My Sunshine Away

by M. O. Walsh

  “I’m a botanist,” I told her. “I study plants and trees and stuff.”

  Lindy seemed to find this hilarious. “A botanist?” she asked. She looked around. She pointed up. “Okay,” she said. “Prove it. What kind of trees are these?”

  “Those are crepe myrtles,” I said. “Lagerstroemia indica.”

  “What is that, Latin?” she asked, and I nodded. “My God,” she said. “Do you remember taking Latin with Ms. Abbott? What a windbag. All I remember is veni vidi vici. Veni vidi vici. I think we spent an entire year just saying veni vidi vici and watching shit like Ben-Hur.”

  I smiled. She was right.

  It was good to see her.

  “What about you?” I asked. “What are you doing these days?”

  “I’m a stylist,” she said, and dramatically primped her hair. “You know, I study hair and stuff.”

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s great.”

  “Well,” she said. “It lets me play with scissors.”

  And before I could even recall the soft white scars that I am sure still line her inner thighs, Lindy clapped her hands. She grabbed my wrist.

  “You’ve got to meet my husband!” she said, and pulled me a few steps toward the crowd. “He’s a sad little puppy right now. Maybe you can cheer him up. Stay right here.” Lindy then turned away from me and sort of half walked and half danced to a guy standing in a small group of people wearing Florida Gator jackets. I’d seen the ring on her finger the moment I first spotted her and so I was curious to meet the man she’d married. I watched her sneak up and slap one of the guys on the butt and give him a long and generous kiss on the cheek and it filled me with pleasure to see this. Then she whispered in his ear and led him over to me.

  “This is Sean,” she said. “He is, like, the biggest Florida fan.”

  We shook hands. “Sorry, man,” I said.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “Who gives up five fourth-down conversions in one game?”

  “Nobody,” I said. “I know.”

  “What a nightmare,” he said.

  “Wait!” Lindy said, and put her hands on my shoulders. “You have got to tell Sean about that time Old Man Casemore drove his boat around the neighborhood handing out Cokes and jambalaya and stuff after the street flooded. And tell him about how we used to make those huge beds of moss. He never believes any of the stuff I tell him about growing up.”

  “It’s all true,” I said.

  Sean laughed. He was clean cut and handsome. He looked like a pretty good guy.

  “It sounds like some kind of wonderland to hear her talk about it,” he said. “I’m from Gainesville, man. All I remember is being really bored as a kid. We lived in Florida but we weren’t on the beach. We didn’t have Disney World. It was just hot. I don’t know, when she talks about Baton Rouge, it all sounds made up.”

  “It gets a bad rap sometimes,” I said. “But it’s a pretty good place.”

  “It is,” Lindy said, and looked at me. “I mean, it was weird, you know, and it took me a while before I started missing it. But now I think about the good times a lot. Do you keep in touch with anybody else from the neighborhood? What about Randy? The Kern boys? Artsy Julie?”

  I smiled a little.

  “What?” she asked. “Do you have gossip?”

  “Well,” I said, and held up my left hand. “I keep in touch with Artsy Julie pretty well.”

  Lindy went nuts. It was like she had won the lottery.

  She jumped up and down and hugged me. She nearly knocked me over. “That’s incredible,” she said. “My God, it was so obvious even then. You two are perfect. I’m so glad you finally saw that.” She clapped her hands again. She punched her husband on the shoulder. “You don’t understand,” she told him. “That’s like some storybook shit right there. You don’t even know.”

  I smiled. I was happy and embarrassed and we were all a little drunk. Plus the football game, the atmosphere, the Louisiana night, it had all been so good. “Yeah,” I said. “It turned out really great.”

  Then, as if on cue, Julie and her father, who we always go to football games with, came walking toward us across the parking lot. They’d been talking to some family friends who’d wanted to feel Julie’s belly and make their predictions. I found out later that they’d also given Julie a list of names, written on a purple napkin, that we should call the child if it was a boy. The names were LSU-related things like Tiger and Geaux Boy and Charlie Mac. One person, I saw, had simply written down the date, that night of our victory on October 6, 2007, and then scribbled No, I’m serious. Name him that.

