“Oh, neat! I want to try some … later.” Jenny moved off gracefully to praise Angela’s mother’s handbags.
Sunny stood there at the sideboard, looking around the gleaming heads and smooth shoulders of her neighbors. They were good people, and smart people. She did not feel, without her wig, that she was suddenly better than them, that they did not deserve her. Instead, the opposite. Here they were, unsuspiciously they had brought her into their fold, let her rise to the top of their pecking order, had listened to her advice, had followed her lead, and now she had betrayed them. She could feel them avoiding her gaze when she faced them, but felt their eyes on her behind her back. In some ways, she was invisible, but in some ways, they couldn’t take their eyes off her.
Then a strong knock sounded on the door, and it flew open, revealing a familiar figure in the doorway, bold and sure. Les Weathers entered the room. The women went to him like butterflies. They offered to take his jacket, they led him to the food table, pressed a plate into his hand, a fork. Their voices lilted up an octave. Suddenly Jenny’s husband, who had been telling a story of how he got beat up half a block from home, walking to a party at the Hardisons’ last New Year’s Eve, was abandoned. They had all heard that story anyway. Here was Les Weathers of Channel 10 News. He greeted them, flashing his white teeth, patting shoulders and nodding, but then Les Weathers made a tall, blond beeline for Sunny.
He took her by the elbow, bent his head toward her in concern, and said, “Sunny, are you all right? How’s the baby? Hanging in there?”
“We’re okay,” said Sunny.
“Oh, good,” said Les Weathers. “I’m glad to see you out and about, taking in the nice fall air.”
“Yes, well,” said Sunny, “I need to go soon. To the hospital.”
“What’s wrong?” he gasped, instantly renewing his posture of concern. “More contractions?”
“No, it’s my mother.”
Les Weathers furrowed his brow and the few ladies around Sunny said “aww” and “ooh” sympathetically. They knew about the mother, how she had been retrieved from Pennsylvania in an advanced state of death, and how she had been lingering at the hospital.
“How is she, Sunny?” asked Rache. “Is she conscious? Did she say something?”
“Oh, I took her off life support,” said Sunny. “She’s dying. She’s going to die now.”
When she said these things, she felt her rib cage weaken. In her mind, she saw the slice of muffin she had been holding fall out of her hand. Someone dove for it, scooped it into a napkin, disappeared it. She imagined Les Weathers’s strong, broad arm around her, and she almost felt herself leaning into his starched shirtfront, his sternum smelling briskly of lime and confidence. She wanted to cry and scream and wail, there in front of everyone, her face twisted up and red, her hands clawing apart his hairdo, pulling his ears off. But these things didn’t happen. The muffin stayed in her hand. The box of feelings she had packed in the hospital room remained packed, and nothing escaped it.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Les Weathers, more to the gathering of women than to Sunny.
“She’s okay. She’s had a rough time. But she’s dealing with it. Look.”
“I feel bad,” Sunny said, and coughed a little bit. She saw herself, as if from across the room, keeping it together, mouth solid like a line across her face. How much she longed to scream it out at them: I FEEL BAD! I FEEL BAD THAT I PULLED THE PLUG ON MY MOTHER! I KILLED HER AND I FEEL BAD! SHE IS GOING TO DIE! But she would not. She would not be something that would be remembered for years, something people would tell their husbands about later, tell their sisters about on the phone. No, they would not talk about some wrinkled tearing thing clinging to the big man with the ironed curls of hair and the cleft chin, squeaking and spouting. They would report, instead, the smooth alien in the peasant top, saying calmly, “I do feel bad that I pulled the plug on her.”
“Sunny, you must have had to!” Rache put in, and Jenny put one hand on Sunny’s back. “You had to let her go, and it was time! You did the right thing.”
How could it be the right thing to kill something that’s alive? How could Rache know anything, when Sunny had been lying to her from the start? But she put that thought in the box, and she closed the box. And the screaming, and the tearing at herself, and the crawling under her bed to wait for death, all was packed into the box, and the box was shut, and taped shut, and she would not open the box, or think about the box.
“She was alive, and now she’s going to die, and it’s my fault. I did it,” she said.
“Ridiculous,” thundered Les Weathers. With one hand wrapped tightly around Sunny, he picked up a chocolate-chip scone in the other and gesticulated definitively before putting it into his mouth with a flourish. “You’re not some criminal. You don’t go around killing people. You’re just a woman. A bald woman. And you just do what you have to do.”
Chewing the scone, he warmed to his topic. “We all do hard things, Sunny. Losing my wife Teresa was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But it had to happen. Did I abandon her? No, she ran away from me. Did you kill your mother? No. Through your inaction you allowed her to die. But everyone told you to do it. The court, the doctor, even your own husband. You did the right thing. It was for the best.”
19
In the winter of the year when Sunny was eight years old, Maxon was nine. She and her mother wanted to take Maxon skiing but his father said no. They were going to go skiing, wrapping up in parkas and snow pants, fuzzy hats, goggles, scarves, until no one could distinguish Sunny from a regular child with a regular head all full of glossy ringlets or straight layers. Maxon, they felt sure, would benefit from going skiing. From getting out of the valley. They all would. They were going to drive to Vermont. But his father said no.
Nu also said no, said they were crazy, freezing to death in the snow, but Emma was adamant. She had bought a pale blue ski jacket for herself and goggles for both the children, which they wore while pulling each other on disk toboggans around the yard. Paul Mann said the boy was needed at home. Needed at home, when there were five other brothers, all older, all working on the property in their various capacities: lumberjack, bulldozer, meth cooker, etc. Why this one small other brother was needed so greatly when they could never remember to feed him, the Butcher women could not comprehend. But he was not allowed to go and Sunny was very angry about it.
IN THE WINTER THERE was no bicycling, no trail ride, and not even any time for play after school, because it got dark and cold so early, so they both rode the bus to Sunny’s house, where they ate, then walked through the valley to Maxon’s. Then Sunny ran back, Maxon-style, brushing the trees with her hand, climbing and clamoring up the hill in a rush while Nu stood at the back door worrying and waiting. She went with him that night on his walk home; they left right away after school with hot sandwiches in their pockets, so Nu wouldn’t worry. They cut a wide angle through the valley, not a direct route. It was cold, the pines were shrouded in ice, every little branch a glass filament, and the wind brought the boughs tinkling down around them, raining crystals. Their boots crunched in the snow. The creek, frozen at the bottom of the valley, was an ice sculpture of a creek, frozen in motion, all the little waterfalls. They stopped there, by Maxon’s stump cache, which they had turned into a fairy throne.
“All hail the king the fairy!” cried Maxon.
“Come all the fairy come to king,” yelled Sunny. “Die the enemy the fairy evermore!”
“A feast the fairy come!” shouted Maxon. He brushed off a log where they often sat to talk or pretend fairy courts, and they sat down to eat.
“The wolf tribe come the feast,” Maxon said through a mouthful of ground beef. “The hawk tribe say death to the wolf tribe.”
“The hawk tribe bring the penitence,” said Sunny. “Bring ten penitence the feast, keep all the wolf tribe cold the snow.”
They went on like this as they ate, doing their pretend in their own words, garbled and fast. It was all wound in with the tribes of the forest, the wars they were in, the plots they had played out, the characters they had invented. Maxon had it all worked out in visuals around a particular stand of trees, like a data map. Sunny tried to understand him when he talked fast, tried to talk back, faster. She was the one who was reading a whole lot of
