Right as Rain

by Lindsey Stoddard

  Then we all start talking about tomorrow’s fund-raiser. Dad is telling everyone about the tomato plants he transferred in yesterday and how it took two days and all the kids at Ms. Dacie’s to pull out the weeds and mix in good soil. “A real team effort.”

  Amelia’s mom and my mom are having a little side conversation about her new job at the hospital, and Amelia’s mom is telling her that she’s a high school teacher and maybe my mom might want to come up to the school next year for a career fair.

  “I’d love to do that,” she responds.

  Even though my mom and dad aren’t sitting next to each other, and there’s a whole long table of space between them, I’m thinking they both sound good, like they used to sound when everything was normal. Their voices lift at the right times and they’re leaning in and laughing along. And I’m hoping that tomorrow, even if there’s space between them, they’ll sound the same. Like they’re OK, like they’re getting out and putting one foot down and then the next, even if it doesn’t erase their brain.

  The waitress comes back with refills we didn’t even order, and we all cheer, maybe because it’s the best hot chocolate in the whole world, and maybe because we’re happy for more time, all nine of us, squished around the pushed-together tables in La Cocina.

  And when we’re all walking home, with chocolate mustaches, linked arm in arm in arm in arm, it feels like I’m still flying.

  Chapter 38

  Twice as Tall

  I wake up at exactly 10:43 because my brain knows that time, and instead of flying, I’m crashing. The race and the medals and the hot chocolate with ice cream and Mom and Dad cheering feels four hundred miles away, and all I can feel is Guthrie’s guitar pick against my ear through my pillowcase and my heart beating one hundred twenty beats per minute wishing I hadn’t told Frankie and Amelia and Ana everything about that night because now when I see them tomorrow without our shiny gold medals and the crowd cheering behind us, they’ll look at me with sad eyes, or blaming eyes.

  Hey, sleepyhead.

  I need a favor.

  I try to erase my brain and play memory games, but they’re all leading back to that night, and even when I try counting, it comes out in four minutes, four minutes, four minutes, and I wonder how many songs Guthrie listened to before he got back in his truck to come home and why he couldn’t have stayed for just one more song, one more four minutes, so that eighteen-wheeler could have lost its brakes and zoomed through an empty intersection.

  I hear a door open and close, and when I press the light on my digital watch I’m surprised it’s already 2:41. I pull back the comforter and walk up on my toes slowly and open my door too. Dad is sitting on the couch.

  “Rain?”

  “I’m just—”

  “It’s OK. Come sit.” He pats the cushion next to him, and I crawl up and sit with my feet tucked under me.

  “Can’t sleep?”

  I shake my head.

  He pushes the light on his digital watch. “2:41 was when the phone rang,” he says.

  “Four rings,” I say.

  He nods.

  Then a light turns on and Mom opens the bedroom door and shushes her slippers across the wood floors, tying her bathrobe.

  “Can’t sleep?” she asks.

  I pat the cushion on the other side of me and she sits.

  Then my brain makes one hundred clicks and I realize that this is the anniversary, and I was so busy trying to fill the day with cheer and winning and gold medals and chocolate and forgetting, that I wasn’t thinking about the whole night and how there isn’t anything Dr. Cyn could say that could get us through the night.

  “Tonight sucks,” Mom says.

  And because that’s a word I’m not supposed to say and it sounds so funny coming out of my mom’s mouth, it makes me laugh a little at first, but in three seconds I’m tasting salty tears reach my lips.

  Mom grabs my hand and Dad grabs my other one and it makes me think of the knots in the grass chain necklaces.

  “It’s not your fault that your dad and I are taking a little space.”

  My heart feels like it drops right out of my chest. Winning the relay and cheering and secret team handshakes and hot chocolate and walking and laughing with Frankie and Amelia and Ana and their parents and meeting Dacie and getting the gardens ready for today didn’t push them back together.

  And they don’t even know the facts. That it is. It is my fault.

  “Yes, it is.” I sniff.

  “No—” Dad starts.

