Lullaby for the Rain Girl (31 page)

“We get up.”

“I mean...the way we used to be. Both of us working, running around—and writing. Whatever happened to writing?”

“I ran out of ideas. You write, if you want to. I don’t care.”

“Rachel...” I leaned down to her. She smelled bad, like old sweat and other, worse things. I was crying. She put her pale arms around me.

“I just think...” I murmured, “that we need...”

“Shh. Don’t ruin it.”

I stayed quiet for a while.

“It’s raining,” she said at last. “It’s funny that it’s raining. It never rains here.”

“I know.”

“Do you think it’ll ever stop?”

“Someday.”

“Maybe it won’t. Maybe it’ll rain for the rest of time.”

“Maybe.”

“Like the snow. The snow when my dad died. The snow that never stopped. It never bothered to stop, even when he died. It just kept snowing.”

“Yes.”

“Maybe the rain will be like that. Maybe we’ll need a lifeboat. An ark.”

“Maybe.”

“Do you think it’s raining where Peter and Sherry are?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know where they are. Have you talked to Peter?”

“Not in a long time. They were in Texas then.”

“My sister told me Sherry was going to go home to her parents, but that was ages ago.” I tried to picture her in that house across the way, each of us speaking softly into our tin-can telephone. If she’d followed through on what Alice had said, she’d be at San Francisco State by now. I wondered if she and Peter were still together. But I refused to call the my sister or the O’Sheas. I’d been aborted one day—both Rachel and I had. Aborted from people’s lives. We were what was left after others ran recklessly away. The leftovers, the dregs. The forsaken ones.

We were silent for a time.

“Let’s get up,” I suggested finally. “Let’s go for a walk. Then we can come back and go grocery shopping and do the laundry. Wash these sheets.”

“A walk in the rain?”

“A walk in the rain.”

“Okay.” But her voice contained no joy, no anticipation. 

We got dressed and waited for the rain to let up a bit and walked out into a colorless, misty afternoon. We walked with no direction in mind. The streets looked strange, soaking wet. I could feel water tickling me at the back of my neck. Rachel had on a black T-shirt and ripped blue jeans; she looked much as she had when I first met her, except for the silver piercings she no longer wore. The rain made her face and hair glisten. She didn’t look at me. We just walked.

After a while the rain began to pick up again, steel-colored clouds roll turbulently above us. Soon we were both soaked through. The rain fell so hard that it became difficult to see in front of us.

Finally I stopped and said—nearly shouted—“Where are we?”

We looked around us. I realized that we’d arrived at the County Courthouse, the big white building with the gardens and Spanish-style archway and the clock tower which loomed over the street like a sentinel. The clock read a few minutes past four.

“Want to go in?” I asked. “To get out of the rain?”

She didn’t respond, instead turning and walking toward the entrance to the building. I followed her. Once we were inside the hushed halls the rain seemed far away. We wandered in the reception area for a few minutes, glancing aimlessly at brochures. We peeked into the Mural Room. It was very quiet; voices from elsewhere in the building reverberated distantly.

“Let’s go to the tower,” Rachel said. “Let’s see what everything looks like in the rain. I want to see.”

“Okay.”

We took the stairs, slowly.

“Rachel?” I said as we walked.

“Mm.”

“Rachel, do you think we should make...make some decisions?”

“About what?”

“I don’t know. The future.”

“I don’t like thinking about the future.”

“I know, but...”

The stairs turned and we marched up a bit farther. Finally we arrived at the top and stepped out onto the red tiles. White pillars and archways were all around us, leading to the edge where one could look around and see the entire vista of the city from more than eighty feet up. We were alone together, wandering from one side to another, looking at a view which had become a vague cold stew of gray. Stepping to the edge and holding onto the black steel safety rails involved walking out from under the sheltered section of the tower, heading into rain again, so I hung back. Rachel stepped to the edge herself, her body framed in an archway. She was facing Anacapa Street. I watched her from behind.

After a moment she turned toward me again, her back to the railing, the rain spattering her face.

“What do you mean, the future?” she asked.

“Well...I don’t know. Maybe we...” I stopped.

She studied me. “Are you saying you want to break up?”

“I...”

I turned away, half-hid myself behind a pillar.

“Is that what you mean?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said helplessly. I really didn’t know if it was what I meant or not. I knew that I was sick of the rain. I wanted the sky to break through suddenly, for us to be flooded with glowing light.

