Lullaby for the Rain Girl (15 page)

He—I—stood facing her beside the bed. She sat up, folding her legs under her, and took my erection gently in her small hand, stroking it. She smiled, looked up at the boy standing before her. Her lips moved, but whatever she’d said was inaudible on the ancient videotape.

I thought: No. We were never this way, never so young, these were never our bodies, never our lives. They couldn’t have been. Certainly not.

Yet eventually my younger self climbed onto the bed with her. She reclined onto her back. Her thighs opened. Her arms went around my, his, waist.

Oh my God.

I watched—horrified, embarrassed, saddened, moved—as my long-dead self made love to this long-dead girl.

As I stared at the screen I had an odd sense that there was someone in the room with me.

Glancing quickly over my shoulder, I saw the Rain Girl just behind me there in the semi-darkness, the light of the TV flickering on her face. In the instant before I reacted I saw that her expression was wide-eyed: not in shock or disgust, not in titillation.

In hunger. In
need.

It was the same look you sometimes see on the faces of starving people in news stories about Third World famines. The eye sockets appear to grow larger, the eyeballs virtually popping out from the face. The cheekbones sink in, corpse-like. The mouth gapes. Yet the entire face seems nothing but eyes, eyes gazing, envisioning something that we, the comfortable, the well-fed, can never see.

That was her expression now.

“Kiddo—” I started to say, then gathered my wits and grabbed the remote, shut off the VCR.

We sat in silence for a moment. My heart was pounding, pounding. She was kneeling behind the sofa, her eyes still on the TV screen, as if there remained something to see there. I watched her.

“Why did you do that?” she asked, her voice breathless.

“It’s not—honey, you can’t watch—things like that…”

“Turn it on again.”

“No.”

“Please?”

“No.”

Finally she looked at me. “That was
you,
wasn’t it?”

I sat forward, buried my face in my hands, tried to breathe. I heard her step around, felt her drop down on the sofa next to me.

“It was,” she repeated, “wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“And the girl—the woman—that was…was
Rachel,
wasn’t it?”

“Yes. It was.”

We sat silently in the darkness.

I asked finally, “How did you get in here?”

“Your door isn’t locked.”

“It locks automatically.”

“Not this time it didn’t. Go see.”

Looking at her, I stood. I was glad it was dark: my face felt flushed with emotion. I was sweating. I moved to the door, which was indeed slightly ajar. I pushed it shut.

“You always have an explanation,” I sighed, “for everything.”

“Tell me about Rachel, Ben.”

“You need to go home now.”

“Oh, come on, Ben.” She scowled and stood. “You should know by now that I don’t have a ‘home.’”

“Where do you go, then?”

She shrugged, stepped near me. She wore the same drab brown coat I’d always seen her in.

“Who are you?” I asked.

Our eyes met in the darkness.

“You know who I am, Ben,” she said finally.

I shook my head. “I don’t.”

“If you think about it, you’ll know.”

I heard myself groan. I dropped down to a chair at my little dining room table. “I have thought about it,” I said. “I don’t have any answers.”

She brought my forgotten tea mug to the table and placed in before me, then sat at the other chair.

“Can I watch the video?” she asked, “Please?”

I took a sip of the lukewarm brew. “It’s a porn video, kiddo. A homemade porn video. I can’t let you see that.”

“I don’t think it’s porn. It’s not porn if it wasn’t made for other people to see. It’s not porn if the people in it are in love.”

I looked at her, sighed shakily. “What do you know about it?”

“I just know.”

I shook my head. “There’s plenty of porn on the Internet, if that’s what you want to see.”

“That’s not what I want to see.” She paused and looked closely at me. “I want to see my mother.”

The room grew darker. “What?”

“My mother. I want to see my mother.”

“Rachel was not your mother.”

“Yes, she was.”

“Rachel never had children.”

“But she’s my mother.”

I shook my head violently. “Rachel did not have children.”

