Father of the Rain: A Novel

by Lily King

  “Is she ever going to get to the point?” Elyse says, and everyone cracks up. It is cozy in our little cottage by the beach, sitting all of us together on the wicker furniture with big comfy cushions. My father continues to read.

  One night she has to stay late to catch up on some work. She gets a little uneasy when the last person leaves, but then she waves her fear away. She knows she’s being a baby. About an hour later she hears the elevator rise and her fear returns. She shuts off all the lights. The elevator stops on her floor and opens. She stops breathing. She thinks if she stays very still—she’s in the corner, facing the wall—he won’t notice her. She doesn’t dare turn around. She thinks she hears something but she can’t tell because her heart is beating so loudly—and then she feels hands on her neck. They are warm. “For some reason I feel myself relax then. I know everything’s going to be okay. His hands are so big. They slide down over my shoulders and around to my breasts. I’m wet instantly. I can hear him breathing and I smell cigarettes on his breath and I feel his stubble on my cheek but I never see him. He takes off all my clothes and pleasures me in every way imaginable and then, finally, he puts his long rod-hard cock inside me and—”

  “Gardiner, really, this is going too far,” Catherine says. “Elyse is going to tell this to her class when she gets back.”

  “Elyse Tabor! Well, I never!” Patrick imitates the first grade teacher’s constipated grimace.

  We all laugh.

  “Two more sentences,” my father says. “—and I feel him explode. And then he leaves the building. I never saw his face. I’ll never know who he was.”

  The first morning in St. Thomas I went with my father to collect our passports at the front desk in the main building. Everyone else was still asleep. At home there was three feet of snow on the ground but now I was in bare feet and shorts. Our cottage was one of the farthest away, right on the water. We walked on the wide stone paths that connected everything at the resort, and, because it had rained a little before dawn, the stones were wet but warm. We watched a lizard chase another up a palm tree until we couldn’t see them anymore.

  “Your mother and I stayed in a place like this in Barbados,” he said. It almost sounded like a fond memory. He never spoke about my mother in front of Catherine except to insult her. It was so much better when we were alone, but we were never alone. I pretended all the way to the front desk and back that we had come by ourselves to St. Thomas.

  I have a crush on a blond boy I see at the pool in the afternoons. He’s small and slender and wears long green swimming trunks with orange fish on them. He knows I like him. I can tell from the way he’s always checking to see if I’m still watching him. He’ll pretend to look beyond me, leave me off to the side of his gaze. When we first got there he was hanging out with two girls who looked a lot older than us, but they left after a few days and now he has no one.

  “Stop looking at him. He’s a total jerk,” Patrick says. “Do you know what he did in the shop yesterday? He—”

  “Shut up. I don’t care.”

  We’re finishing up our papaya juices. We’re so badly sunburned that we sit at the edge of our chairs, careful to let our skin touch the least amount of chair as possible. We don’t have sun lotion. We only have something called Hawaiian Tropic, which is coconut-smelling baby oil that promises to increase the sun’s rays. We’re obsessed with getting the deepest darkest tan possible. Elyse has had the worst reaction to the sun. Her skin has bubbled up on her arms and back, and the Salt Lake City family took her to the clinic in town where they wrapped gauze around her forearms, which had become infected. They bought her a long-sleeved shirt and sunblock and have hinted that we should be using those things, too. But we don’t have blisters, just a good burgundy burn that will turn into a deep dark tan by the time we go back to school.

  My father and Catherine appear behind the blond boy in their tennis whites.

  “Let’s go,” my father says.

  We pick up our racquets and loop around the pool.

  “Ace ‘em,” the blond boy whispers to me.

  I smile, relieved that my sunburn hides my blush.

