Father of the Rain (32 page)

Nashua. It was the kind of name we would have made fun of when we were kids, the kind of place whose racetrack was advertised on channel 56.
Nashua
, we would have said in our pretend
Boston nasal accents.
Naaashua, New Hampsha
. I expected Mallory to be living somewhere glamorous.

“The rumors are flying around town about you.” She laughs hard. “I even heard you were dating Neal Caffrey.”

“No dates, but he
is
my only friend here.”

“So you really are living in Ashing?”

“My father had a bit of a breakdown when Catherine left.”

“I heard she left. In June, right? Just like your mom.”

“Spring with him must be hell, I guess.”

Gracie howls and Mallory leaps up. Something pinched her finger. Mallory holds the baby’s head as she bends over Gracie in the water, but the baby wakes up anyway. By the time she returns to the towel he’s red and bleating and kicking. She unfastens a series of snaps and pulls out from the cup of her bathing suit an enormous veined udder with a wide brown center and an inch-long nipple which the child seizes in his mouth, sucking the skin up into pleats around his pumping lips. Jesus.

“I was always a little scared of your dad,” she says, then asks if I remember the time we missed the train and he and Catherine came to get us in Allencaster. I didn’t. She says she has a long diary entry about it, how I calmly told them there was a mistake in the schedule but they didn’t believe us. “I cried when they kept yelling at us, but you were so cool and controlled and never cracked.”

“I don’t remember that at all.”

“Really? I swear, once you have kids—Gracie!” She jumps up again, baby still attached and sucking, and sprints to the water. She splashes in and plunges her left arm to the bottom while the right keeps the baby in position, and hauls up Gracie, whose face has momentarily lost its confidence.

“Breathe,” Mallory shouts, and whacks her on the back. And I watch as the color comes back into the child’s face. Then she looks down at the sandy bottom and up at her mother and bursts into
tears. “It’s all right. You’re fine.” Mallory tries to wipe her wet hair out of her eyes but Gracie swats her away.

“I almost had an eel and you scared it away!”

Mallory smiles. “There are no eels here, honey. There’s never been an eel.” Which makes Gracie even more furious.

When Mallory comes back I want to compliment her on her patience but I feel like that might be insulting Gracie. The baby’s meal has gone on uninterrupted. His legs and most of the blue pouch are soaking wet but his eyes press tighter shut each time he sucks.

“You’re thinking, and that’s not even the complicated child.”

I laugh.

“She has no interest in learning how to swim. And she wants to be in the water all day long.”

I’m curious to know what she’d been about to say about having kids. “So, you’ve been reading your old diaries recently?”

“Yeah, I have. It’s funny—” she winces, then yanks her nipple out of the baby’s mouth. It doesn’t look easy. The skin stretches an inch before he releases it. He wails as she lifts him up and out of the wet pouch, and he keeps wailing until she slides him in the tent with the hanging chicken and he stops short. “He starts to bite when he’s done. Drives me crazy.” She pushes her boob back in her suit. I see the long nipple fold in half to fit. Mallory got breasts before me, like everyone else, but they had been normal, not these pale raw tubers. She doesn’t seem to remember, again, what she was about to say.

We watch Gracie dredge the bottom of the pool with both hands, occasionally taking in water and croaking it out. She has elements of Mallory at that age, the straight dark-blonde hair, the strong thighs, but her square slightly squished face is someone else’s. Her focus, her fixation on a thing, is from her mother, too. And yet that seems to be gone from Mallory now. She can’t follow through on a thought. Her snacks are neatly packed, though. She brings out thinly sliced apples
laid carefully in a plastic container with a lime green top. Gracie grabs a few and then hurries back to the water.

“Plumber’s butt,” Mallory says, and Gracie pulls up the droopy back of her suit. “Remember the hours we spent in your mother’s closet? All her fancy clothes. And that wall of shoes! Oh, she was like a real live princess to me.”

The words are familiar. She was at the funeral, I’m remembering now. I sobbed in her arms. And she sobbed too. And then I didn’t see her again until this moment.

