Lady Sunshine Page 10

  “Please don’t ask me to do anything physical for the rest of the week. I think you may have to carry me back to my cabin as it is.” I raised my hands as if she’d need to drag me.

  She laughed, took my wrists. “Okay, you don’t have to get on the raft, but your nose is burning. Come to the shade... What’s this?”

  I pulled my hand from hers. “Nothing. Sort of a poem about my mother that I wrote last night.”

  She sat next to me. “Because of those magazines you found.”

  I nodded. I’d told her last night, elated, after confirming my suspicions with Graham.

  She was so silent, so accepting that the writing on my palm might be too private to share. And it was so quiet and warm here on the bank, I held my hand out to her.

  She read the lines, spreading my fingers so she wouldn’t miss a word. “It could be a song.”

  “I just mess around with poems sometimes. That’s different.”

  “Is it?”

  I shrugged.

  “If you were going to hum this first line, how would it go? You’ve memorized it, right?”

  “Yes,” I admitted.

  “So close your eyes.”

  “Willa. I haven’t even finished it.”

  “I know... C’mon, no one’s around but the butterflies, and they’re too busy to listen. Just close your eyes and hum.”

  14

  Stowaways

  1999

  Midnight

  Shane and I lie on the studio floor, on the overlapping Persian rugs, islands surrounded by a sea of paper. Notes, album liners, zoomed-in copies of the notebook he made as backups. We’ve been analyzing them for hours.

  And I’ve been rereading the same three songs: “Sky-Colored Glasses,” “Answers,” and “Janey.” Shane has selected all three for the anniversary album.

  “I can’t believe I didn’t see it,” he says, rubbing the back of his neck hard, more as if to punish himself than to relax tired muscles. “Some super fan.”

  It’s not his fault. “Their handwriting’s similar. He’s the one who taught Willa cursive.”

  “Still. God, I feel like such an idiot... I mean, it’s so obvious now that I’m looking for it. But how are you feeling? Do you want to hear the songs?”

  “Answers” and “Sky-Colored Glasses” are already laid down, and “Janey” is nearly mixed. But I shake my head; I can’t bear to listen to others singing in Willa’s place. Not yet.

  “They’re beautiful songs, Jackie. You two... Do you think you’d have worked on more together, if things had turned out differently?”

  “We weren’t planning that far ahead. We never dreamed they’d have an audience beyond the two of us. That wasn’t why we wrote them.”

  I stare across the room at one of Graham’s tapestries. Leaping stags and turrets and moats. No. It was just something we enjoyed doing together, like trading opinions on Important Things, or digging a sleeping nook into the dunes on Glass Beach.

  I’ve wondered about these songs often, even hummed parts of them, in unguarded moments. I dismissed them as girlish, shallow. But, looking over them now, I can’t resist a surge of pride. We made these. The songs started life in my head. Then I wrote them in my diary, or on my hands, or flattened custard cups, on anything, if I had an idea that I feared would blow away. Then, once I was ready, I showed them to Willa, and she set them to music. Since then, they have sat, waiting patiently in these cold pages. Little stowaways from the past.

  “So why do you think she put them in there? Did you ever see Willa writing in the notebook?” he asks.

  “Never. And Graham nearly always carried it with him. The notebook and his guitar.”

  Except for the last week.

  I remember every detail of that week—the cups of tea Willa wouldn’t drink, the drab clothes she wore.

  I remember everything. But there’s so much I don’t know.

  “So, maybe she was proud of the songs,” Shane says. “And she wanted to show them to Graham, but she was too shy to ask. It could be as simple as that.”

  “It could be.” But I know that’s not what happened. The timing makes it impossible.

  He shakes his head again, still upset with himself. “I should’ve realized...”

  I read through the last stanza of “Janey” again. The song I’d written about my mother, and how she’d filled in those magazine quizzes. I’d been so thrilled to discover what those silly, glossy magazines hid.

  Circles and check marks and a few precious words in her youthful handwriting. Handwriting...

  “Shane. Angela would’ve recognized Willa’s handwriting if she looked through here. Do you think she knew?”

  “You think... She always referred to it as my late husband’s music. You think she knew some of these songs were yours and Willa’s?”

  “It’s possible. And if Angela did know, maybe it was the reason she said yes?”

  “Said yes?”

  “To your project. You know, when you first approached her about recording Graham’s covers, and she agreed and offered up the notebook, too?”

  “Right, I...” He flips through the notebook yet again, as if we haven’t scoured through it over and over. “Maybe that’s why she...”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. She was just sort of cagey now that I think about it. Or, not cagey, but drifty. I mean, she’d sort of conveniently float off whenever I asked her too many questions. I don’t know what I’m saying. This whole thing... I don’t get it. So Angela knew Willa wrote three of these, and she wanted her dead daughter immortalized on the recording, fine. Why couldn’t she just tell me? And arrange for her to get credit?”

  “I don’t know.” And this part is true. Maybe she didn’t know. Maybe, like me, she’d been too scared to look inside.

  “So, what now?” Shane says.

  “You mean, with the album?”

  He nods. “I guess you’ll want to call it off, huh?”

