Lullaby for the Rain Girl (45 page)

“I...Well, is everybody all right?”

“Yes. We’re okay. Dad’s okay, too. He just won’t be living with us anymore. Can you go see him?”

“Well—sure, of course. Where?” She named it—a hospital and home for the elderly in Northern Virginia. “Yeah, of course I’ll visit him. But...”

“Can you stop by here first, Ben? I can drive you there. It’s not far. But I want to talk to you.”

“Sure. I will. In the morning?”

“Yes.”

I thought about Sherry, decided we could always see each other in the afternoon. This was obviously a crisis. “I’ll Metro down there.”

“Can you be at the station at nine? I’ll meet you.”

“Sure. I’m sorry this has happened, Sis. And on Christmas, too.”

“So am I. I hope you had a merry one, anyway.”

Good Lord. I suddenly remembered that Alice didn’t know anything about Rae, about my heart attack, or about Sherry O’Shea’s reappearance in my life. Absolutely nothing.

“Yeah,” I said. “Not too eventful.”

“Well—tomorrow morning? You’re sure?”

“I’m sure. I’ll be there. Take care, Sis.”

“Thanks, Ben. Bye.”

I hung up, my mind swirling.

It took me a moment to refocus and realize that Rae was still sobbing in the other room.

I stepped in. The lights were off. She was huddled in my bed, fetus-style, weeping and shivering.

I sat beside her on the bed, stroked her shoulder gently. “Rae,” I whispered. “Rae, honey, don’t. Don’t do this.”

“I can’t help it.”

“Shh.” I touched her hair. “It’s all right, honey. Calm down.”

It was too dark to see clearly, but when she looked up at me her tear-dampened eyes seemed big, too big, her cheeks shriveled and sunken-in.

“Don’t you
understand?”
she cried, her voice small, strangled.
“You
called me here. I’m only here because of you. Only you can keep me here.”

“I love you, sweetheart. You know that.”

“You have to love me more.”

“I—honey, I don’t know how to love you any more than I already do.” I wasn’t sure anymore if there was sufficient love in my bruised and battered heart, or in the world’s, to satisfy her need, her terrible need.

“Shhh,” I repeated, pulling her to me, holding her. “Try to calm down, Rae. Try to sleep.” The slow motion of my hand stroking her hair seemed to pacify her a little. Her breathing slowed. Her sobs lessened.

Then, suddenly, absurdly, I found myself whisper-singing to her—a lullaby, of all things. I’d made no conscious decision about it. It just came out of me, very quietly, naturally, soothingly. I’d never sung a lullaby to anyone in my life. It seemed to escape from me almost beyond my own will. I knew the song, remembered it as someone else had sung it to me over thirty years before.

Rock-a-bye baby, on the tree top,

When the wind blows, the cradle will rock,

When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall,

And down will come baby, cradle and all.

I cradled my daughter in my arms. At last she slept. We stayed like that all night.

8

“We didn’t have any choice, Ben,” my sister said.

“I’m sure you didn’t, Sis. I saw how he was.” We were in her gargantuan, tank-like Hummer, rolling down Arlington Boulevard. Though it had only been nine or ten days, it felt like an eternity since I’d seen Alice. Her hair was loose, spilling in blonde waves over her lavender sweater. She wore blue jeans and boots and looked very tired. “So what exactly happened?”

She sighed. “He was—standing at the doorway of Mindy’s room, looking at her. She said something like, ‘What do you want, Grandpa?’ And he said he wanted to...Well. You can imagine.”

“No, I can’t. Tell me what he said.”

She scowled. “He said, ‘I want to fuck you in your little ass.’ That’s the direct quote. That’s what Mindy told me. Nobody else was home, which was my mistake. I should have known better.”

“Sis, I’m sorry. Sorry it happened. What did Mindy do?”

“She locked herself in the bathroom until we came home. Luckily that was only a few minutes.”

“Shit. God damn it.”