  The courts are clay. A black man in tennis whites is sweeping ours. The instruments are the same as at the club at home, a wide broom the size of a narrow hallway that you pull behind you like a cart, and a small round brush on rollers. We sit on the green bench and watch him drag the big broom in long dramatic curves across one side and then the other, then clean the lines with the small brush that makes a scritch-scratch noise as it passes us. The lines he cuts are crisp and perfect, which is not easy to do. I can’t tell how old he is, in his teens or twenties or thirties, his hair cropped close, his thighs no thicker than his calves, and his legs and arms so long and so very black against the white of his clothes. I wish I could watch him do the other courts, but ours is ready and my father walks onto it with his big splayed feet, bouncing a ball off his racquet and scuffing it up immediately.

  I think my father hopes, each time we step on the court together, that since our last match I have transformed myself into Chrissie Evert. I think he actually believes, despite years of witnessing the raw truth, that I possess that kind of talent and am stubbornly withholding it from him, deliberately making him suffer. He insists on getting me out on the court, even though it makes him miserable.

  Garvey was the tennis player. His room, before Frank moved into it, was filled with trophies of little gold men getting ready to serve and Garvey’s name on the plaques at the bottom. He played on the varsity team at St. Paul’s his freshman and sophomore years and then quit. My father often refers to that moment as the greatest disappointment of his life.

  So now there is just me, who’s never done any better than the improvement prize in any sport.

  “Daley and I will take you two on,” my father says, to my relief. It’s easier playing with him than against him.

  We confer at the baseline. My father has that hopeful look on his face. “Catherine’s wrist is hurting again. Play to her backhand. She barely has any strength in it. And Patrick—well, you can take on Patrick.” Patrick is a very good tennis player. I’ve gotten about four games off of him in all the sets we’ve played, but my father hasn’t forgotten them. “Okay, let’s go get ‘em.” He pats my shoulder and gives me the three balls.

  My practice serves go in.

  “Look at that!” my father shouts. “Look at that!”

  My real ones are abysmal. The first slaps the bottom of the net. The second hits the fence. My father comes down to the baseline.

  “Stand right here. A little farther over. Good. Now,” he stands behind me and lifts my racquet back for a serve, “try and snap your wrist at the top, like this.” He takes my arm and slowly lifts it over my head, flicking my wrist at just the right moment. He smells like lime and cigarettes, his Caribbean smell.

  I double-fault two more times.

  My father comes back down to the baseline.

  “If you’d just leave her alone, she’d be fine, Gardiner,” Catherine says. “She just needs to warm up a little.”

  After that, I get one in. Patrick, startled that it has gone in, misses it entirely. My father high-fives me. I win the next point, too, by hitting down Catherine’s backhand alley.

  No matter what mood I begin with, I always have the same feeling playing tennis, a sort of claustrophobia despite the open space, fresh air, and wind in the trees, combined with a boredom bordering on despair. I keep looking at the clean lines and thinking about the black man in his white shorts. He has left glasses of ice water and a plate of sliced melon on our bench. For three sets a day I’m caged here, the white lines flashing in the heat, the sky too hot to be blue, and the sun searing our already burned skin.

  My father never gives up. I don’t think he feels anything but completely alive and exhilarated on the tennis court. He can’t understand my mood, the stupor his ambitions for me puts me in. Even in the last game of the third set (0–6, 1–6, 0–5), he
is still giving me tips, showing me the footwork involved in receiving an overhead lob. I watch him move at a backward diagonal, his lovely crisscrossed steps a dance I will never learn. I hit my best shot in the last point, a low crosscourt pass, but it falls just beyond the line.

  “Out,” Patrick yells, thrilled not to have won but for the match to be over.

  “Bullshit!” my father yells back. “It was a perfect shot.”

  “Baloney, Gardiner,” Catherine says.

  He’s too pissed to speak and threatens her with a finger as he marches over to their side. My father has a reverence for the rules of tennis, and is a gracious loser on those rare occasions when he does lose. But his desire for my one beautiful shot to be in is far greater than his abilities of perception.

  The court is clay, however, and Patrick is pointing to the freshly made imprint, just outside the line.

  “That’s bullshit,” my father says again, but weakly.

  “I’m sorry, Dad.”

