Lullaby for the Rain Girl

by Christopher Conlon

  # # #

  The clothes dryer was on the fritz, so after she’d run the sheets and blankets through the washing machine twice, Mina used the old clothesline out back and some clothespins she’d found under the sink to hang everything out in the wind. The blood, she knew, would never come out completely; she needed new bed things; but for now, these were all she had. They flapped in the breeze like old battle flags, tattered and stained.

  She turned on the TV—she received only one channel—and stared at two grinning morning-show hosts trying hard to be amusing. After five minutes she shut it off. She moved to her computer then, which sat on a table in the corner of the living room, and looked desultorily at her e-mail. (The house’s telephone line allowed her Internet access with a very slow dial-up modem.) There was an invitation to do a reading in Boston. A journal editor sending along some minor suggestions for an essay of hers they were printing. Some spam. And a letter from Judy Epstein: It’s been a month now, kid. Had enough of the country life? I think you could still get your job back here if you want it—I don’t think our old fart of a dept. chair has put out any notices yet. Want me to tell him you’re interested? PS The correct answer to that question is YES. Love you, even if you’re out of your flippin’ head. NYC needs you! Come back! Judy.

  She smiled as she read the note. But she was also listening, listening carefully, for any sound that might come from upstairs.

  She realized, of course, that her imagination had run away with her. The miscarriage, the scary hemorrhage, the sight of herself in the mirror covered in blood like the surviving heroine at the end of a slasher film—all had combined, no doubt with a rat or a mouse with unfortunate timing, to make her think…No. It was ridiculous. She had cleaned the sheets, cleaned her room, it was all in the past now. Today would be a day like any other. She would read, eat, sleep. She would stare at her yellow pad for a while to see if any poems came (most likely, none would; she had written nothing since arriving here). It was possible that she should drive into the county seat to see a doctor; she was monitoring herself carefully for any further blood, any further pain. But there was none. The incident, strange though it was, seemed finished.

  And yet she listened. Carefully. For any sound. From upstairs.

  The day passed. Her mood was gray, though the day itself was brilliant: at one point she wandered outside for a while, felt the breeze on her face, in her hair, flapping the skirt against her legs. She tried to write, but the yellow pad remained stubbornly blank. Finally she pulled her Dickinson from the shelf—it was curious, she hadn’t read Emily Dickinson in years, yet she felt drawn to a poem which had once been her favorite:

  There’s a certain slant of light

  On winter afternoons,

  That oppresses, like the weight

  Of cathedral tunes….

  Well, it wasn’t winter now; it was bright spring. Yet she couldn’t shake a melancholy feeling that permeated her bones; the poem, so famously about depression, caught it perfectly: she felt as if the light itself oppressed her. Was she anemic? She’d lost blood the night before, there was no doubt about that. Perhaps that was the cause. Perhaps she should, after all, drive into town, see a doctor. But when she got up to go to the telephone all energy seemed to drain from her, leaving her limp and listless. She had to lie down. Stepping into her bedroom, she pulled the curtains closed. There were no sheets on her bed, of course, so she took a coat from the closet and placed it over her shoulders.

  The light gradually faded from the room.

  She slept for a time, a deep but uneasy sleep in which odd fragmentary dreams seemed to bob up into her consciousness, only to sink down again. Michael, her long-limbed college boyfriend, who always avoided looking at her when they made love. Her mother’s sagging, wasted face in her final illness, perspiring, eyes blinking fast, mouth gaping spasmodically. A boy—what was his name?—pushing her into a mud puddle with her new dress when she was four or five. Her father, silent in his chair, not reading, not watching TV, not speaking, just smoking his pipe for hours on end, as he often did in later years.

  She was somewhere between sleeping and waking, her partly-open eyes staring absently past the door toward the living room, when she heard the footsteps coming down the stairs.

