“Does he have a name?” asked the therapist.
Rain hadn’t wanted to say that he did. Saying his name gives him power. Saying his name calls him. Those thoughts flicked through her mind that day in the therapist’s office.
And yet she said his name anyway. Unwanted, unbidden, the name came out of her mouth without permission, as if the words were crawly bugs and her mouth wanted to spit them out.
“Doctor Nine,” she said.
She said it then and she said it now. The name hung burning in the air both times. It was nailed to the moment in a bad way. Crooked and awkward and ugly.
“What does that name mean to you, Lorraine?” asked the therapist.
Rain hadn’t answered. The therapist asked again, and again, and finally put some edge into it. “Lorraine, why do you call him Doctor Nine and—Oh!”
That’s when the therapist’s nose had started to bleed. It was a bad nosebleed, too. She couldn’t stop it. The blood ran thick over her upper lip and down around her mouth and in between her lips. The therapist gagged and yelped and ran for the little bathroom. Rain sat there and did nothing except listen to the coughing sounds from the bathroom and look at the pattern of bright red dots spattered across the floor.
It’s because you said his name, thought Rain at the time. He doesn’t like it. You’re not allowed.
They took the therapist to the emergency room. Rain never saw her again. She never heard what happened to her. The new therapist gave her meds and asked her about her mother and never mentioned Doctor Nine at all.
Doctor Nine.
Rain had no idea why she called him that except that it was his name. One of his names. What she did know was that Doctor Nine had been in that dream, in the fire-bright place in the dream. Every time she began to turn to look at something else magical and bright, she’d catch a glimpse of him out of the corner of her eye. Each time she would turn, and he would not be there. Even in the dream, Rain didn’t think she was imagining that he was there. He was there, but he’d slipped away to hide inside a shadow, because he didn’t want her to see him. Yet.
Not yet. He wanted to watch her and watch her looking for him. When she caught those glimpses, he was always smiling. She knew that about Doctor Nine. He never, ever laughed but always, always smiled. A big, wide, white smile. He had red lips and very wet teeth and he loved watching her.
“Doctor Nine,” she said again, spitting the words into the empty morning air. “Fuck you.”
“What?” asked a stranger’s voice, and Rain opened her eyes. It took a moment for her to remember where she was. A Starbucks in the city. The dream flew away like a balloon that had not been properly tied. Gone.
She shook her head at the stranger, and he gave her a look like he’d pegged her as another New York crazy. One of the Others.
Rain sipped her coffee and winced. It was ice cold.
She got up, threw the cup away, and went outside into a misty drizzle. It was a weird morning, and it was like the day started off by stripping its gears. Rain rubbed her eyes, not yet realizing that her trembling fingers were painted with magic.
CHAPTER NINE
The kid on the skateboard rolled down the wet Brooklyn street, moving in and out of traffic, onto curbs and back to asphalt with the seamless and uncomplicated flow of creek water following the path of least resistance.
He wore torn blue jeans, an ugly thermal hoodie that was four sizes too big, a stained New York Yankees baseball cap, and a bright blue waterproof backpack that was the only new, clean, and undamaged item he owned. He’d stolen it two days ago. Even his skateboard was junk, with mismatched trucks and a cracked deck.
The backpack was heavy, and it rattled with every irregularity the wheels rattled over.
As he rounded one corner, he saw that there was a line of big black birds on the telephone wires. A murder of crows, he thought. It was a phrase he had learned from a television show. He turned his board so that he skated with his back to the birds. It might work. They weren’t looking for him. They didn’t know he’d escaped again. Not yet, anyway.
Just in case, though, he stopped at every building on the block, ran up the stone steps and loitered inside long enough to sell the idea that he was delivering something. Flyers, maybe. In the third building, there was a stack of printed ads from one of the big-box stores, and he stole it, used a Filipino butterfly knife to cut the twine, and took it with him. He made sure to leave a few at each building so his stack would diminish. He also made sure to spend exactly the same amount of time in each building.