Gracie totters slowly toward us with her bucket. Water sloshes at the sides. “I’m thirsty and hungry and thirsty,” she says. She puts the bucket down and takes a little box of juice from her mother. She puts the straw in her mouth and it turns purple. She sucks it all down without stopping, her breathing growing louder and her belly pushing out, then hands the shrunken box back to her mother. “More,” she gasps. But the baby has started fussing in the tent and Mallory is on her knees changing his diaper.

I reach in the bag for another juice box.

“Say thank you, Gracie,” Mallory says without looking. She’s lifting the baby up by his feet with one hand like a plucked chicken.

“Thanks,” Gracie says and hands me back the box half full.

I offer her some crackers but she shakes her head.

“Wanna see my collection?”

I get up and peer into her bucket. Snails, crayfish, starfish, and crabs are piled on top of each other. The crabs are fighting, two against one. I ask her what she’ll do with them, and she says she’ll put them all back. She asks if I’ll help her.

“I’ll carry the bucket,” she says, and lugs it back to the edge of the water. The little white bows on her red bikini have come untied. “Don’t drop them all out together. You need to find the right spot for each one.” She wades in. “Here. Here’s a good spot for a crab.”

She wants me to reach in the pail and get one. “You’re going to have to pull them apart first.”

“Easier said than done,” I say.

“I know!” Her laugh is just like Mallory’s. I feel like I’m playing with Mallory again, only I’ve grown up and she hasn’t yet.

I stick my hand in the cold water and grab one by the sides of its body and shake but they all stay stuck together.

“Here,” she says, and her little fingers go in and all the crabs shoot apart. I don’t even know how she did it.

We place each crab in different parts of the pool.

“Off you go,” she says quietly each time. We watch them float to the bottom, then scramble furiously beneath the sand to hide.

Before she puts the snails back, she puts one hole-side-up in her palm. “Did you know they come out of their shells when you hum to them?”

“What?’

“It’s true. Watch carefully.”

She hums one note over and over but the hole stays dark. Then she hums the first few bars of “Edelweiss” and a little bit of water seeps out and then a brown tube inches out of the shell like a periscope.

Up on the beach, Mallory is putting the baby back in his carrier. They have to go. “I’ll call you when we come down again. Will you still be here?”

“Maybe.”

Gracie is swinging her empty bucket around in a wide circle. “Will you come here tomorrow, Daley?”

“I will, but I don’t think I’ll see you.”

“I know. I’ll be in my home. But will you come say hi to everyone for me? You don’t have to take them out of the water. You can just wave.”

“I can do that.”

“Thanks.”

I stroke the little patch of fine hairs on the baby’s head. They are light and soft as milkweed. And the skull beneath feels spongy, like it hasn’t hardened all the way yet. I stand on the rocks and watch them move slowly around the cove, Mallory’s shoulders weighed down by the beach bags, the tent, and the cooler, and Gracie skipping through the water, and Mallory telling her she is going too deep. I should have offered to help them back home. I never learned the baby’s name, or how old he is. My chest is burning for all three of them.

In my notebook I write:
Mallory. Gracie. Baby with fat legs kicking in his pouch. I want that. I do want that, J
.

He gave me a blue silk robe for my birthday. We were on his bed, and he’d brought me breakfast and a wrapped box.

“My first choice of outfit is this, of course.” He pulled the sheet all the way off me and kissed my bare belly. “But short of that, here you go.”

I opened it. He knew it was my favorite color, and my favorite fabric. I slid my arms through the sleeves and tied the sash. It was scandalously short.

“Now you are one sexy white girl.”

“Woman.”

“Sorry, but if I’m using the modifier white, it’s got to be girl. When I say white woman it makes me think of Edith Bunker or Maude.”

“I learned about menopause from Maude,” I said. “I’d never heard of it before.” Jonathan was one of the few boyfriends I’d had who’d watched as much TV in the seventies as I had.

“Please, please let’s not talk about white women in menopause.”

“Another twenty years and that’s me.”

“Really? Only twenty? We better get going.”

I shook my head.

“You don’t want babies?”

I’d never been asked by a guy about babies before. I’d never
wanted
to be asked about babies. It was like being asked if I wanted a polar bear.

He undid the sash of my new robe and traced his finger along a hip. “You’ve got some good baby-making hips.”

