Shine Shine Shine

Sunny here on Earth.

* * *

IN THE BIG HOUSE on Harrington Avenue, Sunny stood at the kitchen counter, bald as an egg, curtains wide, and opened three orange bottles of Bubber’s medications. She set them out in front of her on the smooth granite countertop. Bubber stood next to her, solemnly, his footed pajamas wrinkled around his ankles, snapped together at the waist. He was waiting to take his medicine. Then he would watch two episodes of Blue’s Clues. Then he would go to school. Except that today, Sunny had decided that he would neither take the medicine nor go to school. He would stay home and be unmedicated. See what happened. See if the roof flew off the world. See if the doctors came and stood in the yard, waving clipboards and adjusting their glasses. If she had to bar the door and put the sofa in front of it, no one would come in and put a medicine into her child. Whether the walls came down, whether he turned into a werewolf and devoured her, whether he said, distinctly, “Give me the medicine. It’s what I really, secretly want,” she would not give in. She would learn exactly what he was without the medicine to make it easier. She would watch him all day. If a fit came, she would sit on him.

“No medicine today, Bubber,” she said. She poured the pills out on the counter and they mixed together, blue with white tablets with the green capsules. Bubber watched her. He had his blanket around his shoulders, a flannel shirt of Maxon’s, ancient and soft and full of holes. His bright blue eyes regarded her. “It’s okay,” she said to him softly. “No school, no medicine.”

“Where’s Dad?” said Bubber loudly, like a duck. After he was done talking, his mouth hung open and he breathed through it.

“Daddy is on the rocket. He’s taking the robots to the moon. But I know he’s glad you’re thinking about him.”

“I know,” said Bubber. He looked at the clock. “Blue’s Clues,” he said.

Sunny swept the pills into the trash can and they fell down around the garbage, down to the bottom of the can where it was wet. She watched Bubber trot into the living room. What would happen? She thought maybe she should put his helmet on. He put the DVD expertly into the machine and pressed the button on the remote, sat down in front of the TV. His face went brighter when the characters came on the screen and she watched him sing, talk, move his shoulders up and down exactly in time with Steve and Blue. He had it all memorized. Elmo, too. And all of Dr. Seuss. He had memorized the inflections, the facial expressions. He could always do it. It was all a flawless replication, as many times as he tried.

Maybe without the medicine, he would have a facial expression he made up by himself. A new one. She feared it would be rage. Or sorrow. Or hate. What would his brain put out, given rein to put out anything it chose? Then the hospital called. They said: “Your mother is still alive. Will you be visiting today?” She said: “We will have to see how it goes. My son is having a medical emergency.” They said: “She will not hang on for long. This might be your last chance to say good-bye.” Sunny had already said good-bye. She didn’t want to say good-bye again. She wanted it to be a week from now, or ten days ago, or ten years ago, when she was still certifiably alive, before everything had happened: the cancer, the pregnancies, the wigs. There were too many things happening at once and one of them had to go.

Sunny smoothed her hand over her scalp. She had taken the mother off life support. She had taken the child off medicine. She had taken herself off wigs, eyebrows, her urban housewife costume disguise. She couldn’t do anything else to speed the end times, but the end times refused to come. Someone should come to the door, pronounce her unfit, the charade over, but no one came. The musical sounds of Blue’s Clues tinkled in the living room with Bubber’s peaceful echo, and Sunny wished that Maxon would turn the rocket around and come straight the hell home. She moved through the house over the dark walnut floors, those wide planks, polished weekly, stained perfectly. She stood behind Maxon’s empty chair in Maxon’s empty office, and looked at his desk. Inside the desk somewhere were papers, official papers that would be needed soon. She would need her mother’s will. She would need insurance documents. Her mother’s, and maybe Maxon’s. After all, Maxon might never come home. Astronauts died. They also decided they liked space, living in space suits, orbiting other astral bodies. They stayed away, forgot they had homes, families, bald wives, crazy children, cancerous mothers- in-law.

