Father of the Rain (2 page)

When I surface, the littlest boy pushes himself toward me. The others watch him.

“This your pool?” he asks. The water lies in crystals in his hair.

“Yes.”

“You swim in it every day?”

“When it’s warm out.”

“But it’s heated, right?” He swings his arms around fast, making his fingers hop along the surface.

“Right.”

“I’d swim in it every day,” he says. “Even if it was twenty below. I’d get in in the morning and not get out till night.”

“You’d have to eat or you’d die.”

“Then I’d die in this pool. It’s the perfect place to die.”

I decide not to tell him about Mrs. Walsh, who did. She had a heart attack. “Is that Mrs. Walsh floating in the pool?” my father likes to say sometimes when I’ve left a raft in the water. My mother doesn’t think it’s funny.

This leaves a pause in the conversation and the boy paddles away. I feel bad and relieved at the same time.

My mother’s smile fades as she realizes I’m getting out. Bob is telling her about some fundraiser and she can’t interrupt to prod me back in. After I dry off a little, I cross the lawn and run up the steps.

My father is in the den, watching the Red Sox and smoking a cigarette. I sit next to him in my wet bathing suit. He doesn’t care about the possibility of the slipcover colors bleeding. At the commercial he says, “You didn’t enjoy your swim?”

“I got cold.”

He snorts. “The pool’s probably over ninety with all the pee they’re putting into it.”

“They’re not peeing in it.”

I wait for him to say I sound just like my mother, but instead he puts his warm hand on my leg. “I promise this will never happen again, little elf. I’m going to put a stop to it.”

It will stop without you having to do a thing, I think.

They only come a few times a summer. On other weekends they go to other people’s pools or private beaches in other towns. “Project Genesis,” my brother said at the beginning of the summer, on one of the few days he was home between boarding school and his summer plans, whatever they are, making his voice deep and serious like a TV announcer. “In the beginning there was blue chlorinated water in backyards. There were trampolines and Mercedes and generous housewives in Lilly Pulitzer dresses willing to share a little, just a little.” My mother giggled. My father scowled. He can’t amuse her with his teasing the way my brother can.

They swim for hours, until Bob calls them all out and makes them dry off and change in the poolhouse. He and my mother get the charcoal lit in the bottom of the grill and, once the coals are hot enough, put fifteen patties on the rack. The kids explore the yard, back and front, running from the space trolley to the swing set to the low-limbed apple tree. They dare to do things I don’t, like hang upside down on the trolley as it whizzes from one tree to the other, crawl on hands and knees across the single narrow tube on the top of the swing set, and flip off the stone wall around my mother’s rose garden.

I watch them from the kitchen window.

“Bunch of monkeys,” my father says, mixing a drink at the bar.

They have so much energy. They make me feel like I’ve been living on one lung. The littlest girl skins her knee on one of the huge rocks that heaves up through the grass in our yard and the two oldest take turns jogging her in their arms, planting kisses in her hair and stroking away her tears. She clings to them for a long time and they let her.

“Daley.” My mother stands at the screen door. “Please come out and eat with the rest of us.”

“Oh, yes,” my father says. “Do go eat with the fairy and his little friends.”

My mother acts like no one has spoken. On the steps, away from him, she puts her arm around me. She always smells like flowers. “I know it’s hard, but try not to be so remote. This is important, honey,” she whispers.

Normally I eat dinner with Nora, but she’s in Ireland for two weeks visiting cousins. She goes every summer and I never like it. The rest of the year she lives with us except on Sundays when, after church, she drives over to Lynn, where her sister lives, and spends the night with her. “Lynn, Lynn, the city of sin. You never come out the way you went in,” my father often says when she drives away, but never to her face. She is a serious Catholic and she wouldn’t like it. I’ve gone with her many times to see her sister in Lynn on Sunday nights. They eat cutlets and play hearts and go to bed early. There’s no sinning for them in Lynn. There’s a picture on Nora’s bureau in our house of her and my father on some rocks near the ocean. She’s eighteen and my father is one. He’s holding onto her hand with both of his. His mother hired Nora for a summer in Maine, but she ended up going to Boston with them and staying for nine years, until my father went to boarding school. When my brother, Garvey, was born, she was working for another family somewhere in Pennsylvania, but she was free when I came along. After dinner Nora and I watch TV on her bed,
Mannix
and
Hawaii Five-0
, both of us in our bathrobes. She puts me to bed and we always say “Now I Lay Me” and the Lord’s Prayer, though at her church it has a different ending. My mother says that after we leave, Nora will stay on to take care of my father, who can’t boil an egg.

