Lullaby for the Rain Girl

by Christopher Conlon

  “I’m not hungry,” she said, in a voice so small I hardly heard her.

  “What? C’mon over. You always eat a good breakfast.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  I looked at her. All I could see was her hair, her pajamas, her pale hands around her knees. I felt utterly helpless.

  “Well...it’s here if you change your mind.” I sat down and ate mechanically. In the time it took me to drink a mug of tea and eat a bowl of oatmeal with apple slices, she never moved. I thought again of taking her to a doctor, thought again of what the doctor would say after the examination. I wanted to go to her, wrap my arms around what little was left of her, saying, What can I do for you, honey? What can I do? But I already knew the answer: Love me. Love me. Love me.

  I took a shower, swallowed my medications, dressed. I figured I’d do my exercises later.

  “Rae?” I called from the bedroom. “Are you coming with us? Sherry and I are going to the National Gallery of Art.”

  She didn’t answer. But she always refused to come along on any of our excursions. Today would be no different. I could stay with her, I supposed, but to what purpose? To be miserable together? To sit on the sofa with her and go through her mother’s things again, as we had now done several times? Yet what could I do? Doctors were impossible. There weren’t any resources for dysfunctional kids like her. None at all. I was her only resource and I was somehow failing her. I knew that. But I didn’t know what I could do about it. I wasn’t going to run away with her and live on the road, I knew that. How, then? What was going to happen when school started up in a few days? Would she be able to adjust, go to classes? I couldn’t see it. I knew she couldn’t, either. It was impossible. Would she just sit in this apartment forever, then? Sleeping and crying and staring out the window?

  Things could not continue like this.

  Standing in the bedroom doorway, I looked at her. Her profile was to me. An odd optical illusion occurred then: for just an instant, she appeared translucent. I somehow seemed to be able to see straight through her to the window frame behind.

  I blinked twice; the illusion vanished. She was solidly there again. Solid but small, pitiable. Lost.

  No. Things could not continue like this.

  I stepped over to her, put my hand over her shoulder again, pulled her gently to me. “Love to have you come along, Rae.”

  No response. But her head rested easily against my shirt.

  “You going to stay here, then?”

  She rubbed her face softly against me. I tousled her hair. If only I could convince her to let Sherry into her life, I thought, things would be different. Rae needed a mom, needed one desperately, and I’d begun to suspect that Sherry might be available to fill the position. She would do it magnificently, I knew. How wonderful it would be—the three of us, a complete family....

  “You should get up, Rae, take a shower, have something to eat. Pop the oatmeal in the microwave. It’ll be okay.” I knelt down beside her then, looked up at her. Crusty yellow deposits laced her eyes. I reached my finger up to her face and tried to gently brush them away. “Honey,” I said, “you need to take care of yourself. Really.” I touched her cheek with my palm. “You’re a beautiful girl, but you have to take care of yourself.” When I was finished with her eyes I rustled around for my Chap Stick and applied some to her flaking lips again. Rae smelled strange, I noticed. Partly it came from her underarms, but there was something else, something harder to define. A sweet smell, but not a pleasant one. Like...

  I stood up suddenly, my breath short. I backed away.

  “Well...I’ll go now, honey,” I said. “I’ll be back in a few hours. We’ll—we’ll ring in the new year together. Maybe I’ll bring Sherry back. We can watch Dick Clark on TV. Countdown to midnight. That would be fun, huh?” But I hardly knew what I was saying. My heart was beating fast.

  “Okay,” she whispered, not looking at me.

  “So...okay. Right. Bye, sweetheart.”

  I stepped out into the corridor, closing the door and resting with my back against it for a moment. I closed my eyes. The odor I’d smelled seemed to stay with me, in my nostrils, my brain. I tried to shake my head, to clear it, but the odor stayed there, followed me to the elevator, into the lobby, out the front door. It was only when the frigid morning air hit my lungs that it finally dissipated.

  It was the smell of rotting meat.

  # # #

  Yet once I was outside in the winter’s day, feeling my shoes on the pavement, looking at the people and cars all around me, I felt all right again: part of the world, the real world, moving among the living and breathing swarm of normality—reality, the shared reality people live in. I felt my energy gathering as I made my way to the Metro, rode up to Tenleytown. I was worried about Rae the entire ride, but somehow the rumble and clatter of the train, the voices of the other people had the effect of taking me away from her, making her world seem vaguely surreal, dreamlike. As I exited the station and made the walk to the hotel my heart felt strong, powerful. A few drops of rain splashed on my face, invigorating me. By the time I stepped into the hotel lobby I found that I felt good. I felt guilty about feeling good. But I felt good.

  Sherry was waiting for me. “Hi, stranger,” she smiled. We kissed each other’s cheeks, as we’d gotten into the habit of doing. “Happy New Year’s Eve.”

  “Hey, you too.”

  “Is it starting to rain?”

  “A little. Yeah. It’s not a very nice day, I’m afraid.” As I said it, I saw that a downpour had suddenly begun. We stared at it for a moment.

  “Want a drink first? A snack?” she asked me. “The restaurant’s open.”

  “Well...it doesn’t look too nice outside, does it? And I didn’t bring an umbrella. Dummy me.”

  We stepped into the restaurant, had coffee. Sherry and I had grown easy with each other: old friends. We talked for a while of the city, things we still planned to do while she was here.

  “How’s Rae?” she asked finally.

  “Rae’s...Rae’s good.” I hesitated. “Well, maybe not good. I think she’s...I don’t know. Depressed.”

  Sherry nodded. “Does she have a therapist? Some kind of counselor?”