  When Lindy saw Julie waddling our way, a good seven months pregnant by then, she grabbed my arm. “She looks so beautiful,” she said, and then whispered in my ear, “Don’t you dare fuck this up.”

  I smiled as Lindy ran over to give Julie a hug and I could hear her complimenting Julie’s dress, telling her how she always knew we’d get together. Julie looked at me, sober and amused by this turn of events, and said, “Pish-posh. I practically had to beat him over the head with an anvil.”

  As the two of them caught up, and Julie’s father wandered over to listen to the band, Lindy’s husband, Sean, handed me a beer. I had no idea where he got it from. They appear by magic in this place. “So,” he said, “tell me this. Is it true that there was this crazy giant psychiatrist guy on your block who took weird porno pictures of all the kids?”

  “Yep,” I said. “Pretty much.”

  “Okay,” he said. “And is it true that he experimented on all these foster kids with drugs and whatnot? And that his own son basically blew up his house trying to kill him?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It was his adopted son, but still. He’d made all these Molotov cocktails. The whole place burned to the ground. He burned down our school, too.”

  “Jesus,” Sean said. “And what about the guy who tried to gather all this evidence to protect the girls in the neighborhood? Lindy said he got caught in the crossfire. She said it was kind of tragic.”

  I looked at Sean. Out of all the men in the world Lindy could have ended up with, this guy seemed all right to me. I suppose this is because I knew that behind his easy smile was a man in love with a woman who had struggled in life and that he was aware of this. I knew, in other words, that Lindy had scars on her thighs that she could not hide and that, by their marriage, this man, at the very least, had made himself vulnerable enough to share them with her. I also saw that below his heavy Florida jacket Sean wore nice khaki pants that were pressed. And, below this, he wore a pair of dress shoes, not the kind you typically put on to go to a football game, and not the kind you would ever pair with sweat socks. So, we were okay from the start. He had no idea who I was, I understood, but we were okay.

  “Is that what Lindy told you?” I asked him. “She said some guy was trying to protect her?”

  “She’s got a million stories,” he said. “But what I don’t get is that she tells me these things like it was the most exciting stuff that ever happened, like it was a good time. No offense, but that sounds horrible to me. Floods and fires and psychopath neighbors? It sounds like a freak show.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I understand what you mean. It’s hard to explain.”

  Then the two of us stood there and watched our wives laugh and talk. We watched Lindy reach down and rub Julie’s belly, and I think we both knew we were pretty lucky in life.

  I raised my can of beer, and Sean toasted it without a word. We took a long gulp.

  “Who even goes for it on fourth down five times in one game?” he asked me.

  “Nobody,” I said. “I know.”

  And later that night, while Julie and I lay in bed and I put my hands on her belly to feel our unborn child do its little knee-and-elbow dance, I began to experience a guilt so tremendous that I knew I would eventually tell you this story, or that I woul
d at least tell someone. It just seemed so strange to me, all of a sudden, that I could still have secrets in the world like the ones I had in regard to the rape of Lindy Simpson.

  After all, with Julie, I felt I had no secrets. Anything she had asked me, I told her. Even after we had parted for college and dated other people and then reunited for graduate school (she’s a literature professor now, by the way, a smart cookie), I’d told her the truth about all of my feelings. But then, after I saw Lindy again, the legitimate joy I’d experienced at learning she was happy and healthy slowly faded into self-loathing. It was like I was back in high school, shaving the sides of my head, trying so hard to impress her. This made me think of my uncle Barry, and what he’d said to me about love always being the same. It began to make a certain sense to me. I felt antsy and nerve-wracked. I felt full of a tremendous vulnerability. And although there didn’t seem to be any similarities between Lindy and Julie, I understood that they were connected by the pain I felt when I was keeping secrets from them. Or, to put it another way, that they were connected by the tremendous potential for love I imagined if they knew the whole truth about me.