“She’s my mother.”

“Honey—” I started to reach out to her, pulled back again. “It’s impossible. I would have known. There wasn’t—she didn’t have children. There was no possibility of that. I know it. For a fact.”

“She’s my mother, Ben.”

I studied her eyes. They glistened in the darkness.

“You’re wrong, kiddo. I don’t know where you got that idea. I’m sorry. But you’re wrong.”

“I’m not wrong, Ben.”

“Then—if  Rachel—I don’t know,  I guess—before I knew her, maybe—I can’t imagine, but just say—if she was your mother, then who…?”

“You are, Ben.”

There was another long silence. The elevator made its chuffing sounds down the hall. My chest hurt.

“I
am? Kiddo, I can’t be.”

“You are, though.”

“Not—” I suddenly realized that I was gripping the warm mug tightly, so tightly it might break apart in my hands. I let it go and shook my head again. “It’s not possible. Not—not with Rachel. Maybe with some other girl, later. I mean, I guess I’d have to admit that would be
possible.
But with—with Rachel—the timing—no. There’s no possibility. It can’t be.”

I watched her watching me. She was crying quietly. Her glistening eyes seemed to melt down her cheeks.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart. Some things just aren’t possible.”

“You don’t understand, Ben.”

“I understand that I can’t be your father,” I said gently. “That Rachel almost certainly couldn’t have been your mother.”

“You don’t understand.”

“There’s nothing to understand. Just—just how the human reproduction process works. That’s all anybody needs to understand.”

“No, Ben.”

“What, then?” I reached out and touched her very solid, decidedly un-ghostlike hand. “What do you mean? Tell me what you mean.”

She stared at me for a long time, tears making slow, shining rivers on her face.

“You have to go back farther,” she said.

“Go back? What do you mean?”

“Your story. That you wrote? About Mitchell and Jane? That took you back, but not far enough. You have to go farther. To understand.”

“To understand what?”

“To
understand,
Ben.”

Suddenly something inside myself seemed to grab my heart and squeeze it—hard. Very hard.

I gasped and doubled over in the chair. Sweat poured from my forehead.

“Ben?” she said. “What is it?”

“I—” The world turned red, then blue, and I had a sensation of falling. Had the end come at last, in darkness and pain? The end of the century, the millennium, the world?

I think I blacked out for a moment. When I came to my breath was shallow and fast.

I opened my eyes.

She was kneeling over me in the semi-dark, her expression frightened. I saw that she held my hand in hers, though I couldn’t seem to feel it.

“Call...Call...” I gasped. I was shocked at how difficult it was to say the words. It was as if a cement block had been dropped onto my chest, pushing out all the air.

“You’ll be okay, Ben,” she said, clasping our hands together under her chin. “Just relax. Try to breathe.”

“Call...” But I couldn’t finish what I was trying to say, which was:
Call 911.

“Just breathe,” she said softly. “Breathe. You’ll be okay. Trust me.”

I looked at her and a wild idea crossed my mind. “Are you—is it—you? Are you...?”

“I’m not doing it, Ben. Oh my God, I would never hurt you. Don’t you know that by now? I don’t want you to be hurt. Not ever. You’re having a heart attack. It’s a very mild one. You’ll be okay. Just stay quiet and try to breathe.”

“I—how—do you...?”

She smiled slightly. “Because I’m
observant,”
she said quietly.

I looked at her. The tears had mostly dried on her face but I could still see slight, fading glistenings on her cheeks. The cement block lifted partially.

“Just breathe slowly,” she insisted. “Breathe....”

“Honey...”

“Shh.”

“Honey, what—did you mean...go back—farther...?”

“Think about it, Ben,” she said, her voice hardly above a whisper. “Think about all of it. Lie there quietly and think. Think and breathe.”

I had a distant sensation of her hand, her hand wrapped strongly around mine, giving strength to me, to us both.

Outside it started to rain.

“Breathe,” she said again. “Breathe.”

