Shine Shine Shine (2 page)

Very few of the neighbors had ever actually spoken to Maxon. Yet all the people up and down this street took Sunny’s opinions very seriously. She was a natural, living here. She was a pro. When she moved to this town, said the neighbors, things fell into place. Barbecues were organized. Tupperware was bought. Women drove Asian minivans and men drove German sedans. Indian restaurants, gelato stands, and pet boutiques gathered around the one independent movie theater. No one went without a meal on the day they had a sick child or a root canal. No one went without a babysitter on the day they had a doctor’s appointment, or a flat tire, or a visitor from out of town. All of the houses moved sedately through space at a steady pace as the Earth rotated and the Commonwealth of Virginia rotated right along with it. In Virginia, people said, you can eat on the patio all year round.

There were babysitters for Sunny, when bad things happened. There were casseroles that arrived with a quiet knock. When her mother had to go to the hospital, there was help. When Maxon was being launched to the moon in a rocket, there was aid. There was a system in place, it was all working properly, beautifully, and everyone was doing their part.

*   *   *

S
UNNY SAT BESIDE THE
hospital bed of her own sick mother. She sat in her peach summer cardigan and her khaki capris, her leather braided thong sandals and her tortoiseshell sunglasses. She sat under a smooth waterfall of blond hair, inside the body of a concerned and loving daughter. She sat with her child on her lap and a baby in her belly. Her mother lay on the hospital bed, covered in a sheet. She did not wear sunglasses or a cardigan. She wore only what was tied around her without her knowledge. She had not actually been awake for weeks.

On the inside of her mother, there was something going on that was death. But Sunny didn’t really think about that. On the outside of her mother, where it was obvious, there was still a lot of beauty. Out of the body on the bed, out of the mouth, and out of the torso, Sunny saw flowering vines growing. The vines that kept her mother alive draped down across her body and out into a tree beside her bed. They lay in coils around the floor, tangled gently with each other, draped with dewy flowers and curling tendrils. Against the walls, clusters of trees formed and bent in a gentle wind, and all around, golden leaves dropped from the trees to the ground. A wood thrush sang its chords in the corner of the room, blending with Bubber’s chirps and giggles.

Bubber was her son and Maxon’s son. He was four, with bright orange hair that stood straight up from his head like a broom. He was autistic. That’s what they knew about him. With the medicine, he was pretty quiet about everything. He was able to walk silently through a hospital ward and read to his grandmother while Sunny held him on her lap. He was able to pass for a regular kid, sometimes. There would be medicine in the morning, medicine at lunch, medicine to control psychosis, medicine to promote healthy digestion. Sunny sat up straight, holding Bubber, who was reading out loud in a brisk monotone. The baby inside her stretched and turned, uncertain whether it would be autistic or not. Whether it would be more like Maxon, or more like Sunny. Whether it would fit into the neighborhood. It had not been determined.

The babbling gurgle of the breathing machine soothed Sunny’s mind, and she told herself she smelled evergreens. A breeze ruffled the blond hair that brushed her shoulders. She could put her sunglasses up on top of her head, close her eyes, and believe she was in heaven. She could believe that there would always be a mother here, in this enchanted forest, and that she could come here every day to sit and look on the peaceful face.

*   *   *

S
UNNY LEFT THE HOSPITAL.
When the car crash happened, Sunny was driving down the street toward home. Her smooth, white, manicured hands held the wheel. Her left foot pressed flat on the floor. Her head was up, alert, paying attention. The scent of someone’s grill wafted through her open window. And yet there still was a car accident. At the corner of majestic Harrington Street and stately Gates Boulevard, a black SUV smashed into her big silver minivan broadside. It happened on the very street where her house was planted. It happened that afternoon, on that very first day after Maxon went into space. No one died in the car accident, but everyone’s life was changed. There was no going back to a time before it. There was no pretending it didn’t happen. Other people’s cars are like meteors. Sometimes they smash into you and there’s nothing you can do about it.