  He shakes his head as we walk off the court. “You just need to play more. Practice makes perfect.”

  But we have played every day for a week and I’m only getting worse.

  I stand next to the blond boy that night at the salad bar.

  “How’s your game?” he asks, staring down into the cottage cheese

  “I suck.”

  He smiles but does not look at me. “Beach afterwards?”

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t bring your boyfriend.” He flicks his eyes at Patrick, three people ahead of us.

  “He’s my brother.”

  “Step,” he corrects me. “Big difference, Daley.”

  He’s found out my name and my family configuration. His power thrills me. I can barely eat. Things are tense at our table. Frank has not shown up.

  “You play with fire, you’re going to get burned,” my father keeps saying. Even here he has his A-1 for his steaks. His nose has already started to bead up. Catherine isn’t eating much either. She jerks her head up every time someone comes through the thatched archway into the restaurant. She drinks. This pleases my father.

  “You’s keeping up with me good tonight,” he says, trying to pinch her tit discreetly. She flinches away. “Oh fuck that,” he says under his breath.

  Every night there is baked Alaska. The kitchen staff wheels it out and everyone is expected to stop eating and talking and watch it flame up.

  “Oh for chrissake, don’t clap for these monkeys,” my father says.

  There is dancing after dinner to a steel band. Usually my father and Catherine stay and dance while we go back to the cottage and watch TV, but tonight she doesn’t want to.

  “It’s all right, my little pussy,” my father croons at her, but she’s just watching the doorway now.

  “I know what you need,” my father says, and does something to her under the table.

  “Keep your fucking hands off me!” she says loudly. People look, even Elyse and her new family all the way across the room. Even the blond boy who hasn’t glanced at me since the salad bar.

  I tip my head to the beach. He nods. I get up then, leave Patrick, leave Catherine, leave my father and his purple sweaty face and yellow eyes and shaking hands and follow the blond boy to the sand.

  The sun drops early at the equator. The sky is dark blue, no hint of a sunset left, just a cold pale line at the horizon. The sand is still warmer than the air. We walk down the beach away from the restaurant and all our cottages. We tell each other where we live. He’s from Connecticut. When we get far enough away from the last old lady collecting shells, he pulls me down on the sand and starts kissing me. His kisses are hard and wet, purposeful, like he is trying to get something out of my mouth with his tongue. His saliva is all over me and makes my skin cold. I think of stopping him, then remember where I am, in St. Thomas, staying at that cottage that I don’t want to go back to until all the fighting is over. So I refocus, try to remember Neal Caffrey’s kisses and how floaty I felt afterward, and I try not to think about the Penthouse letter and the dead star feeling, and when all that fails I think once more that I should stop him and go home, but then I remember where I am again.

  He puts his hand up the back of my shirt. “No bra,” he whispers, his first words in a long time.

  No breasts, I feel like saying, but he’s about to find that out. His hand begins to travel around to the front. When it’s just below my armpit, I reach up and pull it out. I stand up, the breeze blowing cold on my spit-soaked face.

  “Prude,” he calls as I begin walking toward the lights of the cottages. “Stuck-up prude!”

  There is only one light on in our cottage. The bedrooms are dark, and the other lamp in the living room is broken, smashed to pieces on the floor. Patrick and Elyse are on opposite ends of the couch, crying.

  “They’re going to get a divorce!” Elyse wails when she sees me.

  “No, they’re not.”

  “I think they are,” Patrick says, the skin around his eyes even redder than his sunburn.

  “They just had a fight,” I say.

  “You weren’t here. It wasn’t a normal fight. She tried to strangle him.”

  “They were drunk. They won’t even remember it tomorrow.” I realize they don’t understand about the drinking. They take the drunk behavior as seriously as the sober behavior. They don’t get the problem at all. “They’re alcoholics.”

  “What’s that?” Elyse asks.

  “It’s when you can’t stop drinking alcohol, like vodka and gin and all that stuff. The alcohol makes them behave like that. They can’t help it. It’s not really them talking.”

