One Hundred Days of Rain (10 page)

77.

Everything would be perfect if only. This time it's a walk in the green, but the park at the end of the block is fenced off entirely. First it was the public washrooms they razed. Then the children's playground attached to the school, chained against weekenders. Finally the block was entirely closed off by a metal grid with a sign on it about how this was being done for her benefit. Improvements. A timeline for the bulldozers to ignore. She sees the dog people behind the fence. They got in somehow. We went to all the planning meetings, her neighbour with the aged Pomeranian explains. We told them the dog park was self-policing.

Did they listen to you?

Of course not.

She writes a letter about how the park is her child's backyard, how they cannot go a season without it. Sends it to the name on the sign. No reply.

78.

The season has changed, not gradually as you'd expect but flipped like a switch, the air so soft now she doesn't even notice the window being open. She's looking after Nurse's dog while Nurse works at the Catholic hospital two blocks away. Saints preserve us. The dog lays his heavy head on her knee and then gives up and goes away again, his paws clicking on the polished wooden floor.

Men go up the stairs and come out the elevator in the building opposite, on the floor above. The floor below is obscured by its overhang, in its turn indifferently dappled by the cling of rain. She makes herself breakfast, makes phone calls, combs out her hair in the bath. She should put on some clothes: this mere towel around her waist isn't decent. Wet hair drips onto the crook of her elbow and down her back.

All of Good Friday's intentions have ebbed away. Yes, she should cycle to the natural-foods co-op for beef and organic butter but it's so far to go, and look, the rain has begun again. It's two-way rain. On the one side she can tell herself it's not much: just get out in it, you won't even notice. On the other she can use it as excuse.

She chooses the latter. Yesterday she walked: to the corner store for a week's worth of heavy groceries, seven oranges, two lemons, two limes. To the usual shops. To the bank and then through the shopping mall on the way home, fingering merchandise she won't buy.

79.

Rain again, spring rain, starting last night as wet slashes to the face, irregular, erratic. She catches one full in the lips as she walks, a promissory note. More to come.

Rain starts this way and builds and by nightfall there is glitter everywhere and the small thick noise of its falling. Instead of going out into rain she falls asleep. She wakes often in the night: the air is warmer than she is used to, the quilt heavy on her. Nurse's dog, here still, restless, thumping.

By morning rain has resolved itself into silence. The coating of it on the glass opposite. She's lost her hat somewhere, she can't really go out. Not unless she wants to get wet, with her wanton hair.

80.

Sunshine today. The two of them late again, they're late, they're incredibly late as always. Back to work, back to school, back to the packed lunches and the search for containers, back to the tightness at the back of the throat, forward and back, unraveling. Shuttle. The sky clear as far as the eye can see. It's as if it never rained, not once in their lives. Forget me blue.

81.

This morning she wakes to rain. Cars outside swish through the wet. Will she ride? She has a tight black skirt that cleaves to her hips. The amount of her earnings, gathered in preparation for tax time, astounds her. It comes to her with equal astonishment that she has survived the year. Downstairs in her apartment building is a free shelf, offering up the humblest of discards: dented saltshakers and flimsy plastic dishracks, dollar store discards she discovers anew with cries of internal triumph. And all the while she has been offering up these enormous sums, as she sees it now, to lawyers. In trust.

The rain gives a luminous almost beautiful quality to the yellow lamps shining opposite. There are so many different colours of grey. One so pallid as to be practically negligible, the sky holding rain ready to drop. One dark and stone-coloured. A handful shot through with other colours: a pale flashing kind of lavender, the dark slatey blue of night coming on, even white turning up at the edges, like particoloured covers.

82.

They turn into the city (they become part of the city, they enter into it, this enterprise) on a blue day. Here is puffiness, cloudsful, in the sky. Here is surprised sudden summer. How she drinks up these unpredictably dry days. The sun, far above, impersonally caressing them.

How it all begins to change. How the sky grows dirty with it, like a cloth soiled from cleaning: an imperceptible then overlaid filthy grey. A creeping darkness clouds her in, outside, and then the sentinel drops. Meek they are, the Uriah Heeps of rain.