  So, “Jewels,” I said, “I need to tell you something.”

  Julie rolled over on her side to face me. At seven months, this took some doing, but she didn’t seem to mind. She held a pillow between her legs and wore an oversized T-shirt with a cartoon Tyrannosaurus rex on the front of it. The dinosaur was lying facedown, its mouth and feet on the ground, while its short arms flailed around uselessly. The caption read “I hate doing push-ups!”

  She smiled.

  “Are you going to tell me that you used to be madly in love with Lindy Simpson?” she said. “Because I already knew that.”

  “No,” I said. “That’s not what I was going to say.”

  “It was nice to see her, wasn’t it?” Julie said. “She looks good, don’t you think?”

  “She does look good,” I said. “I mean, you know what I mean. She looks happy.”

  Julie smirked. “What else could you mean, young squire?”

  She gave me a playful little pinch under the sheets, and I pulled the covers up to my shoulders. I closed my eyes.

  “Do you remember what happened to her?” I asked.

  “Of course,” Julie said. “She was like Little Red Riding Hood in my house. She was my cautionary tale. It was how my parents told me to be careful, you know, even in our neighborhood.”

  The idea of this bothered me.

  “But Lindy was careful, wasn’t she?” I said. “And our neighborhood was safe, wasn’t it?”

  “Who knows,” Julie said. “I’m sure my parents just used her as an example because she was the only one they knew about. Who knows how many others there were.”

  “Other what?” I asked. “You mean victims? In our neighborhood?”

  “Sure,” Julie said. “In our neighborhood, or anywhere. Who knows how many more there are out there. That’s just not the type of thing women go around talking about.”

  I thought about this. It seemed to me a horrible version of the world I love.

  “I would die if that ever happened to you,” I told her.

  “Who’s to say it hasn’t?” she said.

  I sat up in bed and looked at Julie. My heart started pounding. I felt frantic.

  “You would tell me,” I said. “Wouldn’t you?”

  “I guess I would if I wanted to,” she said. “But that would really be up to me.”

  Then, after a while, she touched my arm.

  “Relax, Lancelot,” she said. “We’re just talking.”

  I lay down again and looked at the ceiling. I had this painful lump in my throat and was so afraid, already, of becoming a parent.

  “If you were Lindy,” I said, “do you think you’d want to know who did that to you? Whether you found out now or back then, do you think that would change things for you? Would it make it better, if you had someone to blame?”

  “I think a lot of women know who did it,” Julie said. “I think they might rather not. Still, it’s not like either one is a good option.”

  I kept staring at the ceiling as Julie watched me. She saw that I was close to crying. I know she did.

  “They never arrested anybody, did they?” she asked me.

  “No,” I said. “But they should have.”

  She took a moment. I could feel her still watching me.

  “You’re the one who told everybody at school, aren’t you,” she said.

  “I was,” I said. “I am.”

  I then turned to look Julie in the eye and beneath the covers she took my hand and placed it again on her belly. “Hey,” she said. “Before you tell me that thing you were going to tell me, will you do me a favor? Will you think about whether or not it will help us? Will it help the baby? I mean, even in the long term. I know how you are. Even if you’re thinking about big-picture stuff like honesty and trust, will you also think about how good things seem for Lindy now? And think about how good they are for us? And think about whether or not what you say will help that goodness continue?”

  I didn’t understand what she was getting at.

  “Are you suggesting that the point of the truth is to help people?” I asked her. “Isn’t it more complicated than that?”

  “Just think about it, okay?” Julie said.

  So, I did think about it.

  I’m still thinking about it now.

  But on that night, Julie rolled back over to her other side, where it was more comfortable for her to sleep in those days. It wasn’t personal that she turned her back to me. I understood that. I reached out and adjusted the crease in her shirt. I straightened the covers on her legs.

