, we’ve had a deluge of interest. Half a mile to the north it’s all state preserve. Of course you’re familiar with the egress—”

  They emerge from behind the trees. Vivienne in a cream dress and her gold jewelry, and a stubby, suited man who’s mopping his shining forehead with a hankie.

  They spot me and the group, standing in a line on the ridge above them. Gunslingers from a Western. Vivienne, busted, stops short.

  “Hey, neighbors!” Piper calls out. “Nice day for a stroll!” Piper’s shooting Vivienne the kind of look old hair-band guitarists in videos give the camera right before they smash their axe.

  It’s how I feel. How dare she poke around here, near the treehouse, as if it’s just another parcel. Not my sacred ground.

  “Jackie!” Vivienne says, trying to recover. “What terrific luck! This is Andrew Simmons, who recently bought this parcel. Remember, I mentioned that he might be interested in yours? We were just—”

  “Trespassing?” I call back.

  They have a private conversation and walk up to us, Vivienne sending me don’t botch this looks.

  “No harm done, right?” The man peers downhill. “Since we’re here, how about showing us a little more of the promised land?”

  “Not today,” I say coolly. “It’s not a good time for us.”

  I glance over at Shane, but his attention’s not on me, or the man in the suit, or Vivienne. His eyes are glassy, and he’s staring down at the bulldozers cutting into the neighboring land. The parcel.

  “Jackie, I would’ve called you if you had a cell,” Vivienne says. “We just crossed onto your side a titch to see the parcel from above.”

  “Vivienne,” I say quietly. “Take your visitor back. The way you came. And I’ll be hiring another listing agent.”

  “Jackie, I know you’re—”

  “Go,” I say. She marches back uphill with her client.

  Shane hasn’t said a word. Not don’t be rash, and not way to give it to them, Jackie. Nothing.

  He’s just gazing off at the bulldozers.

  “Hey?” I ask him, rubbing his arm softly. “What’s up?”

  He shakes his head slightly. He’s got that pained look again. The look from the first day, from the field. I haven’t seen it in a while. Maybe he’s thinking about how we all have to leave here soon, how life after August is a big unknown, so cold and foreign that we’re afraid to talk about it. Maybe he’s just depressed, seeing the bulldozers carving into the hill.

  The two of us stand there, silent and still. Close. And I don’t realize until Fiona giggles and Piper shushes her that I’ve given it all away—that Shane and I are together.

  “Paving paradise,” Bree says. “Well, that was all very exciting, but I’m thirsty. C’mon, soldiers.” I see her out of the corner of my eye, signaling to the others to leave us alone.

  Long after their footsteps in the dry leaves fade out, Shane and I watch the bulldozers below the ridge. He seems even sadder than me to see them there. His jaw and fists are clenched, and I remember the rocks he threw that night I followed him.

  “I’m no better than they are,” I say. “I’m the pavement villain from the Joni song. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?”

  “Oh. No. Oh, Jackie.” He’s out of his spell. He puts his arms around me and I rest my cheek on his chest. “Not at all.”

  “But it’s true,” I murmur. “I saw you throwing rocks here that night. And this time next year, maybe sooner, there’ll be a fleet of bulldozers on this side of the ridge, cutting everything up. Then it’ll be as ugly as what’s over there.”

  He strokes my shoulder. “It happens. Land changes hands. Land changes. It’s not your fault, you know it’s not.”

  We turn, walk downhill, back toward the house.

  Under the big old oak that holds the treehouse, we stop and gaze up. It’s my first time here during the day.

  “I thought Mat or someone had found it and that’s why they were shouting,” I said. “You think whoever buys the place will cut the tree down?”

  He shakes his head, caressing the bark. “It’s a beautiful old tree. They won’t hurt it.”

  I circle the trunk, looking up. “You’re just saying that to make me feel better.”

  “Is it working?”

  “A little, even if it’s bull... Shane?”

  “Hmmm?”

  “Look at the rope.”

  High above our heads, the frayed end of the rope ladder swings gently. It’s not where I left it the night after I climbed up, carefully tucked high up into branches, the way Willa and I used to hide it between visits. And it has broken off about ten feet from the ground. I hunt around...there, in a bush. The lower section of rope. I pick it up and hold it, running my hand over the split ends. They look spiky, but they’re soft as baby hair.

  “Maybe an animal chewed on it?” Shane asks.

  “Maybe.”

  “Or one of the kids was swinging on it and it broke?” Shane says. “Or someone else, one of the session guys who wandered up here for a smoke...?”

