The Sunshine When She's Gone: A Novel

by Thea Goodman

  “Do you think so? No, no, dear,” Muriel said, snatching the train schedule. “I’ll drive you home. Get dressed.”

  “I am dressed. I’m so sorry to bother you.”

  “Don’t be silly.” Muriel spoke with a refreshing harshness she rarely employed. “It’s not a bother.”

  As Muriel ran upstairs to get dressed, Veronica looked through the picture window to the backyard. A squirrel skidded over the icy deck, then bounced up to a branch, where it began to eat, oblivious to the cold. Amherst was it. Some yearning John had for nature, to escape the city like Thoreau and let Clara see clean snow.

  “Could he be with Arthur?” Muriel ventured as they moved outside to the car.

  “No, I was with Arthur and Ines last night. They thought he was here too.” She looked at Muriel, as if she might say something to change that reality, but Muriel only reflected her worry, her face a mass of lines.

  * * *

  By one P.M. they were sitting in her baby whale of a car, driving silently, as hybrids do, over the winding roads, through the quaint town, past the brown depressing house, to the highway.

  On the Saw Mill Parkway, Muriel mused, “Once when he was about three he got out of bed in the middle of the night and went over to the Sandlemans’ to play. He just waltzed across the street!” She laughed at the memory. How was she even capable of smiling? “You have no idea how frightened I was to see that empty bed.” He was once Muriel’s baby; she would always find him endearing, no matter what he did.

  After that, they drove in silence. Veronica recalled the details of John’s boyhood room. Everything in that room had once moved her, making her feel, as love does, that she had known him all her life. Yet she was not his mother; her love was conditional.

  Her romance, her memories, her real diner coffee on the train, her sudden compassion, all felt flimsy and foolish.

  Muriel touched her, laying a hand on her knee. The tenderness surprised Veronica—no one in her own family touched a person who was upset—yet she did not push her away.

  “Thank you,” Veronica said, as the two women entered Manhattan, rolling into the scant Sunday traffic of the Henry Hudson, where a faint light presided over the dirty slush.

  15

  Sunday

  John

  Whenever there’d been a discussion of the equator in school, John had envisioned a visible red line, a hot ribbon wrapped around the center of the earth. The parts of the globe that were green were land, and the parts that were blue were ocean. Once an image fixed in his mind, he was stubborn about it, argumentative with his gentle mother as she tried to show him the nuance of things, the way reality was not as he had imagined.

  Sunday at dawn, Clara had taken a full bottle of formula and had terrible hiccups. Her fever seemed to be returning as the daylight intensified. The sun was already white and aggressive on the baking tarmac. As they walked across the hot runway, he wouldn’t have been surprised to see that red line burning their path. In the airport’s small pharmacy he asked for more medicine, but the saleswoman laughed and explained that the pink liquid was “an American luxury.” She smiled indulgently as she eyed the empty bottle and explained that they did not have any in Barbados.

  With dread, he mounted the stairs to the plane. With each step his head crashed, metal against bone. He hadn’t been able to take the painkiller on time, as Tisbury had advised—now he was waiting for water to swallow it—and the hammering was ceaseless, overwhelming. Clara faced out in the carrier and kicked repeatedly; she seemed to have her mother’s long legs and knocked her little heel into his crotch.

  Don’t feel sorry for yourself, Evan would’ve said.

  Take the medicine without water, Muriel might suggest. But he wanted simply to complain. Complaint raced in him like something wild. If Veronica kissed him, if his own wife still wanted him, he’d vow not to complain anymore. Although wasn’t the option to complain to your beloved essential? Veronica had complained to John for months: the insensitivity of the doctors, the numbness of the incision, the mood shifts from the hysterectomy, the sleeplessness of life with an infant. The world, life, not as it should be. He’d complained too. They’d indulged in grievances small and large. They’d complained so much, they no longer heard each other.

  He wanted to say to her, I know, wanted to listen to her as Ines and Art must have during their weeks of “experimentation.” Clara’s small forehead was heating up. He had left Veronica. He had taken the baby. Derek had said, her baby, and, yes, Clara was irrefutably hers.

