My Sunshine Away

by M. O. Walsh

  Jason handed me a shovel.

  “Do you pray?” he asked me.

  “No,” I said. “Not in a long time.”

  “Fine,” he said. “I’ll do it.” Jason stuck the blade of his shovel in the ground and squeezed the hilt like a microphone. “Dear Whatever,” he said. “Please let my dog get lots of horny bitches in heaven. Or, if not that, let him come back to Earth infested with rabies and finish the job that he started when he was just trying to protect me from that asshole who is probably your biggest mistake. Or maybe just go back in time and switch life around so that my dad is the one that gets hunted for years and locked in a shed and then shot in the face by my dog. I’m good with any of these options. Okay, then. Fuck you very much. Amen.”

  “Amen,” I said. We began to dig.

  I like to think now that I was biting my tongue as we dug that hole, trying not to ask Jason for more details about his obviously horrible personal life. Or that I was trying to skillfully negotiate a way to offer some help without insulting him. I think the truth, though, is that I was already envisioning myself as some sort of local hero. The more we labored and sweat and slapped at the mosquitoes on our arms in the darkness, the more I imagined what Lindy might say if I crawled out of the Landrys’ window with handfuls of evidence. I had no idea what that evidence could be, other than perhaps some more photos, but if I could find something to link Mr. Landry to the crime, something to put Lindy and her family at ease, something that would allow us all to move on and let me assuage my guilt without ever having to tell her about what I had done and seen while sitting in the branches of her water oak, then that would be nice. I imagined holding this evidence up like a trophy while my parents congratulated me. The Perkins School might even throw some sort of catered reception and invite Lindy back to the track team, give her a standing ovation. And by the time my fantasy had evolved into a vision of me traipsing across the stage to accept my Medal of Honor, Jason and I were covered in dirt.

  “I think that’s deep enough,” he said, and he was right.

  After we covered the hole back up, Jason encircled the grave with random junk as if to mark it: a rusty toaster, an elbow of PVC pipe, a birdcage, a broken speaker. It looked like the crown of some buried and monstrous king. He then gathered the bottles he’d filled with fuel, wrapped them loosely in a T-shirt, and put them in a backpack he slung over his shoulders.

  “I guess that’s it,” he said. “Just make sure you’re out of the house in an hour. Don’t start whacking off in there.”

  “Aren’t you coming with me?” I asked.

  “Fuck no,” he said. He then looked past me toward the neighborhood, as if he could see straight through the woods and up the hill and into the living room of the home he’d fled from. “I’m never going back inside that house.”

  “Should we meet back here, then?” I asked him.

  “Don’t ever come back here,” he told me. “I’m serious. Someone could follow you. This place is sacred ground now.”

  Jason tightened the straps on his shoulders and walked in the opposite direction of our neighborhood. I felt a quiet sadness that he was leaving, like we should shake hands or something. I suppose part of me knew I might not see him again.

  “Jason,” I asked him, “where are you going?”

  “To the prom,” he said. “You’ll thank me later.”

  Then, after a few more steps, Jason stopped and tapped at his pockets like he was looking for something. He finally pulled out a lighter and flicked it twice in the darkness to make sure it worked. And I wonder, now, if I could go back in time and freeze that moment, how much would be lit up in those flint strikes? What else besides us was out there? Oaks? Owls? Mangroves? Gods? Could they tell any difference between me and Jason? Was there any difference? I don’t know. Yet as I watched him disappear into the night, I felt pretty sure that something bad was about to happen.

  And, possibly, something great.

  So I ran. I broke back through the clearing and into the woods and felt no fear as I crossed the fallen tree over the canal. When I neared the edge of my property, instead of continuing toward the street, I took a sharp right and stayed hidden behind the tree line until I could see the lights from the back patio of the Landrys’. Their house, like all of ours, stood on a hill but was almost totally obscured by the metal storage shed Jason and I had leaned against the day I first saw that cur. I ducked behind an oak to catch my breath, and it struck me that I was likely hiding behind the same tree that fork-eared stray had hidden behind.

