Lullaby for the Rain Girl (40 page)

Well, at least she’d liked
Leprechauns Can Be Murder.
Abigail McGillicuddy and her goddamn parrot. I shook my head.

Finally I clicked out of the e-mail and went into the living room, where Rae had turned off the stereo and switched on the TV.

“Kiddo,” I said, “do you want to go for a walk? I feel like some exercise.”

She jumped up. “Great! It’s good for you. Let me get my coat.”

What I really felt was restless, jumpy. Everything was happening at the same time: Rae, my heart attack, and now Sherry O’Shea. I could, of course, simply delete her e-mail and forget about it. But I wouldn’t forget about it, or about the information that she would be in town until next Thursday. That would include Christmas. What kind of company would send their employee out of town over Christmas?

“You okay?” she said, looking up at me as we made our way out of the building. A few snow flurries danced downward to the street. “How’s the old ticker?” She bumped my arm playfully.

“The ticker’s great. Feels great. Really.” And it did, though I found myself aware every time my pulse rate hastened or slowed. I wondered if I would even make it to the millennium, that historical pivot point that both frightened and exhilarated me. To be living in the twenty-first century—it sounded so science-fictioney. And yet, the clocks ticking...all the computers in the world seizing up...airplanes careening down from the sky, elevators in freefall...Y2K, the blasting-back of humanity to the Stone Age...

“You know,” she said, “we don’t have any Christmas decorations in the apartment. None at all.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I never got that kind of stuff just for myself, and a heart attack kind of distracts a person.”

“I’m not criticizing,” she said, smiling. “Only, just...do you think we could get some? I’ve never had, like,
Christmas
before.”

I glanced at her. A thousand questions popped into my mind all at once, but I decided against asking any. Talking to her about her life—life?—before I’d met her only opened up a chasm of mystery, things I doubted I’d ever understand. Who could? It was like college bull sessions I remembered from American University, years ago, a bunch of earnest English majors arguing about the existence of God: around and around we’d go, the beer and weed flowing, saying great and profound things (or so they sounded to us, anyway) that contradicted and disproved each other but in the end, life went on. We stopped talking about the unknowable and went back to our daily lives, singularly unilluminated. It was like that with Rae. I could talk to her forever about who she was,
what
she was, but in the end all that mattered was that she was here, she was my daughter, she was real. The rest was abstraction.

“We could go to the CVS,” I said, pointing across the Circle to the drug store. “They’re open. I imagine they have Christmas things.”

“Yeah! Let’s!”

We did. It was late, but as it was only a few days until the holiday there were plenty of people milling around. We picked up silly things—little Santa statuettes, colorful streamers, a green and red banner that read HO HO HO, cassettes of Christmas music, lots of candy in holiday-hued wrappers.

“Can we get a tree?” she asked, looking at the various artificial trees on display.

“We don’t really have room for a tree, honey.”

“No, I guess not. Hey, what about this?” She picked up a little green potted plant. The pot had been wrapped shiny red gift paper.

I smiled. “That’s a bush, not a tree.”

“So, it’ll be our Christmas bush!”

“But we’d need ornaments for it, wouldn’t we?” As I said it, my glance fell on exactly that: tiny boxes of miniature ornaments for sale. “Well, okay,” I said, taking up a box. “A Christmas bush it is!”

“Awesome!”

Her excitement communicated itself to me and I felt almost giddy as we bought the items. We both giggled with anticipation of turning our apartment into a Christmas-themed wonderland. We rushed home with the loot and spent a laughing half-hour setting things up and decorating our “tree”; by the time we were finished it looked, at least to my eyes, beautiful. Rae made tea for us and we dropped down onto the sofa. She turned on the TV and there it was, one of the basic holiday treats of my childhood:
A Charlie Brown Christmas.
We watched, munching on holiday chocolates and finishing our drinks as Charlie Brown picked the scrawny tree, as he always did, and eventually was forgiven by the other kids, as he always was. At the end I looked at her. There was a tear trickling down her cheek.

“Are you
crying?”
I said, smiling slightly.

“Shut up!” she laughed. “It was sad!”

“It had a happy ending!”

“Well, I still felt sorry for the tree!”

I tickled her and she giggled wildly, kicking and play-slapping me.

Eventually we calmed down again, turned off the TV, sat in the December semi-dark quietly together. I realized that I couldn’t remember another time when I’d been so happy. Thoughts of my heart, of Vincent and his mother, of Dad, of my own fading energies and encroaching mortality—it all seemed far away, if only for a little while.

Finally I heard her breathing grow deep and even and I realized she’d fallen asleep. I jostled her gently off my shoulder and eased her down onto the sofa. I stood looking at her for a while. She looked fuller than she had, it seemed to me. Healthier. Certainly fuller and healthier than when we’d first met, when she seemed so thin and weak that she appeared on the verge of simply crumpling up and vanishing.

I stepped into the bedroom, turned on the computer. Took off my clothes, put on pajamas and a robe while I waited for it to boot up. I glanced at a few irrelevant e-mails and then clicked back to the only one that mattered. Sherry O’Shea’s. I again considered not answering at all. Then I played with possible tones, typing out a few words, a sentence or two—flippant, serious, nostalgic, neutral—and deleted them all. Eventually I glanced at the clock and realized with shocked impatience that I’d been fiddling at this for nearly an hour.

Finally I typed
Would you like to meet at your hotel for a drink?
No salutation, no closing. I hit
Send
before I deleted my words again.

Done.

Well, there it was. Just like that. Contact reestablished, after a decade and a half.