  “Hey,” Julie said. “Can I tell you something?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Anything.”

  “It doesn’t bother me that you used to be in love with Lindy, or that you got arrested trying to save her like some comic-book hero.”

  I smiled at this.

  “Why not?” I said. “Shouldn’t you be insane with jealousy?”

  “No,” she said, “because you are in love with me now and we are going to have a kid and you will be our real-life hero.”

  “Ouch,” I said. “No pressure.”

  Then, after a minute, I said, “You’re right about that, though. I am in love with you.”

  “Plus,” Julie said, “I’ve got like forty pounds on her now. I’ve got a ninja in my belly. If Lindy tried anything, it could get ugly.”

  I lay there and smiled for a good long time.

  And then a couple of years went by and our child was healthy and bright and everything I believed I knew about love and humanity deepened in ways I could have never predicted. Still, I understand that we are just getting started, Julie and I. Our daughter is three years old now, and every leap she makes, even the simple sound of her singing in her room when she thinks that no one is listening, it fills me with an irreplaceable joy. It does this to Julie, as well, and so we are happily crushed, like so many others, by parenthood.

  But just the other day, as my daughter and I were playing around outside, drawing chalk figures on the driveway, washing the car, and picking a few stray weeds from the flower beds, a small group of neighborhood kids came by. They range from around my daughter’s age up to maybe nine years old or so. They are polite and energetic and we see them in the neighborhood often. We wave at them when we pass by. I recognize each of their parents. I hope that Baton Rouge will always be this way. Still, this was the first time they had come to our house in a group to ask if my daughter could join them a few houses down, where they were doing things like riding their bikes in a circle, building an igloo out of milk jugs, and eating popsicles.

  I looked down to ask my daughter what she thought of this idea and the look in her eyes was so hopeful that all I said was, “Okay.
” She ran to the patio to grab her tricycle, a pink getup with a basket on the back, and she was gone. The older kids were kicking off on their skateboards and rip-sticks, the younger kids still with their training wheels, and in that scene I saw what felt to me like the entirety of my life. The plump kid on the Big Wheel, that was Randy Stiller. The older kid on the skateboard was Duke Kern. The girl on the bike, pedaling hard to get to the front of the pack, was Lindy. I did not know who my daughter was yet, or if she would ever be like any of us. I only knew that, whoever she might be, I would love her.

  And then a number of things made sense to me—the research I’d found myself doing lately, the old photo albums I’d been looking through, the way I kept steering the conversations with my mother and sister toward Lindy and Hannah and the old days, and even the conversations with my father and Laura, who are now married. These past few years, ever since we had our first child, our daughter, I understood, I’ve only been trying to say this one thing.

  35.

  I was up in the tree that night.

  It was June and it was hot and I was young and turned completely inside out by what I thought at that time was love. And on that night I had finished supper and helped my mom with the dishes and without even the slightest bit of hesitation I lied and told her that I wasn’t in the mood for television. I said that I was instead going to my room to play video games, maybe fall asleep a bit early. And these were the days when everyone I knew was alive, remember. My father was gone, yes, but Lindy and Hannah were untouched. We were all young. So, I knew that my mom would do what she always did in the young summer evenings of 1989 and sit at the dining room table to call Rachel in her dorm room in Lafayette, call Hannah at her apartment on the other side of Baton Rouge. If she got hold of them, they would chat pleasantly for a few minutes and tell each other they loved each other and my mom would then walk the phone back to the wall to hang it up. She might then have called her father or perhaps a friend to reconfirm a lunch date, but not much more, though I am sure she wanted, at times, to call my dad. I am sure she wanted, at other times, to knock on my door and say, Hey, you, come visit with me. It’s barely eight o’clock. But she did not. She instead walked through the house turning off the lights and picking up little odds and ends like socks and discarded food wrappers until she got to her room, where she began the long process of undressing and taking off her makeup before she would lie in bed and fall asleep reading a self-help book about how to parent through a divorce.