My Sunshine Away

by M. O. Walsh

  Meanwhile, in my room, I watched the clock.

  The thing was, I knew the routine of the Simpson girl.

  So when I heard my mother’s door shut at eight o’clock, I waited fifteen more minutes and then opened my window to sprint across our darkening street. Lindy would return from the track at eight-thirty, and this gave me enough time to run from one yard to the next while making sure all of the neighbors were inside. I had done this a few times since I learned how to spy on her from the water oak and the results had been tremendous. I saw her, once, talking on the phone and painting her toenails. On another occasion, I watched her fold some laundry and put it away and I honestly never imagined there would come a time when I regretted this.

  But that night, as I made like a cat across the street, I couldn’t help but look a bit farther down the block to where that broken streetlight looked so peculiar to me. It was still new to us at that time, maybe a couple weeks old, and as I sprinted toward the tree, I saw someone beneath it. I did not think I saw someone. I did see someone. It was a man, I thought, or perhaps a boy, and the truth is that it was impossible for me to tell because I was running. In other words, I did not get a good look because I did not stop to get a good look.

  What I did see was a shadow working hurriedly, moving back and forth from the pole to the azalea bushes, and I thought it was perhaps Old Man Casemore, or maybe some utility worker who’d come to fix the light. I did not care as long I was not seen.

  I cannot go back and change this. I cannot go back and fix this.

  All I can do is confess that a few minutes later, when I was up in that tree, I heard something happen on Piney Creek Road. The sound of it was quick and muted and has no other reference for me than that single event. So I have no way to describe it to you, no way to make you hear it. Yet I can tell you this. It was a sound that gave me a feeling. I immediately felt that something was not right and I knew that, whatever it was, it was happening around the corner. I also knew that Lindy, at that time of night, would likely be around the corner. I thought to climb down and go see. That’s what kills me. I thought to check on her. Yet I was so afraid of being caught that I decided not to.

  So, I never really saw what happened. And I did not commit the act myself.

  That’s the truth.

  What I did see, however, was Lindy, a few minutes later, walking her bike up the sidewalk. Her face was as blank as the day of the Challenger, the day I fell in love with her, and I noticed that her shoe was missing. The scraping sound of her uneven walk up the driveway is as clear to me now as it was then. It is as clear as the way I saw her bathroom light turn on, the way I stayed in the tree against my better judgment and listened to the shower go, and the way I watched through my binoculars as she walked into her bedroom still wrapped in a towel, still wearing the exact same blank expression, and curled into a ball on top of her bed. It is also as clear to me as our street was empty, by the time I finally went back home.

  So, I am guilty in the most specific sense.

  I had an opportunity to help someone and I chose not to. For a large part of my life, I’ve felt that this decision defined me and I’ve worn my guilt like a locket.

  What am I trying to say?

  After my mother’s stroke, a minor one that occurred in 2006, a year or so before my daughter was born, she told me that she kept a box in her closet. She was still in the hospital, doing fine but a little shaken and confused, and asked me to go retrieve it for her. When I brought it back to the hospital she unlocked it with a simple combination and opened it up. She pulled out a manila envelope.

  “This is my will,” she said. “This is the boring part. The rest of this stuff, I figured we could take a look at.”

  I imagine there is little need for me to describe the bittersweet exhaustion of that afternoon. My mother had a smattering of old photos, strange personal favorites she had collected that were pretty much evenly distributed between Hannah, Rachel, and me. She also had some mementos that didn’t mean much to me, but that I enjoyed hearing about. She had a dried corsage from her wedding to my father. She had a blue piece of silk that she told me was from her mother’s wedding to her father, both of whom had passed by then. She had letters that had been especially meaningful to her, one from my dad’s remorseful parents who had drifted away from us after my father’s adultery, another from Finally Douglas after Hannah had died. She had a photograph clipped from the newspaper that showed Rachel playing the wife in a kindergarten version of ’Twas the Night Before Christmas, and she had a poem that I had written to her for a Mother’s Day present when I was in the second grade that I had no recollection of. She also had a yellow Duncan yo-yo that my uncle Barry had asked her to give me.

  “I’m sorry I never gave this to you,” she said. “Things were just so difficult back then. Barry was so confused and I could tell how much you looked up to him. I don’t know. I was afraid of everything.”

  “I know, Mom,” I said. “I was, too.”

  Other people came to visit throughout the afternoon, like Rachel and her family, and although the crying jags passed through the room like weather fronts, the majority of the day, interrupted by nurses’ visits, was cheerful with memory. When visiting hours were over and we were packing up to leave, my mother pulled out a small notebook from the bottom of the box and asked me if I would like to take it home.

  It was Hannah’s journal.

  “You were so young when that happened,” my mom said. “I figured you might not appreciate this until later. And then, you know, time went by and I didn’t know what to do.”