“We’d already looked into places for him. We took him to one before, just to look around, but he got—angry. But the doctors were on top of it. He’d had his check-up just a few weeks ago. I talked to the doctor then, and he said we should consider putting him—somewhere else. Someplace besides our home. So we were—ready. As ready as you can be for this kind of thing, I guess.”

She took the turn onto Route 50 and we drove in silence for a few minutes. My brain was filled with images of Dad, Dad as he was then, as he was now: and my unfortunate niece, Mindy, having to hear that bile vomiting up from his increasingly unhinged mind.

But Dad and Alice and Mindy fought for space in my brain with Rae. I’d left her alone, hadn’t told her ahead of time, hadn’t asked. I didn’t have time. She was still sleeping in my bed when I got up, showered, dressed: she looked pale, thin, weak. I knew if I woke her there would be another scene, so I didn’t. I feared she might panic before she happened to find any note I might leave on the kitchen table or taped to the door, so instead I gently pinned a message to her shirtsleeve. She would just have to get by on her own for a few hours. There was no alternative. I couldn’t possibly have brought her along—
Hi, Sis, this is a daughter of mine you’ve never heard of. Rae, meet your Aunt Alice!
No. I would have to introduce them eventually, I knew that, but this wasn’t the time or place. And Rae just wasn’t ready to deal with other people yet—people who took up any significant portion of my emotional life. That was it, I realized. She could wander around the school, talk to the janitor or the person behind the counter at Dugan’s, my doctor and nurses, because none of them had any significant hold on my emotions. They weren’t competition. Sherry was. Alice was. Dad would be. At least as my daughter saw things.

Alice pulled into the parking lot of a very modern-efficient sort of building, all tan paint and pleasant green lawn. We went through the automatic doors and I stood slightly behind my sister as she checked in at the front desk. The woman there, in a crisp nurse’s uniform, smiled pleasantly at the both of us. She handed us temporary I.D. tags and said, “You can go right up.”

“He’s on the fourth floor,” Alice said, pinning her tag to her sweater. I pinned my own onto my shirt as we stepped into an elevator and Alice pushed the button. We rode in silence. I found myself wanting to apologize to her, to say,
I’m sorry I haven’t done more,
but if I said that I knew I would have to get into my heart attack, my daughter...My life had undergone such enormous changes in the past couple of weeks that I didn’t even know how to begin telling her. And this wasn’t the time or place. At some point I’d sit her down when she was calmer, try to catch her up on what had been happening to me. For now, I could feel her impatience, her disapproval of her vanishing brother. Why not? In her place I’d be angry, too. The burden had descended entirely on her.
But Sis, I just had a heart attack...

No. Another time.

The elevator doors slid silently open. We walked into a sunny sitting room populated entirely by very old people sitting or mulling slowly about. One was being pushed by somebody in street clothes—a relative, no doubt. There was a nurse’s station to the far right, with several competent-looking men and women in white uniforms. A TV was on in the other corner:
The Price is Right,
exactly what I’d found myself watching in the hospital the week before. (Good Lord. It felt like months. Years.) A couple of the elderly residents actually seemed to be watching the program, but most of the others were just staring glassily at the screen.

“I don’t see him out here,” Alice said. “Do you?”

“No. No, I don’t.”

“He must be in his room. C’mon.”

We walked up the corridor until we reached 407. The door was open. Alice peered in.

“Hi, Dad.”

I heard no response.

“Dad, I brought somebody with me today. To visit you. Ben’s here.” She took my hand, pulled me into the little room. It was very clean and well-maintained, but there was virtually nothing in it. A bed with safety rails on the side. A little desk with a straight-backed chair. The room was dark; only the fluorescent light from the hall provided some indirect illumination.

“Want me to turn the light on, Dad?” I asked.

He didn’t answer. She left it dark.

I looked. He was sitting at the back of the little room in a chair that looked identical to the one at the desk. He didn’t appear to be doing anything. He just sat there. His clothes looked familiar—blue work shirt, jeans, tennis shoes.