My parents didn’t name my brother Garvey. They named him Gardiner, after my father, and he was Gardiner all my life until he
went to boarding school and came back Garvey. My mother tried to stop it, but he is Garvey now. At his graduation a few weeks ago even the headmaster called him Garvey.

We sit in a jagged circle in the grass. My mother’s dress is too short for her to sit Indian-style so she folds her legs off to one side, which tilts her toward Bob Wuzzy. I’m aware of how it will look to my father in the kitchen window, sipping his drink.

Bob makes us all go around and say our names, but after that we’re silent. Even the two grown-ups seem unable to keep up a conversation. We eat our burgers, then Bob says, “Who wants to play sardines?” and all of them cry out, “Me!” I know my father would rather I come in and sit with him, but my mother’s eyes are locked on mine.

Bob tells us we can only hide in the yard as defined by the back and front driveways, and not inside any of the buildings on the property. He makes it sound like a small college campus. Then he chooses a girl named Devon to hide first. The rest of us count aloud as fast as we can to fifty, omitting vowels and syllables, like racing down stairs three at a time. Then we scatter, to find Devon without anyone else seeing. I’m sure I’ll get to her first, since I know the terrain and all the good hiding places. I go first to the rhododendrons in front, then to the small empty fountain in the rose garden. After that I check behind the granite outcropping near the street. Soon everyone else is missing, too, except the little boy named Joe, my friend from the pool.

“Let’s check over there,” I call to him, pointing toward the small pines beyond the pool, but Joe runs off in the opposite direction.

As I pass the back porch, I hear a crinkling sound. They’re all in a tight cluster beneath the back steps, in a small, dark, spidery space that has always scared me. As I draw closer, the buzz of their chatter is so loud I wonder how I could have passed by twice without having heard them. I bend over and squeeze in. To fit all the way, I have to press up against several bodies. We’re all hot and our
skin sticks. All their buzzing stops. No one says a thing. It seems to me that they’ve all stopped breathing. I try to think of something to say, something goofy the way Patrick can, that will make us all giggle. Out in the twilight of the yard little Joe begins to cry, and Bob Wuzzy tells us to come out.

The boy who found Devon first goes off to hide, and the rest run off to count. I slip back up the porch steps.

My father is eating a minute steak with A-1 sauce slathered all over it. His forehead and his nose are covered in sweat, the way they always are when he eats dinner. He’s staring straight ahead and I can’t tell if he knows I’m there.

“You’s a good kid, you know that, elf?” His words are skating slightly sideways.

When he’s done with dinner, he makes another drink. He gives me two tiny, vinegary onions from the bottle. In four days I won’t live here with him. When we come back to Ashing in the fall, my mother says, she and I will live in an apartment and I’ll only come up here on weekends.

The game outside has ended and no sounds come through the screen door. Then the pool lights go on, the little mushroom-shaped lamps in the grass and the big underwater bulb beneath the diving board. Bodies stream out of the poolhouse and crash into the water. My father’s body goes rigid at the sound.

He finishes his martini, jiggles the ice as he drinks to drain it of every drop. Then he sets the glass down on the counter. “I’ve got an idea,” he says.

I don’t say no to my father’s ideas, just as I don’t say no to my mother’s. If my father had asked me to go away with him, I would have. My brother says no all the time when he’s home, and that just gets everyone all riled up.

We take off our clothes on the back porch. The puppy is with us, jumping around our ankles, sensing something different.

“
Un, deux, trois
,” my father says. He knows French from fishing in Quebec. “Go!”

