Sunshine Girl

No, no. I was getting dizzy, nauseous, everything around me too harsh, the lights, walls, floor of the grocery store all too starkly white, drilling into my eyes. An all-too-familiar feeling. What terrible timing. Why now? Please not now. 

Someone was going to approach me soon, a concerned grandmother-type, maybe, or one of those red-shirted, dull-eyed employees. The red-shirt employee would wonder why he always got the worst shift because now he had to deal with the madwoman in aisle nine – maybe he should try to find a job other than this thankless one? – and who has breakdowns at 9 pm on a Tuesday with a singular box of cereal in their shopping cart?!

I tried to calm myself, hearing my father’s voice – “deep breaths, Mila, in, out, in, out” – and looked down, focusing on the tangible, my bran flakes. I gripped the handle of the shopping cart so tightly I couldn’t feel my fingers as the tears ran, indiscriminate, down my face.

***

“Sunshine girl, come look at pictures with me.”

I brushed her off, prickling a little at the childhood nickname. “No, I have to get ready for graduation. You know it’s tomorrow, right?”

“Come on, Mila. Just for a minute,” my mother wheedled.

“No! I don’t even know what dress I’m wearing. Just—no.”

She didn’t answer, and if it wasn’t for a chance walk by the living room, I never would’ve seen her small, graying form huddled over a stack of browning photo albums; never would’ve felt a sharp, stabbing, irrational sense of pity; never would’ve joined her on the couch and flipped through the pictures with her. 

She didn’t say anything, just looked up and smiled knowingly, the corners of her eyes folding into tiny little lines. “Look, this is you when you were only two months old! My beautiful sunshine girl.”

I examined the picture she was referring to, but I didn’t see anything special.

“Here you are with Grandma. That smile! Such a happy baby.”

And so she went, talking mostly to herself, both of us refusing to mention, pretending not to notice, her conspicuous absence in three-fourths of the pictures.

“You were only five years old in this one!” She held the album closer to her face so she could read my father’s chicken-scratch writing. “Your hair used to be so blonde, Mila.”

I glanced disdainfully at the boring, middling brownish color it had become. “Well, that’s what happens when you get older. Your hair gets darker.”

As she kept turning the pages, tears collected in her eyes, occasionally spilling over and dotting the page. I pushed at my cuticles and pretended not to notice. Both of us were good at that: pretending not to notice, avoiding, always avoiding.

After a little while I left, more concerned with finding the perfect dress than reminiscing. And, if I was being completely honest with myself, I was getting angry with her, long-repressed feelings surfacing. It was the way she talked about these pictures – possessively – acting as though they were hers when they weren’t. All the moments, the big ones and the small ones, the ones frozen in time and the ones not, and she had no right to them, because she was never there. 

Like with the Disney World picture. My mother was only seeing the highlight reel – my gap-toothed, chocolate-covered smile, the delight on my seven-year-old face as I posed with Minnie Mouse – but she didn’t know the full story, the hours my father – my ever patient, all-suffering father – and I spent waiting in hot, sticky lines, the Cinderella who asked me if my mom wanted to be in the picture with us and how I had to tell her no, my mom was too sad to come to the amusement park. 

I knew, intellectually, it wasn’t her fault. But it was hard not to blame her. 

The morning of graduation, I woke three hours early, tingling with a strange combination of nerves and excitement. I puttered around my room, pointlessly moving things, willing the time to go by more quickly. At a reasonable hour, I got ready, putting on the silky dress I had chosen the night before and taking care to apply enough concealer to hide the dark circles beneath my eyes.

In the kitchen, my father was at the stove, batter for crepes in hand. He looked up and smiled when he saw me, just like he always did. “Good morning, honey. You look beautiful.”

“Thanks. But the crepes—you really don’t have to.” 

“You only graduate from high school once, Mila. It’s for nostalgia’s sake. Lemon-sugar crepes were your favorite when you were younger.”

“What’s up with all the sentimental stuff?” I asked, kidding only a little. “First Mom, now you?”

“It’s because you’re graduating, Mila! You were my—our—little girl and now look at you! Eighteen and about to leave for college.”

He caught his mistake quickly, rushing to correct the singular with a plural, but I heard. I wanted to defend his slip of the tongue, say, “No, you’re right! I was your little girl, not mom’s too. You did all the work. You’re the one in all my memories.” But I had a feeling it would only hurt more than help.

 “I mean, I’ll come back for breaks and everything,” I said, taking out a plate and shoveling a perfect, delicate crepe on top. 

“I know, but still. We’ll miss seeing your, uh…cheerful…face every day.”

I laughed, cutting off a little square of crepe and dousing it with powdered sugar and lemon juice. “Cheerful, that’s me.” Then, casually: “So, where’s Mom?”

My father responded in kind. “Still sleeping, I think. I mean, it is 8 am, Mila. We can’t all be early birds.”

I stuffed the crepe square in my mouth so I wouldn’t say anything. It was just…no matter the circumstance, without fail, he always defended her. It was his unfaltering defense, his inability to see her flaws and imperfections, that was the cause of all our worst arguments. And when I would confront him about it, ask him why, he would turn into a weak, feeble mess, which in turn would aggravate me more. 

“Well, please just don’t be late.”

“Of course, honey. She wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

Later that day.

“So, wanna bet?” I asked, turning around to face Pruthi, a close friend from chemistry who sat a row behind me when put in alphabetical order for graduation. I had told her the situation little by little as we collaborated on worksheets and muddled over labs together.

“On what?” she asked.

“Whether my mom will show.”