  I looked over at Rachel. I knew she and Hannah were closer than we had ever been.

  “You can take it,” Rachel said. “Trust me. I’ve read it a hundred times.”

  I got home that night to a series of messages on our machine from Julie, who had been at an academic conference in Chicago when my mother had her stroke the day before. I’d told her to stay and deliver her paper, and she had called me to say that she managed a way to deliver it early and get a flight that would have her home the next morning. She asked me to call her in her hotel room and I did.

  After this I sat at the kitchen counter of our rental home, on a bar stool I rarely sat on, and opened Hannah’s journal. I’d never been so nervous. I imagine now it is because I was old enough to realize that I never really knew my sister and perhaps, at this moment, I was about to.

  To my surprise, the journal spanned the entirety of her writing life. The entries were sporadic and often undated and consisted of everything from poems to stories to songs to random observations about the happenings of our family from times both before and after I became a part of it. The tough parts that dealt with her disappointment with my father, her string of bad and even dangerous-sounding relationships with guys her age, these were difficult to read. Some of the pages were even glued together or blacked out in Sharpie so that no one could read them and I imagine that Hannah did this herself, for whatever private reasons she had, and that we all do this with our pasts. Still, the well-earned skepticism about men that I could see coming through, about their intentions, it reminded me of things Lindy might have said on the phone those years back. And yet the lighthearted stuff from when she was a kid, the tales of princesses and dragons she’d cooked up, it all seemed steeped with a certain unorthodox wisdom that reminded me of Julie. It was powerful stuff, all of it, and I couldn’t get enough.

  But two specific entries were of particular note.

  One was dated from the early summer 1989, the summer of Lindy’s rape, when Hannah must have been home visiting or stopping by for a swim. The setting seemed to be a window at our house, facing Piney Creek Road, where she was composing a love song about Finally Douglas, called “This Lucky Heart.” On the margins of the page, Hannah had scribbled details from our neighborhood as she saw them outside. Perhaps they were for future songs. Perhaps they were just prac
tice. I am sure, however, that she had no idea of what they might mean to me all those years later.

  Some of the lines read awkwardly, like:

  A missing Mercedes / can’t hide the pain

  Oak trees drop / what will be theirs again.

  Maybe this is where I’d gotten my bad taste in poetry.

  But then, near the bottom of this page, I saw this line:

  A skinny boy slinks / tattoos blue as night.

  His head as bald as the street / he throws rocks at the light.

  And there it was.

  Tyler Bannister. It had to have been him. He was the only kid with tattoos and a shaved head that Piney Creek Road had ever known. He must have returned to the neighborhood after leaving the Landrys’ and knocked out the light. He must have planned the whole thing. I felt sick to my stomach as I recalled the day that Tyler, Jason, and I stood in front of Lindy’s house talking about the water oak, the way we pretended to be fiddling with a remote-control car as Lindy’s father pulled up and smiled and asked his daughter, yet again, to remind him of what time she was to return from the track. It would be eight-thirty, Daddy, she told him, the same as every day, and in this way the whole awful thing became obvious to me.

  The fact that Tyler Bannister had moved out months before—that he no longer lived with the Landrys at the time of the crime—meant nothing, because the simple truth is that there was a stretch of time in his life in which Woodland Hills was his home, and a home, no matter how wonderful or menacing, is a thing you don’t forget. Ask anybody.

  So, my mystery was solved.

  Yet I didn’t feel any better.

  I had my reasons.

  For starters, how had we not stumbled upon this connection before? Although Hannah lived across town at that point, although she was busy with her own life, hadn’t my mom or Rachel or perhaps even the police spoken to her about Lindy’s rape? Hadn’t everyone given their best effort, discussing simple clues like a busted streetlight or the reappearance of suspicious boys? I’d always thought so. This made me wonder if there was perhaps another, darker, reason that we’d missed this. It made me wonder if maybe my mother or Rachel, knowing what they did about Hannah’s history with men that was just now unfolding for me, felt it better not to mention to her what had happened to the Simpson girl in our very own neighborhood. It made me wonder if perhaps this was the reason my mother took that police officer’s card off the refrigerator and slipped it into the drawer that day, if maybe she didn’t want her daughters seeing a thing like this, being reminded of realities like this, every time they wanted a little something to eat.

  This type of care, I understood, would not be dissimilar to the way people had been so wary to mention Hannah around my mother after she had died. I then began to wonder what Julie meant, exactly, when she said that rape is not a thing that women go around talking about, and this made me wonder what other dreadful knowledge is passed silently among the hearts of women and I suddenly had a hard time understanding men, in general, and the damage we can do, and how it is even possible that I am one of them.