  But I don’t let him finish because I have to tell them how I know. How I know it’s my fault. I tell them about 10:43 and saying OK and our pinkie pact and flushing on three.

  And they’re both sobbing by the time I tell them that I couldn’t even hear Guthrie drive out of the driveway because the water was still running in the toilet bowl and I can’t erase it and no amount of counting or secret messages or shovels of snow ever brought anyone back.

  And if he hadn’t gone, he would be alive, and Mom wouldn’t have wanted a fresh start, a new job, a new city, and we wouldn’t be here in the Muñozes’ apartment and Dad would have his backyard garden and I would have Izzy and we would all have each other just like always.

  Then I stop because there’s nothing more to say and Mom’s and Dad’s shoulders are shaking, they’re crying so hard, but they’re both holding on to me so tight in a big heaping pile of limbs and tears.

  Then Mom holds me out at arm’s length and looks right at me and instead of keeping me there, she pulls me in again and whispers right in my ear. “No, my little Raindrop. It’s not your fault. I’m his mom. It’s my job to protect him.”

  Then Dad sniffs and clears his throat and says, “It’s no one’s fault.”

  We’re still shaking, all three of us.

  “Guthrie went to that concert because he loved music and hated curfew.”

  And that makes me laugh a little but not enough to stop crying and quivering and sniffing.

  “And that stupid eighteen-wheeler lost its stupid brakes that very stupid moment,” Dad continues. “And no one made that happen. And no one could have made that not happen.”

  I say Dad’s words over and over again in my brain so I can’t forget them.

  Mom snorts tears. “He really did hate curfew.”

  Then she unwraps herself from our heap and for one minute I think she’s hustling off to the bedroom like Dad does, but she reemerges with the photo albums that disappeared 365 days ago.

  We look through them picture by picture, all three of us. And because memories stick best when we tell them into stories with feelings and smells and colors, we tell the story of each one.

  And when we get to the one of three-year-old naked me, crying in the dress-strewn garden, Mom puts her arm around me.

  “You tell this one,” she says.

  And so I do.

  “I’d wait until you two weren’t looking . . .” I start, and I add every detail I know and I don’t stop until I get to the dirt beneath my fingernails.

  Then I turn to Mom. “And you told me, When you bury things deep, they grow up twice as tall.”

  She smiles at me and squeezes my shoulder and pulls me close. “Yes, I did.”

  And I’m 98 percent certain that we’re sharing a secret message right then, all three of us.

  Chapter 39

  Something Great

  We wake up in a heap on the couch and Dad says, “We have to hurry!”

  We skip breakfast, which is fine because I plan on buying at least two dozen cookies today just for myself, and no one showers, which is also fine because I plan on having dirt under my nails all day too.

  We meet Frankie and her dad outside the building and all walk over together and when Frankie first sees me she doesn’t look at me with sad eyes or blaming eyes. She just says, “Ready to kick butt again?” and it makes us all laugh.

  “Ready,” I say.

  And now I’m glad that I told her and Amelia and Ana
and Mom and Dad about that night because the way it’s making me feel reminds me of what Dad taught me about weight-bearing walls when you’re doing a house renovation. If you take down a weight-bearing wall without setting up a system of support beams, the whole weight of the house will collapse down on you. But if you build up a strong system of support beams, you can take that weight right off. And it feels good to take that weight right off, knowing that I’ve got a whole team of beams holding strong.

  When we get to Dacie’s, I help Alia carry a table outside for the cookies and lemonade. The kitchen already smells like peanut butter and melty chocolate, and Jer and Trevor are in the living room taping a sign to the big plastic donation jar.

  When Amelia and Ana get there, they give me a team handshake and say, “What can we do?”

  “A menu for the bake sale,” I say, and Ana runs inside for art supplies.

  Ms. Dacie is hugging everyone when they arrive and saying, “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” just like that, three times each for everyone, like she means something so much more but there just isn’t a way to say it.