  “I’m not sure. I have to think about it.”

  Except I don’t want to call it off. I want to be on that album. Me and Willa, holding our own with her legendary father. The way I always dreamed we could.

  I want to be on the album, but would she have wanted that, after everything?

  That question leads to a hundred others. So many questions, after so many years, that I can hardly breathe.

  “Maybe we should take a break, clear out for a few days. Give you some space to decide what you want to do... You all right?”

  I drag myself back to the present. “Hmmm? Yes. I just...”

  “Hey, we’ll figure this out.” Shane touches my hand, smiling sadly. He’s sure I’m going to kill the album. “Try to get some sleep.”

  “You, too.”

  But I don’t try. I go upstairs and walk out to the porch to gulp in fresh air.

  The lyrics have brought Willa back in a way no mountain of her family belongings could.

  You show me your world and I’ll show you mine.

  And Willa had kept her promise. But I never imagined that once she showed me her world, invited me into it, she’d leave it.

  Gripping the porch railing, I gaze out at the soft night. Willa’s been dead longer than she was alive. It seems impossible.

  Why did you leave your beautiful home, Willa? I’ve wanted to ask her that for so long. That, and another question.

  Why did you leave me?

  It wasn’t our fault, what happened.

  I need to accept that I’ll never find the answer.

  But when I go inside, I can’t help myself—I recheck the hall closet I’ve already emptied. Which leads me to the kitchen, where I run my hands inside the drawers and on the high pantry shelves I’ve already searched. I give the empty dining room sideboard one more look.

  By the time
I enter the Rec Room, I’m a wrecking ball. I toss orange corduroy cushions and LPs and 45s everywhere, destroying my planned genre organizational system for the donation boxes. I rip into the beanbag chair to root inside, knowing it’ll be fruitless, but in the moment it feels good, tearing into it so it bleeds foam pellets across the carpet. It’s not here.

  I’m torturing myself, looking. Hoping. But if I could only find it, maybe it would tell me something new. Offer me some clue I was too self-absorbed to understand back then, at seventeen.

  There must have been a word, an inflection in a voice, a look on a face that would have prepared me for how my time with the Kingstons would end. A sign of what was building, what we were speeding toward that summer, when all I’d paid attention to at the time was my own happiness.

  * * *

  “Morning,” Shane says on the porch, handing me a coffee. “You look like you need that as much as I do. Rough night?”

  I nod. “But I decided. I want you to finish the album. The way you planned it.”

  “With your and Willa’s songs?”

  “Yes. And I’m going to stay until it’s done.”

  “You can think about it awhile.”

  “No. I’m sure. Willa would like it.” And I’m surrendering. To the Sandcastle’s hold on me. To this admission: I want to stay longer.

  Time making something beautiful out of something ugly, like how she described sea glass. That was always the plan for this project.

  I just didn’t know until now that some of the beauty on the album would be Willa’s and mine. Our songs. Pretty survivors of violent seas.

  Should I have seen just how rough they would get?

  Or was it something that started so gradually, so far below the surface, I’d have had just as much luck trying to pinpoint the second a shard of glass, whirling in the waves, became completely smooth?

  15

  A Small Favor

  1979

  It started so casually. An afterthought, it seemed.

  “Hey, could you girls do me a small favor?” Graham said by the picnic tables, one windy day after lunch. “That kid who came today. Can you play with her this afternoon? Her folks’re exhausted.” He meant Dylan, the daughter of his session pianist. She and her mom, Serena, had come up to surprise her father.

  A couple days after, Graham asked if we would mind “entertaining the wild things,” since we’d been so good with Dylan. He handed Willa some bills so we could take a group of kids for custard. I hadn’t technically agreed to do it, but who could say no, when he needed us, and put it so nicely?

  Before custard, we took them to Glass Beach. Dylan wouldn’t wade out to the tide pool, a rite of passage an older, much bigger kid had come up with, since it was no challenge for him.

  “The important thing about Dylan is she needs to feel proud of something,” I said to Willa as we watched her. “What if she was the first to try the Flying Swing? Then we could give her a super special bravery award.”

  “Brilliant,” Willa said.

  “It’s brilliant, if she’ll do it.”

  I’d found the reward in the treehouse, getting the idea from the Superman movie posters I’d seen everywhere—one of the marigold-colored fabric remnants we used as carpet.

  At the swing later that week, when we presented Dylan with the cape, for her bravery, she turned positively drunk with happiness, the bright, butterfly-print fabric streaming behind her in the sun. She wore the cape night and day after that.

  That’s how it began—our informal day camp. One afternoon became every afternoon. It became expected, that we would corral the littler kids while their parents lazed in the grassy bowl or at the beach or in the springs, restoring themselves after the morning’s work, the night’s revelries. It was only a few hours a day, and helping felt like an honor since it was for Graham. I’d have organized his guitar picks if he’d asked.

  “They listen to you,” Willa said in astonishment, when a little boy refused to come into shallower water at the beach and I lured him using a “redirection” trick I’d learned from an old book I’d bought at the thrift store. Parenting with Compassion, written by a wise-looking woman named Barbara Fairwhistle, Licensed Clinical Social Worker.

