Bring the Rain
Copyright © JoAnn Franklin, 2019
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press.
Published 2019
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN: 978-1-63152-507-0
ISBN: 978-1-63152-508-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018953150
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locals is entirely coincidental.
Dedicated to Richard
ONE
Painting the outside trim of my house in Southport, North Carolina, was boring and monotonous, which is why I was daydreaming, while standing on a ladder, about an historic, beautiful palace in Salzburg, Austria. The ballroom’s ceiling and columns gleamed with gold leaf, creating a place of light and beauty. Hundreds of scholars and leaders, all experts on poverty, stood before me in that cavernous room. They smiled as I took the podium. Their applause caused my ears to ring.
We had a week together at the prestigious Salzburg Global Seminar. A week to brainstorm how we could erase poverty and ease humanity’s suffering. Not enough time, but the work would start . . . and caught up in my exuberant fantasy, I must have ignored that the ladder wobbled when I stretched to reach the last bit of trim. I did feel my body lean into nothing and remembered thinking, How odd. No one is smiling anymore.
My unconscious mind, the Sentinel, reacted before I could consciously take action. With speed and exquisite care, the Sentinel centered my weight. By the time I realized I was in danger, he had me upright again, my body plastered against the ladder, pinning it into place.
I had almost fallen. I looked a long way down, shuddered, and looked up. Overhead, the sun shone in a cloudless sky, and I felt its heat on my face. I heard the ocean waves and, when a gust swept the paint fumes away, I could smell the salt air, for the Atlantic Ocean was my front yard.
Several deep breaths later, I realized what had happened. I hadn’t been paying attention. No more daydreaming, I told myself, and eased my grip on the ladder, to look up and away from the ladder, to finish the job, this time without the daydream. That’s when I saw what I didn’t want to admit. I’d missed a spot.
I couldn’t believe it. The ladder wasn’t steady. Every muscle ached because I’d been up and down all morning painting this stupid trim plus standing on my tiptoes to reach impossible places, like the spot I’d missed that I didn’t know how I’d missed— although now that I knew the dinginess was there, that was all I could see. I was afraid of heights but living in a two-story house that is over a hundred years old in a climate of salt and humidity makes upkeep a constant chore. No matter how many times I told myself to let it go, that no one could see the dinginess from the ground looking up, the rationalization didn’t matter. I knew that I’d missed a spot, and that wouldn’t do.
I would have to move the ladder again. Ten, twelve, what looked to be hundreds of feet below me, a gigantic beautyberry bush loaded with purple berries blocked the way. Couldn’t move the ladder over. I looked up. Climbing higher on the ladder, to that last rung, made sense, except my mind kept shouting, You’re going to fall. Don’t move.
Academics spend their lives immersed in the nuances of specifics. My research focus is decision-making, which is why my unobtrusive Sentinel hadn’t fooled me. As a scholar of the mind, specifically the conscious (what scientists call System 2) and the unconscious (what scientists call System 1), I know the Sentinel likes his own way. But I’d always believed that I, not the Sentinel, was the one in control.
Yet I hadn’t saved myself from falling. The Sentinel had hijacked my body to yank me back from space. It happens to everyone, but I study this stuff. I’m aware that I’m not in control, but I can never bring myself to believe it. Which is why I’m so shocked that I can’t, no matter how hard I try, bring myself to step up on that last rung and finish the job.
Should have hired this job out, I told myself for the fifteenth time.
But that didn’t matter either. I’d started the work. I’d finish it. If I couldn’t go up or down, I’d have to go over, without moving the ladder. That meant leaning out over nothing. Something I didn’t want to do.
I dipped the brush into the bucket of white satin trim paint that hung on my ladder and reached out, then hesitated. Reconsidering, I dipped the brush again into the paint because I didn’t have the nerve to lean out over nothing twice to reach what I’d missed.
The paint-loaded brush touched the trim.
Just a few brush strokes. That’s all that needed done. Then I could quit for the day.
My arm trembled. My elbow ached, so did my wrist. The brush weighed a hundred pounds. I could do this, and I leaned farther out. My back spasmed.
The paintbrush dropped from my hand.
I grabbed air.
After that, I don’t remember much. Except I thought falling might hurt worse than it did.
That’s when I realized I was still upright, trembling enough to make the ladder shake. The Sentinel had made numerous calculations in nanoseconds, then moved my feet and hands, and twisted my torso in space to center my body weight against the ladder. This time he’d moved me two rungs down from where I’d stood. Normal behavior for the Sentinel because that decision, the calculations, the hijacking, all movement made without my conscious participation, had saved my life.
The unconscious never sleeps, they say. Thank God. I hugged the ladder like my nephew used to hug his old brown teddy bear.
Through the rungs, below me, I saw the brush on the brown mulch, its white-coated bristles splotched with fine particles of hardwood. That could have been me, lying there, spattered with wood chips, startled blue eyes wide open, staring up at the sky. I shivered and closed my eyes.
