Lullaby for the Rain Girl (49 page)

“I don’t know, honey,” I said. “It’s a little too soon to be thinking about that.”

She stared at me, her eyes like big flat saucers. She was breathing shallowly through her mouth. She looked very sick.

“Honey, I...I think I should take you to a doctor.”

“What?”

“A doctor. You’re sick, honey.”

“You can’t take me to a doctor, Dad. You know that.”

I studied her. “Yeah. I guess I do.” What on earth would a doctor make, I wondered, of Rae Grace Fall, the Rain Girl?
Mr. Fall, this child does not exist.

“You’re going to marry her, aren’t you?” she whispered.

“I...honey, that’s a million miles away...I’ve only gotten to know her again over the past few days.”

“You will. I know you will.” She began sobbing again, a strange, whispery, hiccupping sound.

“Rae, sweetheart, just give her a
chance.
That’s all I’m asking. She likes you. She’s told me that. I think you two could really get along.”

I gathered her up in my arms. She was shockingly light. Her pajamas seemed to hang on her, as if they were made for someone vastly larger. But when she put her arms around me the grip was just as astoundingly strong as it had been.

“Dad? Daddy?” she whispered into my ear.

“What, honey?”

“Let’s go away from here.”

“What do you mean?”

“Far away.”

“Where? What are you talking about, Rae?”

“Where no one will ever find us. Just you and me,” she said, her voice growing slightly stronger as she warmed to the idea. “You and me and Mom. Mom’s things, I mean.”

“Kiddo, how could we do that, even if we wanted to? Where would we go? I have a job. I have responsibilities, you know. I have a life here.”

“We could go anywhere,” she said. “It wouldn’t matter. Just as long as we’re always together and you always love me.”

“I
do
love you, Rae...”

“Me and no one else.”

“Rae...”

“Just anyplace. We could travel around.”

“What would we do for money?”

“I don’t care about money...”

“Well, I like to eat, you know.”

“We could live on handouts. Like street people. We could just...just live on the street, push our belongings around in an old grocery cart, beg money from people on corners.”

“What? Honey, that’s...that’s crazy. Why would we want to live like that?”

“Just us. Just us two. Always.”

“I don’t care for sleeping on the streets, honey.”

“We could go out into the country. Sleep in fields. Under the stars.”

“What would we do when it rained?”

“Sleep in barns. In farmhouses. We’d do work on people’s farms and they’d pay us with food and giving us their barn to sleep in.”

“Oh, Rae. You’re being silly.”

“I’m not.”

“You are, sweetheart. It’s a fun fantasy. But it would never work. Not in the real world.”

“It could work, Dad. If you wanted it to.”

“Honey...”

“Please, Dad?” She was whispering again, holding me close, so close I could hardly breathe. “Please, Dad? Because I’m...”

“You’re what, honey?”

“I’m scared, Dad.”

“Scared of what, honey?”

“Of what—what might happen.”

“What? What might happen?”

“Please,
Dad!” She wept openly then, her tears soaking my cheek and neck. “Oh,
please!”

10

New Year’s Eve dawned cloudy, the sky steel-colored and windy. I came awake from a very deep place, from a dream of shadowy figures and gray stones, a cemetery in which I wandered among the carved names of those I’d loved. I looked around my dim bedroom. I had a queasy feeling, a sense of impending doom. All nonsense, I knew. Stupid irrationality, superstition. How Barb Seymour would laugh at me.
Watch out! Y2K is upon us!

Yet it was. And I couldn’t put the thought out of my mind as I got up, stretched, went to the bathroom. I felt as if I were part of some cosmic countdown to...what? Planes dropping from the sky, elevators in freefall? I splashed cold water on my face, brushed my teeth, and made my way out to the main room.

“Morning, hon,” I said. She was already up, sitting in a chair with her knees against her chin, looking out the window. I moved to her, touched her pajama-clad shoulder. “Doesn’t look like a very nice day,” I said.

“No.” Her voice sounded hoarse, sick.

I looked down at her. “How long have you been sitting here?”

“I dunno. Long time.”

She looked awful. Despite occasionally rallying over the past few days, her progress overall had been only downward. Her cheeks were sunken, her shoulders hard with bone. The veins in her wrists showed through so clearly through the papery skin it was as if they’d been drawn on with a blue ink pen. It was the same with her feet, which were bare.

“Are you feeling any better today, sweetheart?”

She shrugged listlessly, not looking at me.

“Would you like to go out? Maybe get some breakfast someplace?”

“It’s too cold.”

“Yeah. Well, we can have tea and fruit here, right?”

She didn’t answer. I moved to the kitchen and started making the tea, trying to tamp down the awful feeling of disaster that was rising in me like bile. Just another day, I kept telling myself. Just another day, no different from any day. Stop being stupid. You know the world’s not going to end. You know that little if anything is going to happen because the damned millennium is here.
(Not really!
I could hear Barb saying with a grin.
There was no year zero, so the millennium really...
Yeah, thanks, Barb. That doesn’t help.)

I went through the motions of making breakfast: tea, oatmeal, sliced apples. When everything was on the table I said, “C’mon, honey, it’s ready.”

“I’m not hungry,” she said, in a voice so small I hardly heard her.

“What? C’mon over. You always eat a good breakfast.”

“I’m not hungry.”

I looked at her. All I could see was her hair, her pajamas, her pale hands around her knees. I felt utterly helpless.

“Well...it’s here if you change your mind.” I sat down and ate mechanically. In the time it took me to drink a mug of tea and eat a bowl of oatmeal with apple slices, she never moved. I thought again of taking her to a doctor, thought again of what the doctor would say after the examination. I wanted to go to her, wrap my arms around what little was left of her, saying,
What can I do for you, honey? What can I do?
But I already knew the answer:
Love me. Love me. Love me.

