The Rainy Season (22 page)

The question didn’t seem to him to want an answer, and he remained quiet, letting her talk as she gazed silently out the window for a moment. “I feel exactly like I’m alone in a small boat,” she said finally, “adrift in the middle of the ocean. That’s trite, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” Phil said uneasily. “I guess it depends on what you mean by trite. Trite isn’t a bad thing. Sometimes it’s just the simple truth.”

She smiled at him now, then took off the plastic ring and set it onto the table again. “You’re really very kind,” she said. “And Betsy is wonderful. I think I’m just worn out right now, and when I get tired I start to feel poetic. That’s always time to stop talking, when you’re feeling poetic. It means you’re giddy.”

“I’ll let you rest.”

“I’ll get my bearings yet.”

He nodded, then turned to leave, then stopped again. “You know Betsy’s my niece?” he asked.

“I’ll bet that’s why she calls you Uncle Phil.”

“Almost certainly. I guess I should tell you, though, that her mother died recently, just a few days ago. She’s dealing with it pretty well, I think. I hope so, anyway. But I thought maybe you should know.”

“She told me,” Jen said to him. “She also told me that she likes it here. She said—how did she put it?—that this house is a golden house. A book she read once said that a golden house is a house with a shining heart.”

“Did she really say that?” asked Phil. He couldn’t help smiling now.

“Yes, she really did. I was glad to hear it, because I seem to have found my way here, haven’t I?” She settled back into the pillows now, and shut her eyes.

Phil went out through the door, closing it behind him, and headed downstairs. He felt like whistling, and it occurred to him that he was happier than he had been in years. Was it Betsy who made him happy? Or was it Jen? Right now it didn’t much matter to him. The house had life in it again, and the oppressive months of dark weather seemed to him to be clearing at last.

He heard the doorbell ring then, and he was suddenly certain that it was Elizabeth—so certain that he stopped on the stairs to think, to pull himself together.
Hell
, he thought, and went on down the stairs and into the living room. Betsy had disappeared. He looked out the window onto the porch, trying unsuccessfully not to be seen.

BETSY CLIMBED OUT
through the window, onto the balcony and out into the tree. She made her way out to the trunk and down toward the ground, branch by branch, until she was at the place where she had hidden the box. She took it out of its hidey-hole and put it into her book bag, which she slung over her shoulder before climbing on down to the lower branches and dropping to the grass below. At the edge of the house, she stopped to look at the old water tower across the lawn. She had never been inside the tower before, although she had thought about it, and she saw now that there was no lock on the door. She wondered what was inside—old things, probably. It wouldn’t hurt anything if she looked around in there. Phil had
told
her to look, sort of.

She went back into the house finally, back up the stairs and along the hallway, peeking in through the door of Jen’s room. Jen’s eyes were shut, and maybe she was asleep, but Betsy stood there watching her anyway, because what she had to say couldn’t wait. Finally she tapped on the door molding.

“Come on in,” Jen said to her after a moment. “I thought you might come back. You left like you had some reason to leave.”

“I brought something to show you,” Betsy said, setting the box on the bedspread. She stepped across and looked out the window, at the tower, at Phil and the old man still talking in the driveway.

“What’s in it?” Jen asked.

“An inkwell. It was my grandma’s inkwell.”

Jen took it from her. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, she opened the box and sat looking at the inkwell. “This was May’s?”

“Uh-huh,” Betsy said. “She gave it to my mom in a different box, but I had to leave her box behind at home. My mom said it was a memory box, and that the inkwell was a well of memories. It’s a special inkwell, because it didn’t need any ink. Take it out, if you want to. It was a secret between my mom and me.”

“Can I hold it?”

“If you want to. But do you know what?”

“What?”

“I know something about you.”

“Your grandma told you something?”

She shook her head. “Something in this inkwell. There’s a memory that’s in it, like my Grandma said. Like a story.”

Jen looked at her, as if waiting for more. “Tell me what you know about me,” she said.

“That my grandma had a baby once.”

“Oh, that,” Jen said, smiling faintly at her now. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be here, I guess. So that’s not hard to know, is it? I knew that, and I didn’t even have an inkwell.”

