My Sunshine Away by M. O. Walsh Read Free Book Online Page B

went to therapy instead. No more bicycle ride out to the track at five o’clock, but rather a ride to and from the track with her parents. Small stuff. She looked the same to us then as she always had, bright and smiling, although all of this would soon change.
    And so, terrible as it was, the summer of her rape carried on, bright and blue-skied, and full of immense pleasure. Even our parents, who had taken the news of this crime and the lack of a subsequent arrest the hardest, eventually came back into the fold, bonded together by the appearance of late-summer whiteflies in the neighborhood.
    Tiny and prodigious creatures, whiteflies look like lint.
    Alone, they are easily squashed, nothing more than a bit of dust on your fingers. In great numbers, however, they are disastrous, and feed indiscriminately on anything green. They colonize beneath the leaves of the flora available to them and work their tiny jaws to extract sap from the plant. This is not the trouble. The waste they subsequently excrete attracts a type of mold called black sooty, and this name speaks for itself. A dark color grows over the plant life, eventually growing so thick that it divorces the plant from the sun and a botanical sadness takes over. Irises lie down in their clumps. Trees drop their leaves out of season.
    So, when Piney Creek Road came under siege that late summer,the neighborhood formed an alliance. Kids sprayed soapy water all over the gardens while their parents called one another to talk about successes and failures, progress and setbacks, any subject
other
than Lindy and the possible suspects in her rape, and were happy to focus on the more manageable problem at hand.
    That Labor Day, when the infestation seemed under control, there was a party at my buddy Randy’s house, the Stillers’ house, and everyone there was in good spirits. Parents drank margaritas and iced beer as their kids ran around like lunatics in swim trunks. Lindy Simpson was there, too, without her parents, who had since withdrawn from these types of affairs. She wore a blue one-piece bathing suit, and I followed her around the yard with a water gun. It was all laughter and cheer until around six o’clock, when we heard a chain saw revving up in the distance and a group of us went out to see.
    In the farthest bend of Piney Creek Road stood a common area, a spot of land that was not technically on anyone’s lot. It was obvious now that despite their best intentions, no one had taken it upon themselves to treat the large live oak that stood there, and so this tree remained the last bastion of whiteflies. As such, the oak had apparently just given up, dropping all of its leaves on that Labor Day like some defeated sigh. So, while everyone else was at the party, saying good-bye to a summer they’d like to forget, Lindy’s father had sprung into action. He wore goggles, shorts, and a T-shirt, and laid into the ancient tree with his chain saw, an act so strangely violent that none of us knew what to say.
    Two of the neighborhood men left the party at full trot to try and stop him, to explain to him that the tree was not dead, that it would come back next year, and that he had no right to do what he was doing. Then, when they got halfway up the street, they halted dead in their tracks. It turned out that on closer inspection, these men couldsee something that we hadn’t seen from the party, something that only Mr. Simpson had seen, after the tree dropped its leaves and went bare.
    On the third-lowest branch of the live oak, slung around a tangle of sticks, a faded blue Reebok hung from its laces.
    So the men returned up the street to us, solemn, and let Mr. Simpson continue his work with the chain saw. When we asked them what they’d seen up there, why they hadn’t stopped him, the men put their large hands on our heads as if we were their own sons, their own daughters.
    “Let’s all go back to the party,” they said. “Let’s all get something to eat.”
    So we