After the hospital visit, she had buckled the boy into his seat in the minivan, and strapped his helmet on his head. He was a head banger, unfortunately, and it happened a lot in the car. While driving, she was explaining something trivial. She spent a lot of time talking out loud to Bubber, although he didn’t spend much time talking back. It was part of what they did for Bubber to help him with his difficulty, talking to him like this.

“It doesn’t matter which chair you get, right?” she said. “You just say, ‘Oh well!,’ and you sit in whichever chair is open. Because if you pitch a fit about your chair, you’re going to miss your art project, aren’t you? And it’s only a chair, right? It’s nice to have different-colored chairs. It doesn’t matter which one you get. You just say, ‘Oh well! It’s only a chair. I’ll get the blue chair next time!,’ and then you sit in the red chair. Say, ‘Oh well!,’ Bubber.”

Bubber said, “Oh well.”

His voice sounded loud, like a duck’s voice, if a duck talked like a robot. And he had to have a helmet on. Just for riding in the van. Otherwise, he sometimes whacked his head against the car seat, again and again, as the wheels drove over the joints in the road. It was terrible just hearing it happen. It was not something that Sunny ever wanted to hear.

“And then you sit down,” Sunny went on, “and you don’t even think about what color you’re sitting on, you just have fun with your art project. Because which one’s more fun, pitching a fit or doing an art project?”

“Doing an art project,” said Bubber like a duck.

“So you just say, ‘Oh well!’ and you sit down.”

Sunny waved one hand from up to down, to illustrate the point. Bubber hummed in his car seat. Sunny was plenty busy just being the mother of Bubber, but there was something else inside her, this baby making her pregnant. It had a heart and the heart was beating. Most of it could be seen on viewing machines at the doctor’s office. On the outside, a giant pregnant belly sat in her lap like a basket. The seat belt went above and below it. There was no returning from it. It was already here. In spite of what might have been done to prevent it, or any opinions she might have had that another baby was a bad idea, she was now over the line. She would be a mother of two, under the pale blond hair, in the trapezoidal minivan, in her own stately manor. In spite of the fact that Bubber hadn’t come out right, that he’d come out with some brain wires crossed and frayed, some extra here, some missing over there, she was going to be a mother again, because everyone wants to have two children. One just isn’t enough.

When Sunny was a little child, she had never envisioned herself having children. She had never played mother. Often she played sister, but never mother. Maybe that’s why she wanted another baby for Bubber. To save him from being an only child, just like her.

The car accident happened at a four-way stop. Sunny looked left, right, left again. When she looked, everything was clear. But then a black Land Rover shot toward her out of the street she was crossing. It smashed into the van with a crushing force.
This is the end
, Sunny thought.
The end of me, and the end of the baby. The end of Bubber, too.
There would be no family. After all this effort, there would be a bad outcome. It seemed monstrous, impossible. It shook her brain, thinking about it. She felt it rattle her bones.
Poor Maxon
, she thought, as the air bag hit her chest.
What have we done to each other?
There was a brutal specificity to the car accident at this time, in this place, and under the weight of all that reality, her heart felt like it had really stopped.

In that moment, sunshine still fell down through thousands of space miles to warm up the windshield in front of Sunny’s face, but with her mouth so grimaced, she looked like a monster. The sunglasses on her face pointed forward in the direction the van had been moving. The Earth rotated in the opposite direction. The van moved over the Earth on a crazy slant. After the smash, the cars were still moving a little, but in different directions now. The vectors were all changed. Air bags hissed. A sapling was bent to the ground. And at that tremulous moment, a perfect blond wig flew off Sunny’s head, out the window, and landed in the street in a puddle full of leaves. Underneath the wig, she was all bald.

Her mother was dying, her husband was in space, her son was wearing a helmet because he had to, and she was bald. Could such a woman really exist? Could such a woman ever explain herself? Sunny had time, in that moment, to wonder.

