My Sunshine Away Read Online Free PDF Page A

kitchen to our living room and leaned casually against the door frame, still stirring his hot cup of coffee. He was tall and well built and looked indestructible in his uniform. The shining badge on his chest, the thick utility belt and pistol he wore around his waist, it all sent a panic through me. I wondered how much information he could draw out of me if he tried. Not just about the crime, necessarily, but about my relationship with Lindy in general. About the way I thought of her so often that she had become a figure not only alive for me in my waking hours but active in my dreams as well. I sat up straight as the officer looked me over.
    “Don’t mind me,” he said, and nodded toward the Simpsons. “Just answer their question. Do you know anything about this?”
    I looked at my mother, who in turn smiled at me so gently that I knew I could say anything, in those years, and she would believe me.
    “Honey,” she said.
    “Lindy was raped?” I asked her.
    “Yes,” she told me.
    “That’s terrible,” I said.
    “Yes,” she said. “It is.”
    I thought about this for a long time.
    “But I don’t understand,” I said. “Who was she playing?”
    This comment seemed to confuse the adults in that room to such a degree that they began shifting the weight around on their feet and picking at the lint on their clothing as if they were the guilty ones now, because they had said a thing to a child that the child was not ready to hear. The police officer shook his head, sipped from his coffee, and walked back into the kitchen. My mother then walked over and kissed me on the forehead.
    “Thank you, God,” I heard her say. “Thank you, Jesus.”
    The police officer left a card on our refrigerator door and asked us to call him if we thought of anything. He then thanked my mother for the coffee and patted me kindly on the shoulder as he and the Simpsons, like unfortunate salesmen, walked back into the heat of that brutal summer. My mother and I returned to the kitchen, where she took the policeman’s card from the fridge and studied it before slipping it into a drawer by the phone. She then took out a carton of eggs, some sugar, flour, and a mixing bowl, and began to make cookies.
    Later that week I walked into my room to find a pamphlet aboutsex on my bed. There was no note attached to it, and when I opened it up a loose roll of condoms fell out. We have never spoken to each other about this, my mother and I, but I can remember her lavishing praise on me in this time. She made macaroni and cheese with every meal. She brought oranges to all of my soccer games. Things were remarkably good between us for a while, until she found a real reason to suspect me. It was hard for her, I suppose, to realize that committing the act does not depend on knowing the word.

7.
    T he day I fell in love with Lindy Simpson was January 28, 1986.
    This was also the day the Space Shuttle
Challenger
exploded, and seven courageous astronauts died. I was eleven years old and in the fifth grade.
    Along with nearly every other school in America, the Perkins School had structured its entire science curriculum around this mission. We focused on stars and galaxies and made crude Styrofoam mobiles of the Milky Way that we hung with fishing line from the ceilings of our classrooms. In preparation for the
Challenger
’s liftoff, to be broadcast live on CNN, similar grades had been lumped together, fourth through sixth, seventh and eighth, et cetera, and ushered into rooms with televisions. This was exotic to us then, watching cable at school, and the TVs stood on carts that had been pushed in front of the blackboards. They had plastic knobs and buttons beneath the screens. To make additional space in the classrooms, our wooden desks had been stacked and moved out into the hallways and we were seated in long rows along the carpeted floor, organized by homeroom.
    As a class project, the sixth grade, Lindy’s grade, had written a letter to Christa