Shine Shine Shine Read online

  “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 any
one 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.

  The new mother looked at her husband and his potted plant. He wore a black linen shirt unbuttoned over a shining chest, and a ridiculous fishing hat. Her baby slept in her bed, between her body and her arm, wrapped in a long orange cloth. Its lashless eyes closed like the eyes on a statue of a saint, which can have no hair or eyelashes either. Her white-blond hair fell around them both like a metal curtain, smooth as polished rock. Her level blue eyes stared, her lips spread in a beatific smile. She had exchanged her bloody gown for a gauzy wrap, the color of burnt salmon. She lay like a long slim knife in the bed. At the top of the knife was her beautiful head, chiseled out of bone. She was as serene as a pool in a cave.

  She let her husband pick up the baby and hold it in his arms. She watched him hold it up to the light and look deeply into its face and droop his sagging cheeks next to its nose. She looked at him and saw that he was old. She wondered what exactly she had done to herself, marrying such an old man, and having his child here in the hotness of Burma. Had it been a dark and tousled baby, mewing loudly, or a ginger thing squawking, she would not have felt the same heartbeat in her throat. When she saw him holding her strange baby with his sweating paws, she knew she had to take her baby back to America, where she could be real. Burma was a dream, their mission an escape. Her baby would engage, would fire up like a rocket, and would burn in this world. She would not drift in the murmured prayers of her father. She would not languish in the jungle. The Buddhist nurses had left her, so that when she could get up, she could leave. She could leave all the way. She could rethink old decisions. Having a baby makes you do that.

  But instead they took her back to the small cottage at the bottom of the big mountain, and they kept house together. Turns out, it was hard to leave Burma. Turns out, she had been stuck the whole time. She named her baby Sunny because of the eclipse. The father had to relent. After all, he had not been there when the baby was coming. He had been down on the coast, collecting specimens. So the baby’s name was Sunny Butcher.

  *

  WHEN SUNNY TURNED TWO, they were still in Burma, and she had not grown any hair. She was still nursing, and still sleeping in her mother’s arms. Her mother braided sun hats for her out of fabric, out of reeds, and out of yarn. They hired a nurse, Nu, who helped Emma take care of the baby and with the house. Sunny walked around in a tiny head wrap, with her round belly protruding from a saffron kimono. Her features stayed elfin, her shoulders and limbs fragile, but her head was enormous. She was a strange-looking child. The local Chin people smiled and nodded to her. To them she looked like one of the monks who kept coming to convert them back to Buddhism. The men reached out to her with two hands. The women would not touch her garments. Although the Chin mostly worshipped the Christian God, they adhered to their native traditions.

  The father had wanted to name the baby Ann because of Ann Judson, one of the first missionaries to penetrate Burma. Ann Judson was the victim of many fevers and eventually died of one. In her day, the locals censured Christian missionaries by locking their feet in fetters and raising them up until only their shoulders were touching the ground. What with the mosquitoes attacking, this was a difficult punishment to endure. That was before the British took over Burma, which was before the Communists took over. A whole lot of Christians had come to Burma, and to the Chin province, over that century.

  The last missionary to arrive was Sunny’s father, with his beautiful wife. When they first established themselves in Hakha, Emma was twenty-three and Bob was forty. They built a pretty wooden church next to the industrial housing complex. Christians had been meeting in buildings around Burma for over a hundred and fifty years. Their church was just one more church. A single round fan at the back of the sanctuary moved air through the congregation. The wife sat in pew one with her knees pressed together and off to the side. She wore American-style ladies’ hats and craved crisp untropical fruit. Her husband struggled to teach her the language, insisted on speaking Chin at the dinner table, over the rice and vegetables.

  One year after their arrival, all the missionaries were thrown out of Burma. Burma was purged of foreigners altogether, both of the missionary and commercial variety. Men in gray uniforms from the other side of the mountains knocked on the Butchers’ door and put them out of their house. They left everything, running immediately to India, where Bob sat in the kitchen of his missionary friends, broadcasting a radio show in Chin. He did not use the term “counterrevolutionary.” Emma worried, would they have to go back home? She could live in Burma with her enthusiastic husband, but could she live in America with him? Could she be a pastor’s wife, and hold Bible study meetings in her house? She prayed that she would be allowed to stay in Asia. It seemed easier.

