One Hundred Days of Rain (8 page)

59.

On the weekdays, scanty showers, driblets, interspersed with peekaboo sun or sullen cloud. On the weekends, rain, sudden and torrential. All-encompassing. Week after week and month after month this pattern continues.

It's easy, someone says. There's all this traffic. Monday to Friday. Then it stops.

The explanation can't be right but the pattern imposes its own truth, or logic. Saturday comes, a torrent. Water pouring between buildings, the hollow drowning fall of it. In the morning she lies in bed listening to rain. It's early, there are no noises to get in the way. The very occasional swish of a car pursuing its blind blunt way down the hidden street outside, at the front. The water a cascade, a cavalcade, a call to arms, a march. It depresses one, the very regularity of it. The inevitability. You will get wet again. Yes you will, no matter if you buy cute rubbers and a bright mackintosh. No matter where you store your umbrella. Despite the magazines that exhort you to this new colour or kicky print. Dots.

Lying there she imagines that the deluge comes from somewhere closer than cloud, a discarded hose pouring. Loosed hydrant in the sky. The little trees on the windowsill skewed. Cascade on the glass. Rain continues inevitable.

60.

November. She attends a criminal trial where her fate is to be decided. The accused. She wears the same clothes she wore on the day she apparently viciously assaulted M: the skirt, the little sweater, the wedge heels. Even the pearls.

Do you accept. Has it been proven that. Two days of this, increasingly removed. The details of this trial are sealed, their publication banned. In vain she argues against this.

Her son's father attends both days. He slouches in the visitor's gallery wearing an uncouth T-shirt. At the recess he walks her to lunch. Outside it is always raining, lightly, but she doesn't feel a thing on her as they pass over the brick streets with their allotment of grey. They end up in a warm cloudy restaurant, full of people whose innocence is not in doubt. Try to eat, he says.

Back to the judge, who says simply: I don't know who to believe. She is acquitted on all counts. I frankly do not think this belonged in a courtroom, the judge says.

I am sure she believes what she says is true, he says of M, kindly.

M stands up after the verdict, all five foot three of her quivering. The small head lifts in an invisible wind. Bullies always win, she says bitterly.

Unusually a riposte comes to her at once. Not this time, she replies, before the bailiffs crowd in.

61.

Saturday again, raining again. Looking out the window at the sliver of air between her and the next building she sees no space into which her body, the size of a human being, might insert itself. The wet presses down so unrelentingly that she turns to her son.

Let's just leave.

And the child, all of six, replies at once: Okay.

They take the elevated railway to the bus station. The bus for Victoria has gone, another will not come for hours. Outside again, the rain unchanged, they dash for the el station where she has left the transfers for anyone who needs them. Nobody has. They are still there on the floor, only slightly damped.

They get on a bus in the rain. They get off. They get on another bus in the rain. They get off. They get on another bus in the rain. They get off. They get on the last bus, the one that will take them to the ferry. Movement, she's decided, is what she needs, that and some distance from the piles of paperwork she should be doing. In her pack are a couple of pieces of paper, a pen, but no matter how long she sits and where she goes she knows she won't even uncap the lid.

The next ferry to Victoria won't leave for an hour and a half. The cashier glares at the man in front of them as they idle in his wake. He is buying a ticket for the boat to Nanaimo. She tells him he has ten minutes.

You're lucky you're getting on, says the cashier sourly. Behind them, outside, the rain is a soft, unrelenting murmur on the concrete apron of the drop-off area. The automatic doors whisk open and shut. Drops linger in their hair and speckle their bags. It's the last ferry of the night, continues the clerk.

Two to Nanaimo, she says.

The cashier tries to glare at them too, but has used most of it up on the man in front. I'm busy, she says instead, when asked about buses into Nanaimo. I don't have time. But she has time to give them instructions, extremely detailed ones, about how to get to the ferry's car deck.

They run through the rain for the open maw of the boat. Her son is game, his superhero knapsack bouncing behind him as he trots with great concentration. The workers await them on the ramp, their pickup truck drawn up with lights flashing. Inside, the echoing hold is stained with the wet tracks of their predecessors. The ferry workers direct them up the stairs with a fine offhand concern, one that feels almost like love. The kind she wants, not the kind she can get.