  His mouth was parched. The stewardess approached eventually and offered him water. He swallowed the overdue pills with gratitude and told Evan that Veronica had needed to do what she did those fall weekends and not to judge her, that he had been utterly consumed with work and had not been there for her, as she would have liked him to be. He had not been there for her.

  Evan would’ve said, Your mother and I can see a few too many glasses of wine every now and then, but really.

  He wanted his dead father to stop talking and Clara to stop jumping on his lap. He turned Clara around to face him and she sneezed on him. Wiping his face on his sleeve, he tried to change her diaper right there in the seat—it was only urine—and with a smile, she slid a tiny finger into his nostril. His large-pored, repulsive man nose. A flight attendant saw and smiled. If he could hand Clara to her, to anyone, well, then they would see how hard it was. He balanced Clara’s half-nude wiggling body on his knees and removed the soaking sack of diaper. Charitably, the flight attendant waited and reached to retrieve the Cheekie. Seconds ago he’d felt capable of hurting the baby, but once she was dry and calm, he felt he would kill anyone who harmed her.

  The five-hour flight continued, full of impossibilities: loose stool creeping up her diaper onto her back just when the fasten-seat-belt light went on; her recurrent shrieking and twisting as she gnawed on a magazine, stood on his legs, and tugged at the fascinating silvery hair of the passenger in the seat in front of him. Her energy, even with a fever, was constant.

  “Karma!” he accidentally said aloud.

  “Excuse me?” said the woman beside him. She was young, maybe twenty, with light caramel skin, very long eyelashes, and too many bracelets decking both wrists. She looked at him warily.

  “Are you … uh, going to New York?” he asked her.

  “Yes—obviously,” she said.

  “Do you live there or are you just visiting?” It was Arthur who counseled that small talk put people at ease.

  “I live in New York,” she said in a monotone, with an unmistakable New Yorker’s detachment. “I was visiting my family.”

  “It’s a beautiful place—Barbados—isn’t it?” Perversely, he continued to speak. He straightened the baby’s sock as if he felt at all normal. As if he were a nice normal older man, a father.

  It was disconcerting to see that she didn’t buy it—his normalcy, that is—and lifted a magazine to block her face. He stared as one can on planes at parts of her, the smoothness of her wrists, the youthful skin of her collarbone and chest. Blemishless.

  Art had once described Veronica this way after he and John first met her. Blemishless. Art had said nothing like this about Ines, whom he’d met at the West End up by Columbia months earlier, although he had clearly liked her too. It was after one of their basketball games on West 12th Street, and Art had let John shower at his tiny studio on Jane Street. They were meeting the two women at the Corner Bistro for a beer.

  Art skipped a little on the way to the Bistro. He was still a grad student, but he seemed already focused on practical routes to happiness (as no graduate student, it seemed to John, ever was). John asked him about his parents as they walked. Art had mentioned the furrier and the housewife, humorously but without derision.

  “Whatever they were or did,” John said, “they clearly loved the shit out of you.”

  “Of course,” Art said, seeing no reason why they wouldn’t.

  As John held Clara, he thought of
the Greenes of Levittown; if he could love her like that, whatever that inimitable way was, then she would be fine.

  The twenty-year-old next to him on the plane burrowed protectively into her magazine. John cuddled Clara like the furrier would.

  * * *

  The cab from Kennedy let them out on Canal, across the street from where they’d originally departed. The baby was hot but asleep on his chest. Crosby Street was the same dark snowy block he’d left on Friday morning. He walked north toward their building, the gray sky flecked with bits of freezing rain. The same stack of take-out menus jammed the door as he pushed it open. His heart pounded in the small elevator, which smelled of someone’s workout. Of course, it would not be normal to see her. For an instant he couldn’t recall her face, the precise line of her jaw or the shape of her nose. He was terrified.

