Lullaby for the Rain Girl

by Christopher Conlon

  It was then that a dull, throbbing pain began to radiate through her, beginning at her pelvis and pulsating out through her legs and arms and head. Her breath came fast. She wondered if she was about to pass out. Looking at the bed, she thought she should call someone—but who would she call? She lived alone. There was no one else within ten miles of the house. Though technically she could ring 911—she paid taxes for such services, after all—it would take a very long time for any ambulance to come all the way out here. Yet she feared she might be dying.

  But how? Why? She could see no injury anywhere on her body. It had to be menstrual. And yet she wasn’t leaking now. Had she suffered some sort of hemorrhage?

  Then, for a single insane moment, she believed that she had grown a tail.

  There it was, between her legs. Perhaps two feet long, slick with blood and clots of gore. Of course it was not a tail. It was an umbilical cord.

  But she wasn’t pregnant.

  Heart hammering in her chest, she reached down and took the end of the cord in her hands. It was slick, knotty, bumpy. She could see a big blue vein running through the middle of it.

  But what she noticed most of all was the end of the cord. What she saw—what she thought she saw—was impossible, so she turned to the lamp and held the cord close to the light.

  The cord terminated with what were unmistakably teeth marks.

  # # #

  They’d told her she was crazy, of course: Mina Lynn Greenwood, the celebrated Mina Lynn Greenwood, pitching away her tenure-track position at the university, her control of the nationally famous Summer Writing Institute, her fantastically popular courses in Victorian Women Poets and Modern English Verse, pitching away New York itself in order to go cultivate her talent in some shack on the High Plains? Nebraska, wasn’t it? North Dakota?

  Judy Epstein, her office mate—they were the same age, thirty-eight, and sometimes team-taught courses—would have none of it. “Mina,” she said, gulping coffee in that hurried way that she had even when she had no reason to be hurried, “you must be mad. No, you can’t.” She shook her unkempt red curls. “You’re on the ladder now—there’s nowhere to go but up. You’ll be the chair of the English department eventually. My God, you’ve already written three books, and you started with the Yale Younger Poets Prize. You’ll get a Pulitzer one of these days.”

  “I still can,” Mina said, smiling indulgently.

  “You know better than that. If you jump off this particular ladder you’re gone forever. You can forget about the big prizes. To get one of those takes clout. You know as well as I do that you didn’t just get the Yale Prize. God knows you deserved it, Mina. I’m not saying that. But you had some powerful people in your corner.”

  “Well, maybe I won’t win any more of the big prizes, that’s all.”

  “And for what? Why are you doing this?”

  “It’s my home, Judy.”

  “Your home,” she spat. “Home is the place you visit for a week over Christmas. Take a sabbatical and live there for half the year if you want. Don’t just leave.”

  But she left. When she’d learned that her childhood home was for sale, she knew she would. She’d made an offer—quickly accepted—and informed the Department Chair that she would not be renewing her contract for the following year. She had no particular money worries. Her income would be reasonable from her essays and criticism, if not from her poetry; an annotated edition she’d prepared of Aurora Leigh brought in a small but steady stream of money, having been adopted in countless university courses. She could guest-lecture occasionally here and there. Financially she would be all right.

  She couldn’t explain it—this irresistible urge to go home. She hadn’t been back in twenty years; her parents were long dead; she knew no one there. The house had passed through two subsequent owners since her father died (she herself had never had a chance to possess it before; the bank had taken it to pay Papa’s back debts). She wondered vaguely if the later owners had been like Papa, broken would-be farmers.

