Lullaby for the Rain Girl (34 page)

“Well...it’s pretty far from the truth, I think!”

“Maybe. But it’ll be easy to remember.”

“How about...it just occurred to me. You don’t have a birth certificate, a Social Security number...”

She shook her head then, and laughed. “You just realized that I’m your
daughter
and all you can do is think about stupid junk like that? We’ll work that stuff out! Man, you are
lame!”
She sipped her tea.

I laughed with her. “I guess I am.”

We drank tea for a while. Finally I took her hand, held it, squeezed it. The grip she returned was firm.

“So,” she said, “do you...do you think you can—you know—love me? Dad?”

I looked at this once-lost child, this crazy, other-dimensional creature that was nothing more than a teenage girl sitting next to me drinking tea. Her hair hung limp. Her face was, objectively speaking, uninteresting, without any distinguishing features other than her big, round, dark eyes. She was, would be, to the world, nondescript, unnoticeable. A face in the crowd. Nothing to remark on or remember. And none of that mattered. As I gazed at her, I felt my own soul opening, felt an overwhelming sensation enter me and infuse every atom of me with love for her. I held her hand tightly, so tightly I imagined that I would never, ever let it go.

“I do love you, Rae. I do.”

3

Over the next few days we did things together. Father-daughter things. We went for walks. We shopped for clothes for her—a few, at least, what pants and shirts and pajamas I could afford, along with a properly heavy winter coat. We made meals in the apartment—healthful ones, of course, decided on by Rae: fruits, vegetables, rice, fish, everything baked or poached, nothing fried. No butter. No salt. And yet it was all delicious, somehow. It was the best food I’d ever eaten in my life.

She slept on the fold-out sofa in the living room and in the mornings she did my exercises with me. It was a simple routine involving a warm-up, mostly stretching, and light running in place while keeping tabs on my heart rate.

“Lift those knees!” she’d command me, both of us running in front of the television. “Come on, soldier, get the lead out!”

I laughed. “Where’d you get that?”

She grinned. “Old movie.”

Walking was part of the rehabilitation too, and so we did a lot of it. Each day I felt stronger, but in truth, I’d felt strong since the night I realized that Rae Grace Fall was my child. I felt wonderful. I’d not felt like this in ten, maybe fifteen years. And I found myself with no desire whatsoever for cigarettes. Once I’d convinced Rae that I wasn’t about to keel over and die, we started taking the Metro downtown and visiting museums, looking at art, at dinosaurs, at airplanes and spaceships. She came with me to my follow-up doctor’s appointment at G.W. and asked intelligent questions of Dr. Nguyen.

And we talked. It seemed that we never stopped talking. My experience with teenagers both as a teacher and as a step-parent had driven home the lesson that young people have absolutely no interest in the lives of older people, but Rae was exactly the opposite. We would sit upstairs at Teaism looking out at the people in their overcoats wandering by on R Street and listening to the jazz coming over the speakers while we drank tea and she asked me question after question about myself, listening raptly to my answers. What was it like growing up in Stone’s End? What did I remember of my mother—her grandmother? What did I like to do when I was a kid? Who were my friends? When did I get interested in writing? Did I remember my first stories? Did I still have any? Could she read them? What was my sister like? How about her husband and kids? What was my dad like? Could she meet him—could she meet all of them? (That was an interesting question, one I’d not yet quite resolved in my mind.) I answered her endless queries as honestly as I could. I felt she literally wanted to know
everything—
that if she could somehow crawl up into my mind and extract everything in it, every memory, every sensation I’d ever had, she would. But I was aware that I was talking to my daughter—my
daughter!—
and that she was sixteen years old, and there were some things that I wouldn’t say. Not that I ever had any impression of judgment from her. I felt I could tell her anything at all, no matter how intimate, and that she would simply nod eagerly and ask her next question. But no, some things I kept private. I said little about girlfriends. Nothing about sex. She didn’t push on those topics; she had a hundred thousand other questions, anyway. We spent hours sitting in cafés and on cold park benches and in museum cafeterias and at home simply talking, talking, talking.

Naturally she wanted to know about her mother. I told her what I knew, what I remembered. It had all been a very long time ago, but my hospital stay had freshened it in my mind, as did talking about it with her. She listened, listened, listened, her big dark eyes never leaving mine, and talked only when I stopped, only to ask another question.

I edited the truth somewhat, of course, as one does when speaking to a child. But there was only one moment in this multi-day marathon of talking that I said something to her which I suspected might not have been true.

“But you loved her, right?” she asked me, after I’d talked about some of Rachel’s emotional problems. “You loved her?”

“Of course I did, honey,” I said.

But had I? It was too long ago to remember. We’d been left behind by others, thrown unwillingly into a leaky life raft together. Was that love? Had it become love, at some point? Had I known then? Did I now?

“You’re sure?”

“Of course, Rae.” You don’t tell the daughter of your long-dead girlfriend that you’re not sure how you felt about her mother, then or now, or that you find memories of her to be so dark and horrific that you’ve not allowed yourself to think of them for fifteen years.

She looked quizzical, but said, “Okay,” and we talked of other things.

In truth, I remembered little of what happened in the days and months after Rachel’s suicide. The police talked to me a couple of times; I recalled being asked some questions by someone in a lawman’s uniform over a cup of coffee at the police headquarters on East Figueroa Street, not too far from where Rachel and I had lived (and I still did, briefly). It wasn’t a grilling. No one suspected me of anything. One major issue was discovering any next of kin for her. She had no driver’s license, it seemed, no proper I.D. of any kind. I told them what I knew, that she said she’d come from the High Plains of North Dakota, lived in a town called Harman. The lawman said they’d look into it, and they did; eventually, I recall, a cousin was located who dealt with everything long distance. I never met her. I had no say, of course, in anything; a lawyer called me one day and said that he’d been hired by “the family” to take care of things and he needed to come gather her belongings, which he did. I remembered him. Mr. Bland, a fat florid-faced man wearing a blue suit about two sizes too small for him. He wheezed as he looked into the few boxes I’d assembled of Rachel’s things, asked for help getting them to his car. There were some papers to sign.