Then I looked down again because I’d seen something else below me. Patterns, compelling patterns grabbed my attention. Splattered white dots on ripe purple berries and shiny green leaves. Intriguing patterns. I started to connect the dots of white, purple, and green.
I don’t know how long I stood there tracing, retracing, connecting the multiple patterns that linked purple to green to white, green to purple to white, purplewhitegreen.
I do know the pain in my feet brought me back to reality. Released from whatever had kept me focused on that pattern of dots below, I closed my eyes and laid my cheek against the warm ladder. My head felt hot from the sun overhead.
What had happened to me? I’d been standing, staring at those dots for a long time. Maybe for half an hour or more.
I flexed my toes. Opened and closed one hand, then the other, all the while searching for what really happened because this dissociation from reality didn’t make sense. Not for me. I had a reputation for hard work, common sense, insight, and intellect.
The first incident, the Sentinel hijacking my body on the ladder, I could understand. My unconscious did that all th
e time with a seamlessness I never noticed. Tracing phantom patterns on a bruised beautyberry bush though, that meant something else had hijacked my mind, something that wasn’t normal behavior, not for me or for the Sentinel.
I’d never before found dots of paint compelling. In fact, I hated painting the trim, the walls, the floor—anything that involved a brush and paint. I started to tremble from the implications of what I couldn’t accept. That I’m a psychology professor who studies decision making didn’t make one bit of difference to how I felt because, although the Sentinal held me safe from that first skirmish for control, the fury I didn’t know was within my mind wouldn’t give me a second chance. How could my mind be a place of fury, and I hadn’t noticed? Yet I had no reason to doubt the passage of time, the ache in my feet, the hot burn on my scalp, all the evidence that said I’d been standing staring at paint patterns on a bush for way too long. The facts blazed with truth. The Sentinel, an entity more intimate to me than my body, an entity I relied on every second of every day, had stuttered. And that glimpse into my own mind terrified me.
Lost in a mental confusion that wouldn’t let go, I looked up at the sky. The sun blazed hotter. I looked down at the ground. The paintbrush hadn’t moved.
I gripped both sides of the ladder and slid my fingers down the rail as I moved one foot off the rung to the one below. What happened to me today while painting the trim could have happened to anybody. Rationalization wasn’t a wise choice, but those psychological miscues the Sentinel put up had cascaded into denial. Closing my eyes against all external stimuli, I told myself that I had good reason to reject the metaphor of my mind as a battlefield. I moved my other foot to join the first one. Then I stepped down to the next rung. Within the total hours of the day, this was a small blip that would be forgotten once I climbed down off this ladder, got a cool drink, and relaxed for a bit.
Susan heard me come inside. “Done with the trim?” she asked as, without looking up, she laid down her Mahjong tile on the dining room table and said, “One bam.”
“You missed lunch,” Mary Beth said, choosing a tile from the Mahjong wall. “We left you a sandwich in the refrigerator.”
The four women who had rented rooms from me for almost a decade—Classy, Susan, Lynn, and Mary Beth—were playing Mahjong as if nothing had happened. Sunlight filtered through the lace curtains at the large windows. The beams highlighted the lighter accents of lilac and pink in the soft gray floral rug my mother had put under the large dining room table more than fifty years ago.
They played the game every weekend that found all of them home. Each of them rented a bedroom from me, and my home had become theirs, a place of refuge and sanctuary. And by making them founding members of The Raindrop Institute, a think tank I’d started five years ago, they had another purpose for living, although sometimes I felt they preferred to play Mahjong than to untangle complex messy problems.
“I almost fell off the ladder.”
“You didn’t,” Lynn said, looking up at me, refusing to believe that what I’d done had been that dangerous. “You were only up one story.”
“I hate ladders. I’m hiring someone to paint the rest of the trim.”
“We told you, but would you listen?” Classy shook her head and turned away to draw a Mahjong tile. “Oh no. You had to do it yourself.”
That stung. I’d almost died out there. “Don’t know how I’m going to pay for it. Guess I could always raise the rent.”
“Good luck with that.” Susan turned back to the game, but Lynn and Mary Beth didn’t.
“You okay?” Mary Beth asked.
No. But I couldn’t tell her I’d been staring at dots for half the morning.
Nothing to worry about, I told myself for the ten-thousandth time since I’d climbed off the ladder and picked up the paint-brush. People my age had brain farts all the time. I’d have that sandwich Mary Beth mentioned, a drink of water, and relax for a bit. Everything would be fine if I didn’t get back up on that ladder.
“Your letter came, Dart.” Lynn inclined her head toward the single chair at the farther end of the table and the pile of correspondence.
I stiffened as once again space opened beneath me. Patterns, but this time coming to an end.
Atop the pile of business correspondence for our weekly meeting of The Raindrop Institute, which I would convene this afternoon, sat a legal-sized envelope. I made myself walk over, pick it up, and examine the address. As Lynn had indicated, my name was there in old-fashioned cursive writing. Once I saw the return address that was embossed on the envelope, I knew I was about to learn whether I’d finish the trim or pack my suitcases.
