My Sunshine Away (23 page)

U
nfortunately, some things are so bad.

The inside of Jacques P. Landry’s private room was fifteen by twelve feet and stank of cigar smoke. The carpet was thick and brown and felt dirty beneath my palms as I trespassed across it that night, scared thoughtless on my hands and knees. To my left was a table stacked with files and envelopes. On the wall above it, a dry-erase board scrawled with symbols I could not discern. Next to this stood three filing cabinets, the middle of which was topped with a television and other electronic devices, and the digital clocks of these machines provided one of my only two sources of light. The other came in a sliver from beneath the locked door and made the doorway look like the entrance to another dimension. It reminded me immediately of something in my past that I could not place. Then the hair on my arms stood up like an animal’s.

I got the feeling I was not alone.

I stopped and listened for someone else in the room but heard only the soft whir of electronics. The place was so dark that I could barely make out even the largest objects and so I held my breath and
scanned the wall to my right, making guesses as to what was there, and then my body went cold all over. In the far corner of the room I saw the outline of a head, what could be hair. It was hard not to scream. The shadow was so still, though, that I couldn’t be sure. This made me doubt everything else in my vision, as well. Is that a lamp or a shotgun? A table or a cage
?

I did not know the answers to these simple questions, and the shape I saw against the wall could have been a potted plant. It could have been the smiling face of Jacques Landry. Yet it remained freakishly still. So I sunk closer to the floor and invented simple rules for myself. If it moves, I fly out of the open window. If I hear breathing, I crawl backward and try not to wake it. Is that a chin or a handle
?
I wondered. A shoulder or a drawer
?
I pressed my belly to the ground to get a different vantage point and soon felt something cold beneath my forearm, a light square on the dark carpet. Once I noticed this one I saw others as well, spread across the room as if spilled or dealt out like cards. They were made of photographic paper, I could tell, the same size and shape as my picture of Lindy, and I carefully slid the nearest one toward me and turned it over. It was a close-up of male genitalia.

The image was so unexpected that I almost didn’t recognize it. The picture looked posed and clinical, and yet this was not from a medical book. It was black and white and poorly lit, like pornography from a bygone era, and I immediately knew whose body it was. The thick mat of pubic hair, the sturdy thighs from which the organ stood erect all repulsed me. A trio of dark moles dotted the pelvis. The testicles hung like weights. It looked, to me, just like him.

When I glanced back up, I saw a person sitting in the corner. Her cheeks were thin and her neck long and I wondered wildly if some foster child had been tied to a chair and left for dead in this room. I worried too, even though it was irrational, that it could have been
Lindy tied up in that chair because this is the nature of worry. Yet my fear of this was enough to motivate me to stand up and, once I moved toward her, I saw that this was not a person at all, but rather a life-sized female doll. She was stiff and naked and plastic, and the blank of her openmouthed gaze horrified me. I then saw another one, a male counterpart, crumpled to the floor beside her. He was facedown and undressed and the way his arms folded over his head made him look like a guilty penitent. I became clumsy with fear. I backed away and knocked an ashtray off an end table. I bumped against a video camera perched on a tripod. I tripped over cords that ran across the carpet to the far wall, and when I followed them to the filing cabinets I saw that they were plugged into the electronic devices stacked on top of the television. Once I got close enough, I could see that these devices were Betamax machines, outdated versions of the VCR. There were three of them, all plugged into one another, and I carefully ran my hands across their fronts. I flipped open their small viewing windows and, inside the middle machine, I saw a tape. I couldn’t help myself.

I made sure the volume was off. I pressed play.

I expected the worst. Some part of me hoped for it. I knew that if I could find evidence of obvious atrocity then I could just grab this tape and go. This was my idea, I suppose, of being a hero. Instead, what materialized on the television was not immediately obvious. It was a series of pictures laid out like a grid and, in the eight or so squares that made a border around the screen, I saw the faces of foster children. The kids were thin and shirtless and stared blankly at something off camera like a Third World version of
The Brady Bunch
. I recognized the face of Tyler Bannister, the tattoo of a bird with one wing visible on his neck every time he looked away from the camera. The tattoos on his wrists visible when he covered his eyes. I also recognized Tin Tin and, in the other frames, saw kids from around eight
to twelve years old that did not last long at the Landrys’. I did not see Jason at all. Every so often, one of these children would gaze into the camera and speak, but I could not hear what they were saying. For this, all these years later, I remain thankful.