  Well, that was unfair. There was nothing would-be about Papa’s farming. But the land had shattered him. The vast plains, the wind, the hard stubborn soil, the endless buffalo grass, the silence, the isolation, the loneliness. For a few years, when Mina was young and her mother was still relatively well, it looked as if they might make a go of it. But then Mama died, a long drought hit, and her father was never the same. He kept on, raising wheat and cotton as best he could. (And sunflowers! Those were Mina’s favorite, the giant sunflower fields, hundreds of happy yellow heads bursting with seed, just the right place for girls and goldfinches.) But each year there were fewer crops. Each year Papa employed fewer men; the great irrigating sprinklers dampened less land. Piece by piece he sold it off, until by the time he became ill there was only the house and a scrubby acre or two left. Mina was in New York, on the first semester of her undergraduate scholarship, when he passed away.

  No, she couldn’t explain this urge to return home. All she knew was that when she looked in the mirror, at her celery-thin body, her sallow, even ghostly features—the big dark eyes, the hair as straight and black as a waterfall at midnight—she felt hopeless, lost. They were good features, she knew—she was pretty, even beautiful in an odd, off-kilter sort of way. (Some had gone so far as to suggest that her books succeeded as much for the author photos prominently displayed on their back panels as for their actual content.) But she hated what she saw.

  She hated her voice, too, which sounded to her too high, too shrill. And she hated how her clothes hung on her. But most of all, she hated her work. Not her classes—those were all right, she could drift through them easily enough on what others called “charm” and “charisma” even if she was unaware of possessing either—but her poems. She could scarcely bear to look at any of them after they’d been published; what had seemed vital and real as it poured out from her pencil onto the yellow pad seemed, in the cold light of print, false, artificial, ridiculous. Someday they’ll find me out, she would think. Someday they’ll realize their mistake and take back their awards, burn all the copies of the books. As well they should.

  Yet this disgust hadn’t harmed her career; in one way it enhanced it. Her readings, of which she’d given hundreds by now, all over the East Coast, were something of a minor sensation—not least because of her adamant refusal to read from any of her published work. She couldn’t. She felt she would quite literally die if she had to utter any of the wretched things aloud. When someone went to a Mina Lynn Greenwood reading, they were guaranteed to hear nothing but new poems, read in her quiet but intense style (intense because she was terrified), usually while she had on one of her long white dresses (which were the ones that covered her body the most completely). She was “ethereally electrifying,” one newspaper reported—a clunky phrase that had nonetheless stuck.

  Impassioned letters came from readers, usually young female college students. Some of them created websites honoring her and her work. She understood that someone at a university in Canada was even writing a full-length study of her poems.

  Somehow, she was a hit.

  She found it all bizarre. They were celebrating someone else, it seemed. Certainly not her: not little Mina Greenwood, the farm girl from the High Plains who’d spent her time running around barefoot in her father’s bright sunflower patches, who’d worn overalls all summer and had to be bribed into ever taking a bath. No, not that girl. That girl was gone, long dead.

  But now she felt that the Mina Lynn Greenwood she’d created since, the poet and scholar, the presence, was dead too. She had nothing—classes to which she was indifferent, books she couldn’t bear to look at. Over the years there had been two major relationships, painful and debilitating affairs which ended badly. Flirtations and brief encounters that ended badly as well. She was alone in the world.

  And so there was nothing for it. With nowhere else to go, she went home.

  # # #

  When she opened her eyes again it was morning.
The blood had mostly dried on her legs, making them brittle and sticky. The sheets had crisped in places. The umbilical cord had fallen off: there it was on the floor, dry and dead.

  She had apparently collapsed across the bed; she was lying diagonally on it, uncovered. She tried to sit up. Her head ached and she felt exhausted, but at the same time she somehow perceived that the crisis had passed. Checking between her legs, she understood that whatever had caused the river of blood the night before had stopped. Her hands, probing, came away dry, merely flecked with hard particles of red matter. There was no specific pain. But she did sense a dull ache everywhere in her extremities, as if someone had been punching her vagina and thighs. But there were no bruises, as far as she could see. Of course there wouldn’t be; she’d given birth, that’s all.

  She shook her head. She had not given birth.

