My Sunshine Away

by M. O. Walsh

  I imagine that many children in South Louisiana have stories similar to this one, and when they grow up, they move out into the world and tell them. This is not the problem. It is the way these stories return that dog us, the way they are altered by the outsiders who hear them. A man from California once asked me, for instance, if I rode to school in a boat. A woman from Des Moines said, “What was it like? Growing up chasing gators off your porch? It sounds horrible.”

  It isn’t like that. I promise.

  Even in the summer of Lindy’s rape, for instance, there was joy.

  We played baseball in the street. We chased the ice-cream man from two blocks away.

  Lindy was a part of this, too.

  In fact, in the weeks immediately following the crime, after the police had made their rounds, the only difference we noticed in Lindy herself was a change in her schedule. No more piano lessons, to my dismay. Lindy went to therapy instead. No more bicycle ride out to the track at five o’clock, but rather a ride to and from the track with her parents. Small stuff. She looked the same to us then as she always had, bright and smiling, although all of this would soon change.

  And so, terrible as it was, the summer of her rape carried on, bright and blue-skied, and full of immense pleasure. Even our parents, who had taken the news of this crime and the lack of a subsequent arrest the hardest, eventually came back into the fold, bonded together by the appearance of late-summer whiteflies in the neighborhood.

  Tiny and prodigious creatures, whiteflies look like lint.

  Alone, they are easily squashed, nothing more than a bit of dust on your fingers. In great numbers, however, they are disastrous, and feed indiscriminately on anything green. They colonize beneath the leaves of the flora available to them and work their tiny jaws to extract sap from the plant. This is not the trouble. The waste they subsequently excrete attracts a type of mold called black sooty, and this name speaks for itself. A dark color grows over the plant life, eventually growing so thick that it divorces the plant from the sun and a botanical sadness takes over. Irises lie down in their clumps. Trees drop their leaves out of season.

  So, when Piney Creek Road came under siege that late summer, the neighborhood formed an alliance. Kids sprayed soapy water all over the gardens while their parents called one another to talk about successes and failures, progress and setbacks, any subject other than Lindy and the possible suspects in her rape, and were happy to focus on the more manageable problem at hand.

  That Labor Day, when the infestation seemed under control, there was a party at my buddy Randy’s house, the Stillers’ house, and everyone there was in good spirits. Parents drank margaritas and iced beer as their kids ran around like lunatics in swim trunks. Lindy Simpson was there, too, without her parents, who had since withdrawn from these types of affairs. She wore a blue one-piece bathing suit, and I followed her around the yard with a water gun. It was all laughter and cheer until around six o’clock, when we heard a chain saw revving up in the distance and a group of us went out to see.

  In the farthest bend of Piney Creek Road stood a common area, a spot of land that was not technically on anyone’s lot. It was obvious now that despite their best intentions, no one had taken it upon themselves to treat the large live oak that stood there, and so this tree remained the last bastion of whiteflies. As such, the oak had apparently just given up, dropping all of its leaves on that Labor Day like some defeated sigh. So, while everyone else was at the party, saying good-bye to a summer they’d like to forget, Lindy’s father had sprung into action. He wore goggles, shorts, and a T-shirt, and laid into the ancient tree with his chain saw, an act so strangely violent that none of us knew what to say.

  Two of the neighborhood men left the party at full trot to try and stop him, to explain to him that the tree was not dead, that it would come back next year, and that he had no right to do what he was doing. Then, when they got halfway up the street, they halted dead in their tracks. It turned out that on closer inspection, these men could see something that we hadn’t seen from the party, something that only Mr. Simpson had seen, after the tree dropped its leaves and went bare.

  On the third-lowest branch of the live oak, slung around a tangle of sticks, a faded blue Reebok hung from its laces.

  So the men returned up the street to us, solemn, and let Mr. Simpson continue his work with the chain saw. When we asked them what they’d seen up there, why they hadn’t stopped him, the men put their large hands on our heads as if we were their own sons, their own daughters.

