Lullaby for the Rain Girl

by Christopher Conlon

  7

  The next morning I was surprised to discover her still sleeping on the fold out bed as I sluffed out to the kitchen to start the water for tea. Usually she was up before me, already showered and dressed by the time I managed to make my appearance.

  Standing there in my robe, I looked down at her. Her breath seemed quicker and shallower than it should be, and there were dark rings under her eyes. I moved to the blinds at the front windows, pulled them open slowly, looked down the eight floors to the street. It appeared to be a calm, clear day. Finally I moved back to the sofa.

  “Psst. Hey kiddo. Time to wake up.” I shook her gently.

  She was a long time waking. She stirred slightly, made an indistinct sighing sound—maybe it was more of a growling—and turned over on her back. For a while her eyes didn’t open. When I touched her shoulder, she pushed me sleepily away.

  “C’mon, sweetie. It’s past nine. We both slept in late. Time for breakfast.”

  When she opened her eyes I thought that I’d hardly ever seen anyone look less refreshed from a night’s sleep. Her eyes were red—a red film covered them, broken only by deeper red veins shooting in different directions like little bloody lightning bolts. The circles under her eyes seemed to make her cheeks sag; she looked ten years older. Her lips were dry and cracked. Her hair was limp, greasy. She looked at me silently.

  “Honey, you don’t look so good,” I said. “How do you feel?”

  “I’m okay,” she said lifelessly, struggling to sit up.

  “How did you sleep?”

  “Not great.”

  “It shows. You look really tired. Maybe I shouldn’t have woken you up. Do you want to go back to sleep?”

  She shrugged. “In a while, maybe.”

  “Some juice? How about breakfast?”

  “That’d be good. Yeah.”

  I poured orange juice into two glasses, slipped bread into the toaster. When I came back to the living room I found her standing in her pajamas looking out at the morning with only slight apparent interest. She still had that thin, underfed quality I’d noticed last night. She looked skinny, too skinny, as she had when I first encountered her in my classroom on a rainy afternoon which seemed years ago now.

  “Looks like a nice day, doesn’t it?” I asked.

  “I guess. Sure.”

  She took the orange juice and swallowed a healthy gulp. It seemed to help her a little. I turned on the TV while she wandered around the room, drinking the juice and shaking her head now and then, seemingly to help herself wake up. Finally I brought buttered toast on two plates to the kitchen table and we sat down together. She ate hers quickly, hungrily.

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  “That help?”

  “Yeah, it does.”

  “Wow. You didn’t look so good a few minutes ago. Better now, though.” She did look better—color had started to fill her cheeks again, lessening the ghastly pale quality her face had had a few minutes before.

  “I’ll be okay,” she said as I brought our morning tea to the table. “I just had a bad night, that’s all.”

  “Wonder what caused it.”

  She glanced at me, then away. “Who knows?” Then, after she’d sipped her tea for a moment: “Dad, we’ll just be alone together today, right?”

  “What do you mean, honey?”

  “I mean...you’re not going out anywhere, are you? By yourself?”

  “Today? Um...” I thought carefully about how to answer. “No. No, I don’t think so. No, it’ll just be you and me today. How’s that?”

  Her face suddenly seemed to glow, to absolutely radiate happiness. “Great!”

  It was strange, how changeable she was. No doubt it was a trick of the morning light touching her face, but suddenly she looked fuller, healthier, more herself. The cheekbones and fingers that had seemed semi-starved were normal again, rounded, well-colored. The rings under her eyes were less pronounced. Even her hair seemed bouncier, livelier than it had just a moment ago.

  I shook my head, wondering if my own morning bleariness was playing tricks with my vision. No doubt I was oversensitive to every nuance of my new daughter’s health, I thought; even paranoid about it. That must be it. Yes.

