Deborah Shapiro - The Sun in Your Eyes

“I changed my look. I cut my hair, dressed differently. I went to college. Then graduate school. Sometimes my ego would get the better of me and I’d wonder if people recognized me. But people rarely did. I realized Jesse was the context in which people had known me. You couldn’t have ‘Jesse Parrish’s black girlfriend’ if you didn’t have Jesse Parrish. In time, I became someone else. I probably would have become someone else regardless. I always knew I would lose him somehow.”

“Maybe. But not like that,” said Lee. There was something lovely about Marion’s self-sufficiency and endurance, but also something remarkably sad. Her solitary life in a fairy-tale cottage in the forest. If there wasn’t a prince, there ought to have been a woodsman, at least, or some dwarves.

“You never heard from Linda again?”

“No, we don’t send each other Christmas cards.” A bitterness crept into Marion’s voice. “I went into one of her shops in San Francisco once, out of curiosity. I even tried on a tunic. It had a very nice drape. I have to give that to Linda: a sense of proportion in clothes, if not in life.”

It seemed to Lee that she ought to be shocked by what she’d just heard, by all the implications of it, and maybe that would come later. Or maybe this is what shock felt like: having the dream where you discover an extra room in your house, only waking up to find that room really is there.

Lee felt herself on the verge of tears, coupled with a stubborn urge to keep it all in. As though she didn’t want to give someone the satisfaction. But who? Marion hadn’t hidden her feelings. And if Viv wasn’t overcome with emotion, she at least looked like someone who was trying to be concerned for the sake of a friend, while also spreading one last schmear of soft cheese on a piece of bread. She moved slowly, as if she knew she shouldn’t be thinking about hors d’oeuvres at this moment, but nevertheless going for the hors d’oeuvre. It broke the tension.

“I have more where that came from,” said Marion, noticing the time on her watch and turning on a floor lamp. “We could have dinner if you like. Where are you staying?”

“Nowhere yet,” Lee said. “We’ll probably go to Carmel or Monterey, find a hotel for the night.” Linda would stay at a posh inn just down the road from here when she used to come for spa weekends with Roy or Stephen or Monty. A cabin at Deetjen’s the couple of times she tried the great outdoors family thing with Lee. She couldn’t have known Marion had been so close all this time.

“Why don’t you just stay here?”

Lee shook her head. “Oh, no. Thank you, but that’s okay.”

“It’s no trouble. I would like it. I go into the guestroom and I can practically feel it accusing me of neglect. Please. Stay.”

Lee didn’t need a lot of convincing. She had been going, going, going, all to get to this and now that they were here, she let fatigue overtake her. She wanted someone to take care of her, and Marion would do that. She didn’t have to think about what came next, only had to go out to the car and bring in her bag for the night. It was a piece of luggage that Linda swore by for travel. As usual, Linda was right about these things. It held all she had needed this whole time and there had still been room, a deep inner pocket, in which to keep safe the Haseltine photo that Flintwick had given her. She pulled it out of its rigid cardboard case. Days ago (Had it really been just days?) when Flintwick first showed it to her, she had seen a complacent man, one who maybe knew that complacency didn’t play well so he should disingenuously try to appear a little more troubled. But now she saw it the other way around — Jesse tightening a valve on his worry after he’d let a little of it leak out. It was of a piece with the entire Haseltine series. It had that quality that captivated Carnahan: involving-but-uninvolved. Like the waves and the rocks and the towering trees around here. You could observe the terrain, you could wander in it, it could move you, it could hurt you, but it had no need for you. No need at all.

Marion’s face came alive when Lee showed her the photograph. Bewilderment, scrutiny, avidity. Marion was looking at a code she had once been able to decipher easily by virtue of daily practice. She was rusty now, but give her a minute. She would get it. It would come back to her.

“You know what I haven’t thought of in years?” she said. “How Jesse used to call me Maid Marion sometimes, like Robin Hood. I never told Jesse that I’d only ever seen the Mr. Magoo version. I didn’t want to spoil the romance.”

“I know it’s not so simple, but he must have loved you a lot,” said Lee.

“He did,” said Marion. “In his way.”

“You should have this,” Lee said.

“Oh. No. No, I couldn’t. You keep it. It’s yours.”

Lee didn’t argue when Marion handed it back to her, but she didn’t really believe what Marion had said. Yes, she could keep it, but it wasn’t hers.

IN THE DARK,in the cool, soft sheets of a queen bed, under the white matelassé cover, neither Lee nor Viv was asleep.

“If it’s true, she’s a monster,” said Lee.

“Lee, if it’s true, she was out of her mind. She didn’t know what she was doing. Other than trying to kill herself.”

“By stepping in front of his car? So either they went or she went? So he’s either dead or he gets to live with her death on his hands for the rest of his life?”

“But that’s what she’s had to live with. His death on her hands. If it’s true.”

“How do you find her so defensible? You always have. I’m asking for real. I’d love to know how it’s possible because just for once I’d like to stop hating her.”

“She’s not my mother.”

“No, she’s not.”

“We all do things we can’t take back.”

“Yeah, we all do things. Believe me, I know that. But not manslaughter. I know you’re feeling guilty about sleeping with Rodgers, but it’s not the same. It’s hardly the same thing. I should never have called him. I should never have started that whole thing.”

“I do feel guilty. I feel terrible. But it’s also like I feel guilty that I don’t feel guilty enough. Maybe that’s what it is, what makes me sympathetic to Linda. I’m not trying to excuse what she did or explain it away. I can just feel for her, that’s all.”

“When are you going to tell Andy that you’re pregnant?”

“As soon as we get back.”

“You should go home, then.”

“Now?”

“We got what we came here for. I should go see Linda on my own, anyway.”

“And the tapes?” Viv suppressed a yawn.

“Who knows. Maybe Linda has them after all, locked away somewhere.”

“You make them sound like Rochester’s wife.”

Linda was never a big reader, not like Jesse, but she liked the Brontë sisters. When Lee was reading Wuthering Heights in high school, Linda said she liked their anger, ate a pecan sandy, and then walked out of the kitchen where Lee sat at the table with her book. Lee didn’t immediately understand what she felt at that moment in Linda’s wake — admiration for her mother. She hadn’t registered any anger on the part of the Brontë sisters before Linda mentioned it. But once she did, she began to burn through the book, whose first few chapters she’d found a slog. Then she read Jane Eyre when it wasn’t even assigned. She’d loved how dark and gusty it was, and she loved Jane with her stormy feelings and her sense of right and wrong. Jane was a bundle of contradictions, but was she ever hypocritical? Lee let the thought drift as she and Viv lay there silently in Marion’s guest bed.

A light salty breeze came through an open window. It was different from the beachy, smoggy air of the Southern California coast, of her childhood. It was more rugged and moodier up here. Linda, as best Lee could remember, always took her (and the boyfriends) north. Never south, to La Jolla or to Mexico, never east, to the desert that Jesse had loved, where his ashes had been scattered. So when Lee went to the desert for the first time, it wasn’t with her mother but with Alex Garcia, who had his license a year before she did. Alex with his long skateboarder shorts and his smooth, tan skin. He thought the trip to Joshua Tree was all about his coming out to her, and she pretended it was, for his sake. Alex Garcia was paunchy now but still had the same clear complexion and dark, razor-straight hair. Living in Oakland. Working for a start-up that sold eyeglasses online. He wore a Buddy Holly pair himself. That she gleaned from the social network she had belonged to for about two seconds. He had written in her yearbook that he didn’t know what he would do without her. But he’d figured it out pretty quickly.