What I didn’t tell him was that I’d already hidden what I wanted of her: the handful of items I later put into the blue Nike shoe box. Thank God, I thought, that I’d remembered the tape she and I had made. I didn’t want to imagine Mr. Bland getting back to his office and popping that into his VCR out of curiosity.

“What will happen—to her?” I asked him as we stood by his little brown sedan.

“Already happened,” he answered casually, pulling himself into the vehicle. “Cremated. The family’ll get the ashes.”

I found I felt nothing about it. Rachel was gone; the ashes were irrelevant. Anyway, any “family” back in North Dakota had clearly been unimportant to Rachel. I wondered what they would do with the ashes of a girl they’d hardly known.

“Okay. Thanks.”

“Tough break, kid. My condolences.”

“Thanks. Oh,” I said, suddenly remembering, “she had a safety deposit box. Or she said she did. In Harman.”

“Got the key for it?”

“No. I mean, not that I know of. It may be in her things.”

“Know what bank?”

“No. I don’t.”

He nodded. “We’ll look into it. Thanks a lot.”

He drove away. I was alone; I’d not even told Alice what had happened, let alone Dad. I remember that the day Mr. Bland drove off with Rachel’s belongings I suddenly found myself ravenously hungry, and marched downtown to a restaurant on State Street to eat one of the biggest and most expensive meals I’d ever had in my life. Strange fancy appetizers, an enormous steak, lobster, mashed potatoes, deep-dish blueberry pie—I devoured it all and wanted more. Later I had an extraordinarily vivid time in the Santa Barbara Art Museum, the paintings and sculptures all but alive to me, speaking to me personally, telling me their secrets. It was a little as if I were on acid again, but without any sense of pleasure or discovery.

The real world was less memorable. Gray, indistinct. I walked down to lower State that evening and spent the night in a seedy motel occupied by drunks in the next room who shouted at each other all night. I didn’t care. It was perfect.

I went through a period when I wasted a great deal of time doing nothing. I moved to another apartment but held on to my job. I drove all the way back to Stone’s End one night, just to watch the sun rising behind what used to be Dad’s and Alice’s and my house. There were unfamiliar children’s toys on the front lawn. I didn’t stop to knock on the O’Sheas’ door. I didn’t look up anybody I knew. I just watched the sunrise for a while and then, when I saw shadowy movement behind the curtains of our old place, I drove off again, back to Santa Barbara. With what remained of my family off in Washington, D.C., there didn’t seem to be any other place to go.

Time becomes watery in my mind in terms of what happened next. Eventually, of course, I told Alice everything in a long phone call. She was sympathetic and invited me to come out and stay with “them” for a while: “them” being not her and Dad, but her and a new boyfriend, an architect, just licensed, with whom she was sharing a house. Dad, she said, had his own place in town.

“Initially I turned her down,” I said to Rae, to whom I’d told a somewhat edited version of all this. “But as time went on it just seemed to make sense. There was nothing left for me in Santa Barbara. Nothing in Stone’s End. Nothing anywhere. So one day I called her and said okay, I’d do it. I threw my junk in my car and filled it up with gas and took off that morning. Drove all the way across the country. That’s how I ended up here.”

“Have you ever gone back there?” she asked. “To Stone’s End?”

“No. Never.”

“Ever want to?”

“Not really.”

“I’d like to see it,” she said. “I’d like to see the house where you grew up. And the town. And Santa Barbara and everything.” She looked away. “That clock tower. I’d like to see that.”

“Really?”

She nodded, looking out at the passersby on R Street.

“You saw it, though—on that day that...”

“Not really,” she said. “It’s hard to explain. Not like I’d see it now. Really
see
it.”

I thought about it. “Maybe—maybe this summer. We could drive. Or just take a plane. We could be there in a few hours.”

She looked at me, grinned. “You’d take me?”

“Sure. If it’s important to you.”

She nodded enthusiastically. I sat staring at the table, bright swaths of memory washing uneasily through me. 

“What’s wrong?” she asked, after a while.

“Hm? Nothing.”

“You look sad. You’re
worrying.”

“I’m not worrying. It’s just...”

“Just what? Dad, you can tell me
anything.
Don’t you know that?”

“I know.”

“So what is it?”

“Just...” I’d played this over in my memory when I was in the hospital, but that wasn’t the same as actually telling someone. In fact, I’d never told anyone. Not a single person on earth. To the police, to Alice, to Dad I’d simply said that Rachel had been upset, I wandered over to the other wide of the tower, and when I came back she was gone. I’d tried to erase the other part of it, the part that remained locked away inside myself all these years. I never consciously thought of it. Occasionally it would surface in a dream, that’s all.

“Just before it—happened,” I said, very quietly—she leaned close to hear me—“she said to me, ‘Maybe I should just jump.’”

She watched me, her eyes wide and steady.

“And I—” I spoke slowly, evenly, fearful that if I let my emotions go at this point I’d never get them back under control again in my life—“I said—
nothing.
I just...turned away. I didn’t respond to her at all. She announced to me, to her boyfriend, that she was thinking of killing herself right there and then. And
I—did—absolutely—nothing.”

I stopped talking then. If I continued to talk, I might start to scream.

“And then she jumped,” Rae said.

“And then she jumped.”

She seemed to think about it.

“I’ve never told that,” I said, sighing shakily, “to anyone.”

“Thank you for telling me.”