Lullaby for the Rain Girl (12 page)

“Well—where do you stay?”

“No place. Around.”

“You don’t look like a homeless person to me.”

“I haven’t been homeless very long. Only since last week.”

“Well, shit, Jane, you must have some friends you can crash with. Or your family.”

“No. I don’t.”

He pulled on his trousers. “This is not my problem, okay? I’m sorry you’re having troubles. But that doesn’t mean that I have to solve them for you.” It was harsh, but it was time to cut the crap with this girl. “I brought you home. We fucked. You spent the night. I offered you breakfast. That’s the end of my obligation to you. Please put on your shoes.”

She unfolded her arms, then pressed her palms to her legs and rubbed them slowly.

“Can I just stay here a while? I won’t do anything. I just…”

“No. It’s time for you to leave.” He slipped on his shirt and buttoned it.

She didn’t move, stared pensively at her legs.

“Guys always want me to leave,” she said.

“Oh, come on,” he said, exasperated. “I’m not listening to any sob stories. No one forced you to come home with me last night. Shit, you said yes after one beer. If you didn’t have a good time I’m sorry, but I sure didn’t force you.”

“I didn’t say you forced me.”

“Well, shit.”

“You didn’t force me,” she insisted. “It’s just that guys always seem to want me to leave, that’s all.”

“I have to go to
work.”

She looked at him, her eyes large. “Did you like fucking me?”

He scowled. “Not really.”

Her eyes dropped again. “I didn’t, either.”

“Well, then why did you do it?”

“I needed a place to stay,” she said. “And you seemed nice.”

“Well, I guess you found out that I’m not.” He reached for a tie from the closet. “So put on your shoes.”

She moved glumly to her socks, which were lying haphazardly on the floor. He watched as she began slipping one on and, satisfied that she was finally making progress, he moved out to the kitchen again to put together his lunch. The usual: tuna and lettuce on wheat bread, an apple. He didn’t eat much; it was one of the secrets of keeping his physique. He found a brown bag, put the sandwich and fruit into it, and moved to the hall closet for his blazer. He put it on, glancing out the window again. Sleet was spraying the glass with a tiny hard sound. He cursed silently: they would be short-handed today, for sure. He could already think of a couple of people who would beg off work because of the weather, but living such a short distance from the store left him no excuses. Sighing, he grabbed his umbrella and stuffed his lunch bag in the pocket of the blazer.

“Jane? You ready?” he called.

No response.

“Jane?”

The sleet hissed against the window.

“Goddamn it,” he muttered, furious now. He marched toward the bedroom, resolved to throw her out bodily if necessary. Shit, at this point she was trespassing. He’d call the police if he had to. This was
his
apartment and he wanted her
out
.

But when he looked into the room and saw her lying on her side, facing away from him, one thought slammed instantly and inescapably into his brain.

She’s dead.

He stared at her. She had finished only the one sock; her left foot was still bare. There was something pitiful about the sight. His eyes moved up her body, across her legs, her arms, her shoulders. That was it: that was how he’d realized immediately that she was dead. She wasn’t breathing. Her body was completely still, still and heavy-looking the way dead bodies always were. He remembered looking at his mother and father just after the accident, when he’d staggered from the back seat of the car and seen them both lying in the street: they’d had the same look. Thick, leaden. Graceless. Dead.

He stepped toward the girl with a feeling of horror, his breath short.

“Jane?” he whispered.

Then he heard her inhale. “Mitchell, please let me stay. Just for a while. I’ll leave later. I promise.”

He sat on the bed. He reached out his hand to her shoulder, but pulled back before he touched it. He felt sick.

“I—” His brain seemed to freeze. He could think of nothing, absolutely nothing to say to this girl, to this impossibly talking, moving dead girl.

“My family,” she said at last, “had a history of heart problems. Both my parents died of heart attacks. My dad had four—the fourth one was the one that killed him, when he was thirty-nine. My mom just had one, when she was forty-two.”

“How—how old are you?” he heard himself asking in a whisper.

“Twenty-six.”

“That’s—that’s…rare…”

“My uncle, too. Uncle Pete. He took me in after my mom died. I was twelve.”

He listened to the sleet on the glass, feeling as if he were somewhere else, as if this were not happening at all, could not be happening. “That’s…good,” he whispered. “That he took you in.”

“Uncle Pete?” She was silent for a long time. Then: “Uncle Pete was into guns. When he fucked me he used to hold the muzzle of a cocked pistol against my forehead, right here.” She pressed a spot on her forehead with her finger. “He would show me that it was loaded first. He used to tell me that one of these days he was going to blow my head off at the exact moment he came, that he wanted to see my brains splatter all over the pillow as he shot off into me.”

“He—?”

“Sometimes he would put it in my mouth while he did it, make me suck on it.”

“He—Jane—”

“And he died of a heart attack too,” she said flatly. “I don’t know how old he was, exactly. I was fifteen.” Her voice held no emotion in it; she might have been reciting a bus schedule.

He opened his mouth to speak, but he had no words. He made a small gasping sound, reached to touch her again, pulled back again.

After a long time he stood, stumbled wordlessly to the door. He made his way into the hall, to the elevator, through the lobby, and to the street below. Umbrella forgotten, he staggered along the ice-encased winter street feeling chips of sleet making their way down his face and neck. There was nothing in his mind. He had no thoughts at all.

# # #

He came home early: the federal government declared a weather emergency in the mid-afternoon and shut down, so the store followed suit. Everything in the neighborhood was rapidly closing, doors shutting, neon lights clicked off to darkness. And it
was
dark, the clouds above the city thick and gray-black, the sleet falling, falling. The cars on Wisconsin Avenue crawled sluggishly, timidly along, their tires sliding in the slushy street. He slipped three times on the two-block walk home, once crashing down onto his left knee and sending a jolt of pain through his whole leg.

