My Sunshine Away

by M. O. Walsh

  So I did, and Tyler disappeared from the Landrys’ about a month or so later.

  He was gone before Lindy’s rape. He was never a suspect.

  17.

  As for my candid photo of Lindy, the explanation would have to wait.

  A strange stretch of time arose between the day my mother discovered the box beneath my bed and the day it was all finally dealt with nearly a year later. And although I’d hinted to her of the dark room where the photo had come from, she did not immediately take this issue up with the Landrys. She instead grounded me indefinitely, told me to stay away from Jason, and grew preoccupied with the other disasters that came to define her.

  The first one was subtle.

  In the wake of her discovery, my mother had contacted Peggy Simpson, Lindy’s mom, and the two of them became close friends. I was so mortified by the idea that my mom would spill my secret fantasies to this woman that when she first invited her over, I did all I could to sabotage it. I greeted Mrs. Peggy at the door. I was extremely polite. I offered to pour her some coffee, fix her an iced tea. My mom knew what I was up to when I pulled up a chair beside them at the kitchen table. What child, she understood, would desire this type of company? She looked at my odd haircut, the ring in my left ear, my pale arms. She saw no child at all anymore, I suppose.

  But my mother didn’t understand my keen love.

  I’d confessed it to her, all right, when I first tearfully defended those items she found in my box. But how does one relay this giant emotion? I didn’t have the vocabulary then. When I told her, for instance, that “Lindy is all that I think about,” my mom said, “I can tell. You ought to be ashamed.” Or when I said, “No, Mom, I love her!” she said, “What I’ve got in my hands is not love, son. What I’ve got in my hands is obsession.”

  I couldn’t argue with that.

  Still, there must have been something in that initial conversation about love that gave my mother pause. I mean, I must have said something that stuck. I know this because when I stood in the living room eavesdropping on their conversation, thinking my chance of happiness with Lindy doomed, I heard Mrs. Peggy say, “He’s a good boy, Kathryn. You have to be so pleased,” and my mother took a long time to respond.

  What must have gone through her mind at that moment? I wonder.

  Surely she stood on a precipice.

  Could she empty out my box for this woman, who had already suffered so much? Could she show her those school photos of her young daughter, prematurely pasted onto the adult world? More so, could my mother call her own parenting into such dubious question and risk whatever credibility she might have? Was there a part of her, in other words, that felt as if we had hidden evidence from the police? Did she feel some sort of guilt now, some sort of responsibility for the crime, just by giving birth to a boy who could have these thoughts and then so joyfully entertain them? It was more complicated than I understood at the time. Because she had to know that if I was truly innocent, if my raging obsession for a girl who’d recently been raped was mere circumstance, as she hoped it was, could she possibly say about her son what could not be unsaid?

  I got my answer, I believe, when I heard my mother continue the conversation.

  “Tell me, Peggy,” she said. “How’s Dan? How’s your husband?”

  “He’s a goner,” Mrs. Peggy said. “He never sleeps. He blames himself. We all do.”

  “I understand,” my mother said, and took a long and deep breath. “So, any leads?” she asked. “Any developments? Or would you rather not talk about it?”

  “Nothing new,” Mrs. Peggy said. “Lindy remembers so little, and pressing her for details only makes it worse. She locks herself in her room. She barely speaks to us. I wish Dan could understand that, but you know how men are. He just wants to fix everything.”

  “It’s strange, isn’t it?” my mom said. “I mean, about men. You’d think they’d realize they wouldn’t have to fix so much stuff if they didn’t go around breaking it in the first place.”

  The two of them shared a knowing laugh about this and I could picture them each sipping their drinks and smiling, considering the ridiculous men in their lives, and wondering how we ever got along without them. Then, when this light mood passed over, Mrs. Peggy took a deep breath. I could hear it from around the corner.

  “The police have basically stopped calling,” she said. “Part of me is thankful for that.”

  “Thankful?” my mom asked.

  “Is that horrible?” Mrs. Peggy said.

  Her voice sounded suddenly small and fragile. “Am I horrible for just wanting it all to be over?” she asked.

  I heard my mother moving around in there. I pictured her perhaps leaning forward to look Mrs. Peggy in the eye, to touch her knee. “No,” I heard her say. “No, you are not horrible. Let’s talk about something else, okay? Let’s talk about whatever you like.”

  “Okay,” Mrs. Peggy said. “That sounds nice.” Then, after a while, she said, “But what do I like?”

  I went to my room after I heard this. I felt somehow pardoned.

  I felt protected.

  Still, I consider this friendship a disaster because of the way it affected my mom. She gorged herself on empathy for the Simpson girls from that day forward. Whether this was out of some brand of guilt introduced to her by the contents of my box, or just a remarkable aspect of her character is beside the point. My mother spent countless days with Mrs. Simpson in the following months: shopping with her, drinking coffee on the front porch, talking on the phone late into the night, and even accompanying her to a therapy group for parents.