  They didn’t always listen to Willa. She overindulged, and they climbed all over her. Still, together we made a good team, and Graham showered us with praise about how wonderful we were with the children, how clever.

  Angela helped sometimes, when she was around. She taught the kids how to make daisy chains, how to hold their hands flat to offer apple slices to the goats she’d adopted, after they wandered over, neglected, from the neighboring property Willa had showed me from the treehouse.

  One day after lunch she emerged from the house in thick stage makeup. We were making pine cone birdfeeders at the picnic tables, and the sight of her garish, painted face—the left side happy, the right sad, like mime masks—was a shock, at first. I think Willa and I may have been more startled than the kids.

  But then Angela pulled an old tweed train case from behind her back and revealed its treasures: sticks and pots of old Max Factor greasepaint. The real stuff. She held the kids in thrall, as I imagined she did in the touring plays I’d never seen, demonstrating how a few stick-paint swipes in the right places could transform them into witches or fairies.

  Like Willa, she was gentle and serene, murmuring confidentially to a little girl as she made her detested freckles vanish with a few strokes of her ancient Max Factor stick.

  Graham wandered by and stood over Angela. “Can I be next?” He reached over her shoulder for a red stick and painted a sloppy clown smile over his own, making the kids laugh.

  He leaned down to kiss the crown of Angela’s head, just above her old-fashioned gold bun.

  Angela closed her eyes to receive his kiss as she spoke gently to the little girl beside her: “This stuff can hide anything, see? I’ve used it for decades. But you may decide that you miss your freckles. You know, my favorite flowers have freckles...”

  I would remember this afternoon later, how Angela helped us “entertain” the little kids, showing us all how to try on new faces. And how even under greasepaint, she and Graham looked more natural and happy together than my father and Patricia ever had.

  * * *

  The morning after Angela’s face-painting lesson, as Willa and I crossed the parking lot from the beach trail—now that we were busy with the kids every afternoon, I got up at dawn with her for my surf lessons—I noticed the Sandcastle’s latest arrival.

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  “Who?”

  “That guy over there. Prince Valiant with the truck.”

  I watched the tall, shirtless man unloading crates of fruit from his truck bed. His blond hair was pulled into a ponytail, and his shoulders were slick with sweat. “He must be delivering supplies for Kate.”

  “Oh, that’s just Colin. He crashes here a few nights every summer, on his way back from picking. He’s an old friend of my mom and dad’s, he’s nice, you’ll like him. Colin!” She flung her bike to the gravel and ran across the parking lot. They exchanged a friendly hug and Willa waved for me to come over.

  I fiddled with my bike, propping it against a tree. This old friend seemed a lot younger than Graham and Angela. Maybe twenty-five or twenty-six. And good-looking. Wearing brown sandals, Levi’s faded almost to white, and nothing else.

  I tucked my salt-stiffened hair behind my ears and crossed the parking lot, wishing I’d put anything but Get up on surfboard on my Never-done-but-want-to list. Willa was a patient and creative instructor, but my lessons made my nose run and my eyes red.

  “This is my cousin, Jackie,” Willa said.

  “Named after the Jackie? My folks were wild about all that Camelot stuff, too. My little brother’s name is Kennedy.”

  “Actually, I was born in ’61,
but it’s just a coincidence. I was named after a great-great-grandmother from France named Jacqueline.” In one swoop, I’d pointed out our exact age difference and shifted the conversation to the supremely unsexy topic of great-great-grandmothers.

  But he didn’t seem to mind. “You have her eyes. Wide-set brown eyes. Hey, you two mind helping me carry these up to the house?”

  “Sure!” My worn-out muscles had, miraculously, gotten a second wind.

  As we lugged the berry boxes up the field, I watched a rivulet of sweat progress down the valley of tanned skin between his shoulder blades.

  I would always associate the smell of fresh berries with Colin.

  16

  New!

  He installed himself in Plover cabin, next to mine. The family with the baby had just left for LA—thank you, family.

  He was twenty-six and, I learned from grilling Willa, had met Graham and Angela back when they were students at UCLA and his mother was their sociology professor. He didn’t have a fixed address, preferring to roam with the seasons. Cannery work in Alaska, picking in Washington and Oregon, working concerts or the Country Fair or the wine crush down in Napa. He slept in the back of his truck and sometimes crashed on the beach.

  He’d worked as a roadie for Graham in his late teens. But he wasn’t a musician. And, unlike the rest of Graham and Angela’s visitors, he liked to repay the Kingstons for their hospitality. First were the crates spilling over with fresh Oregon raspberries and strawberries. Then, the next night at campfire, he gave Graham a gift. A small stack of new albums.

  My uncle took one look at the flames and satin on the covers and said, “You’ve been out there too long, my boy.”

  “Just for fun.” Colin’s smile seemed innocent, but he had to know that Graham loathed this kind of music. It was the stuff I adored, even now that I had a newfound appreciation for folk. I kept my passion for pop and disco between me and Willa (we held her Hustle lessons in the woods or my cabin).