In the middle of this grid—what the children were watching while being taped, I suppose—were two separate frames of black-and-white images from our neighborhood. One frame was comprised entirely of video footage and, in it, familiar cars pulled out of driveways, neighbors watered their lawns, we played football in the street. It was the ordinary stuff of our suburban lives in those days. The other frame shuffled through a collection of still photos, much like the close-ups scattered all over the floor. My mother at the mailbox. Bo Kern’s harelip. A woman’s vagina. Duke Kern’s sculpted stomach. And then Lindy, one summer day before it all happened, I knew, with her hair fallen across her tanned shoulders. With her smile so innocent that I’d almost forgotten it.

Then everything changed.

I noticed a light on the walls, and its flicker was unmistakable. I ran over and peeked through the side of the curtains and it took me a long time to process what I saw. There was a police car on Piney Creek Road, parked two doors down at my house. The vehicle sat in our driveway, its lights spinning without sound, and in front of that, I saw my father’s Mercedes. I watched two officers get out of their car as my father walked up our driveway to meet them and I’d no idea what to make of it. I remembered my mother calling him after Jacques Landry came to our door, telling us that he would stop by, but to show up in the middle of the night? How desperate must her voice have sounded? How long had he been at my house? Did I leave my window open? Were Mom and Rachel awake? Or was the reason he had shown up not because of that cur at all, not because of Jacques Landry,
but rather because my mother had woken up to find me missing? Had she called him again? Had she also, this time, called the police? At what point did my decisions begin to hurt the people I loved?

I didn’t have time to think.

Behind me, the Landrys’ telephone rang. I nearly jumped through the window. The clang of the bell filled the house so aggressively that it was hard to recall the silence that preceded it. By the second ring, I heard Mr. Landry moving around in the den. It sounded like someone was rousing a bear. I heard a glass break, a piece of furniture fall over. I then heard him calling out for Louise to answer the phone and I knew I had to get out of there. I took another quick glance around the room for the safe, for the entire reason I came, and I spotted it, the size of a dormitory refrigerator, sitting beneath the desk.

Before I could get to it, three more patrol cars came screaming down Piney Creek Road. They had their sirens on, their lights flashing, and I turned to watch through the side of the curtains as they stopped in front of the Landrys’, maybe thirty yards from where I hid. I shut the curtains and heard the heavy sound of Jacques Landry running down the hallway toward me. I couldn’t move. This was it. I was sure of it. He was going to open the door and find me and he was going to kill me. If a person could shoot an innocent dog, why not shoot a meddlesome boy? I found no logical reason. So I put my back to the wall and stared at the door and in this almost ecstatic fear realized what the sliver of light beneath it reminded me of.

It reminded me of Christmas Eve, every year but that last one.

It reminded me of the way my sisters would return home from college for this holiday or, back when we all lived together, simply play along with the idea of Santa Claus because I was their brother and I was younger than them and I had rushed through supper to take my bath and put on my pajamas so that I could sleep where I always
slept on Christmas Eve, which was on the pullout trundle of my sister Hannah’s bed. She and Rachel would turn in early that night, as well, to share the bed above me as they did only that one time per year where they would tease me by wondering aloud if we had forgotten to put out food for the reindeer, cookies for the big guy. And even after they eventually told me the truth, which they claimed it their big-sisterly duty to do, we continued to sleep in Hannah’s room on Christmas Eve for what we said was our mother’s sake, and I would have sold my soul, at that moment, to do it again.

But the reason I was reminded of this was that in those youngest years, when I still believed in nearly everything a child is supposed to believe in, I would stare at the sliver of light beneath Hannah’s door long after she and Rachel had fallen asleep and want desperately to be the one boy on Earth who saw Santa’s feet and could testify to it, as he stopped outside of our room to give my sisters and I a quiet blessing. Yet when I finally did see a pair of feet stop at a door exactly like Hannah’s, in a room the exact shape of Hannah’s, it did little but confirm to me that Hannah was dead and my childhood was over and that blessings are as easily taken away as they are given.