  The footsteps did not frighten her. A part of her knew they would come; knew that what she’d heard that morning had not been her imagination. But the weight of the dark dream-visions oppressed her, kept her from moving or even considering it. She simply watched the doorway. From her vantage point she could see the bottom of the stairs; she waited for someone to appear there.

  Someone did. It was a little girl, perhaps eight years old, in a plain white skirt and stockings. Her shoes were black. She had long black hair and big eyes. She turned when she reached the bottom of the stairs and stood in the doorway facing Mina.

  Neither said a word. After a moment the little girl walked up to the bed and sat down lightly upon it.

  “Hello,” the girl said.

  Mina moved to sit up. “Hello…What’s your name?”

  “Mina.”

  “That’s my name. How did you know my name?”

  “It’s my name too.”

  “Your name is Mina?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s your last name, Mina?”

  “Greenwood.” The girl looked at her, a flicker of impatience in her eyes. “You should know.”

  “I should?” She scowled, studying the girl closely. Yet there was no denying it, of course. She’d known the second she saw the girl. There was a picture of herself at that age, wearing that dress. It had been her one formal outfit; most of the time she wore jeans or overalls. But part of the image was wrong. She hadn’t worn her hair like that at that age; she’d had a short, pageboy-style look then. And her face had been different, her features smaller and more pressed together; adolescence had broadened her face, expanded her features, made her prettier. This girl looked like she did now, only without the crow’s feet, without the wear and tear of years.

  The child reached out and took Mina’s hand in her own, studying it closely. She touched the old dark scar on her wrist curiously.

  “Did you try to kill yourself?” the girl asked.

  “Yes,” she said, after a moment, “I did. A long time ago.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh…lots of reasons. There’s never just one reason.”

  “Sometimes,” the girl said, “I want to kill myself, too.”

  “Yes.”

  Their eyes met again. “Do you have any food?” the girl asked. “I’m hungry.”

  They went into the kitchen. Mina toasted frozen waffles for her and watched her drench them in margarine and syrup and eat them greedily. She herself had a cup of tea. They sat at the kitchen table for some minutes without speaking, a single light on overhead.

  “Where,” Mina ventured finally, “where…where do you live, Mina?”

  The girl looked up and scowled. “Where do you think I live? Come on.”

  “I…I don’t understand.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “Well, I—I’ve only got the one bed, you know.”

  “We can sleep together. It’s big enough. Only we need to put the sheets and stuff on it.”

  After she finished they went outside, into the cricket-filled darkness, and gathered up the bedclothes. As Mina started spreading them on the bed she noticed that they had come out far better than she’d thought they would; there was really no trace of blood on them at all.

  “I don’t have any pajamas or anything like that for you, you know,” she said.

  The girl shrugged. “That doesn’t matter.”

  “Well, I—I guess we’ll go to sleep, then.”

  She found her old nightgown at the bottom of her bureau drawer and put it on. When she turned out the light she lay there for a long time, staring at the ceiling and listening to the girl next to her breathing.

  “Goodnight, Mina.”

&nbs
p; “Goodnight, Mina.”

  But for a long time she didn’t sleep. The girl’s touching her wrist had roiled up memories that had long been quiescent in her mind. She could remember the sensation of the tip of the razor as it first began to slice into her flesh: she’d known in that moment why people referred to the feeling as cold. It literally was, as if the razor itself had just emerged from a block of dry ice. But then when the blood began to flow her wrist grew warm again, as if thick bathwater were streaming over it. The sensation was actually rather pleasant.

  All of that was long ago. Shortly after she’d arrived in New York. Shortly after her father had died. Afterward a hospital—a special wing—with other girls like her, wrists wrapped, eyes glittering with madness. Laughter, tears. Their hair askew. Fists pounding on walls. Slapping at themselves. She’d stayed quiet, very quiet, accepting the IVs, the counseling, the pills that would “stabilize” her, the new names in her life—lithium, trazodone, chlorpromazine…

  Sometime in the middle of the night she was awakened by a rattling at the garbage can outside. Some wild animal, no doubt. She slept again.

