Lady Sunshine Read online

  Black socks, they never get dirty

  The longer you wear them the stronger they get...

  Soooometimes, I think I might wash them

  But then I decide...not yet, not yet, not yet...

  They’ll sing tomorrow night, too. And I’ll be three thousand miles away.

  Fiona plays ukulele—she’s good. I wonder how my kids are doing back home. This is the first time I haven’t taught summer courses in more than a decade. On the last day of school, before I knew I was coming here, I gave them plastic marimbas as end-of-year gifts. Their upturned faces were so astonished, so sweetly in denial when I said, Yes, they’re yours to keep!

  I’ll be able to give them way more than $4.99 plastic marimbas now. The other teachers don’t understand why I live in my cheap basement apartment; even on my pitiful paycheck I could afford something better. No one knows that I donate as much as I can to keep the music program limping along. That now I’ll be able to fund it for years—I only glanced through Graham’s royalty statements, but I was shocked by his resurgence. His postmortem popularity would have pleased him, despite his insistence that he didn’t care about numbers.

  Bree hugs me. “Goodnight, moon. Wish you could stick around.”

  We all say our good-nights, the campfire’s breaking up, and Shane and I are walking side by side to the house, when Mat and Piper, poking at the fire to separate the embers, begin singing softly—

  She has all the answers

  To the questions I never ask...

  I stop. Concentrate on breathing.

  It can’t be. But I know this song. Every bar.

  “Shane. That song. Where’d you guys hear it?”

  “What? Oh, it’s gonna be the second-to-last track, or maybe the last. Mat and I can’t decide if we should end on a ballad or not. Pretty, isn’t it?”

  “It’s from Graham’s notebook,” I say.

  “Yeah. One of the few with decent chord marks, really good ones, actually, so we didn’t have to fill in many blanks—”

  “What’s it called?”

  “‘Sky-Colored Glasses.’”

  I clench my fists. “Graham’s notebook. Where is it?”

  “The studio, on the stool. What’s wrong? Hey—”

  Up the field to the house, down the stairs, door, anteroom, door, door. Shane’s footsteps pound behind me. “Jackie!”

  * * *

  It sits in the live room under the main mic, lit by a single lamp beam like it’s on an altar. I grab it, flip through it fast.

  There. Willa’s handwriting. Twenty pages later, more. And a third section, near the back.

  Most of the notebook is a mess of scribbled-out words, chord and time markings, sideways writing. Fragments, rejected bridges, ideas for titles and choruses that didn’t lead anywhere, circled—perfect!, then crossed out, the pen digging deep from frustration—worthless!

  But three of the completed songs in the notebook have no markups at all. Squeezed into the blank spaces, they’re the only ones transcribed cleanly, start to finish, without any changes.

  There’s no doubt: among Graham’s songs are three that Willa and I wrote together.

  I sink to the rug, staring at Willa’s writing. Touching the indentations her pen made decades ago. It wouldn’t have taken her long. Five minutes, ten. She must have done it sometime during our last, awful week here—the week after I’d completed these lyrics and Willa had polished the music.

  But why?

  Did you know you were never coming back, Willa?

  Was this your goodbye?

  12

  Unearthly

  1979

  It wasn’t until we were biking to the beach one day that I heard Willa sing for the first time.

  As we flew down the hill, she thought I was well behind, as always, able to hear only the chattering birds, but I was in better shape by then and had entered the storm drain before she exited.

  Her voice floated back to me: “Song for David” from Judy Collins’s Whales & Nightingales. She owned three copies. She wasn’t singing loud, but the tunnel acted as a giant amplifier and her voice bounced off of the ribbed walls, the acoustics better than any shower’s. Not that she needed the help. Her voice was sweet and searching, but there was force in it...power. So much power, coming out of delicate Willa. The roundness of Judy Collins, the jazzy swoops and scampering of Joni Mitchell. But no, that was wrong, to try to compare Willa’s voice to anyone else’s, even her beloved J singers’. It was just hers.