“Mila.” Pruthi gave me a severe, almost disappointed look and lowered her voice to a whisper so our classmates couldn’t hear. “First off, you know it’s out of her control. It’s not her making the decision whether she goes or not.”

Pruthi was right in theory, but she didn’t actually live with my mother.

         “Second,of course she’s going to show. Science fair? Maybe not. But this is high school graduation. Didn’t you tell me your mom was always really hard on you when it came to school because she cared so much about making sure you got a good education?”

         “Yeah. She did.” My mother was fanatic about education because she hadn’t gotten her own high school diploma, dropping out of school after getting pregnant with me. My whole life she’d stressed the importance of school, but I had suspicions about her motives.  I wondered if she wanted to get hers vicariously through me to dispel the deep-rooted inferiority she felt of not being a high school graduate. In any case, she said not getting her diploma was the start of it all; a big, life-changing trigger that started her descent into sadness. 

         With each passing minute, I turned around with increasing frequency, scanning the audience for my parents. As the lights dimmed and the principal took the stage for opening remarks, I caught a glimpse of someone walk in at the last minute – a lone, male figure I immediately recognized as my father.

So she wasn’t coming after all. I had spent so many years being disappointed, I thought I’d gotten used to it. But the disappointment was so acute, so painful, it was like I was six years old all over again and she never showed up for our first grade Mother’s Day party and I had to make matching mother-daughter necklaces with the teacher. What was worse was the lingering hope I couldn’t extinguish – the little voice in the back of my head that couldn’t be crushed with reason or logic, the one that whispered what if she’s just late? The problem was, I actually caredif she showed up or not. At some point – I can’t remember if I was ten or eleven or twelve – I had stopped caring whether she’d be there for violin recitals and volleyball games; I had adjusted my expectations so I couldn’t be disappointed. But for some inexplicable reason, it mattered enormously whether she was there for graduation. Perhaps it was a desire to show her that I had accomplished what she’d always wanted; I wanted her to be proud of me. Or maybe it was more a vengeful, selfish “look at what I’ve done, what you could never do.”

         Names started being called and diplomas given out. I tuned out, trying to avoid thinking about my mother, instead flashing back to moments from my high school experience, rose-tinted in hindsight.

         I think by the time they called my name, I knew, at least subconsciously. As I walked toward the stage – a moment meant to be mine, a moment my mother was supposed to have no part in – I felt an overwhelming, paralyzing sense of dread, but I kept walking, because that’s what I was supposed to do. I darted one last look behind me, searching for my father, but really searching for my mother next to him.

He was alone.

         By the time I was shaking the principal’s hand under the hot, bright lights, light-headed and dizzy, I knew with a dreadful certainty. I knew this wasn’t a typical situation; I knew something awful had happened. I knew without a doubt she would not have missed watching me graduate. I just didn’t know whatterrible accident had occurred – car crash, heart attack, overdose?

         I’m not sure how, but I made it down the stairs on the other side of the stage and back to my seat. I debated going to my father, but there was no way to do it subtly – I would have drawn the attention of the whole auditorium. Plus, I had a feeling whatever had happened had already happened.

         From behind, Pruthi touched my shoulder. “Are you okay? You looked a little nervous up there–”

         “Oh, yeah, yeah I’m good. Just afraid I was going to trip,” I said, a little breathless, the lie effortlessly slipping off my tongue.

         “Okay, good,” Pruthi said, looking at me with concern. “Because really, you looked like you were about to faint.” 

         I arranged my face into a smile. “Low-blood sugar, probably.”

         As the final few people were called, I mentally raced through all the options, each one more and more gory than the last. That was the problem with the mind; it went down places you wished it wouldn’t and you were powerless to stop the spiral.

         After the speeches and the clichés and the congratulations, after the principal gave his closing remarks and thanked everyone for attending, I exited the row as quickly as possible and ran towards my father, stumbling in my three-inch heels. 

         He must have sensed my panic because he had on his sympathetic face, the “Honey, I’m so sorry but your mom just couldn’t make it” face.

         This time, though, he sounded angry: “Mila, I’m so sorry. She promised me she’d get here in time. She told she was about to get out of bed. She toldme.”

         “No, no, no something happened to her. I know something bad, something really, really bad, an accident—” I was sobbing, my words slurred and incomprehensible. People were starting to notice.

         My father didn’t believe me at first. He thought I was just upset she didn’t come. And even after I made him drive home and the house was empty, even after we checked the garage and her car was missing, even after we drove around the neighborhood for hours on end, going everywhere we could think of, he still didn’t believe me. It was only after the police got back to us a week later, saying they’d found a body in the river five miles out of town, and the autopsy report confirmed that time of death was June 8, 1:07 pm, seven minutes after graduation started, that he finally believed me. 

         I was wrong about one thing, though: the accident part. 

***

         See, I thought I’d moved on. I thought I’d put it behind me, left it in the past. After the meltdown at graduation, I did not shed any more tears. I was the strong one, supporting my father, wiping histears, organizing the funeral and booking his therapy appointments and talking to the relatives. I suppressed my feelings, numbing myself, trying to move on by blocking that day from memory. 

Trying to pretend it never happened, trying to pretend I didn’t miss her. I remembering whispering to myself at night, “How could you miss something you never had? It was her decision, anyway.” Most of it was just lingering, vengeful anger – by not missing her, I was getting even for all those times she was never there during my childhood. And for five years, I was successful. I had gotten so good at repression – a skill learned from her – I thought it equated to healing. 

         It doesn’t, I know that now. Because when I was grocery shopping today, I overheard a conversation between a mother and her daughter. At first, I thought I’d misheard what the mother was saying. But then I heard it again: the mother was calling her daughter sunshine girl.