My Only Sunshine

Chapter One

Chapter OneI can understand why the promotion person wants me to take over my profile, because this is a seriously f*****g stupid job. I can’t believe she has dealt with this for over two years without quitting.

According to the SmallWorld red alert button, I have 732 messages waiting for a reply, all of the streaming audio files are corrupted with gray Xes through them, and I can’t figure out how to delete the more than 200 comments on a thread that has become racist, sexist, homophobic, and anti–written language. In the end, the comments devolved into alphanumeric hieroglyphics of hate.

I also can’t believe how many pictures are uploaded to my profile. Most seem to be from fans and feature blurry red and blue stage lights and silhouettes in the middle tagged as me.

It’s eerie to see recognizable pictures of myself with my arm around a fan, backstage or at festival events. Shouldn’t I remember who these people are? There’s one where I’m looking at a man, and we each have our arms around the other.

We’re looking into each other’s faces and laughing.

I not only have no idea who he is, I also can’t recall sharing this joke or exchange. The tag tells me it was taken with “Daniel” at an independent radio festival in Queens. I laughed with a man in Queens a year ago. Nice of the small world to tell me so.

The farmhouse is quiet, has been quiet all day. Which, if you are a farmer, is probably good. If you are a musician who owes your label an album, this is bad. If you are a musician who owes your label an album and everyone you have ever recorded with won’t return your calls, a quiet farmhouse is a metaphor for an empty career.

I haven’t written a whole song in more than a year, and the farmhouse is quiet, so I thought I might as well check off the items on the list the promotion person gave me, since Tina is the only person at the label who makes eye contact when she talks to me. The first item is, “Take over and clean up SmallWorld account.”

After carefully toggling back and forth between the help box and the profile, I manage to get rid of the terrible thread and turn on all but one of the audio files. When I open the message inbox, it’s easy enough to madly delete anything that remotely resembles “When does your new album come out?”

My profile passably wrenched back from the spambots, I look at the next item on Tina’s list: “Prepare a statement regarding Mallory Evans’s book.”

Mallory Evans. God.

I stand up, because music is loud in my head. Music in my head is normal, and it’s always there, even if it can’t lay itself down to get recorded. It’s too loud, though, and hard to focus when I feel out of time like this.

I reach over for my violin, just to fix some physical point against myself so I feel like I am still on earth, still breathing regular air.

I run my fingers in scales until there is no noise except the muted shush of the strings brushing the fingerboard under my racing fingertips, over and over.

Tina’s been talking to me about this for months, ever since Mallory’s book distinguished itself with adoring reviews and the not-small mention of a certain alternative music performer trying to save his career from writer’s block.

It’s been easier to ignore my label’s anger than it’s been to ignore that Mallory wrote a book about us. Impossible to completely turn away from the increasing number of interview questions about it.

Interview questions that I bluster over while the music gets loud in my head, a flurry of rough chords and percussion, pushing into crescendos with sobs of longing.

And why wouldn’t they ask the questions? Though I haven’t read it, I can gather the book is about our year together, the year we spent making a kingdom for ourselves under the stars. My picture is on the cover of this book. I am certain my heart, the part that isn’t left halved and sore in my chest, can be found between the pages.

If I would read it, that’s what I would find.

If I would reach out to her, Mallory Evans, I would only find the worst parts of myself.

I slide the list aside and stare into the dark kitchen, my hand hot around the neck of my violin. My mind settles down, and I try a few soft pizzicato notes from the low strings on the violin. They sound loud in the farmhouse.

When I look back at the list, I realize that Tina has included a few links next to the request for the statement. I type in the first one before I can think about it, the twirl of the spinning browser icon decisive.

A much cleaner and more professional-looking SmallWorld profile than mine loads, and it’s her.

Mallory.

Fifteen years fall over themselves and frame around her picture.

She’s in three-quarters profile, her hair just like what I remember. I can still feel the phantom of its cool softness against my fingers. She looks so close to what I’ve held in my mind’s eye that I can’t figure out what isn’t right until I realize it’s that she’s laughing.

I think about her every day.

Most often, I think about the one and only time I came remotely close to stepping over that breach between us that got wider even as we got closer. From the edge of the field that ringed the little sagging house she existed in like a dog chained in a yard, I remember the nights I came to find her sitting in the wide, low window of her bedroom. The moon shone off her hair just right.

