Lady Sunshine Read online

  “Mine first.” Shane secretly brushes my knee as he sets his gift in my lap.

  I hold it up—thin, square, sixteen by sixteen inches. “I wonder what this could be?” I say, teasing.

  They laugh as I tear off a strip of wrapping paper. An album.

  A mint-condition LP of Blondie’s Parallel Lines, signed by Debbie Harry and Chris Stein and Clem Burke.

  “I love it,” I say, remembering just in time not to kiss Shane. But I hug him.

  “This is perfect, you guys,” I tell everyone. And I want to mean it; it’s nearly perfect. These people feel like family.

  I smile, touched.

  But I can’t hide from it anymore, the tug of the past. As Martin’s clearing the table, I see it.

  Everything’s been swept away except the bowls that had been set down for our cioppino shells.

  White bowls, filled with shells, spaced here and there along the long brown line of tables.

  “Jackie, Jackie, Jackie.” Restless calls from over at the campfire. Performances wait. They have a sweet evening for me. Against all odds, they like me. I’m a favorite in this ragtag group. They’re proud of how they’ve won me over.

  Get it together, it’s nothing. I pick up a mussel shell.

  “Hey, Birthday Girl.” Shane secretly nuzzles my neck from behind. “You’re not trying to clean up, are you?”

  I touch the sharp mussel with my index finger. It’s furry on the outside.

  I stare at the table, at the bowls, biting my lip so hard I can feel the little scar I have inside my mouth, from my teenage bike crash. There are a dozen bowls. Not like the ten cairns. Two bowls too many. Otherwise, it’s a perfect miniature.

  I can’t seem to escape what happened at the waterfall trail.

  28

  This Place Had Other Plans

  1979

  Dear Ray,

  Willa and I have planned my birthday from sunrise to sunrise.

  We’re waking up early and biking down to Glass Beach. Then we’re hiking up to the Triangle Point swing for a picnic lunch, just the two of us. Kate’s cooking an elaborate, mysterious dinner, and Willa’s hinted about “a little surprise” for me that I can’t open until campfire. And then, after we’ve eaten my cake and watched the stars come out and doused the flames, we’re driving Rip Van Winkle to an all-night disco down in Mendocino, where we’re dancing until the sun comes out...

  I marked my place in the diary with the scrap of lace Willa had given me, my Super Special Bravery Award like Dylan’s cape, hid it in the treehouse, and went to bed.

  * * *

  Our day didn’t quite work out like that.

  Or, as Willa put it in her airy-yet-mesmerizing way, “This place had other plans for you.”

  We were coasting downhill on our brakeless bikes, bumping along the dirt trail to the beach like we’d done a hundred times. I’d never go as fast as Willa, but now that I’d memorized the most perilous bumps and turns—and identified a few handy, unofficial markers that reminded me where to duck or slow down—I’d become confident enough to relax and enjoy the ride. The wind whooshing up from the beach chilled my face, and it was so early that dew beaded the dark leaves.

  There could be a song in that. The deep green leaves, how the sunlit drops clinging to them sparkled like stars. “Night for Day.” No. “Almost Like Stars.” I’d play around with the idea tomorrow night, alone in my quiet cabin, and if anything came of it I’d ask Willa to set the words to music. Today was for biking and surfing and dancing.

  “Eighteen!” I shouted down to her.

  “Eighteen!” came the reply, a few seconds later.

  “Sing for an old lady!”

  She obeyed, and I leaned forward to catch her voice over the birds. I’d told her that listening to her voice on the way to the beach kept me balanced, and the idea thrilled her. Really I just liked to hear it, now that she trusted me enough to share it.

  Today she sang something new—a silly, personalized version of Joni’s “Circle Game”:

  And nooow the girl is eighteen...

  And her dancing is the best you ever seeeen...

  I smiled to myself. Even Willa’s nonsense songs could stop your heart. Her voice was so pure when it trilled on a high C.