  I pedaled furiously to keep up. It was slippery in the tunnel, drippy and dark, mud on the ground. It would serve me right if I wiped out. My punishment for eavesdropping.

  But her voice balanced me, pulled me along, and I didn’t let the space between us lengthen until she was done.

  I didn’t bring it up right away.

  I waited until that afternoon before dinner, when we were alone in the treehouse. I was idly watching Graham and some new musicians he was working with milling around outside the studio door, while telling Willa another of the “school stories” she loved.

  This one was about what I used to do at the Marina Club pool. How I’d taken classmates to the hidden, shady strip of grass behind the spool of rolled-up lane markers and messed around. They’d become a blur of lips, hands, landscapes of bare chest glimpsed from below. Fourteen boys and four girls...that I could recall.

  “...and what I remember most is how different everyone’s sweat tasted. Salty. Sweet. It really varied. Sometimes I went back there alone, though. I could hear everyone gossiping, all of the Vaughn kids’ snooty parents. Hey, Willa?” I turned.

  “That’s the end?” Willa, lying faceup on the plywood floor, spoke as groggily as someone yanked from a dream. “That can’t be the end.”

  “I’ve told you everything I remember.”

  “But why’d you take all those people behind the lane-marker wall, if it made things complicated at school...and with your dad, and you didn’t enjoy the actual messing around? If you were just doing things to them, and not letting them do anything to you?”

  I was trying to get my father’s attention. I was lonely. I was acting out. I’d had no adequate female role model during puberty. I was testing boundaries. These were the acceptable answers, I knew from therapy.

  “I guess I needed it. There.”

  “But not here.” It wasn’t a question.

  No. Not here. For a minute, we listened to the crickets, the splashes and calls from down in the field, the other soft, friendly nighttime noises that had become so familiar.

  “Willa? I have a confession.”

  “Hmmm?”

  “I heard you singing, back in the tunnel this morning.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m a hopeless snoop. I hope you don’t mind.”

  She extended her legs and wiggled her feet nervously. “It’s no big deal. Wow, you’re getting fast on the bike. I knew you’d get the hang of it. Same with surfing, you’ll see.”

  “But your voice. I’ve never heard anything like it.”

  “It’s not Judy’s.”

  “It’s wonderful. It’s—” I strained for the perfect word “—unearthly. Why keep it secret?”

  “I sing all the time.”

  “No, you don’t. You hum. And you play your guitar, and you have records or the radio on constantly. You breathe music. But you never sing when anyone’s around. And you never sing at campfire.”

  Your dad never picks you.

  “I guess I never thought about it.”

  “But does Graham know how good you are?” I looked toward the studio door again, but everyone had gone back inside.

  “I guess... Maybe... Hey, we should fix this place up.”

  I let her change the subject, but now that I’d heard her sing, I knew I couldn’t l
et it go.

  * * *

  Over the next week we picked up trinkets for the treehouse; sometimes one of us bought an item in secret and installed it in place as a surprise for the other. She found me posters of Blondie and the Knack, I got her Laura Nyro and Nico.

  At the thrift store, Willa found a box of fabric remnants in a bright marigold-and-purple butterfly print, and we spread it around the floor as carpet. A yellow quilt, a red Igloo cooler, which we filled with my sodas and her herbal iced tea. And a few glass tubes of Willa’s insulin. Though she never tasted more than a bite of candy or custard, or a sip or two of soda at a time, and hadn’t had a reaction in three years. I contributed an orange velour beanbag chair. It was a bitch to get it up; we nearly broke our necks, like what Kate said about Graham, affixing his shells to the chimney long ago. But it was worth it; we’d made a lovely little bower.