Suddenly she was standing next to me, soaked through and dripping. “But that
is
what you mean—right?”

“Rachel, I don’t know. I swear to God I don’t know.” I started to shiver. I realized that I was crying.

“I think you do.”

“Please, Rachel.”

“Please what?”

“I—I don’t know.”

Trembling violently, I gave myself over to tears. My body was wracked with sobs, my throat was hot, tight, clotted.

I didn’t see when she stepped away from me, back toward the railing.

“Maybe we could...” I tried to say something, but nothing came. “Rachel, maybe...”

“Maybe I should just jump,” she said, her back to me, her voice suddenly strong and calm.

I wandered across the platform to the other side of the tower, arms folded against me, trying to stop my shaking. The rain fell all around me. I stood under the roof, watching the beads sail downward and explode on the railing. I think I stood there a long time. Eventually I turned around.

“Rachel, we...”

I looked one way, then another.

“Rachel?”

I circled the tower, which took only seconds; it’s a small area. She was nowhere to be found. I figured she’d started back down the stairs again. Moving to follow her, I glanced back toward Anacapa Street and noticed little ant-like people running toward the courthouse. Curious, I moved toward the railing. Cars had stopped in the middle of the street. People were pointing. Several seemed to be shouting, though I couldn’t hear a thing except the falling rain. I wondered what the fuss was all about. Then I stepped to the edge.

I looked down.

      Ah, no; the years, the years;

Down their carved names the raindrop plows.

—Thomas Hardy, “During Wind and Rain”

1

I spent five days at the George Washington University Hospital, down in Foggy Bottom. It was only a semi-private room, but somehow I got lucky—no other patient was brought in to occupy the empty bed across from mine. More luck: I learned that my health insurance as a teacher in the D.C. Public Schools would cover most of the expenses.

That was where my luck ran out, though. My physician, Dr. Nguyen—a tiny woman of Vietnamese descent with big round glasses—informed me on my first morning that I had what was known as unstable angina—“what you might call a mild heart attack. You’ll be all right,” she said seriously, pointing at me, “if
you do
exactly
what I tell you to do.”

I’d already been given an electrocardiogram, blood test, ultrasound, X-rays. I didn’t feel too bad, everything considered—just worn out, as if I’d collapsed in the last leg of a marathon. My memory of the time leading up to the attack was watery. I’d been in the apartment...white-coated people came to the door with a stretcher, was that right?...I must have gone in an ambulance—I had a vague vision of it sitting in front of the building, its red lights flashing—but I had no memory of riding to the hospital or of arriving. The tests had been done that night, I guessed; it was the next morning. I’d slept a few hours in the interim, an odd, disturbed sleep, filled with memories of people who hadn’t been in my life for fifteen years or more.

“You rest now,” the doctor said. “Breakfast will come in a while. I want to run some tests on you, and then we’ll talk about medications you’ll need.” She stepped efficiently out. In a while a nurse came in, fussed around my bed, checked my IVs and took a reading or two off the blinking and beeping machines hooked up around me. Finally a meal of sorts arrived; I wasn’t hungry, but I sat up and drank the apple juice on the tray. It was good—even delicious. I’d not realized what a horrible taste was in my mouth. The juice washed it away.

Well, this was it. Decades of smoking cigarettes and never exercising and getting fat on crap food had finally caught up with me. Thirty-six years old and my first heart attack.  A “mild” one—that was comforting. But good grief, I wondered, if that was a mild one, what must a serious one be like?

I couldn’t see much from my window—just a gray sky and the tops of a few buildings. It was raining lightly. It was then that I thought of the Rain Girl.

I tried to piece it together in my mind, but everything was stubbornly slow to coalesce. Yet it did come back to me, in little bits and flashes. She’d been with me in the apartment—of course, yes, I recalled it now. We’d been talking about—what? The tape. The video that Rachel Blackburn and I had made all those years ago, the tape I’d blanked completely out of my memory until I’d brought down the old shoe box which cradled what mementoes I had of her—manuscripts in her wild girlish scrawl, scribbled Post-It Notes, literary journals which had posthumously published a few of her poems, an old story of mine, “The Burning Girl,” which I’d completely forgotten I’d ever written (and certainly never submitted anywhere), a few of her silver piercings, a couple of old photos.