  Mom and Dad have all the garden plots sectioned off, and no one can believe how healthy they look. The soil is dark and watered and the rows are labeled with little pictures of vegetables and all the weeds are long gone.

  “Beautiful,” Dacie says.

  “Really happy to do it,” Dad tells her.

  I help him plant the final seeds before everyone starts to show up, and he reminds me to give each one a little space to grow. I count out the inches with my fingers and place the seeds in the dark soil and I can already feel that they’ll grow up and up into something healthy.

  Then I wait until Mom and Dad aren’t looking and sneak Guthrie’s guitar pick from my jeans pocket deep down in the dirt by the tomato plant roots. And I know what my mom says, I know it’ll just grow up twice as tall, and that’s OK. I want Guthrie to grow up twice as tall. All the details and stories of him.

  Sixty-seven people come. Yasmin and Cris throw open the front windows and put on one of Ms. Dacie’s records and turn it up to full volume. Matthew runs down the three steps to the basement apartment, where an older couple lives, and asks if we can use their oven too because people are buying cookies faster than we can bake them.

  Dad is giving everyone tours of the gardens and explaining when the vegetables will come up and how if they decide to rent a plot he’ll help them get the best produce they can. Frankie follows him, translating his words into Spanish. Mom and Frankie’s dad are squeezing lemons with Casey, who needs to keep his hands busy because sixty-seven people is a lot, and Ms. Dacie is welcoming everyone walking by on the street.

  Amelia’s mom is there too, and Ana’s, and so is Claudia from the church, and the waitress from La Cocina and her boyfriend and their little daughter, who is running circles around the raised garden beds. Three kids from our class are there, and I recognize another kid from school with his grandpa, and Mrs. Baldwin comes too and congratulates us on a great relay race. She also tells my parents that I’m quite a poet, which makes my cheeks feel hot, and now I’m 99 percent certain that they’re going to make me read them a poem tonight, which doesn’t actually feel too terrible anymore now that I kind of like poetry.

  “Ms. Dacie helped me,” I say.

  One person I recognize from sitting in the café passes by with a laptop bag over her shoulder, and she stops in too and buys some cookies and tours the gardens and leaves a twenty-dollar bill in the donations jar.

  And then, right before we start the sale of the garden plots, Nestor comes limping around the corner on his sore feet and worn shoes.

  He takes a break at the gate and looks through the crowd from the sidewalk. I wave and he smiles when he sees me. “New Rain.”

  Ms. Dacie welcomes him in, and I bring him a lemonade and chocolate chip cookie and help him sit down on the front stoop. When he’s not looking, I sneak four dollars for him in the cash box. Some people look at him a little long at first, but then because Ms. Dacie’s house is always sending out the secret message that everyone is welcome and everyone belongs, people just go on with eating cookies and listening to music and asking Dad questions about the gardens.

  Then Dad and Ms. Dacie get up on the top step of the stoop, turn down the music, and call out, “Gather around!”

  He explains about the garden plots and how there are sixteen currently for rent. He tells them what kind of vegetables each will produce in the next few months and the type of care it will require until next planting season. He says that today, if they’re interested, they can register to rent a plot, and if Ms. Dacie raises enough money to keep her doors open for the year, monthly garden plot rent payments will begin July first.

  Then Frankie stands up, and she looks just as brave and proud as when she read her poem in class. “I just want to say Ms. Dacie means a lot to us.” She points to Jer and Ana and Casey and Trevor and me, and anyone else she can find in the crowd. “She lets us come after school any day, helps us with our homework, teaches us how to bake, encourages our art, and lets us use her computers.” She looks at Ms. Dacie. “Ms. Dacie belongs here.”

  “W-w n-need Ms. Dacie!” Amelia shouts.

  Everyone starts cheering and chanting, and Ms. Dacie waves and covers her eyes because I’m 96 percent certain she’s about to cry.

  Ana’s mom puts her arm around Ms. Dacie and speaks up. “This place is home to more than just Ms. Dacie. What she gives to our children, and to us, is more than we can repay.”

  I’m watching the people in the crowd nod their heads and whisper with their families and friends, and they start pointing at the garden plots.