  Each of these excursions left my mother exhausted with grief, as there was no end to Mrs. Simpson’s remorse. It even began to show on my mother’s face when she would return home to me in the late afternoon, where she would lie on the couch and stare at the ceiling. I’d watch her kick off her shoes, rub the palms of her hands against her cheeks.

  “Mom?” I’d ask.

  “She’s just such a nice person,” she’d say. “The poor, poor girl.”

  I never asked to which Simpson she was referring.

  Regardless, the second disaster was the reappearance of my bumbling father. Our unfortunate trip to Cocodrie and the ensuing discovery of my box had apparently struck some sort of paternal nerve in him, although it was obvious he didn’t know what to do with this emotion. So he began to stop by sometimes after he had showings in Baton Rouge, usually not for long, just to check on us and maybe fix a dripping faucet in the guest bathroom. He had only one “important” talk with me during this time, regarding my behavior, when he sat me down in my bedroom.

  “Look, son,” he said, “I know this is uncomfortable, but you really freaked your mom out. She’s a little worried you were holding out on her when the police came over.”

  “I know,” I told him. “She doesn’t trust me anymore. I can tell.”

  “It’ll pass,” he said. “That’s the thing about women. Everything with women takes time.”

  “I just wish I would have locked that stupid box,” I said. “I wish she wouldn’t have come in my room.”

  “I told her that,” he said. “I told her every boy on this block probably has a stack of porn in their closet. That doesn’t mean anything. I’m not sure if women understand that. We’re wired a little differently, you know, men and women. A boy’s got to have privacy. If it wouldn’t have been the Simpson girl, it probably wouldn’t be so bad.”

  “I never wanted to hurt her,” I said.

  My father laughed.

  “No man ever does,” he told me. “That’s why I’m not worried about you. That’s why I told your mom not to worry about you, too. Because the person who did that to your friend was not a man. He was an animal. You understand that? You are a man. That’s the difference.”

  I thought about this for a long time. An enormous part of
me wanted to believe him.

  “What are you saying?” I asked. “A real man only hurts women by accident?”

  “Bingo,” he said.

  I felt some nameless air clear between us. But this was as far as we got.

  His growing presence in our house did not seem to me the return of anything comfortable. I instead felt crowded out by the obvious playacting we all began doing. I was supposed to be happy he was back, I understood that, and I tried to be, though I felt a more pressing need to protect my mother, who took it all so seriously.

  After he would leave in the evening, sometimes staying as long as supper, I’d often hear my mom analyzing his every gesture on the phone for Mrs. Peggy. His smile. The way he complimented her chicken. He remained with that Laura, she knew, but still.

  “They always say that if you love something,” I’d hear my mother say, “set it free.”

  She’d sip her wine and listen.

  “That’s right,” she’d say. “If it’s truly meant to be.”

  Nobody else saw it this way.

  When my sisters would call home during this time, the first thing they’d ask me was, “Is Dad over there again?” and if I said “No,” they’d say, “Thank God. Let me talk to Mom.”

  And thinking back on it now, I suppose that even she had glimpses of the farce of it all, the idea that two people can ever “go back,” because on nights when they returned to familiar marital flirting, scooting around each other in the kitchen, I’d later hear them fighting as he walked out the door.

  “It’s all or nothing,” she’d say. “You can’t just do what you want.”

  This was a concept my father did not understand.

  So, he continued stopping by, sometimes bringing over bottles of wine and videotapes he’d rented from a store that a friend of his owned. The night that remains the most vivid to me was centered on the movie Airplane!, already a decade old at this time and, to my father, a classic. He had nearly all of the lines memorized, and he and my mother would laugh at jokes I didn’t get. This was adult stuff here, this movie, despite the tame rating and childish props, and it operated on a level for them that I was unable to access.

  When a particular scene in a disco came on, for instance, they lapsed into utter flashback. My father paused the movie and said, “Come on, Kat. I know you haven’t forgotten my patented lightning-strike move.” He got up from the recliner and cleared a space on the floor. He shot his pointer finger up toward the ceiling.

  “Sha-zam!” he said.

  “Oh, lord,” my mother said and laughed. “Don’t remind me.”

  This, however, was his mission.

  My father grabbed a record off the shelf and played it. He let their story unravel.

  “You wouldn’t know by looking at us,” he told me. “But your mother and I used to tear up the dance floor.”

  “We took one disco lesson,” my mom said. “You hated it.”

  My father smiled and took her hand. He pulled her off the couch. “Come on,” he said. “I don’t remember it like that.”

  The album he played was something by Diana Ross, I believe. It held no magic for me.

  Still, I watched the two of them dance.

  My father pulled my mother close to his chest, his necktie loose. He tapped his foot to the beat. “Ready?” he said, and spun her awkwardly around the room. My mom laughed and pretended to be embarrassed by it all, saying she couldn’t remember the steps. This was apparently true, as the next few minutes devolved into nothing more than repeated lightning strikes by my father, which neither of them tired of.

  I started off to my room.

  “Hey,” my mom said. “You could learn something here. You may not know it, but your father’s always been an excellent dancer. That’s one of the first things I noticed about him.”

  “Is that right?” my dad said.

  “You know it is,” she said.