“I brought you some things, Dad,” Alice said, obviously determined to be happy, or at least sound like it.  She reached into her bag and brought out several small framed photos. “Look,” she said, stepping close to him, “some pictures. See? There’s me, and the kids, and...”

He didn’t respond. He didn’t even look at them. Finally she stopped, turned and arranged the photos on the desk.

“I’ll put them here,” she said cheerily, “so you can see them whenever you want to.”

“How are you doing, Dad?” I ventured.

He didn’t respond. I moved close to him. His skin sagged on him, as if there were more skin than his old and frail body could fill. There seemed to be little left of him at all.

“Dad’s doing fine,” Alice said from behind me. “He’s doing great.”

“That true, Dad? Do you—do you like it here?” I realized I was practically shouting, though as far as I knew Dad didn’t have any hearing problems. I toned myself down. “How are things, Dad?”

His face was fierce, scowling, his eyes angry, his wild white eyebrows every which way. His lips were tightly together.

“Dad’s been here for a couple of days now,” Alice said brightly. “I think he’s really settling in.”

“Sure hope so,” I said. “Hey, it looks like a nice place. Your every need catered to. Not so bad, huh? A pretty good deal.”

“Sure it is,” Alice said. She met my eyes. “Ben, do you want me to leave you alone with Dad for a while?” I’ve known Alice all my life; I can read her eyes. They were saying,
Please?

“Sure, Sis. Sure. I’ll talk to Dad for a while.”

“I can wait out here. Unless you want to come out, Dad? Do you want to come out and watch some TV?”

No response. Finally I mouthed
Go ahead
to her and nodded toward the door
.
She stepped out.

“Hey, Dad,” I said. “What’s happening?”

Silence. I listened to a nurse’s soft footfalls in the corridor, the hum of the air conditioning, the distant sound of the game show on TV in the other room.

“They treating you well here, Dad?”

Silence.

“I’ve—I’ve had a busy week or two since I’ve seen you. Been—been doing lots of things.”

I couldn’t tell if he was
there
or not. His eyes certainly didn’t have the uncomprehending look of some of the elderly people’s in the TV room, but at the same time he seemed little different from a mummy. I didn’t know if he was hearing me at all. Obviously he’d gotten out of bed that morning, dressed himself—possibly with some help. He wasn’t bedridden.  He’d been talking up to two days ago, if only about my niece and the things he wanted to do to her. Had he fallen into a permanent silence? Or was he simply being angry and stubborn?

“I—yeah, it’s been a busy few days, Dad. I—I finished with school. On Winter Break now. Tough semester. I’m glad to have the time off. It’s surprising, how tiring teaching can be. It’s—you’d think, well, all you have to do is go into a classroom and talk to some kids, maybe grade some quizzes, what’s so hard about that?” That was, in fact, exactly what Dad had always said about my job, and about the entire teaching profession. “But it’s—it’s a lot harder than that, it’s...” I searched his face for any reaction. There was none. “It’s...it’s harder because...because...You know, Dad, I had a...a heart attack last week. Did you know that? No, you couldn’t have. Yeah, I spent five days at GW Hospital. A nice doctor there, Dr. Nguyen. I think she’s Vietnamese. I mean, her parents were. Anyway, it...they said it was a mild one, but boy, let me tell you, there’s no such thing as a mild heart attack. It...” I stopped, startled that I was telling him this. But I could think of nothing else to say to this quasi-comatose old man. “It—they have me on an exercise regimen now. I run in place in the mornings. And then I do a lot of walking. Medications, too. Did you know they give people nitroglycerine for heart attacks? I swear, I think I’m going to explode every time I take one of those...” My voice faltered. There was still no response from him. “Dad, maybe if we—it’s always been hard to talk, I...maybe we should talk, you know, just—talk, talk about...things...”

“Bullshit.”

“What?”

“Bullshit. Goddamn bullshit.”

He wasn’t looking at me. I didn’t know if he was aware of me. But he was speaking.

“What’s bullshit, Dad?”