  Then my dad speaks up again. “If you are interested in renting a plot for the year, please form a line to speak with Ms. Dacie, or me, or Maggie.” And he points to my mom, and she waves.

  In less than two minutes, the line is long enough that we have to open the gate so it can curve down the sidewalk.

  Trevor and I carry plates of cookies outside to sell while people stand in line, and almost everyone buys one for the wait, and no one even asks for change.

  My heart is beating one hundred beats per minute because the donation jar is stuffed full and so is the cash box, and everyone is excited about the transplanted tomatoes, which are growing tall and red, and I’m thinking this just might work. We just might save Ms. Dacie’s place.

  Each time someone registers to rent a plot, Ana makes a cool sign with the new renter’s name on it, attaches it to a garden stake, and sticks it deep into their new soil.

  By the end of the day, there are only cookie crumbs and lemon rinds left and all the plots have been rented and everyone starts hugging Ms. Dacie goodbye and leaving. And Ms. Dacie reminds everyone that her door is always open.

  Frankie, Amelia, Ana, and I stay to count the money in the cash box and the donation box, but I keep losing count because Nestor is still here and I’m watching him make slow laps around the new garden beds. Each section has a sign.

  Claudia y Roberto

  La familia Rodolis

  Heather and Andy

  Héctor y Frankie

  Ortiz

  La Cocina Restaurante

  Pamela Baldwin

  And on and on, the names of people from our neighborhood all stuck in the same soil.

  I go over to walk with Nestor and tell him thanks for coming.

  “New Rain,” he says. “This”—he points to the growing gardens and all the names—“this is something great.”

  I remember his haiku in my notebook, but before I figure out what to say, I see a sign I didn’t see before.

  The Andrews Family.

  And it makes a warm hot-chocolate-and-cookies feeling rise on up where the remembering usually does, because it doesn’t just say Henry Andrews or Maggie Andrews and it doesn’t say Henry, Maggie, and Rain. It says The Andrews Family, and I’m thinking that even though I know Dad will be moving to another apartment in fourteen days, and no
matter where we ever live there will always be a big hole where Guthrie should be, at least here we are The Andrews Family, and we’ll come and plant and water and see what we can make grow up and up, and leave with dirt beneath our fingernails.

  And I’m already thinking that maybe we could bring some of the vegetables to the church on Sundays and give them to Nestor and Natasha and her mom.

  Nestor circles the gardens again. “Really,” he says. “Something great.”

  Then Frankie and Amelia and Ana squeal and they’re jumping up in a hug and Ms. Dacie is dancing and crying and my mom and dad are pumping their fists and high-fiving.

  “What? What?”

  “We did it!”

  It takes me 1.2 seconds to run over and jump into their hugs and celebration.

  “We’ve raised enough money for the year. We rented all the garden plots,” Dad says.

  “And p-people ate lots of c-cookies!”

  Then Mom says, “And Ms. Claudia organized the church congregation for a generous donation too. All of that together will sustain the house for the year.” I think of Ms. Claudia and her crow’s-feet wrinkles, and now I’m 100 percent certain that’s what those mean, a life of kindness. And I can’t wait to hug her tomorrow morning in the little church basement kitchen.

  After a quadruple high five, Frankie, Amelia, and Ana leave with their parents, and Nestor follows down the street not long after them. I wonder where he’s going and if he’ll eat again before tomorrow. And I just keep replaying his deep rumble voice in my brain. Something great.

  Mom and Dad and I help Ms. Dacie clean up and wash the last dishes and Dad makes sure the plots are watered before we leave. When we walk down the steps, through the gate, and turn onto the sidewalk to wave goodbye to Ms. Dacie, I look back at The Andrews Family plot and even though I’m too old now to think that a plant of guitar picks will grow up in its place, I feel something growing tall, rising up and up and up, taller than the buildings in Washington Heights.

  And I think there’s a poem singing in me right now, so I tell my brain to remember it so I can write it down with my others when I get home.