62.

In the morning in the unfamiliar room (three beds, no table, no chair) the mist is a low-lying thing on the rooftops. Gathered rain and leaves lie in the hollow of the flat roofs.

You come to Nanaimo to get away from rain? snorts the woman in the polyester housecoat, the one who lives here for the winter. She has waffles and syrup for breakfast, taking up the last of the sweet with her spoon. Good luck.

She is a know-it-all, this woman. She is disappointed that they are locals; otherwise she could give them advice.

There's a great train trip, she turns to the two girls with accents. You go up to Prince Rupert. Across to Jasper.

You can't do everything, one of the girls murmurs, before they shoulder their giant packs. They take everything with them, like extra bodies they must heft from place to place. Once she too took that long trek to a faraway continent and for some reason it was equally important that she bring as much as she could carry and more. But why? Surely when you are going here and there only a couple of outfits suffice, nobody's going to see you long enough to notice, for one thing. But how fragmentary and partial it seemed, that heavy bag of hers! She had not yet learned how little she needed really. She hadn't even gotten rid of her parents.

The best laid plans of underpackers are felled by rain. You need a couple of heavy outfits, one to dry while you wear the other, especially if the rain continues. One summer biking in Europe she took one of those instant raincoats, the kind packed into a baggie. It didn't rain once that trip and she was grateful. So she didn't use the coat until she was on a ride up to Lion's Bay with some insanely chipper members of the local bike club. She stayed behind in the corner store, drinking coffee, while they went up a mountain just for the fun of it and came back.

To her mind the route they took to the village and home was a joke, a cruel one. The road undulated, a picture-book snake. Up the hill. Down the hill. Up the next hill. She imagined planners chortling as they decreed: put up the signs here, tell cyclists they are welcome. If they survive.

The familiar drops began to stipple her in warning on the return. She stopped at the top of the hill, and unfolded her raincoat. She was pleased with her foresight. The plastic was much thinner than she had expected, its area enormous. She arranged the thing over her clothes as best she could and set off. As she gathered speed a flapping, crackling noise grew around her. It was the giant garbage bag of the raincoat, catching wind like a sail.

63.

Her son away tonight, rain holds off. In the clouds as she leaves work, though, a muttered threat. Rain tonight puts her in mind of toughs who pass a bit too close in the school hallway, bump you sort-of accidentally into the lockers. The cool and clang of it. Go ahead, complain. Come on, report us. The menace of rain, impending.

She chains up, walks quickly through the whooshing automatic doors of the store. Dinner to get. Something to eat. Her head bowed, face averted: no-see-um.

Out on the street again, the rain takes its first tentative shoves, tries its weight, like a bully dancing on tiptoe. Water, skycut, jabs unprotected faces & necks and as quickly retreats. She picks up her steps, hurries a little faster along the ugly street of shops. Almost done now, almost time to turn towards home.

Inside her own door at last, barricaded behind stone and brick, she is brave enough to face rain foursquare. Curled lip. Ostentatious flick of sleeve: see, dry.

Imagines herself, good as untouched.

64.

Today rain falls faster than ever, as if human hurry is catching. Rain a sudden model of efficiency. The consultants came some time ago. They crowd the clouds, measuring drops per square inch. They catch and weigh individual drops, calculate area saturated by length of time. They have reports to make, procedures to recommend. Good news. With proper use of technology, they declare in triumph, rain can be made to fall that much faster.

It's true rain has never been exactly, how you say, career weather. Drifting and dropping, that's pretty much the extent of rain's job description. If rain had a resumé it would be a little puffy thing, a breath of wet air that disappeared when someone opened the envelope. Someone in a little room in a little office into which no rain is allowed, ever.

This is the way of the new world and rain can't fall behind. Hurry up, faster. Check your phone. Text someone. Check the website, get directions, grab another coffee (large, larger, largest: you decide), check your email, check your texts. Text someone else. Go over here, go over there, send another email, try to set up a meeting, try again, try one more time, give up. No! Giving up isn't allowed.