  I fell asleep that night with the music still playing, their sporadic laughter sliding underneath my door, and when I woke up the next day I, as per my usual ritual, looked out of my bedroom window in hopes of a Lindy sighting. This was like breakfast for me. Sometimes I would see her in a bathrobe and slippers, going out to get the morning paper for her father, although this hadn’t happened in months.

  It also didn’t happen this day.

  Instead I saw my father’s Mercedes still parked in our driveway. It was as strange to me as a desert landscape. I felt transported. And I would be lying if I said that I was cynical to it all at that moment. My sisters may have been if they’d seen it, but, like my mother, I suppose, I still had the tug of a dreamer inside me.

  So I hurried up and got dressed. I thought perhaps a small piece of life fixed and began to shuffle all the old memories of my father into a pattern more pleasing to me than what I’d carried for so long. He was not altogether a bad fellow, I thought, when you looked past a thing or two. A real man, after all, never means to hurt anything.

  I smelled coffee when I entered the living room.

  I fancied bright presents under the tree.

  Then, when I got into the den, I heard the lock on the front door turning. I walked into the foyer to see my father still wearing the clothes he had worn the night prior, his tie now slung over his shoulder. He held a cup of coffee in his hand and his shoes were untied. A key ring dangled from his pinkie finger.

  “Dad?” I said. “What’s going on?”

  He didn’t even look at me.

  “Where’s Mom?” I asked him. “Is everything all right? Surely you’re not leaving.”

  He had no answers to these simple questions. So, like the man I knew, he said the first thing to come to his mind.

  “Son,” he said. “Please. Don’t call me Shirley.”

  Then he walked out the door.

  The two of us back to square one.

  I spent the rest of that morning picking up empty wine bottles and washing their dirty glasses from the night before. I couldn’t stand to look at the stuff. My mother stayed alone in her room until supper that night and didn’t speak much when she emerged. This type of thing became a habit of hers, staying in her room and crying, as the biggest disaster of all came next.

  18.

  The death of my sister split my world open.

  This occurred on April 6, 1991, and marked the beginning of the end of me and Lindy’s year of dreadful silence. It also left my mom ruined.

  My specific memory of this event, however, is hazy. This is not something I’m proud of.

  All I recall is being home alone one Saturday morning. My mom was off at the mall, shopping for clothes, getting a haircut, who knows. I was barely sixteen years old at the time. I didn’t have a car. At approximately ten o’clock that morning, the phone rang and a woman asked me if my sister Hannah was home. She was not. Hannah was twenty-seven. She had an apartment on the other side of town. I told the caller as much. A series of subsequent calls then trickled in, all by a woman with the same voice who asked me if my parents were home, and how old I was.

  I suspected a scam.

  “Don’t call back here,” I told her.

  “Please,” she said. “Just take down this number for me.”

  I didn’t bother.

  And since this was a time before cell phones, I have no idea how my parents received the news. I only remember one final call, from my father, who told me there’d been a car accident. He then told me he was picking up my mother to go to the hospital because she couldn’t drive herself.

  “Is she okay?” I said. “Is Mom okay?”

  “No,” he said. “It’s not your mom. It’s Hannah.”

  “What’s going on?” I said. “People keep calling for her.”

  “Just stay there,” he told me. “Don’t go anywhere.”

  This was as much as I got.


  The next few hours were spent in itchy solitude. The phone continued to ring, yet it was never my parents. The voices instead morphed into aunts and uncles and grandparents who were cagey and guarded in what they said to me, prefacing it all by asking what I knew. I told them the greatest truth.

  I knew nothing.

  When late afternoon came I saw my family drive up to our house, all sitting together in one car, and this remains to me the clearest image of the event. My father drove the Mercedes with two passengers in the backseat, and I watched them pull into the garage behind the house. It took me a long time to understand who these people were; such was the distance from the last time they had looked like a family. In the car sat my mother and my other sister, Rachel, a person I realize I’ve not even mentioned by name before now.

  There’s nothing behind that. We simply weren’t close then. This is nobody’s fault.

  A decade older than me, Rachel was already off to graduate school in Lafayette at that time, an hour away from Baton Rouge, and so a large amount of thought went simply to what she was doing back home. It made no sense. I watched her help my mother out of the car, and this took some effort.

  My mother looked like a stranger at that moment and, in truth, it would be a long time before I saw her beautiful again. Her back was hunched over. Her face was slack and wet. If I had the ability, I could draw her for you, her sad figure, still crystal clear in my mind. But I don’t. Just know that my sister was also disheveled and upset, and that my father looked composed as a robot.

  This is what gave it away. I bawled before they told me the news.

  My final memory of that moment is of burying my face into my father’s stomach and crying until I made his shirt wet. After this, a large chunk of time disappears.

  When I think back about this scene, most of my thoughts go to why I chose him to cling to. What must my mother have thought? What did I say to console her? Was I so selfish that I thought only of myself? When I try to remember the specifics, it seems that I can only hear my mother in the background saying, “I’m sorry, son. I’m so sorry,” but why would she be apologizing to me?