Even the one where he picked the lock on a specific mailbox and left a small, shiny windup pocket watch nestled in among the letters.
Then he delivered the remaining ads to the other buildings and skated away into the drizzle. The nightbirds watched him, but they did not see his small, secret smile.
CHAPTER TEN
Rain walked without paying any attention to where she was going or even glancing at the names of the street signs. The drizzle had stopped, but the sky was still overcast. The old woman’s glasses bounced on their chain, tapping against Rain’s chest in time to her feet, and that awkward metronome was all she thought about. Or tried to think about.
She wanted to call Joplin, but he was probably painting, with his moody Miles Davis music turned all the way up and his ringer turned off.
Moving fast and on autopilot was her way to keep the panic away. To force the monsters back into their box, to slam the lid down, wrap it in chains, fumble the locks into place, snap them shut. That was the process. The box was real to her, in its way. It had been something another of her shrinks had taught her—to create a kind of Pandora’s box that would contain all her evils, her fears, her rational and irrational terrors, and a lot of the memories of the terrible things she had done and which had been done to her. The box was very full. The shrink suggested she name it, to claim it as her own, and she remembered the title of an old Grateful Dead song she heard once—“Box of Rain”—and that’s what she had named it. The Box of Rain contained so much of her, because fear, doubt, self-loathing, addiction, need, and other similar qualities seemed to define her; it was appropriate they would reside in a box with her name on it.
So Rain crammed all the emotions that were crashing around in her head and heart into the box. It took effort. It cost her, as it always did. She knew it was a temporary measure and not a permanent solution. Not by any stretch. The panic monster wasn’t so much trapped in the box, as it used it as a nest. It waited there. It did not allow her to lock it away, and it liked the taste of her pain too much to wander far.
It was her feet that brought her back to herself. They were killing her. Why is it that cute shoes are so evil? Trying to answer that saw her down two more blocks.
Finally, she stopped and leaned on another signpost for a moment, lifting one foot for a few seconds, then the other as she looked around. The street was in shadows because the buildings on one side were taller than the other and they blocked the sun. It was colder here and, she realized, empty. There were some houses and a few stores, but everything was closed. On a Saturday?
Rain limped over to the closest store, but the windows were grimed to a gray opacity, and there was an unhelpful sign on the door with a little clock that said BACK AT 2. The note was old and weather-stained. Above the store was a sign:
MORT’S MEATS
The picture beneath the words was a silhouette of a big, hulking fat guy with heavy shoulders and a dripping meat cleaver. The stink of dust and something gone very bad a long time ago clung to the outside of the place, so Rain moved away. Who the hell would ever have bought meat at Serial-Killers-R-Us?
Another store farther along the street had a window filled with clocks and watches and a sign with the kitschy name Time Management. The window glass was dusty, and every single clock was stopped. All at different times. There was no one inside, and the place had an empty, abandoned look.
No one’s paying attention to time,
she thought. Then she grunted and replayed that. It was the kind of oddball half joke that often occurred to her, but at the same time it felt …
What?
Strange? That wasn’t it; or at least it was too obvious.
No, thought Rain, the thought had been accurate. Though accurate how was beyond her. Friday was gone, so there was that. On impulse, she looked at her phone, at her call log, text messages, and emails. There was nothing from Friday, and that was weird in itself. She never went a day without at least some kind of spam mail. And her calendar was set to send her notices about every NA meeting in her part of Brooklyn. Plus her pals from the meetings, Yo-Yo and the two Bobs, sent her snarky Facebook memes, stupid cute animal videos, pictures of very hot guys, like that. But there was nothing. The last incoming email had been from 11:41 on Thursday night, telling her that she needed to log in to her PayPal account using her email address and password. Typical scam trying to steal her information. The laugh was on them because Rain didn’t have a PayPal account and she knew every money-grabbing con in the book. All junkies did. No emails, texts, or links after that. Nothing.