And then, sometime later, very quietly, almost shyly: “...Dad.”

Love is a sickroom with the roof half gone

Where nights go down in a continual rain.

Heart, heart. I do not live, the lie of peace

Echoes to no end; the clocks are dead.

What we have had we will not have again.

—Weldon Kees, “Girl at Midnight”

1

The first love of my life was a little orange-haired girl with the dashing name of Sherry O’Shea.

Stone’s End, where she and I grew up next door to each other, is located some twelve miles off Highway 5, roughly halfway between Sacramento and Stockton—the kind of town that wouldn’t be hard to find if anyone thought to look for it, which few ever have. There’s no industry in Stone’s End, no natural attraction; it’s too far from San Francisco to the west and from the Gold Country to the east to receive any tourist spillover. Its biggest claim to fame does, however, come from the Gold Rush days. Stone’s End is so named, legend has it, after the notorious Jeremiah J. Stone—“J.J.” to friends and foes alike—who, after a month-long spree in which he relieved twelve banks of their funds and three clerks of their lives, met his own end here on Easter morning in 1855. Though the official story was that Big John Taylor, the sheriff of this province (which was then known, for reasons lost to history, as “Mad Hat”), faced him down in a man-to-man shootout on Main Street, the hapless J.J. is said to have shuffled off this mortal coil with the fairly surprising total of ninety-six bullet holes in his body.  This inconvenient fact—if fact it was—did not stop the town leaders from erecting a bronze statue in the likeness of Big John Taylor, a statue that still stands in a little park off Liberty Road today. Nor did it stop them from renaming the town after this incident, Mr. Taylor’s single greatest accomplishment as a lawman.

But the Wild West quality of the town was over a hundred years gone by the time my neighbor and I discovered each other—though “discovered” is the wrong word, since I can’t recall a time in my life before I knew Sherry O’Shea. She was as much a part of my early childhood as Dad, as Alice, as our house at 319 Sycamore Street. I have a memory of looking out my bedroom window and seeing her there, just my age—four or five, I guess; my mother couldn’t have been dead long—careening boisterously across a slickly wet Slip ’n’ Slide her parents had unfurled on their back lawn. In my mind I see her swimsuited body rolling and tumbling, her curly hair bobbing, and hear her delighted yelps filling the empty quiet of the afternoon. Her mother sits watching her, a small, pleasantly bored smile on her face. A magazine is in her lap, a cigarette between her fingers.

And later, not too much later, it’s the two of us together on that Slip ’n’ Slide, Sherry bounding ahead of me while I follow floppingly behind, crashing wetly into her at the end of the runner and sending us both rolling into the grass. Laughter then, little-kid wrestling, chasing, squirting the garden hose at each other, much shrieking silliness.

We weren’t always friends. After first grade we withdrew from each other, she into the world of girls, I to boys. If I missed her, I have no memory of it: life then was basketball, baseball, soccer, running and leaping and kicking. Yet I was always aware of her. I would watch sometimes as she ran around the front yard with her family’s golden retriever, Rusty, or played catch with her father, tossing a little round rubber ball with him which Rusty would grab and run away with delightedly whenever either of them dropped it. Sherry was an only child, and while I had Alice, she was eight years older than me; in the absence of our mother, she was more like a very young surrogate parent than a sibling.

Sherry and I were brought together on a regular basis, with neighborly barbeques (whatever his other problems, Dad was magnificent in front of a grill) and dual-family outings to the local movie house. I don’t recall Sherry and I doing a lot of talking at such times, but I do remember playing Yahtzee and Scrabble with her, the two of us sitting together on the carpet in their living room, the TV softly playing
Hawaii Five-O
or
That Girl
or
Room 222
beside us. I have a specific memory of Sherry turning the dial to
Peyton Place
on one of those evenings and her mother, on coming into the room, emitting a little gasp and quickly switching us over to something less racy.