That night, I started whistling so she would know it was me and wouldn’t be scared.

“Mallory,” I’d said, “how’s tricks?”

She was barefoot, her jeans ragged, and her sweater was one of her dad’s — not her stepdad’s, who I still can’t think about without the acid rising, but her real dad, who died when she was a little girl. The hem was pulled around her knees like a tent, and the cuffs folded over multiple times.

That night, her hair was how I loved it — all over the place, tangled in furry ropes that practically wrapped themselves around her elbows. Most of the time, at school, she kept it in severe braids and twists, tight along her temples. But the times when I saw her it was like this. I liked that. I liked having and knowing the Mallory no one else saw.

One night, the little bit of wind picked up her hair and blew it all over the place, making the air smell like shampoo. I can still smell that when I think about her, and just like all that night, it still gives me a sharp tug down low.

“Hey,” she said, like she always did, with this little half-smile she always had.

I hiked myself up in the broad sill next to her. “Whatcha doing?”

“Waiting for you, I guess.”

I was sixteen and stupid then, and didn’t know how to capitalize on a statement like that. So I just looked straight ahead, every cell in my body aware of her next to me, and said, “Oh.”

A tendril of white-blond blew across my wrist. I shuddered then, and I still do, remembering how f*****g sweet it was. I caught it in my fingers, pulled it to watch Mallory’s cheeks get blotchy. She’d grabbed back her hair, twisting it onto itself into a messy knot at her nape.

Even then, I wanted to be brave enough to reach over and untie it, to feel under the mass of fuzzy curls for her neck.

“Where is everyone?” I had noticed that her stepdad’s big, black, stupid truck wasn’t in the drive. He took better care of it than of his wife. Definitely more care than for his stepdaughter.

“They went to the Legion.” She rested her head on her knees and closed her eyes. If they went to the Legion, that meant he was coming back drunk. Which meant—

“Come over to my house tonight.” I was surprised my voice was so steady.

“What?”

“Yeah. My room’s way at the back, next to the old sunroom. My parents would never know. You can have that futon I never use. It’s not even in—” I swallowed over the sudden spike of gravel in my throat. “—the same part of my room that my bed’s in.”

My face roared hot as she turned sharply away. But I persisted. “Then you wouldn’t be here when they came back, and—”

“John, no way.”

I couldn’t stop now that I had started. All my anger and frustration at her situation were boiling up and over.

I remember how some of the wood was splintering under my hands as I gripped the sill. “Yes way. It’s bullshit, Mallory. It’s just f*****g bullshit.”

“John,” she whispered. “Don’t.”

“I could f*****g kill him. I really could.”

“Stop.” She put her hand on my arm, and my brain at the time had switched gears so suddenly that the blood snapped into my d**k with the force of a slap. It was the first time she had ever touched me.

“I shouldn’t have ever told you.” She pulled her hand away. I remember how pale her face looked with just the moon shining on it.

“Just — come. Please.” But I knew I wouldn’t convince her, and the helplessness made me so angry.

“Your parents hate me.”

“They won’t know.”

“I’ll just get in more trouble in the morning.”

“You can sneak out of my house early and come back here. He’ll be so drunk he’ll never know or remember.” But I was afraid I had lost already.

So somehow, through some kind of miracle and emboldened by her touch on my arm, I reached over and put my hand on hers. I remember that all the hairs on my body stood on end, and my poor teenage b***r became painful.

I also remember that she got so still I could taste fear in my mouth and hear a thump of discordant noise in my ears.

“Sorry,” I stammered, but then she flipped her hand over, palm up, and after some excruciating fumbling we managed to weave our fingers together. I remember how hot my ears were and how small her hand seemed. How I absolutely did not know what to do next.

“Okay,” she whispered.

I shut my eyes tight, held my breath. “Okay?”

“I’ll come, tonight. Go back in time for the bus. Just this once.”

I felt so light for a minute, I wanted to laugh. “I just don’t want—”

“Sing me something, John.” She squeezed my hand. I remember thinking how old she seemed right then, and other than the fact that I wanted to just push myself against her and inhale her, I felt about eight years old.

I sang “You Are My Sunshine.” I don’t know why, except that it was the only melody and words I could get a hold of right then. And because it was true.

When I sing, part of me is still always singing to her.