In the sky, in space, Maxon rotated on schedule. He always knew what time it was, although in space he was beyond night and day. At the time of the crash, it was 3:21, Houston time. He remembered how the boy, Bubber, had said good-bye so matter-of-factly. “Guh-bye, Dad.” How he had allowed himself to be kissed, as he had been trained, and Maxon had kissed him, as he had been trained. This is how a father acts, this is how a son acts, and this is what happens when the father leaves for space. How the eyes of the boy had wandered off to some other attraction, counting floor tiles, measuring shadows, while his arms clung around Maxon’s neck, never to let him go.

It was like any other day of work. He could hear her quiet words, “Say good-bye to your father.” So habitual. At age four, the mind could understand, but the boy could not comprehend. Why say good-bye? What does “good-bye” even mean? Why say it? It doesn’t impart any information; no connections are made when you say “hello” or “good-bye.” Of course, of course, a silly convention. Up away from the Earth, Maxon felt physically hungry. Hungry for a sight of his wife and child. Hungry for their outline, the shape they would make in a doorway, coming in. Among the stars, tucked into that tiny shard of metal, he felt their difference from the rest of the planet. It was as if Sunny were a pin on a map, and Bubber the colored outline of the territory she had pointed out. He could not see them, but he knew where they were.

2

Years ago, at the time when Sunny was born, the sun was fully eclipsed by the moon. The whole sun disappeared. Then it came back, just as hot.

The moon rarely manages to fully hide the sun from the Earth. In fact, it only happens every so often, and when it happens, you can only see it from certain parts of the world. On all the other continents, time passes normally. Even one thousand miles away, the morning continues without interruption. But right there, in Burma, in 1981, there was a full eclipse, and the sun was covered up for the minutes it took a baby to be born. Beside the Himalayas, there was a brown twilight on Earth and a bright corona in the sky. Sometime in the future, there will be another eclipse in Burma. But there will never be another baby born like Sunny. She was the only one, and her mother knew this from the beginning.

Only during the dark totality of the eclipse did the pushing really work for this woman, about to give birth. She lay in a government hospital of one hundred beds. For hours she had fought with the idea of letting out the baby. Outside, the shadow of Rung Tlang lay over the jumble of Hakha village, getting sharper and sharper. The sun boiled down to a crescent, a sliver, a curved row of pretty beads. Outside, people were distressed. The pipe-smoking women looked up. Men in cone hats stopped tilling the poppies. The sun’s corona flared and swept around the black disk of moon, like a mermaid’s long hair.

Deep in the umbra of the moon, she was able to bear down. After the sun was hidden, it took only a couple of good pushes for the hard little head to emerge. Her fierce cervix wrapped around that head like a fist around an egg. Then the head shot through. Shoulders were extracted. The baby came out. The midwife bundled her quickly, dropped her on her mother’s chest, and ran to the window.

But the moon had already begun to slide, and the sun was tearing through the valleys on its other side. As it had retreated, so it came back on, hot as ever, and everyone had to stop looking up, or they would go blind. Life resumed, and the person who had not been a mother was now a mother, with her bald baby in her arms.

“She has no hair,” the midwife said. “No eyelashes. She’s a very special baby.”

In the morning, before the eclipse, Emma Butcher had been fine with living out the rest of her life in Burma. She would keep her body going, breathe, smile, and eventually die. Later, after the baby, she was no longer okay with staying in Burma. She rose up from that bed a mother, and ready to fight for the rest of her days. What does it matter for a woman to give up her self, and live quietly, with the choices she has made? But when the woman becomes a mother, she can no longer participate in the slow rot. Because no one’s going to rot the child. And anyone who tries will suffer the mother’s consequences.

In the evening, the father burst into the hospital room carrying a roughly potted Persian Shield. He had torn the plant up out of the jungle by the beach, and brought it to the mountains, to cheer her up. The plant was small and had no bloom on it, but its wide purple leaves spread flat under the dim hospital bulb. He put it down at the dark window. He had something exciting to say, very exciting, and his armpits were both beading up with the strain of getting here, to see his new baby. He had the embarrassing enthusiasm of an older man who finally gets to be a father. “I’ve got the perfect name,” he said. “The baby’s name will be Ann. Isn’t it perfect?” Reaching out his pink hands for her, he came close.