  So, from the time I read that journal until now, a period of a few years, I’ve buried what I’d learned about the rape of Lindy Simpson. I didn’t tell anyone about it. Yet I went so far as to look Tyler Bannister up and, unsurprisingly, found out that he was already in prison on various other charges, including sexual battery. This didn’t make things easier on my conscience and so I began to take strange and nostalgic trips back to the old neighborhood, wondering if I should track Lindy down and tell her what I’d uncovered. I suppose this is why I felt so awful after I ran into her that night at the football game.

  It was the first time I had seen her since I knew, or at least believed I knew, who had changed her life so dramatically, and since I’d come to grips with my own cowardice on that night of her rape, and yet I didn’t even think to apologize. So, in an awful way, I felt again like I was in on the crime.

  Maybe I was.

  That’s why I am so lucky to have Julie around now, and to have had my mother and Rachel around for so long, to make me realize that life is not always about me and the unloading of my conscience. The story of Lindy’s rape, for instance.

  It is about Lindy. And that is all.

  However, what is about me, and the reason I am talking to you, is the other entry in Hannah’s journal.

  It was from a time when Hannah was around eleven years old and, I’ve gathered, on a school field trip, a thing we all had to do in our youth. This seemed to be one of those wilderness camps they sent us to, where the rustic setting is meant to remind you of how fortunate you are in life and how beautiful nature can be. And so Hannah had been sent out to sit by herself in the woods and construct a list of things she was thankful for. Her handwriting was cursive and big and, near the top of her list, beside a collection of butterfly doodles, she had thanked God for her “new baby brother,” which she described as a miracle.

  It hit me so hard when I saw this.

  Don’t you understand?

  My sister had written my name before I ever knew her. She had believed in my goodness in the same way that I now believe in my daughter’s innate goodness and in your innate goodness, and when I read that it was like I could hear Hannah again. It was like I could see her. And it was like I was whole again. I felt no guilt. I had no regrets. It was as if I’d been forgiven.

  After I read those words, my own future suddenly seemed as sunlit to me as it had to Hannah all those years ago, and I guess I would like, very much, to share this feeling. Because no one can change what has happened to Lindy or to Hannah or to anybody. Our histories are just that. But what’s most amazing about the connection I felt with my sister is that it was made possible only by the love she showed to me before I could ever possibly return it.

  And so, you.

  The doctors tell us you will be a boy.

  And they say that you are healthy.

  Your mother and sister are ecstatic about this, as am I, but with my excitement comes the fear that I will not be able to raise you from this boy to the man that I know you can be: a better man than I have been, surely, but one like I am trying to become. And so I have spoken honestly to you about my youth and my mistakes, and also of the incredible fortune that has come my way through the kindness of our family, for one simple reason. I want us to get off on the right foot. I want the two of us, together in this world, to be good men.

  And when I tell you that I love you I want, so badly, for you to understand what I mean.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The first person I’d like to thank is you—anyone who took time to read this—for your generosity and spirit. Thank you for reading every single book you’ve ever read by any author from anywhere. It’s important. My family would also like to express their enormous thanks to Renee Zuckerbrot and Amy Einhorn, who floated into our lives like young fairy godmothers. I could not dream up a better team. Thanks also to Ivan Held and Elizabeth Stein and everyone else at G. P. Putnam’s Sons and the Penguin Group. You are all incredible.

  I am also in the debt of my friends who, for some reason, agreed to read the early pages of this book and yet still let me carry on with it for another seven years. These good people are Matt Brock, Sean Ennis, and Alex Taylor. Special thanks also go to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, especially Steve Yarbrough and Diane Johnson, who gave me the exact push I needed when I needed it, as well as the Faulkner Society, in particular Rosemary James and Jeff Kleinman, who also gave me a huge boost. Thanks also to my students and colleagues in the Creative Writing Workshop at the UNO, at the Yokshop in Oxford, and to my former teachers at the University of Mississippi and the University of Tennessee, for what seems like a never-ending parade of goodwill. And finally a big thanks to the Chimes Tap Room in Baton Rouge and the Parkview Tavern in New Orleans, where much of this book was figured out.

  The deepe
st thanks, of course, go to my mother and father and my sisters. Where would I be without you? That is a question that actually has an answer. Also, to the extended Walsh, Prater, Anselmo, Jones, Berdon, Madere, Patterson, and Taylor families. Thank you for taking me in.

  Lastly but never leastly, to my good luck charms: Sarah and Magnolia and Sherwood. Thank you for laughing at how I type instead of what I type. You’ve no idea how happy you make me.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Milton O’Neal Walsh, Jr., is a writer from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. His stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Epoch, and Best New American Voices, among others. His first book, the story collection The Prospect of Magic, was the winner of the Tartt’s Fiction Prize and a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award for fiction. He is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Mississippi and is currently the director of the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of New Orleans, where he lives and works, happily, with his wife and family.