  But looking down at the wan little cord on the floor, she began to piece together what must have happened. A miscarriage. Calculating back, she realized it was barely possible that she could have been pregnant and not known it; her periods were notoriously unreliable, anyway. It seemed unlikely, but it was the only explanation. And it had the advantage of being possible. She had miscarried, and had some sort of hemorrhage while doing it.

  Yet…a miscarriage with a fully developed umbilical cord? And a placenta? (She saw it next to the cord, what she’d initially taken to be a dirty sock.)

  And: where was the fetus?

  She looked around the bed. Nothing.

  Finally she reached down and took the umbilical cord in her hand, remembering the nightmarish vision she’d had just before passing out. Teeth marks! It seemed absurd now. Looking at it, she could tell nothing; it was blackened, deflated, almost unrecognizable from the living thing she’d held in her hands the night before.

  She felt a terrible sorrow then. She had been carrying a child and not known it. It had miscarried and she’d not understood.

  Yet she still didn’t see anything in the room that could be the fetus. She stripped the bed, crouched under it. Again nothing.

  Sighing, groaning a bit, she decided that what she needed more than anything was a long, hot shower. That would clear her head. Perhaps she would make some coffee. Then she could return to this room and come to a final understanding of what had happened here, to her, what this bloody holocaust meant.

  She would have put on her robe, but didn’t want blood on it. Instead she simply walked naked to the kitchen—the bottoms of her feet were clean— and started up the automatic coffee maker. Then she crossed back toward the bathroom, stopping for a moment to look out the front window. It was a beautiful spring day, sun-washed, with immense clean skies, unbroken pale blue everywhere she saw. She felt she would be all right then. What had happened was over, and she was intact.

  A few moments later she was standing before the bathroom mirror, contemplating her rather horrifying appearance while waiting for the water in the shower to grow warm, when she heard what she quickly decided she had not heard. No.

  She had not heard footsteps upstairs. Tiny ones, moving this way and that.

  She had not.

  # # #

  “I hope you understand,” the real estate agent had said, “that there’s nothing out there. Nothing at all.”

  “I know,” she said. They were in the woman’s office, nearly twenty miles from the house itself. “I used to live there.”

  “Well, yes, you told me that,” she answered, scowling a bit. She was perhaps fifty, defiantly gray-haired, with that intense, underfed look lifelong occupants of the High Plains often had. “But, you know, it’s gone downhill since your time. The area. There’s no town out there anymore.”

  “There wasn’t much of one when I was here. The population was about a hundred, I think.”

  “Maybe, but now there’s nobody. Nothing. The last shops closed up ten years ago. The town of Hartlow no longer exists, except as a name on old maps. You’ll be the only resident. For your groceries—for everything—you’ll have to come here.”

  “Here,” the county seat, was a flat, featureless conglomeration of squat brick buildings—a little place that sold groceries, a hardware store, lumberyard, pool hall, a few local government offices, a bank, a library, and, Mina noted with a grim smile, three bars—which hunkered defensively against the wind and sun, surrounded on all sides by dirt, scrub brush, distant brown fields.

  “You almost sound,” Mina said, “as if you’re trying to talk me out of it.”

  “Oh no,” the woman smiled. “Not at all. I’m delighted—we’re delighted—to have you here. To have you back. A native. It’s just very unusual. I’ve lived here since I was born, and when people leave—they never come back.”

  “Well, it’s my home.”

  “Yes. Yes, it is.”

  She’d bought it sight unseen, having been assured that, yes, the house was inhabitable. There was electricity. The telephone service could be reinstalled (no cell phone would function there). Structurally, though in need of improvements, the place was intact.

  “There’s just nothing out there,” one of the agents said, clearly puzzled by her decision, as they signed the documents at closing. “We have some very nice properties closer to town, where you’d be…”

  “It’s my home,” she insisted. Out there.