  With great relief and disappointment, he found the apartment empty. Her lemony perfume hung in the air of the bathroom. A damp towel fell off a doorknob. He was relieved to find more pink medicine in the cabinet above the microwave and fresh goat milk in the fridge. He fed Clara, put her in the red Bugaboo stroller, and rolled her around the buffed concrete floors until she fell asleep. How long was it, fifteen minutes, twenty? Another deferment. His daughter was always doing this, stretching the distance between him and his own needs. He’d had no time to use the bathroom, let alone shower. But then the intercom sounded, and John answered it quickly after half a buzz so it wouldn’t wake Clara.

  “Hello?” he said. Someone breathed. “Hello?” he said again over the fuzz.

  “John?” Veronica sounded vaguely hoarse, as if hungover. He felt his chest opening, fluttering like it did when they’d first met, every time she spoke to him, and especially when she said his name.

  “Yeah, it’s me.”

  16

  Sunday

  Veronica

  The intercom’s static made it sound like an overseas connection. He buzzed her in. Somehow she’d been unable to go home unannounced. Through the glass, she saw Muriel nod and drive away.

  Veronica entered the elevator and pressed the button. The magical box rose, yet a small eternity bloomed as she waited for the doors to reopen. When they finally did, she saw only John; his face was pinker than she remembered it, and his hair was wilder, as if it had grown over the weekend. He held a finger to his lips to quiet her. She looked quickly past him, scanning the room until the red stroller came into view, and in it the large, nearly bald head of her daughter. “Thank God!” she said. Standing above the stroller, she watched Clara’s mouth moving on her pacifier, her plump cheeks working as she rested under a thin flannel blanket.

  “She’s fine,” John said, approaching Veronica.

  “What about you? You—you lied to me,” she said, truly more confused than angry. She noticed the white sectional, which they never sat on, with its stiff arrangement of slate pillows. It was a sterile room, unwelcoming and cold. “You said you were at your mother’s.” She walked toward the kitchen island and placed her purse on the marble counter. She steadied herself there against the cool veined stone, unable to look up at him. “Where were you?” She came closer to him. For a moment she thought she would hug him, to see that he was real.

  “Shhhh,” he said.

  “Did you just shush me?” She touched his chest and pushed. She saw the shock in his face as he stumbled backward into the blank whiteness of the loft.

  “Sorry, but Clara’s asleep,” he hissed.

  Sleep was the thing—miraculous in its erasure, magnanimous in its blessings.

  “I went to Irvington and you weren’t there.” She spoke tentatively again, with the intonation of a question. Was he still capable of persuading her of something defensible?

  “Can you listen?” he asked, and his defensiveness bothered her.

  “Do you know how humiliating it was to see your old room? It was almost endearing until I discovered you had never slept in it!” It was then that she noticed a large, plum-shaped bruise emerging from his hairline. He looked rougher, ravaged. Maybe he’d been hurt or fallen. “Oh my God. What happened to you?”

  “I’m fine, I—I’m sorry,” he said. A small tremble started in his lower lip as he touched the bruise. He still was a boy. It was uncanny; he was not a boy in disguise as a man, as she’d charitably imagined, but an actual child.

  But he was her boy. Something or someone had struck him. She waited for him to speak.

  “I’m sorry. Listen to me. I tried to reach you. Where were you?”

  “Nowhere,” she said, heat rising to her cheeks. “That’s not the point.” She spoke more softly now, chastened. She felt his eyes on her, lingering on her mouth, then breasts. His mouth was ragged, an inverted slash with a dark shadow of stubble surrounding it. Above the bruise his hairline was caked with a thin maroon line of dried blood. She took his hands in her own. “Were you in an accident?”

  “I was hit on the head with a ball. I almost got a concussion.”

  “Almost? What sort of ball?”

  He looked at the floor. She dropped his hands.

  “You went off to Amherst, with the baby? Why didn’t you tell me?” She was still in her coat. Boiling, she flung it off.

  “No,” he said, perching on a kitchen stool. He closed his eyes and then looked at the ceiling for a long moment.

  “What do you mean, no? We never do that, just go with the baby without talking to each other. Is she all right?” She saw his prominent Adam’s apple bob up and down as he swallowed hard.

  “I told you, she’s fine. I called you last night.”