Us?

Oh nothing.

And the rain, murmuring as if to itself: Don't fuss, mustn't grumble, no, not at all, not a thing, I'll just fall here.

And here and here and here. Like armies or termites they count on being ignored until they can overwhelm. And thus the rain comes, finally, with great violence. The people cluster in doorways and under overhangs, helpless and uncertain. An incidental sorority. The girls in white fluffy summer skirts and little flat shoes. Their small shirts and smaller undershirts. The boys' hoods, the last resource of the wetted, flimsy and inadequate. The people who believed, faithful & betrayed. Wet bounces off the pavement, diagonal slash of water-filled sky, repeat, lose count, overwhelm. A man in a white shirt, soaked to the waist, walks for his car gesturing before him with a small black device. A dowser, a blind man.

The next day: la-la-la sunny, like it never rained.

83.

In the grassy pocket park by the market, overlooking the inlet, a sidewalk preacher shouts his wares. She wanders over possessed.

Nobody wants to listen to you, she shouts, standing in front of him. He controls a wince, but can't refrain from turning slightly, cushioning himself. How much easier to shout than to be shouted at! She is invincible. She goes on and on, matching his every word.

Later, back at the house,
S
's neighbour out walking her dog. The neighbour stops to talk. She confesses what she did.

Mm. Did you ask him how long he's been doing this?

She didn't ask him a thing.

Ask him how many people he's converted. Then, after he tells you, tell him he might want to consider a different approach.

84.

Times she misses M. An ache she doesn't want to admit even to herself. So many things tainted now, the feel of M's body in the bed next to hers (tightly clasp) overlaid with their last fight. No bed or body to regret now. M reading reports on the couch. The back of her neat, shorn head above a polo collar. What little is left.

85.

Rain again. How summer isn't coming. The afternoon sun, golden, shafting in at a slant. And these puddles lying crossways on the road, deep and still. Take a memo, Miss Jones. Let it run as follows: There was rain today, there will be rain tomorrow.

Slashes on the windowpane. Dribbles on the fall. Gloomy morning, gloomy noontime, gloomy day with no hint of what is to come. The future. Will it be warm and sunny again? Or bloody like this forever?

Cutting bread and then, sharply, skin. Red speckles on the wrap, on the bread. Spotted.

Rain starts up again in the afternoon. The sound of rain a thousand shushes, a phalanx of Spanish soldiers: sssss. The blood slows, thickens, clots.

86.

When something is bad there comes a time when she needs it. When that sudden sick feeling in the stomach, that sudden gut sock, that sudden drop is like manna. When she doesn't feel right unless she is reeling from another awful revelation. The poison like milk. She sucks it down from a tube and when the tube is taken away without warning, without notice she feels a sudden irrational sense of loss and panic as she blunders in its wake. The rain starts and she doesn't even have sense to cover herself or get out of the way. She stumbles and lurches a great foolish baby, half-skinned, only partially formed.

She tells herself she can get used to the repeated stupid appearances at court, to the horrible accusations, to the looming up, apologetic but determined, of the next officer. This one, at the airport, enforcing an access order nobody was trying to evade. Your ex-wife, he'll say, trying. She'll interrupt: my wife. Might as well claim it for what it is, make the worst case possible. It's a strategy, like chemotherapy.

She congratulates herself on perfecting her response to strangers who mention her marriage. Universally appropriate, she'd like to think. Wry smile. Oh that, she says. Oh her. Like it's a joke, as if it matters that little to her. Inside she's seething as usual, pot on the boil. The roiling, though she'd never acknowledge it, feels a little bit comforting, a little bit like something she knows.