I took a shower, swallowed my medications, dressed. I figured I’d do my exercises later.

“Rae?” I called from the bedroom. “Are you coming with us? Sherry and I are going to the National Gallery of Art.”

She didn’t answer. But she always refused to come along on any of our excursions. Today would be no different. I could stay with her, I supposed, but to what purpose? To be miserable together? To sit on the sofa with her and go through her mother’s things again, as we had now done several times? Yet what could I do? Doctors were impossible. There weren’t any resources for dysfunctional kids like her. None at all. I was her only resource and I was somehow failing her. I knew that. But I didn’t know what I could do about it. I wasn’t going to run away with her and live on the road, I knew that. How, then? What was going to happen when school started up in a few days? Would she be able to adjust, go to classes? I couldn’t see it. I knew she couldn’t, either. It was impossible. Would she just sit in this apartment forever, then? Sleeping and crying and staring out the window?

Things could not continue like this.

Standing in the bedroom doorway, I looked at her. Her profile was to me. An odd optical illusion occurred then: for just an instant, she appeared translucent. I somehow seemed to be able to see straight through her to the window frame behind.

I blinked twice; the illusion vanished. She was solidly there again. Solid but small, pitiable. Lost.

No. Things could not continue like this.

I stepped over to her, put my hand over her shoulder again, pulled her gently to me. “Love to have you come along, Rae.”

No response. But her head rested easily against my shirt.

“You going to stay here, then?”

She rubbed her face softly against me. I tousled her hair. If only I could convince her to let Sherry into her life, I thought, things would be different. Rae needed a mom, needed one desperately, and I’d begun to suspect that Sherry might be available to fill the position. She would do it magnificently, I knew. How wonderful it would be—the three of us, a complete family....

“You should get up, Rae, take a shower, have something to eat. Pop the oatmeal in the microwave. It’ll be okay.” I knelt down beside her then, looked up at her. Crusty yellow deposits laced her eyes. I reached my finger up to her face and tried to gently brush them away. “Honey,” I said, “you need to take care of yourself. Really.” I touched her cheek with my palm. “You’re a beautiful girl, but you have to take care of yourself.” When I was finished with her eyes I rustled around for my Chap Stick and applied some to her flaking lips again. Rae smelled strange, I noticed. Partly it came from her underarms, but there was something else, something harder to define. A sweet smell, but not a pleasant one. Like...

I stood up suddenly, my breath short. I backed away.

“Well...I’ll go now, honey,” I said. “I’ll be back in a few hours. We’ll—we’ll ring in the new year together. Maybe I’ll bring Sherry back. We can watch Dick Clark on TV. Countdown to midnight. That would be fun, huh?” But I hardly knew what I was saying. My heart was beating fast.

“Okay,” she whispered, not looking at me.

“So...okay. Right. Bye, sweetheart.”

I stepped out into the corridor, closing the door and resting with my back against it for a moment. I closed my eyes. The odor I’d smelled seemed to stay with me, in my nostrils, my brain. I tried to shake my head, to clear it, but the odor stayed there, followed me to the elevator, into the lobby, out the front door. It was only when the frigid morning air hit my lungs that it finally dissipated.

It was the smell of rotting meat.

# # #

Yet once I was outside in the winter’s day, feeling my shoes on the pavement, looking at the people and cars all around me, I felt all right again: part of the world, the
real
world, moving among the living and breathing swarm of normality—reality, the shared reality people live in. I felt my energy gathering as I made my way to the Metro, rode up to Tenleytown. I was worried about Rae the entire ride, but somehow the rumble and clatter of the train, the voices of the other people had the effect of taking me away from her, making her world seem vaguely surreal, dreamlike. As I exited the station and made the walk to the hotel my heart felt strong, powerful. A few drops of rain splashed on my face, invigorating me. By the time I stepped into the hotel lobby I found that I felt good. I felt guilty about feeling good. But I felt good.

Sherry was waiting for me. “Hi, stranger,” she smiled. We kissed each other’s cheeks, as we’d gotten into the habit of doing. “Happy New Year’s Eve.”

“Hey, you too.”

“Is it starting to rain?”

“A little. Yeah. It’s not a very nice day, I’m afraid.” As I said it, I saw that a downpour had suddenly begun. We stared at it for a moment.

“Want a drink first? A snack?” she asked me. “The restaurant’s open.”

“Well...it doesn’t look too nice outside, does it? And I didn’t bring an umbrella. Dummy me.”

We stepped into the restaurant, had coffee. Sherry and I had grown easy with each other: old friends. We talked for a while of the city, things we still planned to do while she was here.

“How’s Rae?” she asked finally.

“Rae’s...Rae’s good.” I hesitated. “Well, maybe not good. I think she’s...I don’t know. Depressed.”

Sherry nodded. “Does she have a therapist? Some kind of counselor?”

“No...no. She probably should, you’re right.” I rolled the idea around in my mind, thinking that the only thing stranger than a doctor giving Rae an examination would be a psychiatrist asking her why she was so unhappy.

“Ben,” she asked, looking at me over her coffee cup, “what happened to her mother? You’ve never told me. Just that she died.”

“Yeah. Well.” I didn’t meet her eyes. I couldn’t think of a thing to say, that I
could
say.

“Never mind,” she said. “I didn’t mean to butt in. I’m sure it must be hard.”

“It is.”

“Let’s drop it, then. Sorry I mentioned it.” She looked toward the window. “Gosh, it’s not letting up, is it?”

“Doesn’t look like it.”

“I don’t think they’ll mind if we sit here a while.”