  Still, as we sat there quietly drinking our tea and the morning news played softly on the TV, I thought of last night and of Sherry O’Shea. I’d been surprised at how much I enjoyed seeing her again. The pain of how our relationship had ended so many years before seemed entirely gone: dust: I could hardly remember who those young people, myself included, had been. Instead sitting there with her had brought back a flood of happy memories, some of which she brought up in the conversation, others which infused my mind then and later. I’d buried Sherry O’Shea, buried her long ago just as I’d buried Rachel Blackburn. My life was teaching, living in Dupont Circle, occasionally writing, dealing with Vincent and Kate and Alice and Dad, trying to pick up a woman now and then. It wasn’t much of a life, but it was mine. Bow everything old was returning; all the things I’d submerged in an extremely deep lake of unvisited memory. I’d been horrified at the thought of revisiting Rachel in any way, and yet the presence of Rae somehow made it all right, even good, to talk about her again, as I had with this daughter of mine for hours and hours.

  And Sherry? How nice it had been, how pleasant, how right, to sit in that lounge with her like the oldest and best of friends. I knew I had to call her today. But, looking over at Rae, I knew just as clearly that I would have to tread carefully. Her jealousy, her possessiveness, was real. It would have been cute if it hadn’t been so deeply felt, so obviously a profound part of her—of who she was and how she thought of me. There was a temptation to just drop everything, say, “You’re right, Rae—it’ll just be the two of us from now on,” but that was, naturally, impossible. Work would start up again in January. I would be in classes, in meetings. She would be in her classes and clubs and athletic activities—whatever she decided to join. No, Rae would have to acclimate herself to the fact that we couldn’t always have sole possession of each other.

  But I also knew that this moment, father and daughter enjoying breakfast together on a lovely morning, was not the time to bring these things up. I decided to let us—to let her have an uninterrupted day with me. I could call Sherry at a convenient moment and, if she were willing (and I found myself surprisingly hopeful that she would be), invite her over for a drink tomorrow. That way I could stay here and Rae wouldn’t need to be without me. Perhaps seeing other people taking some of my attention would be less frightening, less dispiriting for her if she could be here.

  “Good grief,” I said, suddenly realizing. “It’s Christmas Eve, Rae.”

  “Yeah.” She smiled a little.

  “I...God, with everything happening, I...I haven’t taken care of everything. I haven’t gotten you a present.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “No it’s not. How about...” I thought for a minute. “How about making today your present? We’ll do anything you want to do.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, anything I can afford,” I smiled. “If you want me to take you to the Bahamas, we’ll have to talk.”

  She laughed. “I don’t know,” she said. “We can do whatever. I just want to be with you.”

  “Well, we have to do something. We don’t want to just sit here watching Regis Philbin on TV, do we?”

  “I guess not. Well, can we go to the Gap? I need some jeans.”

  “Sure.”

  “Can we go to some bookstores? Like Olsson’s and Second Story?”

  “Sure.”

  “Can we have lunch out somewhere?”

  “Sure.”

  “Can we rent some movies at Blockbuster to watch tonight?”

  “Sure. Of course. Sounds like a great day, honey.”

  “Only we have to do one thing first.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Your exercises, Mr. Heart Attack!”

  We did them—stretching, run
ning in place. It was fun, with Rae as my strict-but-gentle drill sergeant. Afterwards we took turns showering and then headed out into the day.

  The weather threatened rain, maybe sleet, for a while, but gradually cleared. By mid-morning it was delightfully sunny, as pleasant a late-December day as could ever be had in Washington, D.C. We went to all the places Rae wanted to go. Her excitement was infectious: it all seemed new, somehow, with her pulling me from store to store. I didn’t have to reign in her spending; she was quite frugal, actually. A pair of jeans, an inexpensive top. A couple of used paperbacks. She was as happy as I’d ever seen her, her arm entwined in mine as we marched up and down the streets around Dupont Circle. She would even greet sales clerks with bubbly enthusiasm: “Hi!” she say. “How are you today? This is my dad!”

  We wandered for hours in a happy haze—together, I thought, as a father and daughter should be. We had lunch at a very good Indian restaurant. It was strange how natural it all seemed, how easy and inevitable. But I didn’t dwell on the deeper questions. I just enjoyed her grin, her laugh, her bright happy eyes.