“Aw,
Mom!”
Sherry moaned.

Sherry O’Shea wasn’t particularly pretty—the photos I have of her show a little girl whose future issues with her weight were already clearly apparent; she wasn’t fat, but she was naturally big, with thick arms and thighs and a round face peppered with tan-colored freckles. Her eyes were crystal-blue, nearly clear, with a curious fold to the lids which gave the impression that her eyes were partly closed, making her appear sly or sleepy, when they were wide open.

But Sherry’s most striking feature, by far, was her hair. People called her a redhead, but her hair wasn’t red: it was orange, brighter than a carrot or a tabby cat, a virtually neon orange that I would later tease her as being her special glow-in-the-dark feature. She seemed to have mixed feelings about this crazy-colored hair of hers. Some years she would have it cut back so much that she resembled a boy. But at other times she let it all grow out and tumble fantastically across her shoulders and back, a set of wild waves that, when she was older, would turn male heads in the street.

She was never a star among the girls in our classes at school, but neither was she an outcast. She occupied a safe place in the second rank, girls who didn’t threaten the status of the queen bees but who were perfectly acceptable when needed as teammates or Science Lab partners. Boys ignored her, as they generally ignored all the girls. But in her case there was a special reason: she was thought to be my girlfriend, even though I never spoke to her in school or even so much as looked at her. I wasn’t teased about it, and I don’t think she was either; it just seemed to be universally accepted as a fact. Ben and Sherry were in love. Everybody knew it except, for a time, us.

Where our classmates got this notion I don’t know, though in retrospect I suppose all the kids realized—it was a very small town—that the Falls and the O’Sheas spent a certain amount of time with one another, that Ben and Sherry went places together (always with our parents, but that was beside the point), and that we spent time alone together, something few of us that age would have done with members of the opposite sex unless they were family members. Yet, as I’ve indicated, few of these get-togethers amounted to much between Sherry and me. We could sit watching TV or playing Monopoly for hours without speaking, all but ignoring each other. Throughout elementary school there was no clandestine holding of hands, no awkwardly breathless first kiss in the balcony of a movie house. I don’t believe the thought of such things ever crossed either of our minds. We were pushed together by our parents and so put up with each other, that’s all.

Things changed when we hit middle school.

Once—we were probably twelve—our two families went together to a Fourth of July fireworks show out of town (I don’t recall exactly where—Stockton, maybe?). The night was baking, the breeze hot and dry in our faces, and we were sitting on hard wood bleachers looking up at the exploding reds and yellows and whites. Dad and Alice were on my left; Sherry was next to me, on my right, wearing a tank top and cut-off blue jeans. I remember how my glance dropped from a glittering flower of light in the sky down across the crowd and finally to Sherry, whose face was still upturned. As my eyes moved I realized, in a burst of understanding as sudden and spectacular as the fireworks above us, that Sherry had
breasts:
there they were, slightly damp with sweat and wrapped loosely in her green tank top, the split between them clear and obvious. I found myself breathing faster, noticing also her pale, freckled shoulders, naked but for the straps of the tank top, and the delicate hair on her arms; and her thighs, the
skin
of her thighs, completely bare beyond the fringes of her shorts. I felt an erection suddenly huge and urgent in my pants. I was excited, exhilarated, but shocked too: this was Sherry, Sherry O’Shea, the same kid I’d known all my life and never particularly liked or disliked. But in that moment she wasn’t simply a kid. She was a
girl.

I must have been staring at her, since after a moment she glanced at me and asked, “What are you
looking
at?”

I felt myself flush red, the first time I’d ever had any feeling of embarrassment around Sherry O’Shea. Our eyes met. Hers, archly angled because of her heavy eyelids, were suddenly beautiful. A second later, astonishingly, and with a slight groan escaping my lips, I ejaculated violently, even painfully, in my pants.

Sherry looked at me, then down at my lap, then up at me again, with a puzzled expression. Finally, scowling and tight-lipped, she returned her attention to the fireworks.