My throat dried up. My vocal cords couldn’t work. I felt all the aches and pains in my body and, again, I was falling into that yawning space that wanted me.
“Open the letter, Dart,” Classy said.
“Don’t you think I might deserve a bit of privacy?” I said, clearing my throat.
“Our fate as well,” Susan said. She discarded a four bam.
“Don’t you dare take that into the living room or up to your bedroom,” Classy said. She picked up Susan’s discarded four bam, laid the tile face up on her tray, added two more four bams, and discarded a three dot.
“If you don’t inherit, we all have to go,” Mary Beth said.
The others nodded. This insubordination is what comes of inviting people to share your home. They’d morphed from tenants into friends and then crossed over the line to become family.
They weren’t playing Mahjong any more. They were watching me, but I didn’t like their scrutinizing. None of their blood, sweat, or tears had revitalized this house. This morning, they hadn’t been high above the ground on a ladder painting the trim. No, they’d been inside the house, playing Mahjong while I worked in the hot sun.
Small favors.
Had they been watching, they would have carted me off to the hospital.
“If your father’s fancy-pants lawyer sold this house out from underneath us”—Classy’s voice yanked me from my thoughts— “I’m going to dig up your dad and hurt him.” Classy’s eyes flashed determination. Anger heightened her color, snapped her blond hair out of place because, as usual, she’d raked the curls back from her forehead when she became impatient.
My father and I had found one another five years ago in those long days after his accident, and before he died, I’d learned that he trusted me—not my brother David, not my cousin, not my sister-in-law, but me. Then I opened his will and found I would pay penance for five years—not my brother, nor my cousin, but me.
I remembered the words as if I’d read them yesterday. “I want you to put that fancy schooling of yours to use, Dart,” he’d written in his will. “Do something about civilization collapse. And while you’re at it, solve poverty. Martha would like that. If you don’t succeed in five years, your land and the Southport home will be sold and the proceeds given to your favorite charity. Don’t let your mom and me down. Love, Dad.”
I liked to think he’d been sorry for that moment of frustration and fear when he’d changed his will to spite his own flesh and blood, but I knew my dad. He’d had no regrets.
My mother’s home place. I looked around at the dining room, the living room, the hallway to the back bedroom, the stairs up to the second floor where my tenants slept. Mom had grown up here and then brought my brother and me for summer vacations on the ocean. That had been magical for me.
What I’d done to keep the place was launch The Raindrop Institute, what we called TRI, a think tank whose ambitious goal was to prevent civilization collapse, which has happened several times in human history, and to think differently about poverty. But although we’d been successful, we hadn’t eradicated poverty or pushed back civilization collapse. That’s why all of this could be gone—because The Raindrop Institute had tried to do too much and failed. TRI should have focused on unraveling one of those problems, not both, although to be fair, that also was unrealistic. Complex messy problems
had been around for a long time. They provided job security for researchers like me.
The letter would tell me the lawyer had sold this house with the lace curtains at the dining room windows, the rug, the old table, and the china hutch with my mother’s best dishes and glassware inside. The walls glowed a soft pink rose, accented with the tiny rosebud border of wallpaper against the high nine-foot ceiling. I’d worked myself silly to bring this house into shape. I’d painted, patched, refinished, and the house still demanded more money, time, and effort—and it might not be mine.
“You fulfilled your obligations, Dart,” Susan said. Her long gray dreadlocks swung about her face as she leaned across the dining room table to persuade me that I’d done everything I could, but I knew I hadn’t, I knew I could have done more.
“Your father wanted a good faith effort, and he gave you five years to get that done,” Mary Beth said.
“You sent the lawyer all the press releases, the good deeds, the evidence that we have made a difference, all the proof your father demanded in his will, copies of letters people have sent, and thank you letters when our suggestions worked.” Lynn gestured to the portfolio under the letter. “TRI has been successful. You’ve got nothing to worry about.”
Maybe they were right. If what we’d accomplished in the past five years wasn’t enough to make this house mine, I’d start over somewhere else.
As if that would be easy at sixty-three.
Enough.
I sat down at the end of the table, picked up the envelope, and ripped it open. Action at last, Classy’s features said. Satisfaction beamed from Susan’s smile. I felt none of those emotions.
They knew the verdict before I comprehended what I’d read. Classy threw her folder into the air, and pages fluttered everywhere, a swirl of jubilation that matched the spontaneous laughter around her. “What did he say?” Didn’t matter who asked, all of them wanted to know.
I read the brief lines aloud.
“That’s it? After all we’ve accomplished, that’s it? Congratulations . . . exclamation point . . . The house and the farm are yours . . . period.” Classy stood in protest, and papers swirled from her lap onto the gray rug, like swamp magnolia tree blossoms spiraling down onto pine straw, where they made beautiful abstract art on the forest floor. “I can’t believe the brevity.”
Bring the Rain Page 1