  “They’re not alcoholics,” Patrick says.

  “Yes, they are, Patrick.” My mother explained to me about my father’s drinking this winter. She figured out that he was an alcoholic on their honeymoon, and it only got worse. She tried to leave him twice before, but he promised to change and did for a while, but then slipped back. She told me it was like a sickness, only the people who have it don’t believe they’re sick.

  “Gardiner has a job and a house and he’s the president of the tennis association at the club. He’s not an alcoholic.”

  “Have you ever seen him sober at the end of the night?”

  “Tons of times.” He’s lying. He can’t bear to believe my father has a flaw. But he’s crying. “That guy Murphy who sits in the corner of the sub shop. He’s an alcoholic, Daley.”

  “I’m just saying that they drink a lot and they don’t mean half of what they say to each other. It will all be forgotten tomorrow morning.”

  Elyse crawls into my lap and I stroke her arms and the bandages on her arms. Patrick sucks his thumb hard. I watch them both fall asleep, and after a while I carry Elyse into our room. I hear her fall back asleep immediately. I don’t go to sleep for a long time. My heart is throbbing and I find myself worrying that they are right, that they are going to get a divorce. As much as Catherine annoys me, I don’t want to be home alone with my father. I don’t want to be the only one left for him to yell at.

  When I wake up, Elyse is not in the bed beside me. I hear laughter in the kitchenette, the coffeepot gurgling. No divorce. I put on my bathing suit and a pair of shorts. Frank is on the couch, just waking up, and when he sees me he shakes his head and tsk-tsks me with his finger. Why would I be in trouble and not him? The chatter has stopped in the kitchenette. They’re all there, my father, Catherine, and Patrick, all standing in the narrow space between the fridge and the counter, and Elyse on a stool, eating her sugar-coated cereal. Catherine whispers something to her children and they leave the room. Even Frank slips out the sliding glass door.

  My father and Catherine look at each other and sip their coffee. There is some charge in the air I can’t identify. Maybe they are going to get a divorce. And they’re telling me first, so I can break it to Patrick and Elyse. I’ll be unemotional, I decide. I’ll say that it’s for the best.

  “Daley,” Catherine begins. The V in her bathrobe
has widened, and I can see the long nipples of her breasts.

  “Sit down,” my father says to me, in a sudden guttural voice.

  I move toward a counter stool.

  “I said sit down.”

  “I am,” I say, and my voice breaks. So much for unemotional.

  “Daley, your father and I—”

  My father breaks in. “I don’t know who you think you are, but I will not have you come down here with all the lies your mother has fed you. I’m sorry.” There is nothing sorry about him and the taut purple tendons running up his neck. “I’m sorry that you have to live with her, see her, listen to her, see those godawful friends of hers. But if you start believing what she tells you, then you are an even bigger idiot than I thought.”

  “Do you really think we’re alcoholics, Daley?”

  I can’t find my voice. The stool feels so small beneath me.

  “Do you really think this”—she points to the water through the glass door—”is the lifestyle of alcoholics? Are we passed out every night on the floor? Do we have bottles in our closets? Are we asking for money on street corners?”

  I answer no to each of her questions.

  “So what’s an alcoholic, in your opinion?”

  “Someone who gets drunk all the time.”

  “Do we get drunk all the time? Are we drunk right now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s eight o’clock in the morning and we’re drinking coffee. Are we drunk right now?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe you’re drunk right now,” my father says. “Maybe you were drunk last night when you had your little talk with Patrick and Elyse.”

  Catherine pats his leg to shush him.

  “Maybe you and your fucking mother were drunk when you left my house with all my mother’s goddamn jewelry. If I’m an alcoholic, she’s a goddamn criminal.” He makes like he’s going to hit me and I almost want him to, want to have some mark my mother will see when I get back. But he just walks out of the cottage, muttering fucking bitch a few times and shaking his clenched hands around before careening down the path out of view.