Sunny Dreams by Alison Preston Page B

finished except for the paint and my dad didn’t really want to pay someone for painting that he could do himself; he enjoyed painting. Benny stuck to his original plan of heading out to Alberta for the sugar beets. It was decided that he would come back for his friend in four weeks’ time.
    My dad gave Benny some cash and, speaking with a French-Canadian accent, wished him well. He didn’t hear himself do the accent and denied it when I pointed it out. But it was something he always did. At the butcher shop he spoke like an eastern European with very good English, like Mr. Fortensky, the man behind the counter. It was a funny thing about my dad, the way he fell into another person’s way of speaking. It was as though he wasn’t sure where he ended and the next person began.
    Jackson didn’t have polio when he came home, just the two casts up past his elbows. He spent very little time in his room; he wasn’t sick, after all. And he was a young man full of energy, so he mostly used his room for sleep, like the rest of us.
    Sometimes I didn’t think I could bear the wait until I saw him again: the overnight hours, my time at work, any few minutes when he left a room before he walked back into it again. My whole being would concentrate itself on the future moment when he would again fill my vision. My head ached with anticipation and my body squashed in on itself.
    We played checkers. He told me which man to move and I moved it for him. He was good at checkers. And I read to him, mostly Thomas Hardy. He listened carefully and watched me as I read.
    Unlike Benny’s eyes, Jackson’s seemed to shine from within. I guess it was that the light somehow entered his eyes and caught specks of gold on his irises. I couldn’t figure that out, still can’t, the way light changes from one set of eyes to the next.
    It was a little unnerving at first, getting used to the warm light from his eyes falling all over me. But I got to like it. I prepared myself for the readings — made sure my face was shining clean in spite of my new ideas about dirt. It was easy to get a grimy face during those hot damp days when even the sun was obscured by dust. I wanted him to admire me.
    We talked, too, about high school and college (he wanted a break in between the two), songs from the radio (we both liked “Summertime”), broken bones we’d had. We talked about who was a worse prime minister, Bennett or King, and about Jackson’s parents. He told me that his dad had been a lot older than his mum and that he had been a big shot with the Canadian Pacific Railway. And he said that his mum should be permanently locked up in an insane asylum. Life at his home had become way harder to take after his dad had died.
    “My mum no longer tries at all,” he said. “She doesn’t try at all.”
    Some of the things he told me were lies; I was sure of it. I think the lies were just to make him seem more worldly to himself and to me. He hinted at experiences with older girls and women, experiences I was almost certain he hadn’t had. If it was true, why didn’t he at least try to kiss me? Was I so unappealing? I would have helped.
    I told him about my sister. He was interested in Sunny, in what had become of her. We speculated on that and we touched on the worst things that could happen.
    He said that what was going on with him right now was pretty bad, not being able to do anything for himself and all.
    That’s when I told him that my mother had killed herself the summer when Sunny was kidnapped.
    He turned white, as though every ounce of blood had left his head and gone south.
    “That’s so much worse than my broken arms, I feel embarrassed having complained about them. And you folks are being so kind to me during it all. It can’t even compare.”
    “Don’t worry,” I said. “You didn’t know.”
    Although I must say I was a little surprised that he mentioned his arms after my Sunny story. Surely Sunny’s plight, in itself, was much more