  Loose in India, she wandered in a slipstream. She only hummed through the hymns. The mountains interfered with the radio signal, and Bob Butcher went back to the States, but Emma wouldn’t go. He left his beautiful red-lipped wife in India with the other missionaries and went home, determined to find a way to come back under legal cover, as a businessman, or a scientist, or a diplomat. She slept in a hammock on their screened porch. She spent her time in India teaching the local children how to read, but she never imagined having a child of her own. She couldn’t imagine something good coming out of the thing they did together that was necessary to make a child. She didn’t want the sex between her and Bob to have any lasting effects. When she rose from the bed every morning, she saw herself walking away from it and from what was left between the sheets. They never talked about it. It only happened at night, when she had already been asleep. It was as if she had to be sleeping for him to approach her. He couldn’t approach her if she was able to see it coming.

  This was the way he had first come to her, in the middle of the night, when she was asleep in her father’s house in Indiana.

  She had gone away to college and come back, back to her austere parents and their brutally efficient family farm. He had come for a week of prayer meetings, a fire and brimstone speaker who moved the whole church to their knees. She had known him since her childhood, because he came every year and they always hosted him at their house. First he came with his wife, who died in childbirth, taking the baby with her to heaven, and then alone, dramatic and intense, knocking glasses over at dinner and giving her blessings, his hand on her head. That night, when she was back from college and he was visiting, she was asleep under her lemon yellow patchwork quilt, and then she was awake, looking at him in her room. The clock ticked beside her. A shadow moved across the ceiling.

  “I choose you, Emma,” he told her, his voice hoarse. She had never heard him try to speak quietly before. She had heard him shouting, ranting, pleading, even crying. “I choose you to go with me to Burma.”

  She felt cold wonder. Was it a dream? She had seen him only in a suit, behind the pulpit, everyone listening in rapt attention. Then in his shirtsleeves, tie pulled open, at the dinner table, telling stories. When she was twelve, he had baptized her in the river, and the testimony she gave was that she wanted to be more genuine in her faith, not just say the words, but live the life. She had ridden in the back of his truck, with the other kids who had waited all year to be baptized during the revival week. She saw his big shoulders bumping along, one hand on the wheel, one hand clutching the to
p of the doorframe, as if lodging himself firmly in this world.

  He was with her, in the dark, in her room. It was now a private time between the two of them only. She felt paralyzed, and special. How could she not? Within the confined world of the church, the community, the Christian college she had attended with its fumbling, guilty boys, he was a shining celebrity. Her parents would be proud. And what else was she going to do? Next to him, no one else seemed completely alive. She felt twelve again, nervous, unready, and yet proud that she was a woman to him now. Proud that she knew what to do. She had never spoken a full sentence to him. But she could be the one to go to Burma with him, be his helpmeet, and replace his dead and sainted wife.

  He was breathing heavily. He was standing next to her bed with no shirt on, her sleepy eyes could see only the top part of his body, broad chest shining in the dim light from the moon. She felt her body lying flat in the bed like a paper doll. What would it be like, this thing? A shiver went up from her stomach. His breath filled the room.

  “Can I come to you, Emma?” he asked. She saw his brow furrow. She nodded.

  Then he had pulled aside the covers and she felt the chill of the air. He looked down at her, her belly, her legs. Then he was with her in the bed, his knees on either side of hers. His one big hand pushed down the flannel waistband from over his hips, his other pressed on her collarbone, rubbing and rubbing. His penis came out of the top of the pants and she felt it, warm on her leg in the sudden cold of the dark room, smooth and hot, nudging at her, pushing all around over her panties. His square chin was all she could see above her, the rest of his face pointed up and toward the sky. She shifted her hips up to meet him, put her arm around him and her little hand down in the bottom part of his warm back. He moved his hot hand down from her collarbone, down over her breast, fingers dragging urgently down to where he felt her, dug into her, opened her up. His body felt heavy on top of her, everything he did so forceful, so demanding. Now his forehead was on her shoulder, his hips twisting, and the sounds he made were groans. “Oh, oh,” he said. “Oh, god, it feels so good.” But then he could be charming. He could say, “Oh, honey, I know it hurts.”