My Sunshine Away Read Free Page A

conversation. It was like paradise.
    Rarer still, but too often, these moments were disenchanted by the booming and indecipherable fights of Mr. Landry and his wife, Louise, two doors down. And though kids don’t know, I could tell by the concern on my family’s up-lit faces that adult business was going on over there, and I was lucky to have no part of it. I remember once the sound of a bottle breaking in the Landrys’ driveway, another time a car engine being revved without purpose. I remember the force in his voice. And it was here I first heard a phrase I’d never heard before, that I didn’t understand the literal meaning of, uttered by my mom, I believe, when she said, “I shudder to think.”
    So, I was glad Mr. Landry kept his distance.
    He called to us out on the lawn.
    “Have you kids seen a dog running around here?”
    “No, sir.”
    He looked as if he didn’t believe us.
    “If you see it,” he said, “don’t go near it. If you see it, come and tell me.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    I watched Mr. Landry walk back into the woods and cross a small creek. He stabbed at the water with his stick. He had a mop of black hair and was, by profession, a psychiatrist.
    When I turned back to my friends, Lindy and Duke were again lying on the bed of moss, the conversation with Mr. Landry already forgotten. They giggled and whispered to each other and I watched Lindy rest her hand on Duke’s stomach, where she fiddled, playfully, with his belly button.
    A few days after this, our telephone rang. My mother pulled me into the bathroom and riffled through my hair with her fingers, a small flashlight between her teeth. Wiry and gray, she told me, Spanish moss is a living thing, and among the many creatures that reside in its wig are lice. So, by lying in a bed of it, Lindy and Duke were infested. My mother explained to me how they had them all over, nearly microscopic, and feasting on every inch of their bodies. I replayed the scene in my head, the way they had eventually helped each other up off the bed, as if some new allegiance had been formed between them, and tried to recall swarms of tiny bugs on their skin.
    “I didn’t see anything,” I told her.
    “That’s why you have me to look for you,” she said.
    But the whole story, I suppose, is the shared history that this event established between Duke and Lindy. From there out they often stood to the side at times when the rest of us played. Duke, with his head shaven the next day, took to calling her Queenie. Lindy, who would not have allowed anyone to shave her head in those years, woreDuke’s baseball cap to cover the overwhelming smell of vinegar that her mother had used to delouse her hair. She drank from his Gatorade bottle, he ate from her Twizzlers, and it became the assumption that Duke would pick Lindy for his side in tackle football every single time, as if there she could never be hurt.
    A couple years later, after the crime, when Lindy and I stayed up late to talk on the phone, she confessed to me that she often snuck out of her parents’ house in the weeks that followed the bed of moss and met Duke Kern in his driveway. She told me they kissed on the hood of his father’s ’57 Chevy and that she let him put his hands beneath her shirt. Oddly, I was neither jealous nor angry.
    They were young. They were both beautiful.
    Duke Kern was never a suspect.

5.
    B o Kern, on the other hand, was a suspect.
    He had graduated from the Perkins School, but just barely, the year before the crime. He was well known around town and, with his unsettling harelip and crew cut, immediately recognizable. Teenagers and school friends knew him as the guy always willing to go one step beyond what any of them dared to do and, as such, he was the wild card of every social event. House parties screeched to a halt when Bo Kern knocked over some antique table in a fit of dancing. Young hostesses cried when he dented a parent’s car hood while wrestling and drunk. He was the guy