  Eventually as the sun slid low in the sky we stopped off at Blockbuster. We had a funny, silly argument about whether we should get Armageddon and Deep Impact both—two big-rocks-from-space movies on the same night? “How about Godzilla,” I asked. “Or The Truman Show?”

  “Here’s one!” She held up the box for There’s Something About Mary.

  “No! Too dirty!”

  “Aw, c’mon, Dad! Don’t be lame!”

  I laughed. “You can watch something like that on cable sometime. I’m not watching it with my daughter!”

  We settled finally for Men in Black. We flipped a coin for which big-rock movie we’d see: Deep Impact won. Perfect lightweight fare. We picked up popcorn and Raisinets on the way out, as well.

  It was twilight when we returned to the apartment. Rae went off to the bathroom and I checked the answering machine: one message. I pushed the button.

  “Hi, Ben. It’s Sherry. Umm...give me a call.” She said her number and hung up. It was the kind of message that someone leaves when they’re not sure the other party has any interest in hearing from them. I’d forgotten completely about Sherry, and suddenly felt shamefaced about it. Hoping that Rae would take a while, I picked up the phone and dialed the number. After several rings she picked up.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s Ben. Hi.”

  “Ben.” She sounded relieved. “Hello.”

  “Hi. Look, I’m really sorry to have not been here to take your call. Rae and I were out all day Christmas shopping.”

  “Well, that sounds nice.”

  “It was. It was a lot of fun. Listen—how about tomorrow? It’s Christmas, though—do you have plans?”

  “No plans at all, Ben.”

  “What are you doing at a conference over Christmas, anyway? What kind of company do you work for?”

  “Well, I could have gone home, actually. The conference is finished. But I’ve never spent any time in the D.C. area. I decided to stay and see the sights for a few days.”

  I wanted to say: Alone? But I didn’t want to go there, and I’m sure she didn’t want me to either. Anyway, she wasn’t married. Her parents were dead. No siblings. I wondered if Christmas in Oakland might not have been as alone as Christmas in Washington.

  “Well...look,” I said. “Tomorrow evening?”

  “I don’t want to get in the way of you and your daughter, Ben.”

  “No, no, it’s fine. Really. We’ve been a little...discombobulated this year anyway. About Christmas, I mean. Anyway, Christmas pretty much wraps up in the morning, right? I don’t know what kind of meal we can give you, but we’ll figure out something. Maybe order Chinese.”

  She laughed. “That would be great.”

  “I—yeah. I’d like you to see the place. I’d like you to meet my daughter.”

  “Okay. Great.”

  We discussed directions for a minute, and set the time.

  “Okay, then,” I said. “Well—we’ll see you tomorrow. Merry Christmas.”

  “Merry Christmas, Ben. And to your daughter, too.”

  I hung up the phone just as Rae came out of the bathroom.

  “Who’s that?” she asked.

  “Nobody important,” I said. “Just a—co-worker, calling to say Merry Christmas.” I didn’t like to fib, but I was determined to not let anything come between us on this deeply happy day. “So which movie are we watching first?”

  # # #

  Christmas morning passed quietly and cheerfully. We’d both managed little gifts for each other: a simple but elegant gold necklace for her (purchased the day before when she was distracted in another part of a store we visited), and for me, Rae had constructed a startlingly beautiful card—but, though it was the size and shape of a traditional holiday greeting, “card” isn’t the word for it. It was more of an art project, an abstract design made from wrapping paper, bits of tissue, wood and metal, all kinds of things. As I looked at it I realized that she’d embedded bits of our lives together within the splashes of abstraction: a big red heart (mine, I supposed, made of felt), mugs of tea (semi-circular bits of metal with steam-waves of string rising from them), dozens of impossibly narrow rain-like strips of aluminum foil. At the bottom of this striking creation she’d written, in a rather wildly girlish script not unlike Rachel’s: Marry Christmas Dad I LOVE YOU MORE THAN EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD From You’re Daughter Rae the Rain Grrrl!!

  “Honey, how did you make this?” I asked, sitting next to her on the sofa while the Christmas Day Parade played quietly on the TV. “It’s gorgeous. It really is.”