“I don’t mean that. I know that you were there, when the baby came. You were sitting in a chair by the window, asleep. And there was this old woman helping. And the window was open so that the wind blew into the room. I think it was in the morning. And it was summer, because the wind was warm. … I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“It’s all right,” Jen whispered. “I’m just surprised, is all. What else? What else do you know about that?”

Betsy shook her head. “I think something was wrong. I think something happened with the baby.”

“How do you know this?”

“It’s in the inkwell.
Did
something happen?”

Jen nodded silently.

“I thought it did. It was something with the baby?”

“Yes. But the baby wasn’t … wrong. It was healthy—a boy.”

“What happened to him?”

“Your mother couldn’t keep him. The baby’s father wasn’t … he was dead. So the baby was given to strangers.”

“Was the baby happy?”

“I don’t know,” Jen said. “That was a long time ago, to be sure. I like to believe he was happy, though, for May’s sake. For his own sake, too, of course.”

They sat in silence for a moment, and then Betsy said, “Go ahead and take it if you want to. I trust you.” She let the box lie open in her hand, and Jen looked at the inkwell inside.

“Take it?”

“Hold it. In your hand, if you want to. You’ll see.”

Betsy held out the box, and Jen took the inkwell out of it, shutting her eyes when the glass touched her skin.

“Close your hand over it.”

“Like this,” Jen whispered, and shut her hand. She shuddered then, and gasped a breath in through her mouth.

“If you don’t want it,” Betsy said, “just drop it on the bed. I’ll pick it up for you.”

MRS. DARWIN HAD
managed seventy-five miles an hour across west Texas into New Mexico on Highway 40, heading away from Albuquerque now, nearly into Gallup, where she would turn up Route 666 toward Mesa Verde. She had stopped earlier to buy a piece of black Santa Clara pottery from a trading post. It had cost her three hundred dollars, an extravagance for her nowadays, but she was pretty sure that she had gotten a good price. And anyway, she had a little mad money from the estate sale, and there was nothing wrong with giving yourself a little treat when you deserved it. She rolled the window down, although the evening air was cool. It would be downright cold before she got into Mesa Verde,
if
she got into Mesa Verde, which might easily be closed due to weather and the season. It was cold enough to snow. There were patches of black ice on the roads, and the sky was cloudy and threatening. If she didn’t make it into Mesa Verde, she would drive back into Shiprock for the night and then head west in the morning.

She had always loved the southwest desert, the colors of the mesas, the long highways, the place names: Cimarron, Taos, Magdelena. … The names were all the right
color
, somehow; they had the right
smell
. She and her husband had stayed overnight in Truth Or Consequences, down off Highway 25 on the Rio Grande, just because of the name of the place. That had been a long time ago, but she could still remember the cafe where they had eaten breakfast in town, how the waitress had called the oatmeal “mush” and how they had always called it mush from that point on—for the short years that the two of them had enjoyed together.

She saw a road sign for Tohatchi now and considered pulling over for a bite to eat, but instead she opened a paper bag on the seat and got out a banana, along with a fat-free Fig Newton bar. There was something too sad about eating alone on the road—too many memories in roadside diners. It was better just to nibble. You could keep moving that way.

She and Al had put some miles on their Pontiac back in the old days. He had retired from aerospace with enough of a pension for her to retire from nursing, too, and for the few years before his death they had made a dozen road trips, somewhere different every spring and summer. On weekends, though, they would tool that old Pontiac out into the southwest desert and stop at roadside trading posts. Now and then they’d pick up a piece of jewelry—a belt buckle or a bolo tie for Al, or a pair of earrings for her—and occasionally, when they could afford it, a blanket or a piece of pottery and once a squash-blossom necklace. If they had known what would happen to the price of pottery and blankets and turquoise, they’d have put more energy and money into buying them. She had a Two Gray Hills blanket worth a couple of thousand dollars that they’d paid about two hundred for … but two hundred was a lot of money in those days, and all this wishing was just hindsight.

There were some things that you had to let slide, and other things that you did something about. And this second kind of thing, if you waited on it, would become hindsight too, and then you would live with regret.