  Last night. It was a lucid dream that had become reality. She wished it were a dream. She walked past him to look down at Clara again, unable to face him. His familiar mouth was bleary at its edges, like a mouth in a Rembrandt. “When did she go down?” Veronica asked. She returned to lean against the cool marble island.

  “A few minutes ago.” He reached out and squeezed her shoulder. “I know you’re mad, but I want you—I want you to understand,” he said. Taking her by both shoulders, he grabbed her firmly and kissed her hard and fast.

  “Don’t!” she said, a vibration beginning to knock in her knees. Why did he always know her thoughts? His mouth came to hers as if he knew she’d thought about it. Despite everything—or perhaps because of it—desire had returned to her in his absence. They breathed hard, apart from each other, and she tasted salt from his kiss, felt the brief wetness from his tongue.

  “I missed you,” he said. “I went for you. Listen: I—I wanted you to get some sleep. Did you get some sleep?”

  “Of course. Do you understand how tired I am? The chronic—”

  He cut her off. “I know, I do know,” he told her.

  She picked up the note he’d left on the kitchen counter and shook her head. “How could you go without telling me? You took her—”

  This time he averted his eyes. His gaze skittered away to the stroller, to the counter, to the door. She looked at his long eyelashes, the deeper pores around his nose, and for a moment they were simply mammals with hair, skin, and warm breath.

  “I was going to take her out for breakfast,” he said. He walked to the window and opened it, his breath steaming in the chilly air.

  She crossed the room and shut it. “So as you were walking to the car and getting in, you didn’t think—” She tried to proceed, but she couldn’t really be righteous. She was massively relieved; they were all home together.

  “I didn’t drive. Listen, I don’t want to wake her. Come and I’ll tell you.” He took her hand and pulled her with him. Alarmed by his strong grip, she wriggled free yet followed him out of the living room and into Clara’s yellow nursery. He stood there breathing heavily as he leaned against the changing table.

  She folded her arms over her chest as if she were simply annoyed, as she had been on Thursday night. But her anger was enervating. She sat on the crisp twin bed across from the empty crib, frail and depleted.

  “I wasn’t
in Massachusetts,” he said, almost angrily.

  His face darkened. A shadow slid across his eyes. Had he been mugged? She was embarrassed for a moment. She’d misunderstood. He had been taken away, beaten up.

  “What happened?”

  He smiled at her then, a solicitous but sorrowful smile. The black fleck in his eye was as dense and sharp as India ink. “We went to Barbados.”

  It was a strangely simple phrase.

  A loud snort emerged from her nose. “You did not!” Her own laughter, familiar in its rueful disbelief, calmed her for a moment.

  He continued, almost eagerly, his eyes glittering. “I really did. We did.”

  The radiator clanked loudly. She saw the large dark freckle that always emerged on his collarbone when he was in the sun, the pinkish burn on the tops of his white hands where he always forgot to put lotion.

  “What?”

  He nodded.

  “You did not! How did you do that?” Slopes of understanding were jagged in her brain. She fell from one to another. “What? What did you do? You went to the airport? You took her out—you— Holy fucking shit!”

  “I didn’t plan to,” he said, sitting down on the glider. “It wasn’t something I planned. I missed you so much. I still miss you.”

  “You actually went.” It was hard to breathe, and her words were hushed, trancelike. “With Clara…” She stared at her black boots as they dug into the white sheepskin rug at her feet. It could not be. “I don’t know where to begin.”

  “I can’t really comprehend it either,” he said, and she saw the odd glee in his face. He was excited by this shred of commonality, as if it were something to celebrate.

  The room’s edges were crisp and outlined, almost artificial. Their words, clattering objects. “Wait. You had plane tickets?”

  “Well, no, not until I got to the airport, and then I got one ticket. There was one flight—” He had an infuriating smile on his face that she could tell he was trying to contain.

  “You had passports. You’re like one of those people who—you took her out of the country!” Veronica bent herself down over the pillow in her lap. She stared at his feet, both with sunburned tops. A few grains of sand rested on his big toe.