  I was focusing on Willa’s impromptu song, and excited about my birthday, but I remembered to look for my safety markers. There, ahead of me, the shred of yellow nylon tied to a dying branch that reminded me to slow down ever-so-slightly on a gradual switchback. A few minutes later, on my right, the coast side—a trio of fat pine stumps right before the curve where a winter mudslide had made the trail uncomfortably narrow. A graceful lean to the left along that stretch and I was fine. I tilted and swerved, leaned and corrected like the Tour de France racers I’d seen on ABC’s Wide World of Sports, as if I’d done this for years. Like I belonged here.

  And now the girl is eighteeeen.

  She is our San Francisco queeeen...

  She thinks Blondie is peachy-keeeeen...

  “I love it!” I shouted down.

  Her voice fluttered up the hillside: “Do you think it’ll be a hit?”

  “Number one with a bullet!”

  I could just catch her laughter over the birds and my whirring bike spokes.

  My most important marker was coming up. It was nailed to a tree halfway down, about ten yards before a hairpin turn: a birdhouse.

  It was wood, its roof studded with shells. Willa had made it when she was little, and though it was mossy and badly splitting—hardly a weatherproof shelter, which is why it was always unoccupied—the pearly shells that she had glued on when she was seven still stood out clearly against the dark umber bark.

  Whenever I saw the birdhouse’s shell roof straight ahead, I knew it was time to drag my right toe on the ground in preparation for the sharpest left turn.

  I was thinking about many things. The fact that I was now an adult. The fun day ahead. A new scheme I had concocted, to get Willa to perform at a nursing home or hospital to nudge her out of her stage loathing, as she called it.

  Still, I remembered to look for that flash of white.

  By the time I realized I should have seen it already, that something was wrong, it was too late.

  One second I was safely in the middle of the trail.

  The next I was in the woods. Desperately gripping the handlebars, crunching over ferns and juniper bushes. I missed a tree trunk by inches. I juttered down, out of control, my mouth bouncing off my handlebar. My front tire hit a log and the bike bucked me off. I was airborne, a bright green bed of ferns flying at my face. I could make out fringed edges, individual dewdrops. Sparkles. Stars. Stars Falling on Me. Another new song, I thought, before I closed my eyes in fear.

  Go limp, I thought. Limp as a rag doll. Ancient wisdom retrieved from some girlhood riding lesson. I landed face-first in the wet fronds and rolled, tumbling downhill.

  Panic, confusion, the drumming command go limp, go limp, go limp.

  Pain came later.

  Branches cracked, something thudded. Me, I realized. When at last I stopped rolling and the world became quiet again, my first clear thought was that I’d been betrayed. The trail, and this land I’d grown so tender toward, had turned on me. Like it wanted to let me know that I didn’t belong here after all.

  My second thought was that my father and Patricia would hear of my accident from across the Atlantic, blame Graham, and make me leave early.

  “Jackie!” Willa’s voice. Strange. It came from above me, up the hill. It seemed impossible that I’d overtaken her. Had I fallen that far, that fast? I opened my eyes to the marigold ruffle of her skirt hem floating above me; she was frantically checking my legs.

  “Oh my god are you okay does that hurt don’t move your head’s bleeding. Did you break anything? Don’t move, you’re not supp
osed to move.”

  Her face hovered over mine, eyes huge with worry.

  “Hey,” I said. “I finally beat you.”

  She didn’t find this funny. She pulled off her sweater and wadded it gently under my head, tucked her beach towel over my body. “Don’t move, I’m getting help.” She ran uphill.

  “Willa!”

  “What?”

  “Don’t tell my father,” I called weakly. Then the forest went black.

  * * *

  When I woke I saw green and blue. Evergreen branches framing sky. Then, eventually, the green and blue of Graham’s soft plaid shirt.

  Blood was trickling down my forehead and we didn’t know how bad it was yet, but as he cradled me and picked me up, as if I weighed no more than the bough of a baby fir, he said, “I guess this place doesn’t want you to leave, Lady Sunshine.”

  “The birdhouse disappeared.”