  How long ago had that been? I wondered. It was before Lindy’s rape, I knew. It was before my sister died. It was before I was in high school, before I ever did any drugs or drank alcohol or smoked cigarettes, and so we were truly just kids then. We sat in the grass and played with roly-polies and my life was so tremendous and simple that it hurt me to think about it. The more I considered the distance between these two moments, how much we had all changed since then, the angrier I became. I suddenly had no choice but to empathize with Jason Landry and, in many ways, this destroyed me. I knew, for instance, that what I had seen that day behind his shed was not an isolated event and when I began to do the math I realized that Jason had been caring for that dog for years—not weeks or months—by feeding it in secret, by petting it and then cussing it, and by doing everything he could imagine to protect it from his father, who would inevitably return home from work each day and try to kill it, who would stalk the woods for it, who would refresh bowls of antifreeze like others refilled their bird feeders, only because some part of his inexplicable nature was inexplicably offended by an undocumented animal on his property. Or, worse, that he was offended by it because his son loved it.

  This horrible idea led me to think about the length of dog years, too, the old saying that dogs age at the rate of six or seven years to our one. And so where, I had to wonder, did our cur find shelter all those decades it lived alone in the woods? How often had it seen us play? How could it, while surrounded by well-to-do families, find no better situation than this one? How could it watch us eat and laugh and ignore it, day after day, and yet remain hopeful?

  I suppose that it didn’t.

  So my anger expanded.

  I was angry at Jason for letting it live like that and at Mr. Landry for being so cruel and at the dog for being so unfortunate and at myself for seeing it all those years before and not doing a single thing about it. And this brought to my attention that I had not done a single thing about any of the terrible events in my life. I had not dealt with my sister’s death. I had not comforted my family. I had not dealt with my father’s leaving us. I had not comforted Lindy. And, despite my inexhaustible attention toward her, I’d yet to even honestly deal with my own role in her sadness. Up until this point in my life, I understood, I had not been a person of much integrity and I wanted this to change.

  So I moved up the hill toward the Landrys’. I jogged in a half squat like a movie soldier and had ludicrous thoughts of violence. Perhaps Mr. Landry would be waiting for me on the back porch, ready to beat me to death with his walking stick. Maybe he would pounce on me from the bushes, wrestle me to the ground, and shoot me through the back of the head. Or, perhaps he was already in his owl form and watching me, preparing his stinking nest for my bones. If this was the case, then so be it. I didn’t care. I was out of my mind with adrenaline. I was rendered to nothing by guilt. My goals were simple. My ego was zero. It felt, very much, like my life was beginning.

  I got to the top of the hill and hid behind the storage shed. I glanced inside the open door of it and saw dog feces all over the concrete, puddles of piss from where the cur must have been kept those last days, and the depth of my rage multiplied. It made sense to me now why Jason said he wished he could have unlocked the shed. It made sense how this particular assault on Jason’s heart, of what I was sure had been one of many such assaults perpetrated by his father, h
ad finally given him the courage to leave. Who could blame him.

  I left the shed and entered the open garage. I moved slowly around the Landrys’ cars, still on the opposite side of the house as the room I’d been called to loot. I wanted to make sure they were asleep before trying the window, and I needed a good look inside. I bent to all fours and crawled through the garage to the backyard, where my hands and knees got soaked from the grass. I didn’t mind. I wanted it that way. I felt so much a part of the Louisiana landscape that I could sense the dew falling around me. It was a beautiful night and I know this because nearly everything that I remember so clearly—the corpse, the shed, the wet grass beneath my fingers—was lit only by the moon and I was a part of it, snaking up their yard to the back patio, where I could finally see through the big windows of their den, just as I would have been able to see through the big windows of mine. And sitting there, passed out in an armchair, was the enormous Mr. Landry.