And then there was the tape—another item my memory had buried under six feet of dirt, or rather six thousand. No wonder: a week or so after I’d switched off the camera Rachel’s broken body was on the cement walkway leading up to the entrance to the Santa Barbara Courthouse. Rain fell on her, fell as I stood there at the railing of the El Mirador clock tower staring down, uncomprehending for a long time as people rushed to her, looked up, pointed toward the tower, ran into the building. Rain fell, fell. Rain was still falling.

I watched
The Price is Right
on the overhead TV in the room. I dozed. Sometime later Dr. Nguyen came in with charts, my X-ray, and a lot of medical lingo I didn’t quite follow except to get the idea that I should take what happened to me as a warning. “You’ll be fine,” she said. “You’ll live a long healthy life. But only if you make changes.”

“This is the part I don’t like,” I admitted, with a weak smile.

“You’ll like this part better than you’ll like another heart attack, believe me. The first thing I want to talk to you about is nitroglycerin.”

“You’re going to blow me up?”

“Not exactly. Actually nitroglycerin relaxes your blood vessels. You’ll be taking it in a spray. I’m going to put you on a beta blocker, too. And you’ll want to take an aspirin every day. But we’ll cover all this in detail over the next few days. And you’re going to have to go on an exercise regimen. You need to work your heart in healthy ways. And to lose some weight, too. We’ll show you how. And you really must stop smoking. That’s absolutely required. Everything else will be useless otherwise.”

She went on, very competently and very professionally, while I felt gloom overtaking me. I suddenly felt very old, very fat, very pathetic. I wanted a cigarette. When she finished her recitation I thanked her politely and then immediately dropped into a black, dreamless sleep.

# # #

“How are you feeling?”

I opened my eyes and she was there, in her too-thin brown coat, sitting in a straight-backed hospital chair next to my bed with her cool palm lightly atop my hand.

“Hi,” I said groggily.

“I’m so glad you’re awake.” She smiled. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here before. I
was
here, though. I stayed all night. I waited in the corridor, on a bench. They wouldn’t let me in. Visiting hours. And then they said your doctor was with you. Then they said you were asleep. I went to the cafeteria for a while, then I came back here. Finally they let me in.”

“You didn’t have to do all that.”

She looked at me. “Of course I had to. Don’t be stupid.”

I smiled a little. “Didn’t take you long to start insulting me.”

She smiled back and squeezed my hand lightly. “Are you okay? I mean...well, you’re not
okay.
But...”

“It was a mild one,” I said.

She nodded. “I knew it. I knew it was.”

“Dr. Nguyen says I’ll be okay. I’ve got to do a bunch of terrible stuff, though. Take medicines. Lose weight. Exercise.”

“I’ll help you,” she said.

# # #

It went on like that for a total of five days. Occasionally they came in and wheeled me out for another blood test or something. On the third day they had me up and walking, however tentatively. They put me on a treadmill and took readings. I was given medicines, meals. I was given long lectures on the exercise regimen I was to undertake and advice on how to stop smoking, which only made me want to smoke more. I passed in and out of very black moods.

And yet every day she was there, for hours at a time. We watched TV together, she helped me eat my meals and got me things (tissues, straws) when I needed them. She read to me, books that she brought from the apartment—poetry especially, Larkin and Auden, Rilke. She had a sweet reading voice. And she got along with the hospital staff, too. The nurses were all friendly to her. Dr. Nguyen even remarked how lucky I was to have such a daughter.

“Yes, lucky,” I said.

When we were together, she carefully avoided any serious topics of conversation. I tried a few times to draw her out. “Honey,” I said one night, during a commercial break for
The Simpsons,
“don’t you think we need to—to talk some things over? To...?”

“Shh. Not now. You’re sick. Don’t
worry
about things so much. Everything’s okay at your apartment. I’m sleeping on your sofa. Nobody’s broken in or anything.”

“I never gave you a key, though.”

“I found one in a drawer in the kitchen.”

And still, I thought, she had an answer for everything. Every single thing. In fact, I
did
have an extra key in a kitchen drawer.

“How do you—get here?” I asked.

“I walk.”

“It’s quite a distance from Dupont Circle to here.”

She shrugged. “I don’t have anything else to do.”

“Maybe I should give you some money,” I said. “At least you could take the Metro.”