He heads straight for the pool, his long tennis legs springing across the grass he keeps shorn and stiff, a bulb of muscle at the back of each calf, his thighs thin and taut, his bum high and flat and stark white in the dark, and his long arms flashing fast as he moves, the right stronger than the left, with an Ace bandage at the wrist. He moves in a way no one else in my family does, graceful as water. When he reaches the pool, he begins to grunt. He veers right, away from the corner where my mother and Bob Wuzzy sit with their sodas, and runs along the patch of grass between the length of the pool and the garden’s stone wall.

A boy floating on my red raft sees us first.

“Streakers!” he yells.

My father leaps over the short toadstool lights, one at a time, his grunts getting louder, his arms beginning to buckle toward his body, his spine bending forward. He takes the turn around the deep end, his body all sinew and strength, flecked with silver veins and tendons, glowing in the pale green pool reflection.

All the kids are yelling now, hooting and slapping the water, laughing so hard they have to swim over to the edge and hang on.

He saves my mother’s spot in the corner for last. He comes at her now head-on, past the poolhouse, right toward her seat in the chaise longue, his balls whipping from side to side, the penis boylike, small as a mouse. He curls his arms up all the way now, scratches at his armpits, and says, “
Ooooo-ooooo-ooooo
” right in her face, and then is gone.

My mother, for a moment, looks like she’s been tossed out of a plane. Then she reassembles a smile for Bob, who, for the children’s sake, is pretending it’s an odd but innocent prank. But when she sees me, something snaps. She lunges out of her chair to grab me, but I’m fast and slippery without clothes. I feel the thick, tough grass
between my toes and the wet summer night air moving through the hair on my arms and through my hairless crotch. I’m boylike, too, with tight buds on my chest, and this night I’m nearly as lithe and quick and nimble as my father. Both my lungs are pumping hard. I don’t want to stop running, stop the burning of my stomach muscles and the ache in my throat, stop the stars from seeing my bare, newly eleven-year-old body in the grass, fast and graceful as a deer through the woods.

On the porch we stand laughing and panting together with our clothes at our feet and our puppy spinning in joyful circles and my father grinning his biggest grin and looking at me like he loves me, truly loves me, more than anyone else he’s ever loved in his life.

The day before my mother and I leave Ashing, I ride my bike down to Baker’s Cove. There isn’t much of a beach, and it’s smelly at low tide, so we usually have the place to ourselves. If you climb way out around on the rocks, no one can see you from the road.

Mallory’s got her mother’s Larks and I’ve got my father’s L&Ms and Gina’s got her father’s Marlboros. Patrick says his mother ran out, and Neal says neither of his parents smoke. No one believes him. This is the first time Neal Caffrey’s come to the cove with us. I’m not sure who called him.

“You’re just scared to steal,” Teddy says, pulling out a silver box full of menthols.

“My father has asthma,” Neal says. He takes one of the Salems and shuts the box. “Who’s G.E.R.?”

We all look at the swirled initials cut into the silver. Teddy’s last name is Shipley.

He shrugs. “Who cares?” He takes off his shoe. “Are we going to play or what?”

“I want to finish my cig,” Mallory says. She looks exactly like her mother when she smokes, her free hand tucked under the other arm which is bent up in a V, the cigarette never more than a few inches from her mouth.

The boys only ever want to kiss her, so they wait.

The air is thick and hot, but every now and then a cool gust comes off the water. You can see it coming, wrinkling the surface from far away as if it were a huge dark wing. Afterwards everything goes light and flat again. Neal’s curls have been blown around. He’s
the closest thing I’ve ever had to a crush and my heart is thrumming a little faster than normal. I can’t look at Patrick because I know he knows. He’s like that.

“Who wants to go first?” Teddy asks.

“Me.” Mallory scrapes her cigarette out against the rock and pulls her hair into a ponytail, all business.

She spins Teddy’s topsider. When it stops, the toe points at me and everyone laughs. She spins again. It points to the space between Patrick and Gina.

“If it’s between people then you can choose anyone,” Teddy says.

“Patrick,” she says, and Patrick rolls his eyes. He always pretends he hates to be kissed.

They lean in toward each other and their lips meet for a quick peck. Mallory says she likes to pick Patrick because his lips are nice and dry.

It goes clockwise from Mallory. Neal is next. He spins the old crusted topsider with two hands. It wobbles to a stop, the toe pointing undeniably at me.