  “Let’s all go back to the party,” they said. “Let’s all get something to eat.”

  So we did, and this is the last day I remember seeing Lindy happy.

  Yet it had nothing to do with the sight of that shoe.

  No. I admit it.

  This time, I was to blame.

  10.

  In the weeks after it occurred, Lindy’s rape was a strange sort of secret.

  Everyone in the neighborhood “knew,” but I can safely speak for Randy and Artsy Julie and myself when I say that back then, we didn’t exactly know what we knew. We knew the police had milled around for a bit, sure, we knew that we had each been asked a few simple questions, but since our parents had also asked us to be discreet about the crime (another mysterious word for me in those years) we didn’t understand much more than that. We noticed that people now acted differently around Lindy, was all, that our parents lifted their voices when they spoke to her that summer, that they let us stay out a little past suppertime if they saw we were playing with her. “Did you have a good time with Lindy?” my mother would ask me. “It’s important that you kids have fun.”

  All of this just to form my excuse, I suppose, when I tell you the next thing I did.

  I was not yet fifteen years old, remember, and in the first week of that school year, my freshman year, when we were all changing back into our uniforms after gym class, a few of the guys began talking of Lindy. As chronicled, many of these kids had their eyes on her since the onset of time, and our entry to high school seemed to give them a courage I was not yet feeling. They passed along rumors like scouting reports in the locker room: about how Lindy had broken up with some boy I knew she never dated, about how one guy had seen her breasts at a pool party that summer. And so, in a burst of self-serving slop I’m still ashamed of, I also offered up what I knew. I said the word low, and under my breath, because that’s the only way I’d ever heard it spoken.

  Rape.

  It was a word that refused to bring me an image, despite my recent relationship with it. In the weeks I’d sat alone in my room, wondering about its dark meaning, I envisioned Lindy suffering strange beatings, but yet I never saw any bruises on her face. In an attempt to increase my understanding, I went back to a poem I remembered reading in school the year before, Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock,” and the meaning became even further unmoored. I later looked the word up, just to get a hold of it, in a thesaurus my father had left in his study. I came upon these synonyms:

  Plunder. Seizure. Violence.

  So, I knew “rape” to ride shotgun with some grand injustice, yes, I was not dim. But I never thought of it in terms of Lindy’s virginity, her budding spirit, her body, being slaughtered in a sexual way. I never thought of a thing that could not be made right. All I knew was that the boys in the locker room wanted to talk about Lindy that day and that I wanted these boys to talk to me.

  The effect was immediate.

  Word shot like current through the high school circuitry. And when approached, Lindy denied it in every way. However, due to the unexpected depth of her bawling, her strange shouting, she was too obviously upset to convince them, and by the time the afternoon bell rang, Lindy had aged right in front of us. Her ponytail looked unkempt and off-center. She allowed notebooks to spill out of her backpack and spoke to no one as she trudged through the school parking lot to meet her mother,
who, on this day, was waiting to drive her back home.

  Later that afternoon, just before dinner, Lindy knocked on my door. I felt sick when I saw her through the peephole. All those times I’d lain on the floor and wished for this exact vision to materialize, for her to dismount from her bike and come see me, all the times I’d imagined just what I’d say; these all died, silly and unused, next to the potted plants in the corner.

  I opened the door and stood there.

  Behind her, I saw purple clouds slide like battleships into position, the evening rain set to get under way. She was barefoot, Lindy, she wore a dark T-shirt over her uniform, and, my God, she was already gone from me then. From all of us.

  “Is it true that you’re the one who told?” she asked me.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “How did you know?” she asked me. “How did you know about that?”

  This was an odd question to me.

  “Your parents,” I told her. “The police. Everybody knows.”

  Lindy looked crushed.