  Our favorite addition came from the “Boy Toys” bin at the thrift shop. That day, as I sifted through it—cheap cereal-box prizes? A pamphlet on weight lifting? Plastic slingshots? I felt sorry for boys—a kid was digging across from me. As he tried to rake something closer using a long box, he looked at me suspiciously, like I was his competition. I pretended to examine a slingshot, but in his patched shirt three sizes too big, struggling to reach the elusive toy, he was so pitiful that I reached in to help.

  “Is this what you wanted?” I handed it to him—a plastic CHiPs motorcycle with a helmeted man astride it. “Do you watch that show?”

  I took the tiny man off of his bike and made him do a little boogie, one arm up, John Travolta–style. The kid seemed terrified, so I took a quarter from my pocket. “Here, he’s on me.”

  He grabbed the bike and figurine and quarter, threw the coin on the counter, and bolted out the door, shoving past Willa, who came over with an a-ha look, like she’d busted me. Busted me being nice. “You’re so good with kids! That’s the boy who lives over the ridge.”

  I laughed. “He fled, Willa. Kids hate me.”

  “I saw how you were. And your voice... It got different. And you bought him the toy.”

  “Whatever.” I inspected the long box he’d been using as a shovel. Boy’s Spyglass Kit, it said. A freckled kid in a sailor cap on the outside, a cartoon thought bubble: Wow—20x Magnifying Power!! The “kit” was only a gold-painted tin spyglass and booklet of “Tips for Pirates.”

  But the spyglass worked. From the treehouse, we could now see the zinc on people’s noses in the pool. The plumes from musicians’ smokes, as they loitered by the studio door on breaks. Their expressions, too.

  “Pretty good for a quarter,” I said, sweeping our new toy back and forth. “Hey, sing for me?”

  “What?”

  “A pirate song. A spy song. A lullaby, or a ballad for our little friend at the thrift store. Anything.”

  She hesitated. But I’d kept my request casual, and my back was to her. She thought I was occupied with the spyglass.

  She sang.

  13

  Just Hum

  Late afternoon, a few days later

  Dear Ray,

  I can’t believe it. It’s her. Her.

  I shut my diary, grabbed the magazine, and ran across the field to look not for Willa, but for Graham.

  He was near the lower pools, the ones fed by his waterfall, talking and tuning his guitar in a group of a dozen people, including the new visitor Willa and I privately called Bicentennial Woman. (She had piles of red, white, and blue T-shirts and knee socks and visors for sale in her VW; she and her last boyfriend had gotten stuck with them after a 1976 moneymaking scheme, and it’s all she wore. She also had red hair, pale skin, and blue eyes: she matched her T-shirts.)

  When I approached and saw that her eyes were closed—Graham’s tuning was apparently that mesmerizing—I hesitated.

  “What’s that?” Graham called.

  “Oh, I’ll...I’ll show you later. I don’t want to interrupt.” I turned to go.

  “Guys, give us a sec?”

  When they’d scattered—Bicentennial Woman looking miffed—I handed it to him. A 1958 issue of Posy magazine. Inside was a numerology game where you entered your first, middle, and last name, and totaled up the number of letters, and it told you your character traits.

  The girl who’d filled out all of those magazine quizzes, my unknown, time-traveling companion, was Strong, Creative, and A Loyal Friend, according to the quiz. She’d tallied up the total carefully—21, based on the 4, 9, 8 values of her name:

  JANE ELIZABETH KINGSTON

  My mother.

  She’d died having me. Preeclampsia...seizures...systolic blood pressure of 180...magnesium sulfate... I’d found the medical file in my father’s study one rainy October afternoon, detailing what he’d already told me.

  A miracle to have hundreds of silly magazine quizzes to offset those sad documents.

  “I just thought you might like to see it,” I said to Graham.

  It took him a few seconds to understand, and then his face softened. “Sweet Jane,” he said. “Where’d you find this?”

  “In the Rec Room. There are piles of them.”

  “Man,” he said. “Trippy. Now I know why I hauled those old magazines down here. I was clearing them out from the old family place in Evergreen. I tried to throw them out but something stopped me. I guess Janey stopped me.”