The clocks in the window were dead, their hands frozen. Except for one, a grandfather clock with Roman numerals but no hands at all.
Someone stole its time, too.
She had a momentary and inexplicable impulse to put on the old lady’s glasses as she stood there in front of all those quiet clock faces. She almost did, but after telling herself that it was stupid, Rain turned away.
The houses on this block were quiet and some of the doors were boarded up. Old boards, though, with lots of frayed handbills flapping on them, crisscrossed and overlaid, and graffiti tags in elaborate colors. Rain walked to the corner and looked up and down the side streets. They were empty, too. There was a rubble-strewn lot where a house had burned down recently and runoff from old rusted pipes ran red into the gutter. It looked like the rubble was bleeding.
“You are an idiot,” she told herself, but her voice sounded too loud.
She discovered that the GPS app on her cell couldn’t get a signal. Of course it can’t, she grumped. Why would a single woman lost in Murder Alley need a goddamn signal?
Rain walked down a side street, looking for a sign, but there wasn’t one. Very helpful. A sound made her turn, and she saw a cab turning behind her to go down the street she’d just left. Rain’s hand shot up and she yelled for it, but the cab kept moving, and by the time she ran to the corner, it was turning again at the far end of the block. Seeing it vanish like that somehow felt like a statement, though Rain wasn’t sure of the exact wording. Something along the lines of “The universe doesn’t give a shit about you.”
The day was so quiet, and when she stood still and cocked her head to listen, the sounds of traffic were distant, muffled, and hard to locate. Orienting herself was a challenge. How far had she walked? Manhattan was an island and the streets made sense. All she needed to do was find one street sign, and she could figure everything else out.
She walked for several blocks and found nothing, so she cut down some side streets, hoping to get lucky. No signs, no people, no open stores. A coldness began forming in the pit of her stomach. None of this made sense. This was New York. It was never quiet and never deserted. She wanted to take her shoes off because her feet hurt so bad, but the pavements were filthy and there was a lot of broken glass and trash. Above her, the sky darkened, and she saw, with mounting despair, that denser rain clouds had gathered. Even as she stared up at them, the first cold, fat drops fell, slapping her cheeks.
“Really?” she demanded of the sky. “Seriously?”
There was a distant growl of thunder and then as if that—or her reproachful questions—flipped a switch, the rain began to fall. She turned and ran, looking for a doorway in which to hide, but the rain chased her, caught her, drenched her. It was cold. So intensely cold. Icy fingers wormed their way beneath each layer of clothes, touching her skin, stealing her heat. A covered alley ran between two boarded-up stores, and she ran into it. It stank of garbage and excrement and other smells she did not want to label. More of the rainwater discovered cracks in the rows of planks someone had erected to form a roof, and cold droplets ambushed her as she moved from one end toward the other. It seemed somehow brighter at the far end of the alley, as if the shower was localized and on the other street the sun was still shining. Or maybe it was the artificial lights of a store. Anything. Rain moved through the shadows, tripping occasionally, her fingers reaching for the mossy walls for support.
It seemed to take forever to reach the other end, and as she approached, she saw that it was raining there, too. The light did not come from the sky.
At the end of a thousand years of darkness, the alley spilled out into another street. It was the glow of headlights. She stared. There, framed by the walls of the alley’s mouth, half-veiled by the falling gray rain, stood a car. It crouched there on the glistening black asphalt, with smoke curling up from the tailpipe and steam hissing from the hot skin of its hood. Four-ways pulsed like a heartbeat, urgent, steady, alluring. Nor was it a late-model car. This was an old ’57 Chevy painted a flaming scarlet with broad yellow lines running from tailfins to headlights. On the front fender, painted in a swirl of fiery letters traced in black, were three words.