THE FIRST RAIN
started to fall when she was ten miles out of Shiprock, and as she climbed into higher elevations, the rain turned to sleet, so that the wipers pushed aside little heaps of slush. Mesa Verde would be out of the question. Her desire to see it again was mostly nostalgia anyway. She and Al had visited the park on their last road trip, but he’d had a hard time with the elevation, with getting enough air into his lungs, and they had only made an overnight stay. Ignorance had been bliss, though: they hadn’t any idea back then that there was anything really wrong with Al except for his smoking.

He had died of lung cancer in ’88, the same year that Marianne moved into the house in Austin, and Mrs. Darwin would admit that it was Marianne who had kept her afloat in those hard months. Later, when Marianne’s husband died, it was Mrs. Darwin who was a comfort to her. There had been a give and take, a true bonding during that time, although it was a shame that Marianne had fallen into an extended period of depression. The depression had changed her. Richard, Marianne’s husband, had died in a helicopter crash off South Padre Island in 1989. It wasn’t until after his death that Marianne had found out about Richard’s second family, about the woman in Brownsville whom he had been living with off and on. He’d had two children by this other woman: military travel had been good cover for a double life. Betsy was too young to have known him well, thank God, too young to miss him, and baby Betsy had stayed with Mrs. Darwin when Marianne had driven down to Corpus Christi for Richard’s funeral.

Marianne, bless her soul anyway, had been an incompetent mother from then on because of the chronic depression.
Incompetent
—that was the only way to put it. The newspapers are full of terrible stories of mothers who kill or abandon their babies, and Mrs. Darwin lived in fear of that tragedy for months on end, during the worst of Marianne’s depression. Even when the depression cycled out of its downturn and Marianne could smile again and go back to work, there was always the knowledge that the sickness lurked like a shadow behind some door in her mind, waiting to step out into the open again and reclaim her, turn her life into a living hell. People who weren’t familiar with the ravages of depression didn’t understand it in the slightest. They couldn’t imagine the darkness that it brought. It was quite literally better to be dead. Mrs. Darwin could even remember writing down a Dr. Kevorkian hotline number from a late-night radio talk show. Depression could be a terminal illness prolonged through the years. It was death in life, much worse than no life at all.

Worse yet, it was a crime against children if a child’s parents were afflicted. If there were two parents, and one of them was sane, then the child could be carried through the worst times. Mrs. Darwin had functioned as the sane parent. She had done the carrying. From the first, she had been dedicated to Betsy because Marianne was broken and Betsy was not. You didn’t let the unbroken thing drop to the floor because you were trying to juggle the pieces of the thing that was already broken.

She slowed down coming into Shiprock and pulled off the highway at the Chumash Motor Hotel, parking in front of the office under an overhang. The air outside the car struck her like a blizzard, and she hurried into the office, pulling her coat tight around her. There were plenty of rooms—not many travelers at this time of the year—but they wouldn’t give her the seniors’ discount
and
the Triple A discount, which would have saved her 25 percent. No amount of reasoning with the clerk would make him see that she was right in asking for the double discount. Nowhere in their literature did they say that a guest couldn’t ask for both discounts. When she walked back out to the car she was fuming: the clerk’s ignorance had come close to ruining the evening for her, and she was determined to write a letter to the hotel management to complain. She drove across to the lot and parked in front of her room, then climbed out of the car and opened the trunk.

The sleet had let up, and she stood for a moment looking at the little shrine she had put together in the trunk of the Honda: Betsy memorabilia. She hadn’t wanted to leave it at home, because she had no real idea what lay ahead of her, when or how she would go home again, if ever. Everyone who had ever really mattered to her had been taken away from her, and there was nothing left for her in Austin. She didn’t harbor any more ill feeling for Phil Ainsworth than she did for the cancer that had taken Al. There wasn’t a lot of difference between the two; both Phil and the cancer had done their best to destroy her life. One thing was true, though: unlike Al, Betsy wasn’t dead. And unlike cancer, Phil Ainsworth didn’t pack enough wallop to deliver a mortal blow.