So I dove beneath his desk to hide. I had no real plan. When Mr. Landry rattled the doorknob I closed my eyes and clenched my body and prayed like a coward for help from the same God I’d so often dismissed. And yet he did not open the door. He instead began securing the locks outside of it and the rattling noise of this endeavor traveled up the door frame like it was being zipped. In the street, the police cut off their sirens. I heard their footsteps on the sidewalk outside. Inside the house, I could hear Mr. Landry and Louise bickering with each other as they both moved toward the front door. When they opened it, Mr. Landry said, “What is the meaning of this?”

A policeman said, “Are you the parents of Jason Landry?”

I knew we were going down after this.

So I did what Jason suggested I do and opened the safe beneath the desk. If I was going to be arrested for breaking and entering, I at least wanted my hands full of evidence. Who knows what I expected to find. Lindy’s underwear? A signed confession? The entire enterprise suddenly seemed ridiculous. Still, I twisted the key and opened the safe and there was not much inside of it: six Betamax tapes with the word “Master” written on the labels, a few documents that looked official and scientific but were incomprehensible, and a medical case full of glass vials. In a cardboard box next to this sat a pile of syringes still in their plastic. I carefully removed the case and pulled a vial from its package. I did not recognize the name of this drug but recalled the pained face Tyler Bannister had made those years back upon the mention of this room and understood that no matter what Jacques Landry was up to with those children, it was abominable. I’ve never gone back to research this. I’ve never had the stomach. Call me what you will. Yet on that night I took this vial and grabbed as many photos from the floor as I could. I thought about grabbing the tapes, the camera, the spent cigars that were as round as dimes, and then I heard my father’s voice.

He was outside, calling Jacques Landry’s name.

I went to the window and nudged the curtain to see my father barreling down the street. Behind him, two police officers walked with my mother and sister, both of whom were in their robes. “Jacques!” my father yelled. “Where the hell is my son?” Mr. Landry stood talking to two policemen. He seemed totally unaware of my father’s presence until my dad broke through their huddle to confront him. He grabbed Mr. Landry by the shirt, and for one split second, before the voices all rose beyond comprehension, before the police pulled my father off Mr. Landry as easily as lint from a suit coat, it looked like my father was honorable. It looked like he was valorous.

And hereabout came a change in me.

Although it was dark outside and the lighting was bad, just a few rotating sirens, two streetlights lit and a third still broken, it looked like my father was invincible. If you could have frozen that moment in time, like we so often do in our photos, you would have seen my father about to reach into the throat of Jacques Landry and pull out his bullying heart. You would also see genuine fear in Mr. Landry’s broad face. More important, though, and what I am trying to tell you is that within this quick exchange I understood that it is inside all of us men to be both menacing and cowardly. It is in all of us to have virtue and value and yet it is also in our power to fall into irrelevant novelty or, even worse, elicit indifference from the people we’ve loved. This is the challenge, I suppose, of fatherhood. And so I knew that, despite my father’s errors, he loved me. He loved us. I also knew that big and important parts of him were sorry because I knew that he was willing to fight. What more could I ask for? I will never apologize for loving him back.

But it was my mother’s face that brought me out of the window.

She stood to the side of the growing crowd as confusion, in general, began to bloom. She watched my father argue with Mr. Landry, but I could tell by her expression that she was not listening to them. My mother, instead, was in some internal place, looking around at her life. I wondered what she was thinking then, in the same way I so often wonder that now. Was she considering her time with my father? Was she wondering how it had come to this? What is the exact path from old wedding photos to a night of horror outside of your dream house? What are the odds of one child dead and another one missing? The truth is, of course, there are no odds for this, and that is when I realized what my mother must have been doing. She must have been preparing herself. That’s why, when everyone else was yelling and
getting emotional, my mother stood quietly off to the side, as if doing math in her head.