  He wore the same slacks and dress shirt I had seen him in earlier that day, and his hand remained bandaged. His shoes were off and his feet were splayed on an ottoman while his head rested on the fat of his own neck. Beside him on an end table sat a glowing lamp and an empty cocktail glass. Next to this sat a bottle of brown liquor that I did not recognize at that age. What was it? Scotch? Bourbon? Rye? I suppose it’s no matter when a man takes it on by himself. And as I watched the terrible Mr. Landry sleep, I found it odd that a person who caused such pain could rest easily while his child and neighbor scurried about like night roaches.

  And we were not the only ones up. Just as I was about to head to the front of their house, I saw Louise Landry walk through their den. I’d forgotten about her. She wore a thick blue robe that looked as simple as an oven mitt. I ducked out of sight, but she did not turn toward me. She was merely on some domestic trip from point A to point B and stopped only to stare at her husband for a while. She held a lit cigarette in her hand but did not bring it to her mouth in the time that I watched her. The way she stood there so still, with her unbraided hair spread scraggily across the back of her robe, made her look like a witch from a different era. It was eerie enough for me to wonder if she might disappear before my eyes or perhaps smother her sleeping husband with a pillow. But she did not. After a moment, she simply bent forward and dropped her cigarette into his empty cocktail glass. Then she walked around the corner into the hall.

  I, too, changed position and kept to the shadows outside of the house until I got to their bedroom window. The blinds were down, but I was able to watch through a crack at the bottom as Louise Landry entered the far end of their shotgun-style hallway and opened the door to Jason’s room which, in my house, would have been my room. She stood for a while in the same ghostly manner I’d seen in the den and finally closed the door. Then she walked toward me, through the long hall and into her bedroom, turning out the lights along the way.

  Once she was inside her room, I watched her shut the door and remove her thick robe. Beneath it she wore an uncomfortable-looking nightgown that could have passed for a child’s Easter dress. It had lace around the collar and a busy floral pattern and did nothing to suggest that there was a woman beneath it. She looked in the mirror and pressed her palms against her cheeks for what seemed to me like too long, and I wondered crazily if she might remove her entire face, if I was to bear witness to the real reason the Landrys behaved so differently. But she did not. She instead entered their bathroom and turned on the water that I could hear running through the outside meter I stood beside. When she returned, Louise Landry clicked off the overhead lights and was now illuminated only by a lamp on her bedside table. I then watched her walk to the foot of her bed, get down on her knees, and pray.

  I couldn’t believe it.

  The image was so pure and unexpected that I felt sick to my stomach. I’d seen my mother do this so often in the time since Hannah’s death that I could tell, without a doubt, Louise was praying for Jason. Despite their contentious relationship, despite her strange personality, the simple nature of her posture proved to me that she loved him. I had seen this type of worry before and I knew from whatever Jason was up to in the woods, and from whatever he had sent me to find in his father’s private room, that things would only get worse for her. Perhaps I should have put a stop to it there.

  Instead I hurried back across the patio to make sure Mr. Landry was still asleep and then ran halfway up their driveway before ducking into a hedge of azaleas that lined their house. I was sweating as I crouched in those bushes. I saw mosquitoes in their hundreds stir from the dead leaves I disturbed. They gnashed me in my progress. They covered me. I could feel them in my nose and ears and I had to hold my breath to press on. You must live in Louisiana to understand this. You must hide in our azaleas to tell this. And when I rounded the corner to the front of their house I shrugged the mosquitoes off my arms and neck and pulled the small key out of my jeans pocket. I listened intently for people and cars and heard nothing but the sound of frogs and my breathing and perhaps a distant siren. I went quick.

  I scurried across the porch with my head down and when I reached the window to Mr. Landry’s private room I saw that it was covered, on the inside, by blackout curtains. I put the key in my mouth and traced my hands along the slim metal ledge at the bottom of the window. I got a good grip and lifted the frame, and Jason was right. It was unlocked. I slid it open.