  Then, just before dawn, the sound of crying woke her.

  The girl was lying on her side, facing away from her.

  “Mina?” she whispered to the child. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  She leaned over to try to see the girl’s face. In her tiny palms she held the dry, blackened umbilical cord.

  “How could you throw it away?” the child asked, looking back at her with wet, hurt eyes. “How could you?”

  # # #

  Dawn was streaming through the windows when Mina woke to find the girl standing before her. She was wearing a pair of overalls; her feet were bare.

  Mina sat up. “Where—where did you get the clothes?”

  “Here. In the house.”

  “I don’t have any little-girl things here.”

  “Sure you do. You just have to know where to look. C’mon, I want us to go outside and play!”

  “All—all right.” As she stood she noticed that the girl seemed older than she’d been the night before. Certainly she wasn’t eight. She looked closer to ten now. “Let me get dressed.”

  The girl smiled. “You’re so slow!”

  But soon enough she’d dressed and they’d shared an apple and some milk.

  “C’mon, c’mon!” the girl said, tugging at Mina’s hand. “I want to go play in the sunflowers!”

  Mina stopped. “There aren’t any sunflowers, honey.”

  “Sure there are!”

  “No. Nobody harvests the land anymore. Nobody planted any. And even if they did, they’d be small now. It’s not the season for them.”

  “Yes, it is! I’ll show you!”

  And when they stepped outside into the hot light, Mina saw that the child was correct. Sunflowers were everywhere: fat stalks with gigantic drooping heads that burst with seed. She inhaled joyously, smelled the odor of dirt, the odor of green growing things.

  “But honey,” she protested, “this is…”

  “C’mon, c’mon!”

  They ran into the sunflower patch. The stalks dwarfed the little girl and were considerably higher even than Mina’s own head. Within moments they were hidden away, the sunflowers completely encasing them in a world of their own. Nothing but sunflowers could be seen from where they were: sunflowers and sky.

  And, presently, birds. All at once they seemed to descend into the patch, darting this way and that: goldfinches, mountain plovers, blue grosbeaks, brown thrashers, mockingbirds, lark sparrows: an impossible aviary, hundreds of birds everywhere. She heard the little girl laughing, raising her hands as if to try to catch them, and realized that she was laughing too. Some landed on her shoulders, her forearms, then fluttered away again. Twitters and cries filled the air.

  “Honey…this is…”

  “C’mon!”

  They chased each other through the patch, which seemed to have no end: this way and that, crashing between the stalks, falling to the soft ground, jumping up again, giggling, shouting happily, running off again.

  “Mina!”

  “Mina, Mina!”

  And when they finally collapsed in hilarious exhaustion, laughing, tickling each other, the girl said: “I brought you something, Mina.”

  “What did you bring me, Mina?”

  She smiled, quieting, and reached into her back pocket. “Here.” She placed a small book into her hands.

  “Oh my gosh. The Pocket Book of Story Poems. This is the first book of poetry I ever read.”

  “I know, silly.”

  “I haven’t seen this in…”

  “Twenty-five years.”

  “It was a book in the school library. I checked it out so many times that the librarian used to joke with me about it. She said I’d found a way to legally steal it, just by bringing it back every three weeks for renewal.” She opened the volume and found a library-card pocket pasted to the inside front cover. Printed on the pocket were the words Hartlow Combined School.

  “Honey…” she began, puzzled. “This is…”

  “The same book.” The girl smiled.

  “How can it be? The school hasn’t even existed in…”

  “Seventeen years.”

  “Then…?”

  “Well,” the girl said, giggling, “obviously they don’t need it anymore, do they?”

  Mina laughed. She flipped through the yellowed pages of the old paperback. Longfellow, Tennyson, Whitman, Housman, Poe…

  “I like ‘Adventures of Isabel’ best,” the girl offered.

  “Of course you do.” Ogden Nash. She turned to the poem and read aloud:

  “‘Isabel met an enormous bear;

  Isabel, Isabel didn’t care.