But then, I wondered, how else can contact ever be reestablished between people but suddenly, abruptly? In the end, somebody has to say
hello.
Just like that.

I looked idly around at books on Amazon.com for a few minutes, and then noticed the flag on my little e-mailbox at the corner of my screen pop up. I clicked. It was her.

Inhaling slowly, I opened the message. It was exactly one word long.

The word was:
When?

6

The hotel was in Tenleytown, a short ride up the Metro Red Line from Dupont Circle. I knew the place well; it was the neighborhood of American University, “A.U.,” the hub of the area. It was a trendy neighborhood, filled with restaurants and shops and clubs occupying every inch of space along Connecticut Avenue, its main artery. It was a cold night, one of the coldest of the year, and the frigid wind whipped my face as I came up the subway escalator into the winter dark. Burying my hands in my pockets, I oriented myself and figured out which direction to walk; it would be a couple of blocks, that’s all. I started out, my face quickly starting to sting—I realized too late that I should have worn a hat. But I wasn’t really thinking of the cold. I wasn’t even thinking, quite, of Sherry O’Shea. Instead I was preoccupied with what had happened with Rae before I left the apartment.

“Honey,” I’d said, “I’m going out for a couple of hours, to have a drink with a friend. You be okay here?”

She was watching TV, another of my gigantic shirts overhanging her blue jeans and socks. She was sitting with her knees pulled up, arms wrapped around her legs and her feet on the sofa. It was a cozy picture; she looked just like any kid watching TV.

“What?” she said, her head turning to where I stood at the closet, pulling out my coat.

“I said, I’m going to meet a friend for a drink. I’ll be back in a couple of hours, okay? I won’t be gone long. Dinner was great. Thank you.”

As I pulled my sleeve over my arm I saw her stand up and look at me strangely.

“You’re going out?” she asked in a small voice.

I stopped, coat halfway on. “Mm-hm. Is that okay?”

“I...” She hesitated, seemingly confused. “Can—can I come?”

“Well...” I finished with the coat. “I don’t think it would be very interesting for you, honey. Just an old friend. You know what grown-ups are like when they start talking about old times. Boring, right?”

“I wouldn’t mind. I wouldn’t say a word.”

“Honey, I’ll be gone for an hour or two. That’s all.”

“Where? Where are you going?”

“Tenleytown.”

“Where in Tenleytown?”

I looked at her. “What’s wrong, Rae? You don’t want me to go out?”

She stepped close to me. “I just don’t get why you don’t want to take me. Did I do something wrong?”

I tousled her hair. “Of course you didn’t do anything wrong. It’s just...” It was hard to explain. “I do have friends, you know. People I like to meet sometimes. Just like...” But before I finished the sentence I realized that Rae didn’t have any friends. She had no one but me. “Just like you’ll have, once you get going in school and meet kids your own age.”

“I don’t care about kids my own age.”

I exhaled and moved to the kitchen table, pulled out one of the chairs and sat. I could see this was going to take a few minutes. She dropped down beside me.

“Rae, what’s wrong?”

She didn’t meet my eyes. “I want to go with you.”

“You’d be bored.”

“I don’t care.”

“Honey...”

“It’s just that we’ve
never
been apart. Not since I came.”

“Sure we have. You’ve gone out and gotten groceries, gotten the mail...”

“That’s different. That’s for
us.”

I looked at her. Her arms were limp, her palms open on her lap.

“Well, honey, you know, we can’t be together
all
the time.”

She looked up. “Why not?”

“Well...what about when school starts again? You’ll start your different classes, and...”

“I thought I could just stay with you.”

“With me? Kiddo, they’ll give you a schedule. You’ll have math and science and history—all those things. You probably won’t even be in my English class, you know. They’ll assign you to another teacher.”

“Why?”

“Because—because of favoritism, that’s why. It might not be fair to the other students, if a teacher’s daughter is in the class.”

“You’d be fair. I know you would be.”

“Well...”

“I want to have all my classes with you.”

“Honey, come on, you know that can’t work.” I tried to smile. “I only teach English, you know. You have to...”

She scowled then, and looked away. She bit her lip. In a moment tears started to run down her cheeks.

“Honey, honey,” I whispered, folding her into my arms. “What in the world has gotten into you?”

She was whispering something. I couldn’t quite make out the words, but I knew what they were.

Love me. Love me. Love me.

“Rae, I
do
love you.” I kissed the top of her head. “I
do.”

“Then why are you leaving?” she asked, her voice broken, weak.

“I told you, I’ll be back soon.”

“I’m scared. What if you get hit by a...by a car, or a robber...a robber shoots you, or...?”

“Rae, Rae, nothing like that is going to happen.”

“You don’t know that. You don’t
know.”

“Well, I guess I don’t. But it’s so unlikely—it’s a million to one.”

“So am I,” she said. “A million to one.”

“Honey, we—we have to
live.
We can’t be together all the time. It’s not possible. The world doesn’t work that way. People...they have to have their own lives too. They’re together, because they love each other, but then they’re apart too, sometimes.”

“I don’t want to be apart.”

I held her. Maybe I should just call it off, I thought. Send Sherry an e-mail. Postpone. But then another part of me thought that I had to exert parental authority and guidance here. Maybe by separating for a few hours Rae could see, when I returned, that I
would
come home. Always.

“Honey, I want you to calm down. Come on. You know I wouldn’t leave you. I just need to go see an old friend for a little while, that’s all. I’ll take a short Metro ride up to Tenleytown, go to the hotel, have a drink or two with her, and come back home. I promise.”

“Her?”

“Her. She’s—a girl. A woman. Yeah.”