The Days of Summer. Jill Barnett
singing star and entertainer Jimmy Peyton, whose fourth record went number one last week, died tragically tonight in a deadly car accident in LA.”
Hearing the report on the radio made her husband’s death more real—how could this be happening?—and when Kathryn called Jimmy’s mother, she was told Julia Peyton was devastated and unavailable. So Kathryn dialed her sister in California and talked until nothing was left to say and staying on the phone was empty and painfully awkward.
A few reporters called to question her. She hung up and unplugged the phone. Later came the knocks on the door, which didn’t sound as loud from her bedroom, and by midnight they’d left her alone. In her bedroom with the curtains drawn, it was easy to ignore the doorbell, to turn off the phone, to lie on their bed holding Jimmy’s pillow against her, holding on so tightly every muscle in her body hurt.
The smell of his aftershave lingered on the pillowcase; it was on the sheets, and faintly recognizable on the oversized blue oxford shirt she wore. Sheer panic hit her when she realized she would have to wash the pillowcases and sheets; she would have to get rid of his shirt, all of his clothes, or turn into one of those strange old women who hoard the belongings of the one they’d lost and who kept rooms exactly as they had been—cobwebbed shrines to those taken at the very moment they were happiest. Now, alone in the dark, Kathryn cried until sleep was her only relief.
The ringing of the bedside alarm startled her awake, then made her sick to her stomach, because every night when Jimmy was on the road, he would walk offstage and call her. I love you, babe. We brought down the house.
But in this surreal world where Jimmy no longer existed, the alarm kept ringing while she fumbled in the dark for the off switch, then just threw the damned clock against the wall to shut it up. A weak, incessant buzzing still came from a dark corner of the room, and she wanted to put the pillow over her head until it stopped, or maybe until her breathing stopped.
Eventually, she got up and turned off the alarm. A deep crease on the wall marked where she’d thrown the clock. The paint was only three weeks old and blue like the sheets, like the quilted bedspread and the chairs, blue because Jimmy’s latest hit song was “Blue.”
Kathryn dropped the clock on the bed and walked on hollow legs into the bathroom, where she turned on the faucet and drank noisily from a cupped hand. She wiped her mouth with Jimmy’s shirtsleeve, then opened the medicine cabinet.
His shelf was eye level. A clear bottle of golden hair oil she had bought last week. A red container of Old Spice without the metal cap. She took a deep breath of it and utter despair turned her inside out. The bottle slipped from her fingers into the wastebasket. Seeing it as trash was more horrific than seeing it on the shelf. Didn’t that then mean it was all true? When all was in order on the shelf, life still held a modicum of normalcy.
She carefully put it back exactly where it belonged, next to a small black rectangular case that held Gillette double-edged razor blades, which she looked at for a very long, contemplative time, then she reached for a prescription bottle with “James Peyton” typed neatly in epitaphic black-and-white. Seconal. Take one tablet to sleep. Count: 60.
Take one tablet to sleep. Take sixty tablets to die. She turned on the faucet and bent down, a handful of red pills inches from her mouth.
“Is that candy, Mama?”
“Laurel!” Kathryn shot upright, the pills in a fist behind her back, and looked down at the curious face of her four-year-old daughter. “What are you doing up?”
“I want some candy.”
“It’s not candy,” she said sharply.
“I saw Red Hots, Mama.”
“No. It’s medicine. See?” Kathryn opened her hand, then put the pills back inside the bottle. “It’s just medicine to help me sleep.”
“I want some medicine.”
Kathryn knelt down. “Come here.” Laurel would have found her. Laurel would have found her. Shaking and numb, she rested her chin on her daughter’s head, surrounded by the scent of baby shampoo and Ivory soap, a familiar, clean smell. It took a long time for Kathryn to let go.
“I can’t sleep.”
Jimmy’s face in miniature stared up at her. Every day she would look at that face and see the man she loved, and Kathryn didn’t know if that would be a gift or a curse. “Let me wash your face. You can see tear tracks.” She used a warm wash rag to clean Laurel’s red face. “There. All done.” Kathryn straightened and automatically shut the mirrored medicine cabinet. In her reflection she caught a flicker of a pale, shadowed life and had to brace her hands on the cold sink. It was achingly painful to realize she was here and Jimmy wasn’t.
Eventually she would clear out the medicine chest; she would put things in the trash without panicking, wash the sheets, and do something with his clothes. They weren’t him, she told herself; they were only his things.
“Does the medicine taste like candy?” Laurel pointed to the prescription bottle.
“No.” Kathryn made a face. “It’s awful.” She dumped the pills into the toilet and flushed it. “We don’t need medicine.”
It was amazing how skeptical a four-year-old could look.
“It’s late,” Kathryn told her. “You can sleep in our—in my bed.”
Laurel jumped up, all excited and so easily distracted. “Because Daddy’s gone?”
“Yes. Because Daddy’s gone.”
The last time Laurel Peyton waved good-bye to her father was from the backseat of a long black Cadillac that belonged to the Magnolia Funeral Home. Waving goodbye was normal when your father was on the road all the time, but the camera flashbulbs and reporters alongside the car were anything but normal.
The three women inside the car—Kathryn, her sister, Evie, and Julia, Jimmy’s mother—tried to shield Laurel from the faces at the car windows, until the press, dressed in their amphigoric darks, were left behind and stood crowlike at the edge of the grave site while the Cadillac continued down the hill.
Behind them Kathryn saw only a monochrome Seattle sky, and scattered all over the lush green lawn were absurdly bright clumps of fresh flowers, bits of life scattered over a place that was only about death. The tires crunched on the gravel drive and sounded as if something were breaking, while rain pattered impatiently on the roof of the car and the electronic turn signal ticked like a heartbeat.
Jimmy’s mother tapped the driver on the shoulder. “Young man. Young man! Can’t you hear that? Turn off that turn signal!” Julia Laurelhurst Peyton looked as if she were carved from granite. Only Jimmy could ever seem to crack through her veneer.
Laurel began to sing one of Jim’s hit songs in a slightly off-key young voice. Feeling sickened, Kathryn glanced at Julia, who was looking out the car window, her face away from everyone else in the car.
Evie took her hand. “She doesn’t understand, Kay.”
“She will soon enough,” Julia said without turning, her voice serrated and burned from too many cigarettes. She opened her purse and pulled out her cigarette case. “You must make her understand, Kathryn. It’s your job as her mother.”
Her job as a mother was not to swallow a handful of Seconal. Her job as a mother was to go on hour by hour and day by day. Her job as a mother was to do what was best for Laurel, at the expense of anything else, because Jimmy wasn’t there.
Julia tapped a cigarette against the back of her hand, then slid it between her red lips and lit it. Smoke drifted around them. “My son was a star.” She looked at Kathryn, at Evie. “You saw the reporters there.” Julia took short drags off her cigarette. “Tomorrow, they’ll play his songs on the radio.”
Kathryn wondered if she would constantly search the radio for his songs. She began to silently cry.
“Don’t,