  She shrugged, but I could see she was happy with my reaction. “Just did it in my spare time after you went to bed. With stuff I found around the apartment.”

  “You’re an artist. I mean—maybe you should study art. I’m serious.”

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  We watched the parade for a minute or two. “Hey, honey?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Honey, I—I invited someone over for today. Later today.”

  “You did?”

  “Yeah. An old friend of mine. She’s coming for a drink this afternoon. She might stay for dinner.”

  She scowled. “Dinner?”

  “Maybe.”

  Her expression was uncertain. “I wouldn’t know what to make your friend for dinner. I don’t know what she’d like.”

  “No, honey, don’t worry about it. We can order out. Maybe we’ll get Chinese.”

  “Chinese?”

  “Sure. You don’t have to lift a finger.”

  She seemed to think about it.

  “Who is she?”

  “I told you, sweetheart. Just an old friend.”

  “The same one you went to see a couple of nights ago?”

  “Yes. That one.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Sherry. Her name is Sherry.”

  “Sherry what?”

  “O’Shea.”

  “Sherry O’Shea. Sherry O’Shea.” She sounded the name out slowly.

  “We’ve talked about this, Rae, right? We have to see other people. We have to live. Only this time you and I don’t need to be separated. Sherry will come here. You and I will be together the whole time.”

  She didn’t respond. She stared at her lap.

  “Why,” she asked finally, “do you need anybody besides me?”

  “I—well, honey, that’s hard to...It’s just life, that’s all. It’s not healthy for two people to just be together all by themselves all the time. And it isn’t possible, anyway. I’ll be going back to work at the start of January, you know.”

  “I hate that.”

  “I’m sorry, Rae. But unless you want to become homeless, I have to work.”

  “I wouldn’t mind being homeless,” she said, “with you.”

  “Rae, come on. Don’t be silly.”

  “I’m not. I mean it.”

  “No, yo
u don’t. You just think you do.”

  “It’s Christmas. I want to be with my dad.”

  “I’m not going to leave you for one single second, kiddo. Well, except maybe if one of us needs to go to the bathroom.”

  She smiled weakly.

  “Will you try to be nice, Rae? She’s really a nice lady. You’ll like her if you give her a chance. Please? For me?”

  She studied me. “You swear you won’t leave me?”

  “I swear I won’t leave you, sweetheart. I told you, we’ll be here. Together. The whole time.”

  She looked glum. “I’ll try.”

  “That’s my girl.” I hugged her and we watched a big Mickey Mouse float amble by on the TV screen. I looked again at the card she made me, that astonishingly accomplished card.

  “Thank you again for this,” I said. “It means so much to me. I’ll keep it forever.”

  She dropped her head onto my shoulder and sighed. “Aw, Dad.”

  # # #

  I tried not to appear to Rae as nervous as I was, nor to reveal that Sherry had ever meant anything more to me than any casual girlfriend of long ago. Yet, in addition to my concerns about Rae’s reaction to her, I found myself fretting over what Sherry would think of this apartment: how did it compare to where she lived? Was this place a dump in comparison? It probably was. Sherry worked for a huge corporation that sent her around the country to conferences at first-class hotels; I’m sure she’d done vastly better financially than I had. I found myself agitatedly tidying things all day, vacuuming, scrubbing. Rae offered to help, but I was self-conscious enough as it was: “No, no, honey, I’m just cleaning up a little. It’s okay. Just watch TV, read your new books.” An image crossed my mind of Gatsby desperately displaying his shirts to Daisy. Now and again I forced myself to stop it, to sit down, read the paper, watch the news, check my e-mail.

  I had the odd feeling that nothing was getting past Rae, that she could see exactly how edgy I was and could guess the reason. But her behavior was noncommittal. She read for a while, listened to the radio, played around with her hair in the bathroom—exactly the kinds of things one would expect a teenage girl to do on a lazy Christmas day. But I wondered what she was thinking. I feared another meltdown of the sort we’d had two nights before. I worried that she would be rude to Sherry, or collapse in “illness” (real? imagined? put-on?) after she left.