  This is it, I thought. Finally, this is for Lindy. This is for my mom.

  This is for the neighborhood.

  Then I parted the curtains and crawled inside.

  32.

  It is important for me, whenever I relive this night at the Landrys’, to first remind myself of other, better, memories. This is how I keep darkness from winning. This is how I stay healthy.

  So, let me tell you:

  My mother had a crush on Robert Stack.

  This was after the divorce, after Hannah, after Lindy, after I had broken into the Landrys’ house, and after Rachel had moved back out on her own, in a time when it was just me and my mom again on Piney Creek Road, in the fall of 1992, my senior year of high school. She had recently taken another part-time job to keep busy, this time at a beauty salon, working as a receptionist at the counter about four days a week and, on the days it was raining, or if we had decided to go out to dinner after one of my soccer practices, she would pick me up in her car that now smelled strongly of the rank acetone they used at the salon. I would throw my stuff in the backseat and sit down in the front and my mother would reach over and squeeze my arm to greet me. She would tell me how happy she was that I had started soccer again, how much better I was looking, how proud she was of me, and I’d say something like, What’s the big idea? You bucking for a promotion?

  Things were pretty good between us.

  This was not the trouble.

  The trouble was that my mother was still insatiably sad. She put on a brave face and filled as many days as she could manage with work but even this seemed only to remind her of what she had lost. The salon, for example, was frequented by women my mother had known in what she called her “previous life.” These were ladies she’d played tennis with at the country club or gone to real estate conventions with along with their spouses and the constant reappearance of these people in her “new life” seemed to throw my mother off-balance. While driving me home, for instance, she would say things like, Do you remember Lucy Gifford? You played tennis with her son, and I would say things like, I don’t know, Mom. That was a long time ago. Why? Yet she rarely had an answer.

  The obvious reason, I always imagined, was that she had seen Lucy Gifford at work that day and, whether or not Lucy Gifford looked ill or well, my mother had to wonder if Lucy Gifford knew about what my father was doing with the eighteen-year-old biology major who worked at the pro shop those years back, while he was still married. And who knows, my mom may have even been suspicious about Lucy Gifford herself. What was going on at th
ose conventions when my father came back to the room later than she did? What did Lucy Gifford mean when she said she always enjoyed seeing us at the club? Once the trust is gone, you know, all of history changes. A person doesn’t know what to believe. My mother was no different.

  Worse still is that what surely followed these encounters was the way my mother backtracked in her mind to wonder about the Giffords’ kids and how they’d come along, a boy near my age, she remembers, and a daughter near my sister’s. And then there would be Hannah, always dead and waiting for her. There would be love and loss and regret and injustice and the inside knowledge that the way that life fleets can just crush you.

  So despite her best efforts, my mother still struggled to get through the days without exhaustion. This led her to give up dating, to stop being set up by friends, and to stop going to any social events that might require her to be emotionally engaging, although she was still a charming and beautiful woman. This also led her to become less energetic around the house. She began closing off doors to certain rooms and no longer dusting or vacuuming them as rigorously as she used to. She also spent less time cooking, which is a strange thing to do in Louisiana. This is not to suggest that she was lazy, because she wasn’t, but if she came home from work excited about some new recipe the manicurists had passed along, it had nothing to do with the pleasure that meal might provide, but rather the fact that the whole thing took little time to prepare.

  Meals that required forethought, like peeling or slow roasting or marinating, became rare. If they happened at all it was only on weekends or holidays and our weekly supper rotation came to consist of a predictable series of baked pork chops and sloppy joes and plain spaghetti, until even these dwindled down to skinless chicken breasts that my mother would buy in bulk and cook in the microwave. The results were pale and continent-shaped entrées that she would present to me with different names. Chicken a la Ranch Dressing. Chicken a la Ketchup. Maybe some peas on the side. I ate these meals without praise or complaint.