In the office they are packing boxes. Outside rain falls on the alley, muffling in its effect. The phone rings: it's M. Now that the criminal aspect has been decided, M can call anytime. And does. M wants to discuss some detail of the child's rota of pickups and drop-offs. Some question M's decided needs clarification.

I'll tell you if there's a change in the schedule. Goodbye, she says, and hangs up before M can reply.

Are you so desperate to talk to me, she wishes she'd said, to make up all these excuses to call? So many things M could do, to start making amends for her monstrous wrongs. Set the record straight. Admit her culpability. Calling her at work nowhere on the list. Why infuriate her needlessly when she is the one ensuring M's visits, ensuring the child has time with M – she who honours the child's wishes, to a point at least? Oh how noble. Please.

She thrills at the prospect of speaking her mind to M, even in fancy. But mostly she's astounded at herself. How is it, this far from their abrupt division, that M's voice still moves her to trembling fury? That she loses her powers of speech in rage?

Rain can be all these different things, she tells her co-worker Romany.

Nah, says Romany. Rain is rain.

65.

Surprise. A process server lurks outside the door to the alleyway. Rage & violation. Another set of documents. Requisition, affidavit, writ of summons, notice of motion: she hardly knows, and reading won't enlighten her, experience has taught, only panic. Something to do with her separation, with the child's visits, no doubt. Her finances yet again, a few pieces of paper discovered missing in the reams she's passed over. Why the bundle has to be given to her this way, like a drug or a secret, cash in a sack, another legal mystery.

But she takes the papers as she's supposed to, shoves them in her bag for later, when her chest will slow its twitter and thrum. Time enough to read them, then, and puzzle out what they are telling her. Such a nice man, the process server, for someone nobody ever wants to see.

The rain continues. All day there is a solid wall of it wherever she turns, rain hemming her in. Too wet to bike. Too wet to do anything but try and stay out of it, behind the windows of the bus.

The thin man who lives next door to her son's father gets on the bus. He embraces her as she's reading the papers. M's requesting more time with her son, this time confirmed by the court. M proposes a complicated schedule which, as she reads it, reveals itself as an increase in the time M will have with him. M's suggesting a report by a qualified psychologist who will spend time with them all and interview the child. Who will make a recommendation regarding custody and access. She remembers how she and M fought fiercely against the possibility of this same report, in court, when her son's father wanted one. How bitterly M railed against the possibility of intrusion.

Everything will work out, the thin man says. You're the mom.

If only everyone understood this. If only she could be so sure. Break the surface for a moment, rise above the undertow. Instructions she wants to give. Her own: trust self. Trust things to work out. To M: give it up. Give thanks for what you've got. Stop bothering me.

66.

Finally even she begins to talk about weather.

This rain is killing me, she says.

Four of them are sitting at a long table with a view of the harbour. Outside the port glows with harsh orange light and outsize painted machinery. Humming helicopters skim angular towards the heliport. Cutting rain into mist. Below, where she can't see unless she walks to the window itself, boxcars painted brown & orange clash on rows of rusty tracks. Everyone nods at her words.

How are you, she asks the woman at the tea store. They talked so nicely last time she came.

Fine, the clerk lets out, clipped. Her face grim.

She leans forward and confides: This weather is driving me crazy.

The clerk nods.

How are you handling it, she asks the waiter at a restaurant later. She has these secret intelligent conversations with her servers these days. Co-conspirators. She's one of them or they're like her. Hard to tell.

Last year was the worst, he allows in turn. My first winter here.

But last winter it didn't rain as much as it's raining now, she counters. Arguing though there's nothing to argue about. Neither of them having to turn to the window behind her table, so sure are they already of what's to see: the streaming damp, the fast-walking pedestrians, their collars turned up and faces averted from rain's punishment.

I don't know, he answers. Seems like it rained pretty much every day then, too.

That's when she remembers the woman's reply, as she hands back the change: I think it's driving everyone crazy.