Sunny decided she would open up the desk drawers, and find the necessary paperwork for herself. Behave in a way that she might have behaved before she became a mother. Make phone calls. Decide what to do with all their real estate. Sort things out. Hold people’s feet to the fire. Page through sheaves of paperwork and light on an important line here, a contradictory line there, shout, AHA! She lowered herself into Maxon’s chair. She opened the one shaped like a file cabinet, and there were files all neatly labeled, everything she could ever need: insurance, mortgage, and one labeled in block letters: MOTHER. She pulled the file out and sat with it on her lap for a while, then set it aside. Then she opened all the other drawers except one. It was locked.

A locked drawer. In the other drawers she had found neatly organized office supplies, ordered papers, logical files. But here was a long flat drawer locked with a key. The key was not there. Why was it locked? Locked against whom? What could Maxon possibly have to hide?

* * *

SHE REMEMBERED A TIME before she had agreed to marry Maxon, when she had fallen superficially in love with a man who had a lot of hair. This was during college, when she was away from both Maxon and her mother, far away in another state. In college she studied art and math. She was a wigmaker and bald, so she attracted a lot of attention and people knew who she was. She cut an important and contradictory profile on the campus of her college, which was small and liberal, across the Pennsylvania border, in Ohio.

At this college, she had a bicycle. It was one of the ways she was missing Maxon, to ride this bicycle, when her mother had demanded she go at least six hours away to school. He always had one, now she had one, and she rode it around the campus, missing him. Though she knew she should not love him, he was still her best friend.

She also had a woolen poncho with a hood. In the wintertime, when it was bitterly cold, she would put on the poncho, pull up the hood, and go out riding her bicycle in that Ohio wind. Under the poncho, she could be anyone. It was then that she stalked him, the person she called in her mind “Hair Person.” He had long, wavy, rock-star hair. The hair that he had was so luxurious that when she saw him for the first time, from the back, she thought he was a woman. Her first reaction was to sneer. She looked askance at women with long hair. Like they were overcompensating. But a man with hair he could sit on, such a waterfall of frothing, floating hair was attractive.

He was a thin man with metal glasses and a pencil shape to his body. His only fascinating feature was the hair that hung down in soft, fluffy, crinkly waves below his belt. Besides that, he had nothing to recommend him. But she thought of dressing herself in that hair. She imagined him pressed down on top of her, that hair falling down on each side of them, enclosing her in his hairfall. She would say to him, “Stay in me for a little longer,” so she could feel his hair on her head. She had never talked to Hair Person, had never addressed him. She only rode her bicycle past his dorm-room window, one rectangle of many, breathless, twisted in her stomach, painfully in love. When she went right past it, she glanced in and would see him at his desk, or lounging with his guitar, or the light would be out; he must be asleep or out. Eating. Standing in the shower, shrouded in it, or drying it in sections, brushing it.

At times like this, Maxon was far away from her. She could remember him, of course, but she didn’t want him close to her. This is why her mother had recommended, “Go away to college. Try something new. Date someone. Date everyone. Try your hand at dating.”

The night her love for Hair Person ended was such a cold night. Determination clenched between her teeth, she had parked at one end of Hair Person’s dorm, and started down the hallway past his room. He was not as tall as Maxon, not as broad. Maybe he was not as tall as Sunny even. But that hair. As she approached the door of his dorm room, she heard a few soft chords on the guitar, and she dared, breathless, to stop and push the door open a few inches. He was sitting where she had seen him sitting when she looked in from outside, his guitar draped across his tiny legs. For months, she had looked at him through the window in the dark, in his Pink Floyd T-shirt and his faded jeans. Now they were alone in his dorm room, which smelled a little sour, like the boys’ dorms always did.

“Hello,” she said stupidly. “Is there anybody in there?”

“Oh, hey,” he said. As if he recognized her.

She pulled down the hood of her poncho. Several boys jogged down the hallway in towels from the shower