When I think about that night I pretend it ended differently, and I lock away, into the darkest and most mute parts of my brain, what happened in the morning.

I close my eyes and pretend that after the last verse of the song I pull her to me and slide my hand into her fairytale hair and that I breathe in deep as she sighs out.

In this fantasy, her mouth is soft and warm and kisses me like she’ll never stop.

I have tried to stop indulging in this fantasy about that night because I know, f*****g hell I know, how pathetic it is that I have been jerking to the same kissing fantasy for fifteen years. It has variations on the theme — namely, our ages and location — but in fact, not only did I never kiss the girl, but after that night, other than glimpses at school, I never really saw her again.

I look back at the picture. This Mallory has gotten older, and she’s a woman, not a girl. Her mouth is laughing. I want to feel that laugh against my own mouth.

As if going back in time is as easy as walking into the backyard.

Under her picture is a link to her website, and when I click it another professional-looking site loads, the same picture at the top except that this one is uncropped and there she is, sitting in a deck chair, laughing at something off-camera, short and outrageously rounded, her hair all over the place to her waist.

I put my hands tight against my forehead. It’s actually physically painful, looking at this picture. I touch it, my fingers against the glass laptop screen.

Her site is simple, with menu items for Bio, The Encyclopedia of an Ohio Girl in Love, Unmending, Essays, Upcoming Books and Projects, and Contact Me. My blood pounds hard through my neck looking at that last one: contact me.

Mallory Evans is the author of two memoirs, Unmending and The Encyclopedia of an Ohio Girl in Love, along with many essays and poems. Her first novel, You Will Be Offered Chances, is forthcoming. To keep herself and her dog in the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed, she teaches composition and writing as an adjunct faculty member at Lakefield State University.

I can only keep in my head two things. One, her bio mentions only herself and a dog. Two, Lakefield State University is barely fifteen miles from where I am sitting. Ironically, my mother sits on their board of directors.

I click on The Encyclopedia of an Ohio Girl in Love next, since it is the book I am to make a statement about. The book she wrote about us. And then it’s like a trapdoor opens under my feet.

Twenty-six chapters, one for each letter of the alphabet, examine the year in high school Mallory Evans confessed nearly all (except one) of her secrets to the best friend no one knew she had — John Lake — who would grow up to be an acclaimed alternative music performer. Encyclopedia is the cringingly embarrassing moments of a sixteen-year-old girl in love and a heartbreaking follow-up to her earlier memoir of a***e, Unmending. Evans offers a fascinating diary of a generation of awkward girls and the biography and coming-of-age story of one of this generation’s important musical artists.

I grind my palms into my eyeballs. Except when I look back at the screen, lights dancing over my vision, it’s not the unauthorized biography part I find I can’t stop thinking about. If anyone in the whole world has the right to write anything she’d like about her life, it’s Mallory Evans. No, it’s the other thing. The part about the girl in love. I suddenly feel like I could walk miles, cutting across field after field, to find her window again.

Whatever I thought she might have written about us, it wasn’t that.

I had read Unmending with my heart in my actual throat, just like they say, tears thick and mixed with the smell of new ink and paper. I was certain I would find in that book all the places I had failed her, but the book was all the black stories from her life before we met, the time when she was a little girl.

The times she’d told me about, without looking at me, when we sat in her windowsill looking out over the Ohio fields.

Then there were times after, those times that came under my watch. When I told myself we were the best of friends while still leaving her to suffer the worst tragedy of her life nearly every night.

While I did nothing but soak her in under the moonlight, wishing I could figure out how to kiss her, when I should have been figuring out how to save her. Save her the right way, right out in the middle of the day with swords and armies.

Instead of trying to steal her away in the middle of the night, no better than the viper she lived with.

I want to close the whole website down. I want to snap the computer shut. I want to walk away into the empty farmhouse and not write music some more. I want to walk away from Mallory one more time if it means I can walk away from myself.

I want to forget that I just found out that she ever loved me, even if it was the misplaced love of a child who I dazzled into a fugue that kept her from leaving that nighttime confessional and walking into the sunshine.

I want to look away from the worst of myself for another fifteen years.

Enough.

I’d never even tried to be as brave as she had been at sixteen.

I pound my index finger on the trackpad the moment the arrow hits Contact Me.

Mallory, I write. It’s me, John. How’s tricks?