The Red Rocket
There was a sign on the grille from one of the car companies. Like Uber or Lyft, but Rain did not recognize the logo and right then did not much care. The driver, just a shadow within the vehicle, looked at her through the water-beaded glass of the side window. The rain was coming down in sheets now, smashing onto the roof of planks, finding her, drenching her, leeching away the last bits of warmth in her skin, making her fingers and toes burn.
The driver yelled to her. “Licensed car service, ma’am! Need a ride?”
She almost said no. Almost ran back the other way.
She did neither of those things. Instead, Rain burst out into the street, ran the eight short steps to the cab, jerked the door open, and literally dove into the back seat.
“Get me out of here,” she begged. She was a tangle of too many arms and legs and not enough room, but she clawed her way onto the bench seat.
The driver turned to look at her, but all Rain saw was the shadowy outline of a head and shoulders and the glowing tip of an e-cigarette through a smoky blue haze.
“Where to?” he asked.
She looked around. “I don’t even know where I am.”
The e-cigarette tip flared bright as the driver drew on it. A dog ran across the street directly in front of the car, throwing a feral snarl at the machine. The driver punched the horn, and the mournful Doppler wail chased the dog away. The windshield wipers slashed back and forth like the frenetic scythes of maddened reapers.
Rain turned to see if the dog was all right, but it was gone. Instead, she saw a man standing on the same corner where she’d last seen the animal. He was tall and wore a black suit. He held the curved handle of an umbrella in one hand, and the black silk dome completely hid his face.
Somehow Rain knew that the man was bald and that he was smiling.
“Drive,” she said again. Softly, urgently.
“To where?”
“Anywhere. Christ, just drive.”
The driver gave two seconds of a penetrating stare, then he nodded, turned, and hit the gas. The car tore holes in the storm.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
It took Rain a while to gather up all the disconnected pieces of herself and clumsy them back into something resembling an adult woman. All things considered, it was not a grand success. Her clothes were soaked, and there were stains on her skirt and jacket from the disgusting trash in that alley, and she was sure some of the stains on her shoes were never going to come out. A homeless person wouldn’t mug her for anything she wore. The rain had soaked her all the way down to her underwear, and she felt violated by it, invaded. She was a mess. When she checked to make sure she had enough money for this ride, she fo
und that there was water in her purse. She fished out a couple of soggy fives and a few ones that lay like debris amid the flotsam of her lipstick and eyeliner.
“Any survivors back there?” asked the driver.
Rain’s first reaction was to tell him to go screw himself, but she didn’t.
“Jury’s out.”
The driver laughed. He had a good laugh, and he didn’t laugh too much, too loud, or too long. Rain judged people on how they laughed, and when, and grudgingly gave him a couple of points.
Lightning flashed blue-white, and a heartbeat later, deep thunder boomed with such shocking force it set off car alarms along the side of the street. The heavy rain intensified to a downpour that blurred out the street signs and washed everything in a featureless gray.
She fished for her brush and tried to make sense of her hair while covertly checking out the driver. He was a light-skinned black man. Thirtysomething. Very thin, with a crooked nose that had probably been broken and set badly. He wore a ball cap backward on his head. There was a logo on the cap—a bald eagle clutching an American flag hovering over the featureless tan-colored outline of Iraq with OPERATION ENDURING FREEDOM stitched above it, and below that, the word VETERAN. The hand resting on the top of the knobbed steering wheel was missing most of the little finger, and there was something wrong with the skin on his arm. It was mottled pink and brown and as uneven as the cheese on an overbaked pizza. Burn scars? Probably. It wasn’t hard to connect those scars with that hat. Rain didn’t ask him about it, though. She had her own history with the war in Iraq. Noah had been burned, too. Burned and …
Don’t do it, she warned herself. Do not do that.
Rain tried not to think about the boy she had loved for such a short time before he went to off to die in a desert she couldn’t find on a map. Trying not to think about him was part of how she stayed straight. Most of the time, she succeeded. Not always, though. And even now after nearly ten years, it still stuck knives into her and twisted them very, very slowly.
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