  What did she think her parents had been doing, I wondered, in the days they went door to door with the cops? Why did she think our mothers brought all that food to her house as if someone had died? I didn’t understand it. After all, this was a girl who got ill over the death of astronauts. Couldn’t she feel the mourning in her own neighborhood? Or, by this time, nearly two months after the crime, had she just hoped we’d all forgotten?

  I didn’t get the chance to ask her. Lindy turned and ran away.

  She did not speak to me again for a year.

  In that year, Lindy tried on different personalities, all of them false and doomed. She began by taking a strange pride in her appearance, as if the secret had never gotten out, and started running around with an elite crowd. She wore large bows in her hair at school and jingly bracelets on her wrists. She sidled up to the most coveted virgins and laughed cattily at any younger boys that walked by. When this did not work, and the virgins crucified her, she quit the track team and grew dark. She listened to the heavy and slow music that older kids listened to, The Cure, Joy Division, and she wore black eyeliner to school. If you saw her away from Perkins in those days it was hanging around in dark places like the abandoned and unfinished dorms of Jimmy Swaggart’s disgraced church in Baton Rouge, where we all knew not to go, or maybe hovering on the outskirts of the movie theater, chatting with older boys in combat boots who had no business being there.

  None of these disguises suited her.

  But in my guilt, in my love, I followed these personalities, too.

  I got my mom to take me to a high-end clothing store for Christmas, when Lindy was still in her bows. I grew furious when my mom tried to buy me knockoff Polo shirts and discounted shoes, as if she were out to sabotage me. I became nervous and self-conscious and spent days trying to tie the leather laces of my Timberland loafers in a manner called “the beehive,” which I had seen Michael Tuminello, the leader of the Perkins School preps, do. On weekends I stood out by the mailbox in my new pastel getups. I walked up and down Piney Creek Road and whistled, hoping Lindy might see me through her window.

  And then, when Lindy went dark, so did I, shunning the expensive apparel my mother had bought for me. Instead I dragged her around to record shops and thrift stores. I got her to buy me skull rings, incense, and black T-shirts with band names I’d seen displayed in the patches on Lindy’s schoolbag. She worried about this, I know, but she did not deny me.

  Yet my desire to catch Lindy’s eye grew so consuming that I began hating myself and my suburban appearance, as if this was to blame for nearly everything. After a while I even grew to hate my own curly hair, as the rockers Lindy liked all had straight hair, often cut in dramatic angles and gelled. So I slept in baseball caps to straighten my hair out. I used a hot iron to style my bangs. I shaved the sides of my head.

  At the height of this period I began to get in minor troubles at school. I stuffed paper towels in the urinals and flooded the bathrooms. I wrote graffiti in Magic Marker on the lockers. Some part of me hoped that if I kept this up long enough Lindy and I might be sentenced to the same session of detention after school, where if nothing else we would be forced to speak to each other in the ridiculous roundtable confessional the teachers made us do. Yet this never happened, and Lindy was able to avoid me completely.

  I therefore began to stay up late and sleep little, listening to bands I’d overheard Lindy talk about, and I hated this music. The lyrics were dark and without perspective, wrapped up in melodies that inevitably collapsed, self-aware, on themselves. Even as a kid I knew this. To get into her type of music was to sing along with a man on his deathbed. So that’s what I tried to do. I wrote poems about Lindy in red ink. I got an earring. I hit puberty.

  All this to say that when Lindy and I emerged from that year, we were changed.

  Lindy was now a brooding girl who roamed the halls of Perkins alone. Any friends that she did have were meek things who may as well have been shadows. She shunned bright colors, blue included, and wore only gray boxer shorts underneath her uniform at school. She rarely shaved her legs. She became increasingly obsessed with a band called Bauhaus that I was never sure how to pronounce and scribbled things like anarchy signs on her Chuck Taylor high-tops. She cut her hair to chin length and her bangs traced her soft face like sickles.

  She became thin and, most said, bulimic. Rows of small pimples appeared on her chest.

  This was a hard thing to watch.

  But in the following year, when we were speaking again, when we were close, Lindy explained to me how all this had happened.