I sat there horrified at myself, horrified that everyone knew what had just happened: but as I glanced shamefaced to my left, I saw that Dad’s and Alice’s faces were gazing up at the latest crackling blossoms in the air. The same was true on my right, and all around. The darkness and noise had kept anyone from noticing, except Sherry.

For weeks afterward we didn’t speak to each other, but there was nothing unusual about that. The boy/girl division was still strong in middle school, and we each had our own friends. I recall no secret or embarrassed exchanges of looks, no sense of tension or awkwardness between us. Things just continued as before. But I was changing in other ways, and rapidly. My Sherry-inspired discovery of girls seemed to refocus the entire lens through which I had, until then, lived my life: suddenly they were everywhere in my mind, in my imagination, completely overwhelming whatever juvenile thoughts that had occupied me previously. My God, I discovered, girls were
pretty.
I
liked
looking at them. In fact, I found myself hardly able to stop gazing at Enid Forth, Karen Adler, Melody Wannamaker—classmates who had heretofore commanded no attention from me at all but who were now center stage in my newly fervid fantasy life. My mind was overrun with hands, eyes, lips, breasts, tight bellies, curving hips and thighs, gentle high voices. The dangers I saved each of those girls from! The villains I defeated! The hot kisses we shared!

What I actually understood about girls’ anatomies and sex was fairly limited. I had a reasonable comprehension of things theoretically, but this was decades before the Internet would make everything any twelve-year-old would want to know graphically obvious and instantly accessible. My father was silent on these matters. Alice, at this point attending community college, had little time for me; anyway, we never shared serious confidences or talked of intimate things. No, the best a red-blooded young boy like me could hope for was a copy of
Playboy
or
Penthouse—
not wrapped in plastic back then—quickly snatched from the magazine rack of the local newsstand, opened instantly to the center, studied furiously for a second or two, then pushed back onto the rack before the proprietor Mr. Wannamaker (Melody’s dad) noticed.

Other things were happening to me. Though I didn’t entirely give up sports—like Sherry, I was never a star among my peers, but I was at least of average ability on a basketball court or baseball diamond—I’d discovered Edgar Allan Poe in a school reader, first “The Cask of Amontillado,” then “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and this affected my psyche nearly as strongly as girls did (if in, to put it mildly, a completely different way). I’d always loved creepy and far-out movies and liked to watch old ones on TV (
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
was one of my great favorites), but reading Poe was something different. Movies were outside me, external; Poe seemed to sink directly into my deepest self, my soul. He was
visceral.
The fact that I didn’t understand his every word was immaterial—I got the gist, and there was something about his language, that torrent of wild feverish words, that transported me to a place I’d never known existed. I bought a paperback of his stories from Mr. Wannamaker—he complimented me on my taste while I found myself wondering if he could somehow sense the torrid fantasies I was having nightly about his daughter—and found myself engulfed in Poe’s worlds: razor-sharp pendulums, premature burials, nightmarish ravens. It was a short journey from Poe to
Dracula, The Hound of the Baskervilles,
and
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
I was terrified. I was enchanted.

I became a bookworm.

My newfound interest wasn’t lost on Sherry, whom I’d sometimes seen with books of her own: Nancy Drew, Alfred Hitchcock’s Three Investigators, the occasional paperback nurse novel. I was sitting in our backyard one warm Saturday in August when I suddenly heard her voice from across the fence: “What’re you reading?”

That was typical of how Sherry and I interacted; we had always taken each other too much for granted to bother with formal greetings, or in fact greetings of any kind. Still, I felt slightly odd when I looked up at her. The fourth of July was the last time we’d spoken. She was standing there with her arms folded over the top of the fence, a book in one hand.

“Frankenstein,”
I said, holding up the paperback cover for her to see.

“Is it good?”

“Pretty good,” I said. “Not scary. But it’s interesting. Really different from the movie.”