  Though he couldn’t have understood what this meant, he said knowingly, “Ahh, child. Isn’t that always the way?”

  Later, after Willa went back to retrieve my bike—the contents of my basket had scattered far and wide, and my glass tube of Strawberry Kissing Potion was nestled in a branch six feet off the ground—she reported that the birdhouse had fallen off of its peg. Age and rot. Nothing insidious.

  My injuries could have been much worse. Three sprained fingers, a gash above my right ear, a cut inside my lower lip, from when my face slammed against my bike bell. It left me with a permanent, private thickness that I’d run my tongue along whenever I was nervous.

  I most likely had a mild concussion, according to the doctor half a mile up the highway. But he didn’t think a scan was necessary. He shaved the two-inch strip above my scalp himself—apologizing because his nurse was off—gave me seven tidy stitches and a bottle of Vicodin, and made Graham and Willa swear they’d wake me every two hours.

  “Better still if she doesn’t fall asleep at all tonight,” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” Graham said, mockingly, and I thought of insubordinate draftees from anti-Vietnam movies. But he added, looking at me: “We’ll keep her entertained, Doctor.”

  I was bandaged, babied, rather enjoying the attention.

  On the long van ride home—Graham driving, Angela in the passenger seat, me flat on the bed with Willa by my side—I asked Willa how my hair looked.

  “It looks fine! Really punk!” But her eyes were still clouded by fear.

  “I’m okay, Wills.”

  Angela made me wash the Vicodin down the kitchen sink drain. She offered me grass instead, something misty and gentle, for healing. Kate installed me in Willa’s waterbed, with Willa on the floor. Angela put her cool hand on my forehead and promised she’d only write to my father if I got worse. All day people came bearing gifts. Records, pillows, magazines (new ones for a change). Liam presented a half-melted pint of custard. The kids clubbed together and gave me a lunch sack full of scratch-and-sniff stickers.

  That night, Graham carried me to the top of the campfire ring and set me down next to him at his place of honor, decreeing that the entire community should stay awake with me.

  What followed was an all-night campaign of carousing, improv, smoking, singing—some beautiful, some shockingly bad. A Decameron’s worth of entertainment crammed into one night.

  I remember Willa’s face at my right, aglow from the crackling campfire. She gave me a signed Blondie 45, a UK pressing from 1976 with “In the Flesh” on the A side and “X Offender” on the B side.

  “Oh, Wills,” I said, wiping my eyes, though the fire’s plume was nowhere near me.

  “It’s nothing. Just wait for my dad’s gift.”

  Near two in the morning, Graham handed me a small package. It was the gadget someone had sent him from Japan, the one that made music sound like “an underwater kazoo”—a Sony Walkman. I was glad to have it, but puzzled. Willa’s excitement didn’t seem to match this gift, expensive as it was.

  Then Graham stood.

  “And now my real birthday present,” he said. “I told you today after your wee spill that this place didn’t want you to go. And we don’t want you to, either.”

  I held my breath, afraid to hope.

  “Your father wrote back. He said you can stay here through the school year.”

  * * *

  Most people can go their whole lives without feeling so loved.

  I had sixty days of perfect happiness. Sixty consecutive days. I was needed, I was wanted, I was accepted. I was loved. I wonder if I appreciated these things more than any other visitor that passed through their gates. I was so hungry for it.

  How ironic, if the person responsible for destroying their Eden had the only true taste of it.

  29

  W Room

  1999

  It’s been three days since my birthday, but I can’t shake the jangliness that returned when I saw the bowls of shells on the picnic table. I try to hide it from Shane but he knows something’s shifted between us.

  The giddiness has vanished, and I can’t seem to get it back. I can’t run around here with him as if it’s some kind of summer fantasy camp for reliving the past. A false version of that precious summer where I reenact everything good—music at campfire, unlikely friendship, infatuation, freedom from old rules, from the person I didn’t want to be anymore—and pretend the bad never poisoned it.

  I’ve been on a cloud. Happy to let my infatuation crowd out every other feeling associated with this place.

  No, not letting it. Inviting it in to blot out the rest.