  “But they’d have to see the rope, then get it down, and it would’ve been nearly impossible to notice if you didn’t already know it’s up there. Even in daylight.”

  “Nearly impossible.”

  “A trespasser, after all. I hope they didn’t get hurt.” I peer into the woods to where my uninvited visitor might have vanished.

  “You don’t know that for sure. But we’ll call the cops to be safe.”

  “No.” I try to climb the tree but it’s useless; I get only scraped palms. “There’s a ladder in the shed. Angela used it for picking crab apples and plums.”

  “Jackie,
let’s talk first, ask the others if they know what’s up...”

  “Fine, I’ll get it.”

  He puts his hand out to stop me. “No, I will.”

  When Shane’s gone, down the hill and safely out of earshot, I call out softly, knowing it’s madness, to see how it feels.

  “Willa?”

  * * *

  We sit in the darkening treehouse.

  There’s a water bottle, a sleeping bag in a corner. The fabric scraps that were strewn on the floor as carpet have been mounded up as a bed pallet. Since the night I came up weeks ago, someone has slept here.

  “It wasn’t like this when you...”

  “No.”

  “It was probably some fan,” Shane says. “Or... I hope it wasn’t someone I brought to the studio who didn’t tell me they needed a place to crash?”

  “Yeah. That’s probably it.”

  “But why wouldn’t they just ask, with all the empty cabins around? It’s weird...”

  “It is.”

  “Goldilocks,” he says, taking my hand. Trying to lighten my mood. But that hits too close to home.

  Like everything else, this too can be explained away. A visitor to our secret, favorite place. I know, logically, that there must be a simple answer, one that has nothing to do with my lost cousin.

  I won’t tell Shane about the young face, the length of flax behind wind-ruffled leaves I imagined seeing that day when everyone was playing by the pool.

  “I still think we should call the cops,” he says.

  “No. Let’s let them be. No harm done.”

  He comes to me, wraps his arms around me from behind as I stare out to where the ocean is. “Well, they can’t climb up here again. Not after we lock the ladder away.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Jackie.” He hugs me, but my hands stay close to my sides until he lets go.

  I have no business being happy here. For weeks, I’ve been acting like a teenager. Now I feel every day of my age.

  How am I thirty-eight, Willa, while you’re forever nineteen? Half my age...

  Invincible. We’d felt invincible together. We felt like we could control things, right things, from this hidden aerie in the trees. We’d done it with Ben and Rose. Liam’s thieving coworker. I’d schemed at school, recounted my little revenge missions to her. I’d loved how Willa saw me—Justice with Her Flaming Sword. Her clever, brave, cool city cousin.

  I wonder, sometimes, if the closeness we had that summer was all in my head. The girl who vanished without a goodbye doesn’t sound like the cousin I knew...or thought I knew. Maybe what we had for those three precious months was only a confluence of her isolation and my longing for family. I wish I understood why Willa turned her back on this place, the place she’d always vowed she’d never leave. Even after everything that happened the last week we were together, she should have found healing here. I wish I’d tried harder to reach her, to help her.

  I gaze west. “You can’t see as much now. You used to be able to see all the way to the water. That myrtle tree’s grown like crazy. It blocks the view.”

  I leave Shane and cross the rickety platform. “Sometimes Willa and I would fall asleep here. It wasn’t so comfortable. But it was really something, waking up high in the air. Hearing the birds in the morning, and...”

  I see something in the crook of a branch outside the treehouse, near the window. Another flash of yellow. Was it here the other night? I might not have noticed it in the dark...and I only felt around on the other side of the tree, in my hiding place.

  I reach out as if I’m just leaning on the tree to get a better view and touch it. Solid. Rectangular. I know the shape, the thickness, as well as I know the feel of my piano keys under my fingers.

  “Jackie? What were you saying?”

  “Oh.” I’m aching to pull it from the branches, but I don’t want to tell him yet. I’m not sure why. “Nothing. I’m exhausted. I don’t know what decade I’m in.”

  * * *

  At two a.m., while Shane is sleeping, I creep back behind the house to the garden shed, the flashlight in my jeans waistband.

  I carry the weathered gray-brown ladder back up to the tree, prop it against the trunk on the far side. The east side, where it can’t be seen from the house.

  I climb up. Reach for the corner of yellow. Don’t get your hopes up, it could be any book. A Bible, Treasure Island, an ornithology guide...

  The cover is plastic, trimmed with fuzzy strips of artificial suede, stiff and cold to the touch.

  I set it on my lap and examine it under the flashlight.