When he arrived home he entertained a brief notion that nothing that morning had really happened, that there was no girl in his apartment, that everything was as it had been before last night. But no: as soon as he opened the door he smelled a sickly odor of urine, of diarrhea.  He moved quickly to the bedroom.

“Jane?”

She was on her back on the bed. Her eyes were closed, her mouth wide. She had taken off her clothes: she looked small, emaciated. There was an old towel wrapped around her pelvis, a towel that was stained with big brown blotches.

“Mitchell,” she said, her voice cracked and broken, much weaker than before, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Mitchell. It—it just came out. I didn’t…”

He sat next to her. The odors of shit and pee were overwhelming. He could see that some of it had soaked through to the mattress beneath her.

“Jane, we have to call a—”

He didn’t finish the sentence because when he looked at her he realized again that she was dead. That was why her body had voided itself. She was
dead
.

“I’ll—I’ll clean you up,” he said, voice quivering with cold, with fear. “I’ll try to clean you up.”

“I’m sorry, Mitchell.”

For a long moment he didn’t know where to begin. He stood there helplessly. Finally he realized that he was chilled to the bone, and so began to remove his wet things. He found some old jeans and a sweatshirt in his closet, put them on.

“I felt so weird,” she said. “I…not hot, exactly, but
something.
So I took off my clothes. That was when I—oh, God, I’m so sorry about your bed…I grabbed a towel as fast as I could, I…” She lay there unmoving, crying quietly.

“Can you stand?” he said.

“I think so.”

“C’mon, let’s get you up.” He helped her put her arm around him and he stood with her. “Do you think you’re—done? With the diarrhea?”

She smiled wanly, her voice choked with tears. “I think I’m empty.”

She leaned on him as he walked with her to the bathroom. He sat her on the closed toilet while he stoppered the bathtub and began to run warm water into it.

“You’ll feel better after a bath,” he said. “Can you get in by yourself?”

She nodded. Her hair, limp, stringy, lay slack against the sides of her face.

“Okay. Let me see about the bedroom.”

He stepped out. In the bedroom he gathered her clothes and tossed them into the washing machine with some of his own laundry. Then he stripped the bed and threw the sheets in as well and started the machine.

The mattress was another problem. The stains weren’t that bad, but they were there. He found the bleach under the bathroom sink, poured some in a small bowl, cut it with some water, and used an old hand towel to scrub at the stains.

He was amazed at his own calm, his firm resolve to simply take care of the situation. He didn’t even like this girl, he knew. Even now he found her voice whiny, her manner irritating. But he felt pity for her. The fact that the entire situation was surreal didn’t particularly register, not in the midst of his work. She was sick, that’s all. That was it. She was sick.

But even as he thought it, he knew differently. What difference did the knowledge make, though? Who could he call? A doctor? A priest? The city morgue?  What did you do in a situation that couldn’t be happening?

Finishing with the mattress, he grabbed its edge awkwardly and turned the entire thing over. The odor seemed to be gone; now the room had a hospital-like smell of lemon-scented bleach. He brought out sheets, blankets and pillowcases from the closet and made the bed again. Then he stepped back into the bathroom.

“The water feels weird,” she said, looking up at him. “On my skin.”

“Well, you’re…you’re sick.”

She looked down, shrugging sadly.

He took a cup from the bathroom sink and poured cold water into it from the tap. “Here,” he said, “drink this.”

“I don’t think—”

“Just drink.”

She looked at him fearfully as he held the cup to her lips. He poured the water gently into her mouth. It ran down the sides of her chin.

“I can’t swallow,” she said.

“Sure you can. Try.”

She shook her head, looked down at the bathwater again.

“But if you can’t swallow,” he started to say, “you can’t eat. You’ll…”

He stared at her. Her body seemed smaller than it had the night before, when he’d been fucking her; smaller even than this morning. As if some degenerative process were beginning to soften parts inside her, shrink them; as if she were slowly beginning to cave in upon herself. Her skin, still bloodlessly pale, was gaining a dull yellow hue. Her eyes seemed sunken into her face. She didn’t breathe, but when she spoke, air came from her mouth: it smelled fetid, sickly-sweet, like rotting meat.

“Thank you,” she said at last. “For helping me.”

He frowned. “Do you think we should call—someone?”

“Who would we call?”

It took him a long moment to answer. “I don’t know,” he admitted finally.

She stared at the water. “Do you think this happens a lot?”

“I—don’t know.”

“I think it does.” She nodded, more to herself than to him. “I’ll bet it does. I’ll bet it happens to a lot of people.”

“Maybe.”

He helped her out of the tub, giving her a towel to wrap around herself. He rubbed her shoulders and arms with it briefly, noticing a hardness, a stiffness that seemed to have infiltrated her skin and muscles.

“Here,” he said, pulling his bathrobe from its hook on the back of the bathroom door. “Use this.”

She smiled a little, nodded, wrapped it around herself.

They moved to the main room and she sat on the sofa. He paced the floor slowly, trying to think, but unable to come to any conclusions.

“Did you want some—?” he started to say, then stopped, unable to remember what he’d meant to offer her.

“I’m okay,” she said, staring ahead of herself, at nothing.

“How do you feel?” he asked from the window. The sleet had begun to turn to snow, slow fat flakes tumbling down.

“Weird,” she said. “Hot. Cold. Stiff.” She pressed her fingers together. “It’s like I don’t have any sensation left. Or hardly any. I can hardly feel myself doing this.”