  “Where’ve you gone?” he’d said, before drifting off beside me in bed just now. After weeks of wearing each other out until four a.m., I’d tensed when he kissed me. The first time that had happened.

  “I can’t stop thinking about everything I have left to do,” I’d said.

  “I’ll help you. We’ll all help you...”

  I watch him sleep, trying to commit him to memory—the way his lips part in an appealing O, the curves of his shoulder under his left cheek, how he tucks his left hand between the mattress and headboard. I realize I don’t know his birthday.

  He went to so much effort for me... What if his is soon?

  I lift his right hand from my hip and set it down gently, tiptoe out of bed. I ease his wallet out of the frayed black shorts he’s draped over Kate’s desk chair.

  Business cards, health insurance card, grocery store club card...there, driver’s license. Address the same as the one on his business cards. But he already told me that, how he’s cobbled together producing work for the last few years. Money’s too tight for a separate office.

  His birthday’s not until October. A Scorpio—now I can read his horoscope like a lovelorn schoolgirl. I’ll be seven years older for only a couple of months, then six for most of the year. I can’t help but be pleased by this fact, then scold myself for caring even for a second, for my vanity. So far, it hasn’t bothered me except in the abstract, our age difference.

  I slide the cards back into their leather slots and feel it. A folded-up paper in the big compartment, with his cash.

  A love letter from an ex? His parole papers?

  I can’t help it: I always was a snoop. I glance over my shoulder to check that he’s still sound asleep, pull the square of paper out and unfold it. It’s the color of a tea stain.

  A newspaper clipping from August 1979.

  I wonder how long he’s been carrying that sad story around.

  I’d read the article back then. I’m the one who brought the newspaper up to the house, this house, the day it came out.

  The story had been on the front page and I hadn’t known what to do with the paper—if I should crumple it up and throw it in the water to disintegrate, the way Graham used to destroy the pages of words whose very existence pained him.

  The Klamath Weekly B
reeze

  Fatal Accident Near Glass Beach Waterfall Trail

  Local Singer Graham Kingston Dies at 47

  By Sue McCafferty

  Folk singer Graham Kingston, whose hits from the 1960s included “Lonely,” “Meredith Lee,” and “Breton Park,” died of sepsis August 25 after sustaining multiple severe fractures from a 20-foot fall near the scenic North Fork Trail, adjacent to the Kingston family’s 400-acre private property in Agate Beach. Kingston, 47, had lived in the area for 10 years.

  “It’s a devastating loss,” said his long-time manager, Augustus Meade, 62, of San Francisco. “The music world has lost one of the greats.”

  Kingston was born in San Francisco in 1932 and studied music theory and medieval poetry at the University of California, Los Angeles, before dropping out sophomore year. He honed his musical style as part of San Francisco’s club scene in the 1960s, opening for such notable acts as Big Brother and the Holding Company, Moby Grape, and the Charlatans, at clubs including the hungry i and Bill Graham’s Fillmore Auditorium, before breaking through as a solo recording artist with Steel Pony Records in 1968. He was married to Trinidad Playhouse Company producer and actress Angela Swift Kingston, 50, and had one child, daughter Willa Ariel Kingston, 17.

  Kingston was best known for his ingenuity and versatility on both six-and twelve-string acoustic guitar as a “sweep picker,” for his ornate, “brocade-style” lyrics, which frequently mined obscure Irish and English folktales, and for his controversial 1970 experimental album Three, a commercial failure. His sprawling property in Agate Beach, the famed 400-acre “Sandcastle,” which regularly attracts musicians and artists of all stripes, has been favored in recent years as a recording studio for up-and-coming performers.

  Kingston was hiking alone at dusk near the scenic trail, which overlooks the Pacific Ocean and Glass Beach Cove. Authorities believe that he became disoriented or lost his footing on the challenging terrain early in the evening of August 25. Toxicology reports were pending and Sheriff’s Department officials would not comment as this issue went to press, but sources close to Kingston suggest that drugs may have been a factor.