“It doesn’t matter, Dad.”

“Honey...about that...about my being your...”

“Shh! The show’s back on.” She looked at me. “And no talking about serious stuff until you’re better.”

One day a hospital staff member I didn’t know—a young man, perhaps an intern?—came in to help me practice my new warm-up routine for exercising. She stayed with me and did the same practices. “I’m going to do this with him every day,” she told the young man, “so I need to know how to do it right.”

“Well,” he smiled. “What a great daughter you are.”

“Yeah,” she grinned, “I am!”

# # #

On the fifth day I was wheeled by the same young man to the front entrance of the hospital. She had called a taxi for us, and it was waiting as we emerged from the building. The day was December-cold, clear as ice.

“Let’s go home, Dad,” she said, taking my arm firmly and leading me to the vehicle.

“Wait. I don’t have my medicines.”

“I have them.” She patted the pocket of her thin overcoat. “I have all of them. And I already put your things in the taxi, your clothes and stuff. Don’t
worry.”

We rode up Pennsylvania Avenue for a couple of blocks and turned right at Washington Circle onto New Hampshire. As we passed the Sheraton City Centre I began to notice the holiday decorations everywhere—frosted wreaths, Santa banners, Christmas baubles of all kinds. It felt as if I’d been locked away in that hospital room for years; it was a shock to realize that I was still less than halfway through my winter holiday.

The clerk at the desk wished us happy holidays and my companion responded cheerily.

“Be careful, now,” she said as we approached the elevator. “Nice and easy, mister.”

At last we were home—or I was. It took only a moment for everything to look the same, for the strangeness of the past five days to begin to wear off.

“How do you feel?” she asked, helping me with my coat.

“A little tired.” It was an honest answer.

“Have a seat. I’ll make you some tea.” She took off her own coat and moved to the kitchen. I noticed the blinking light on the answering machine, decided against checking messages now. Instead I dropped myself onto the sofa. I was sweating a bit, but my heart rate seemed normal. The doctor had been happy enough with my performance on the treadmill the day before, anyway. Sitting there, I wanted a cigarette again.

The sunlight poured over me and I watched the dust motes drift lazily in the air as she puttered around the kitchen. Finally the tea kettle whistled; I heard her bringing out cups, pouring water. My mind wandered, unable to think about the things I knew I had to think about. Most of all this girl, this impossible girl in the kitchen making me tea.

After a few minutes she appeared again, two steaming mugs in her hand. She handed one to me and sat down next to me on the sofa. I looked at her as she blew gently into her tea to cool it. She wore white socks, blue jeans, and a nondescript, oversized white T-shirt, far too big for her, which I suddenly thought I recognized.

“Kiddo,” I said, “is that my shirt?”

“Mm-hm.” She smiled toward me, then looked away. “Do you mind?”

“Uh—no. Mind? No, I don’t mind.”

She sipped her tea.

“Looks—um, it looks like you’ve taken good care of the place since I’ve been gone.”

She shrugged. “It wasn’t hard. Anyway, I was at the hospital most of the time. But I did your laundry for you. You’re a slob, you know that?”

I sipped my own tea. Earl Grey. Delicious. “Yeah,” I smiled. “I know.”

“I’ve got to clean you up,” she said. “Make you take care of yourself. Keep your clothes clean. Your dishes. Get you to shave.
Bathe.”

I laughed. “Now, come on. I’ll cop to all your other charges, but I do
bathe.”

“Okay.” She grinned. “Maybe you do. Occasionally.”

I breathed slowly, sipped. I was aware now of every tiny sensation in my body: every ache, every passing itch and twinge. Part of me, I knew, was waiting for it all to happen again.

“So you stayed here,” I said, thinking about it. “You...found everything okay? You figured out how the sofa folds out?”

“You just pull. It’s not very complicated.”

I chuckled. “I guess it’s not.”

“I was fine. No problems.”

“How did you find the key? I didn’t tell you where it was.”

She arched an eyebrow at me. “I’m
observant.”

“You are, at that.”

“So how do you feel now?” she asked.

“I guess I’m okay. I’d like a cigarette.” I yawned.

“Nope. Not happening, boss.”

“Well, then, one of those big-ass pastries they sell in the mini-mart downstairs.”

“Nope. Nothing like that for you anymore. We’ve got some fruit. Want an apple?”