  A cloud of batting has escaped from one corner of the diary, where the plastic cover has split, and it’s dusty, but other than that it’s in remarkable shape, considering. Its colors are still garish. The cover’s made up of wide yellow and orange and red and pink color blocks, separated by thin borders of glued-on white Ultrasuede. In the lower left corner is a sun, bright as an egg yolk. Shooting out from it across the cover at forty-five-degree angles are thick rays, three of them, holding fat, stretched-out words—

  GOOD

  DAY

  SUNSHINE

  I remember how Graham strummed a few bars of the Beatles song when he came across me writing in this. He got me to crack, peek at him above the cover. He knew how much I wanted to join in.

  How I pity that swaggering girl I used to be. Acting so tough, when she was aching for the Kingstons to embrace her as one of their own.

  They’d won me over so easily. A kind look from Willa, Angela’s cool hand on my forehead, Graham strumming a few Lennon–McCartney bars on his guitar.

  And I was theirs.

  31

  Skipper’s Fall

  1979

  Dear Ray,

  I’m eighteen now.

  And I’m staying.

  Graham wrote my father, and he agreed.

  Willa and I are so happy we can’t close our eyes, even though we were up all night at my birthday/concussion party (more on that some other time). We keep trying to sleep, but then one of us bursts out laughing in the dark, and her waterbed rolls and sloshes like we’re sailing in a squall out on the Bay, and we give up and turn on the light again.

  We’ve got the radio on KFOG, The Top 200 Hits of Summer Countdown. They’re on number 103. My old favorite, “Goodbye Stranger” by Supertramp. Three months ago I’d have switched the station at the first note of that dopey organ. But when it came on just now Willa and I only looked at each other and laughed. She knows all about the incident(s) at my school.

  My former school. I never have to go back there. No more of that junk in the halls. No more of that girl, whoever she was.

  Goodbye, Stranger.

  Willa’s across the bedroom making space for me in her closet. She just asked if I want the left side or the right. I told her I don’t care. I’ll hang my clothes from the trees, Ray. I’ll stuff them in the pantry next to Kate’s jelly jars. I’ll sleep in the woods.

  I’m staying and that’s all that matters.

  Happy.

  Happy.

  Happy.

  The Monday after my birthday was clear and sunny. Beautiful, but too windy for the beach, so we took the kids to the lower pond. It was lush and green, fed by Graham’s waterfall.

  Willa and I kept smiling at each other across the water. Basking in the knowledge that I was staying.

  I was watching Dylan—of the superhero cape—and her new friend, bold young Alice. They were playing with Alice’s most treasured toy, a Skipper Barbie doll. Malibu Skipper, Barbie’s younger sister. Every time we went to the falls, Malibu Skipper went swimming, or the kids made her a boat out of leaves, or a jungle gym out of branches. Skipper had had so many adventures that her tan had been scraped off, but she was a hardy soul and had survived worse. Their latest game was put
ting her in a swing made out of Dylan’s cape.

  Willa was attending to a little girl with a scraped knee, and I was helping a bunch of kids hunt for Graham’s paper, his song rejects, as we always did here—they liked scooping up the pulpy masses that he crumpled up at the falls.

  So neither of us was looking at Alice and Dylan. If we had been, maybe we’d have advised against Skipper’s latest outdoor adventure. Or made sure the cape had been knotted more tightly. Watched out for calamity.

  I’d just spotted a clump of paper near some reeds when there was a wail from the other side of the pond.

  Dylan. A wail of such undiluted agony that I was sure something terrible had happened.

  Willa and I rushed over and were relieved to see that the victim was plastic: poor Skipper.

  Poor Dylan. In their haste to get started, or our inattention, no one had checked to make sure that the knot securing Skipper’s swing was secure. Or maybe the kids had dunked the doll a few seconds longer than usual, and her hollow plastic torso had filled with more stream water than the other times they’d played this game. Enough to make her a slight, tragic bit heavier. I could still see her, cruising away fast, the bright fabric bunched under her legs like a gay little life raft. Dylan could only point and wail. Willa picked her up, soothing her.

  Alice was stoic—so Alice—and seemed more fascinated by this, Skipper’s ultimate dare, Skipper rounding a big boulder like an Olympic whitewater paddler.

  I jumped into the cold water, confident that I could reach the doll and the cape before it was too late. The drop was a good twenty feet away, with plenty of rocks to stop her. I was not worried, I swam and reached out. I caught...hair, only hair. Skipper’s synthetic blond mop.

  The four of us watched as Dylan’s prized cape, marigold decorated with purple butterflies, whooshed off into the foam and disappeared down the falls.