“Yeah, right.”

“You really don’t want kids?”

“Not anytime soon,” I said finally.

“Ever?

“I don’t know.”

“Two years, four years?”

“I’m not really a long-range planner.”

“Just tell me. When are you going to have your white babies?”

“Oh, so that’s what this is about.”

“What?

“My
white
babies.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You did. You said, When are you going to have your white babies?”

He grinned. “I didn’t mean to say that.”

“It’s all very loaded, this topic.”

“Everything’s going to be with us. Black and white
is
loaded.”

“I mean the whole
baby
thing. I don’t know if you’re trying to tease out some maternal desire in me and then get freaked out by it. Or if you’re insinuating that I’m nonmaternal. Or if you’re testing to see if I’m averse to having a brown baby come out of my white vagina.”

He raised his eyebrows with his eyes shut. “Okay, easy now, Miss A, B, and C. We don’t need to be quite so
graphic
at this moment. Or suspicious. I think I’ve made it clear that this is a big serious deal to me. I had to rewire my mind to go out with a white girl.”

“Woman.”

“Maude
. So I want to know if said girl-woman wants babies. Because I do. I want kids, and it’s not
complicated
for me to say it.”

“So many things are less complicated for a guy to say.”

“True.”

“I need think about it. Maybe you can ask me again in California.”

“All right.”

“Don’t forget.”

“Won’t.”

I can’t sleep. I keep seeing Gracie, her small fat hands, her untied bows. She’s like an infatuation, a song you can’t shake.

I get up and put my clothes back on. My father sounds like someone heaving up a chicken bone when he snores. It’s so loud in the hallway, loud enough that the dogs in his room don’t hear me pass by. I get into my car and drive. I drive past the lobster shack, over the tracks, past Neal’s, which is dark upstairs and down, and through town. There is a cluster of Fords and Chevys outside Mel’s Tavern, and a few sporty foreign cars outside the Captain’s Table. Town and gown, the way it has always been in Ashing. I pass the apartment on Water Street and wave. There are lights on behind the curtains in my mother’s room. I sometimes slept in her bed when we first moved in there and I couldn’t fall asleep. I’d watch how she rocked herself to sleep, one hand around her waist, the other around her neck, a close embrace, the rocking short and shallow, a little rowboat. And then I’m on the highway. There are only trucks. I turn off when I see Howard Johnson’s orange roof.

As I cross the parking lot there is a great clamor above me. I look up and a long thin slanting V of birds is moving just above the restaurant’s cupola, talking all at once. Canada geese. Jonathan and
I taking turns with the binoculars. They pass directly over me, their voices raucous, deep and certain, excited for the trip. The sound is still thundering in my chest long after they’ve flown behind the trees.

Inside the Howard Johnson’s, a few people are at the counter, ordering ice cream. The older woman at the register glances up and tells me to sit anywhere I like. She wears the orange and turquoise sailor cap pinned to her hair. I take the booth at the back on the right. This is where we sat. We ordered fried clams and a club sandwich. She wore her kerchief and her nervous smile. We had my bike and eight-tracks and the television in the car.

A waitress comes and takes my menu and brings me french fries and a garden salad. Four cops come through the door. The woman behind the counter greets them easily. The people getting ice cream give them more room than they need. They drink their coffees standing up. Their walkie-talkies beep and hiss at the same time. And then one of them puts his cup on the counter and walks over to my table.

I panic. Registration? Inspection sticker? Unpaid fine? I hate cops, hate being stopped by them, can never be natural or easy around them like the waitresses are. I have no idea how people charm their way out of a ticket. I can never be anything but sullen and humiliated when a cop appears at my car window.

“Daley?”

I manage to raise my head and nod.

He laughs at my guilt, my deep blush. “You don’t have any idea who I am, do you?”

It never occurred to me that I could know him personally, an armed, barrel-chested, meaty-faced man in full uniform. There were two Ashing cops when I was little: the rangy one who looked a little like Gilligan and dated the girl at the Mug, and the redheaded one who came to the house whenever the alarm system was set off accidentally. This guy is neither. He is amused by my complete bewilderment.