She's longing to talk about it, to go over it again & again like the tongue goes back to a bad tooth, but she thinks it's only decent to pretend. A bad relationship, she tells herself sagely, everyone's had them. So we were married. So what. Lots of people get married. Lots of times it doesn't work out. The platitudes ring hollow. Secretly she feels her loss is tragic: singular & profound. Secretly she understands: this dissolution is a puzzle she is required to solve. A labyrinth within whose painted lines she consents to remain. Who did what to whom. Who was wrong, who was beyond the pale (M, of course, it's obvious, can't everyone see that?), whether in fact she was to blame. In any way. Whether she had been herself, or someone worse. And how exactly it all went wrong, at what moment their marriage stopped being a container with a few insignificant cracks, when it turned into a casualty. Could no longer hold water. These are questions she will have to answer, to somebody's satisfaction. Hers maybe.

She was so surprised when she saw a labyrinth for the first time: no maze of walls but simply a circle traced on the floor of a church hall, infinitely looping back on itself. She learned then that a labyrinth uses nothing to keep you in, except for your own steps stuck to the pattern.

Nurse stretches out a hand, takes hers, touches the circlet on her third finger. Why do you still wear this, Nurse asks. The answer obvious, to her at least. Because I'm still with M. Only half here. Nurse tucks her in, brings her drinks. She should tell her, say: You know this relationship – significant pause – Isn't Going Anywhere. But she doesn't. Too cruel. A different kind of cruelty, sin of omission, what she's doing now. Back to health. Mum's the word on the nights she and Nurse are apart. Nights she can't sleep, thinking of M.

So many betrayals. Blood under the bridge as her boss would say.

87.

Today rain only threatens. The newspaper says it will come later. Speckles on the glass: ghosts of old dirt or the precursor of things to come, it's hard to say.

Nurse I'm sick. Take my temperature. Intubate me Nurse. Nurse, feel my heart. Right here. Is it beating? How strong is the pulse, Nurse? How much time do I have left?

Nurse take me to your kind glass-walled condo. Carry me inside, in your strong arms. Stagger under my weight. I need looking after, like a baby. I picked you for a reason. Can't you see I'm sick, can't you see what's wrong with me? Can't you tell? Bring the cart. Don't send for the technician. I need you.

Is there anything you need, Nurse asks, passing the bed where she lies. The tall bed on its risers, in the tiny room. The chocolate comforter. Anything I can get you.

No. I'm fine, she says, and turns her face, resolute, to the wall.

88.

She imagines herself in another world. Downstairs. How their surroundings will shape them, how they will expand once they have the space to do so. She'll buy furniture, she swears, she'll look on Craigslist, maybe she'll meet someone, when she goes to look at that midcentury sofa. Someone attractive. Maybe someone who doesn't know about her, about her past, about all her mistakes. She'll paint. She hasn't painted but she can, why not, there's no law, nothing to stop her. In this eternally damp weather it'll take a long time to dry but it doesn't matter, she'll keep the big windows she saw along one wall open, she'll let it cure, or whatever it is paint does. The hardware store will know, they'll sell her some paint that's good for kids, that won't kill them with its fumes. She'll paint a nice, rosy pink, salmon-coloured, so everything gets a warm glow. That'd be nice. Or, no, blue. Tiffany blue, that's it. Her new place will look exactly like a jewel box, the kind you open with trepidation and delight. She'll be expensive, that's it. No greys. Nothing dark. Nothing to remind her of rain.

89.

Today it rained. Yesterday it rained. The day before it rained.

She stares out unseeing. Behind her she can feel the weight of the future pressing down on the back of her neck. Have to call. Need to fix. Wipe and wrap. Her favourite word, organize. So often anticipated, so never happening.

I'm moving, but I'm still here, she writes her friend finally, via email. Her friend, her brief ex. The only one who ever said: I'm getting a desk.

What for? Her ex was a chef, all she needed was a kitchen.

For you. So when you come here, you can write.

Tomorrow it will rain again, she wants to tell her. The day after, more rain. And you know how it is: each day the rain ends up being different. Sullen rain. Rain that leaks out of the sky, like an orgasm out of a rock. Mean. Thin. Cold. Rain that lets go. Rain that opens up like a sluice, like internal organs sliding free. Slop and slip. Rain that starts, and stops, and starts again, and peters out, and finally whips itself into a . . . no. Rain that never commits. Rain that should be committed, it's so crazy.

I'm fine, she ends finally. How are you?