  The bear was hungry, the bear was ravenous,

  The bear’s big mouth was cruel and cavernous.

  The bear said, Isabel, glad to meet you,

  How do Isabel…’”

  “ ‘…Now I’ll eat you!’” the girl shouted, completing the line.

  They read the rest of the poem together in different funny voices, sitting close together, laughing hysterically. It had been her favorite poem, at ten years old. She’d thought it the funniest thing she’d ever read.

  The child placed her head in Mina’s lap and they read funny poems together, though neither of them really needed the book. The girl had all the best ones memorized, and as she recited them the words came flowing back into Mina’s mind, as well.

  “I like to write poems,” the child said at one point. “But mine aren’t very good.”

  “Well, you need to practice,” Mina assured her. “You’ll get better.”

  Gradually it grew dark.

  “Do you think we can we find our way back?” Mina asked, standing.

  “Of course, silly.” The girl took her hand.

  It was strange, how quickly the darkness had fallen. Strange too how quickly they found their way out of the sunflower patch; they’d run into it for quite a long way, she’d thought. And yet after only a moment they made their way out of the patch and stood before the house again. For a moment Mina was certain that a light was on in the sitting room—yes, there—and she saw a silhouette of a man in a chair, smoking a pipe.

  “Papa?” she whispered.

  But then the vision was gone. She looked toward her companion, who was still holding her hand. The girl was a teenager now.

  “C’mon,” the youngster said. “Let’s go in.” She wore overalls still, and was still barefoot.

  They did. They stepped into the house and ate ice cream and stayed up to watch The Midnight Special and frolicked with each other on the bed. They did each other’s hair and painted their toenails. They danced to 45 rpm records by the Electric Light Orchestra. Mina had never laughed so much; her stomach muscles were literally in pain as it got very late and they collapsed together on the bed, their heads pressed together.

  The next morning the girl was in her early twenties and
she wore a fetching short blue skirt and blouse. Mina remembered the outfit when she saw it.

  They ended up going for a long walk through the countryside. The morning was cool and fresh, clear and comfortable. They wandered past several abandoned houses, the doors agape, the windows gone.

  “They call these ‘see-through houses’ around here,” Mina explained.

  “I know,” the girl said, smiling.

  Eventually they made their way to Hartlow Combined School. Except that the windows were broken out, the building actually seemed in fairly good repair—it was only when they stepped into the classrooms that the school’s utter abandonment became clear. The walls were smeared by rain. The empty shelves had warped and collapsed. Wall hangings had fallen to the floor and grown moldy. Desks were piled haphazardly atop each other.

  “Strange,” Mina pondered, “to think of the last people here, whoever they were. The very last people to use these rooms for what they were intended. The teachers collecting up their supplies, deciding to leave the posters on the walls. The students gathering up their things, leaving old homework assignments crumpled on the floor.” She picked one up, smoothed the sheet of paper. The first page of an English essay. The topic: Emily Dickinson’s “There’s a certain slant of light…” The grade: B+. The student’s name: Mina Greenwood.

  The two women—the girl was a woman now, after all, in her mid-twenties—looked at each other.

  “Mina,” she whispered, “what’s happening to me? I don’t understand what’s happening to me.” Suddenly, for no reason she knew, she began to cry: great waves of tears seemed to overcome her, crashing through her body like a thunderstorm. She could hardly breathe. She found herself collapsing onto the floor, which smelled of dirt and mildew.

  “It’s all right,” the younger woman said, leaning down, stroking her back.

  “I hate myself,” Mina said. “I’ve always hated myself.”

  “I know.”

  “Ever since I was little. I always knew other people were better than me. I knew that other people got more because they deserved more.” Her throat burned with weeping. “I knew that if I was worth more my mom wouldn’t have died, my dad wouldn’t have grown distant and his farming wouldn’t have failed. It was me. I knew it was me. I was ugly and stupid and useless. That’s what I thought.”