  The long drive across the mostly dirt roads had caused the memories to come pouring back. She had forgotten how vast the plains were, how flat the land, how huge the sky. And how quiet, how forlorn. This was a land that killed people—swallowed them up. They bought their little house and their bit of land, thinking to become hardy farmers in the bold American tradition, only to discover that the soil was never good enough, the rain wasn’t sufficiently steady, crop prices were always too low. Suicide rates had been high here ever since the first European settlers came in the early 1900s—higher even than the old statistics indicated, probably, since so many people who died in “accidents” back then seemed to have had trouble stepping off railroad tracks to avoid onrushing trains.

  And there was no help for it. No one to rescue them. Just the hard land, the unforgiving land.

  The buildings she saw after she’d passed out of town were mostly shattered wrecks. Houses that had clearly been uninhabited for decades, their paint faded and peeling, windows hollow, glassless, screen doors collapsing crookedly off their hinges. Abandoned barns with no roofs, sometimes only three walls standing. And old cars: here and there, colorless heaps without doors, missing wheels or tires, their insides exposed to the elements for decades and so tattered, ripped, burst apart—home, no doubt, to mice, rats, birds.

  When she saw the house for the first time, there ahead, far from the road, she was surprised at how small it looked. And how isolated. It was a plain two-story structure, dirty white, that looked lost amidst the endless brown buffalo grass, like something out of Edward Hopper. As if no one had ever lived there, or ever would. As if it hadn’t been built by people at all but instead had simply appeared there one day, exactly as it was now.

  Pulling up the weed-laced dirt track to the front door, she knew that it had not always looked this way to her. She’d had her girlhood here, after all. Parents who’d loved her. Even friends, a few, at her alma mater, Hartlow Combined School, which had taught the elementary students in one building, the high schoolers in the other. She’d gone there for twelve years. It was difficult to believe, now. The school had closed its doors forever a few years after she’d gone.

  Stepping from the car, she immediately felt the hard, hot breeze in her face, smelled the unique odor of the High Plains: part dry grass, part dust, part something else, something indescribable. Home. The house itself had changed little, despite her initial impression. The front porch was more weathered than she recalled, badly in need of paint, yet it seemed sound. She could picture herself as a girl on this very porch, swinging lazily on the porch swing they’d had, reading library copies of her early favorite poets, Poe and Dickinson and Millay. She w
ould have to order a porch swing now.

  Inside the house was also familiar, though everything seemed smaller than it had then. The ceilings felt lower. The previous owners had torn out the carpet that the Greenwoods had had, exposing the bright pine wood underneath and polishing it: a good decision, though the floor was chipped and dingy now. There was no furniture anywhere except an old kitchen chair sitting, for some reason, in the middle of the living room.

  The kitchen was familiar, too, except for a somewhat newer refrigerator than the one she remembered. The stove and oven were the same. The countertops. The cabinets. They were all worn, scratched, stained. The kitchen really needed refurbishing, but she doubted she would ever do it. The downstairs bathroom seemed in fair shape, also easily recognizable despite a different sink and mirror; everything worked, at least.

  She wandered to her old bedroom, which was at the back of the house—she’d slept downstairs throughout her youth, first to maximize the distance between herself and her parents (not in a negative way, but simply for what she thought of then as independence), later to keep away from her desperately ill mother upstairs. How tiny her old room was! And yet the view out the window was instantly familiar—she knew that exact perspective as well as if it had been tattooed into her DNA. That precise box of sky. The slight undulations in the buffalo grass. The little mound in the distance, off to the right, not enough to be called a hill.

  Upstairs was worse. Clearly the previous owners had let things go. Old wallpaper was dropping from the walls in strips everywhere, including her parents’ old room. Windows were cracked. The floor had holes in it big enough to fit her foot. The toilet, long dry and dirt-streaked, was lying on its side. The entire upper part of the house was “inhabitable” only in the most marginal sense.

  Mina quickly decided to shut off the upstairs completely. She would live down below.

  Later that day a delivery truck made its way to the house—Boy oh boy, ma’am, you really live out in the country!—and the two men unloaded her sofa, chairs, bed, bureaus, books. By the time they’d gone, it had become a place where a human being could live again. It was home.