  Janey. I liked the way he said it.

  “And now we know why you came to this crazy place. It’s because she wanted you to meet her.” He patted the grass. “Sit for a minute.”

  “There are lots more, if you want to see them,” I said, settling next to him. “There’s one where she took a diet quiz, and it told her to switch to half a grapefruit and black coffee for breakfast.”

  He smiled at that. “Jane liked pancakes.”

  It sounded like a line out of a Dick and Jane book, but I treasured this scrap of information. I pictured a sunny breakfast room, a tall stack of pancakes topped with a golden square of butter, place mats, a book bag by her penny-loafered feet, the smell of bacon and coffee, a younger, much slimmer Graham teasing her with an older brother’s affectionate ruthlessness. My mother’s hair brushed, the side of her fork slicing through the gold-and-white layers.

  Graham’s expression clouded. “When our folks had to move to Evergreen, she made herself pancakes for dinner. I was in the Village then.”

  A new picture replaced the old one, fast as a slideshow: my mother sitting alone, no eggs left, no syrup, no butter. Dark outside, parents off at their night jobs at the paper mill, her older brother living in New York, pursuing his music dreams. The radio playing for company.

  He set his hand on my shoulder; it was so big it spanned to my collarbone. “I wish I’d come around after you were born. Me and your dad...”

  “I know.”

  “I wasn’t sure how much you’d want to talk about her. But you ask me anything you want. Okay?”

  He looked at me like we had all the time in the world, though someone was calling to him from up near the house.

  “You don’t need to get back? We can do it another time.”

  “I’m busy, Christian!” he yelled over his shoulder. By the trickling lower pools, he told me all about her. Everything he could remember.

  “She was so much younger,” he said when he was finished. “I wish I had more for you, I really do.”

  “I know.”

  “I wrote a song about her. Only one. But don’t think because I only wrote one that I don’t remember her all the time. It broke my heart, writing that one song.”

  * * *

  The 45 record was on my cabin step when I came out the next morning.

  It looked homemade, the label askew and gummy. It was a song called “Evergreen,” and it was about growing up in Washington state. A game they had, playing in the rain with boughs from a
tree down the street, snapping it so drops of rain would fly at each other. It was so simple and straightforward compared with Graham’s later songs. Though of course I was biased because it was about my mother, I liked this one best.

  I stayed up until three, scribbling a poem by flashlight in my cabin. I’d dabbled in poetry, inspired by the Anne Sexton we’d studied in English class last year, but I’d never finished anything until now. I called it “Janey.”

  In the morning I read it over, wishing I’d captured my mother more completely. She deserved it.

  I wrote the poem onto my palm in permanent marker so I could read it during my surfing lesson—an hour of exhausting paddling on my dinged-up, borrowed longboard next to Willa on her sleek one, pondering the poem on my hand while she dismissed nearly every wave as too big or too small.

  When at last she cried, “Hurry, this one, this one!” she sounded so sure I’d succeed that I tried my hardest. But I wiped out immediately, sputtering and spitting salt water.

  All for the still-elusive dream of standing upright for one second.

  “You were close today,” Willa said. “You’ll get there.”

  I peeled off my borrowed wet suit and followed her not over to the dunes as usual—it was too windy today—but up to what she called the Far Pond. A warm, peaceful place, protected from the wind.

  I collapsed on the grass a few feet from the bank, sunning my chilled, exhausted body, as Willa, not tired at all, told me about the monarch butterflies that only laid their eggs in milkweed plants, and what the pond was like in winter, and the big album cover shoot Graham had done here when she was little and he was still on the radio.

  “He floated on this... Look.” She showed me a crude wooden raft he’d made for the shoot. “I hated all the people I didn’t know tromping around, the equipment, the serious man from the label shouting instructions,” she added dreamily, lost in the memory. “That’s what I remember most, hiding behind these milkweeds and wishing the mean strangers away until they left.”