  She said that therapy was to blame.

  Lindy told me that her months in group counseling, something her parents insisted she attend, were the worst thing that could have happened to her. It was worse even than the way her father spied on her at all hours in the year that followed the crime, worse than the way she would see his car sitting inconspicuously in the corner of the movie theater parking lot as she bummed cigarettes off of random guys. It was worse than the sheepish way he would later act as if he hadn’t been spying at all, as if he didn’t know what she was talking about, when he cruised back around to pick her up at eleven. And it was even worse than the manner in which he eventually collapsed his remorse into hers, begging her to talk to him, and adding complicated locks on their doors.

  Because what therapy did, she explained, was introduce her to a world of problems she never would have known about otherwise. The girl who cut herself; she was in her group. The anorexic. The bulimic. The nymphomaniac. They each offered rebellious possibilities to Lindy, which she explored. The girl in her group who’d watched her mother die in an automobile accident that she herself had caused. Now there was a look at depression, she said. The boy who was molested by his uncle. Good grief.

  Ultimately, the scope of these ills made Piney Creek Road look obscene to Lindy, she said, the way the blossoms on our crepe myrtles bloomed. The lovely street was like an ignorant joke. Therapy had taught her this, and she wore the lesson all over her face.

  So I took on the look of a troubled boy as well. I flipped my long bangs out of my eyes when adults approached me. I quit the soccer team, which I was actually good at and enjoyed, and started playing guitar instead because I thought Lindy might find it sexy. I smoked cigarettes, and later dope, in the Taco Bell parking lot on school nights. I rarely smiled.

  But my image was papier-mâché.

  You could poke a hole right through me in those years and all you would see fall out were items from Lindy’s closet. No blood in me then. Only the one obsessed heart. I stood for nothing. I fought for nothing. Can’t you see?

  I’m drawing myself as innocent here.

  Don’t we all?

  11.

  The third suspect in Lindy’s rape was the adopted boy named Jason Landry. One of the slew of children that Mr. L
andry and his wife, Louise, fostered on Piney Creek Road, Jason was the only one who stuck around. He’d been in their clutches since he was an orphan, a toddler, and was two years older than me. He was not a pleasant boy by any stretch and, just as the people of Woodland Hills wondered if he could have been involved in the crime, we also wondered why he, out of all the children the Landrys cared for, became the constant. Through a little research of my own, I’ve since learned that it is not unusual for a family like the Landrys to keep one individual child with them throughout their fostering years, to adopt him, so that the other children they host will have a playmate. This is called anchoring, in the literature, and is the benevolent interpretation of this process.

  The truth, I believe, in the case of the Landrys, is that Jason was kept around for a different purpose. Erratic and troubled, Jason was used more as a normalizer than an anchor. He was, in the technical sense, a socializer for the other foster kids. To put it more simply, his well-fed existence, no matter its quirks, was empirical proof to the other orphaned children who came in and out of their doors that a life could be made with the Landrys, that you could survive it. This, of course, was also proof to Child Services. So if a young boy or girl felt uneasy during his or her first weeks at the Landrys’, if they thought perhaps there was something amiss, Jason could tell them, “Cut it out. Suck it up. This is normal.”

  A relative term if there was one.

  Jason Landry had thin white hair, even in his youth, yet he was not an albino. His eyes were the color of clean river sand and he had gaps between all of his teeth. I have no idea what tribe of man he was birthed from, no idea of his origin. Perhaps no one does. His skin was yellow, in how I remember him now, and he smelled constantly of the cigarettes his mother smoked in their kitchen. He had been kicked out of the Perkins School in eighth grade for reasons that were never disclosed to me—rumors about him and another boy in a bathroom. Rumors that he’d sexually threatened Ms. Gibson, a fragile Spanish teacher who had lupus. And since he did not attend any youth soccer or swim leagues, he did not play with the rest of the neighborhood kids often. Whenever he did, it ended poorly.