  “No...no. She probably should, you’re right.” I rolled the idea around in my mind, thinking that the only thing stranger than a doctor giving Rae an examination would be a psychiatrist asking her why she was so unhappy.

  “Ben,” she asked, looking at me over her coffee cup, “what happened to her mother? You’ve never told me. Just that she died.”

  “Yeah. Well.” I didn’t meet her eyes. I couldn’t think of a thing to say, that I could say.

  “Never mind,” she said. “I didn’t mean to butt in. I’m sure it must be hard.”

  “It is.”

  “Let’s drop it, then. Sorry I mentioned it.” She looked toward the window. “Gosh, it’s not letting up, is it?”

  “Doesn’t look like it.”

  “I don’t think they’ll mind if we sit here a while.”

  “Good.”

  We were silent for a time.

  “So what are you writing now, Ben? Another Abigail McGillicuddy mystery?”

  “Oh, God! Please don’t mention that name.”

  She looked at me. “Why not?”

  “Sherry, I hate that damned book. I wrote it in a week just to make money. I put in every stupid whodunit cliché I could think of. I barely even looked at it when it was done.”

  “But it’s your biggest success, Ben.” She seemed bewildered.

  “Success. Yeah, it was that. It was successful.”

  “What’s wrong with success?”

  “Well, nothing’s wrong with success. If it’s not for crap like that.”

  She looked down at her cup. “I didn’t think it was crap. I thought it was a fun little story. I didn’t think you would write something like that. Everything I ever saw of your writing was always all—all dark, all intense. I thought you must have
had a lot of fun writing something like that.”

  “It wasn’t fun. I hated it.”

  She seemed somehow hurt. “Well, I liked it. I’d read another one. I mean, even if you weren’t the author. I liked Abigail and Clyde. I can see it like a—a TV movie, or something.”

  I shook my head. “It was just...” But I didn’t want to keep hammering on Leprechauns Can Be Murder. It was as if I were calling her stupid for liking it. I did write it, after all.

  “It was just entertaining. That’s what it was.”

  “Well, okay.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with being entertaining, Ben. Everything doesn’t have to be heavy and literary.”

  “I guess not. I just...it felt, back then, like I was—I don’t know. Compromising my name, or something.”

  “You can still write literary things. Lots of writers do it. Light stuff, heavy stuff. Who’s stopping you?”

  “Nobody, I guess.”

  “Only yourself, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I think you should write more Abigail books. Make money with them. Get as famous as you can. And meanwhile just keep writing the things you care about more.”

  I looked at her. I could always count on Sherry O’Shea for sound, practical advice. I found myself wondering a bit exactly why I did hate that book so much. So it wasn’t literature. Did that matter? As I thought about it, certain scenes from the book came back into my mind. There were some funny bits in it, yes. Parts that had made me laugh while writing it. It hadn’t all been cynicism and anguish. It crossed my mind to wonder whether what I’d really hated was facing the success I’d had with it.

  We watched the rain for a while. It kept falling.

  “Want some more coffee?” she asked.

  “No thanks. I...It’s a shame it’s so wet out there. But we can go, anyway. Maybe I could buy an umbrella. Does this hotel have a little shop?”

  After a moment she said, “We could go up to my room for a while.”

  I looked at her. Tingles ran up and down my spine.

  “Oh,” I said stupidly. “Your room?”

  She looked at me.

  “Uh—sure,” I stammered. “Yes. Let’s. That would be great.”

  We paid the bill. She took my hand and we rode the elevator up to her hotel room. I’d not been there before.

  “C’mon in,” she said, unlocking the door.

  It was the standard kind of room anyone would expect in a good hotel like this. It was small. The bed, however, looked supernaturally big to my eyes. When she closed the door again she turned to me and we kissed each other, really kissed each other, for the first time in—what? Sixteen years? She felt achingly familiar and yet indefinably different. Time, years. After a long while we pulled apart and looked at each other. I wanted to jump, shout with joy. I also wanted to cry. Everything was tangled within me, confused, overwhelming.

  Sherry walked to the window curtains and pulled them closed. The room was mostly dark then.

  On the bed we touched each other for a long time. I was glad it was dark; I found myself embarrassed about my aging, fat, sagging body. I wondered if she felt the same about hers. Lord knows we were both bigger and flabbier than we had been. Yet her skin and her scent were instantly recognizable to me. I would have known them if I’d been a blind man led here with no clues or hints whatsoever. The shapes were a little different now, rounder, softer, but somewhere in my deepest memory, in my brain stem, my DNA, Sherry O’Shea was stored, still accessible to my remembrance all these countless days and nights later. We said nothing, reacquainting ourselves with each other. I remembered playing on a Slip ’n’ Slide with her, doing homework together in my bedroom, dancing to “We’ve Only Just Begun.” It all came rushing back into me, memories stagnant and unvisited for close to two decades. God, the vagaries of that ramshackle contraption we call the human heart.

  I found myself trembling. My body would not respond.

  “It’s okay, Ben,” she whispered. “Let’s just give it time. You’re nervous. You’re shaking. I’m nervous.”

  “Stupid,” I whispered shakily. “Stupid for us to be nervous. It isn’t like we haven’t done this before.”

  “I know,” she smiled. “Thousands of times. But it’s been a while.”

  “It has.”

  We held each other in the darkness. I found myself wanting to be nowhere else on earth, nowhere but here.

  “I love you, Sherry,” I said, hot tears springing to my eyes. “I swear to God, I do.”

  She kissed me, held me. “Ben, I love you too. I love you so much.”

  We were laughing and crying at the same time, kissing each other’s lips, cheeks, eyes, necks. For a while I was aware of nothing else in the world but Sherry. I didn’t want to be aware of anything, anyone else. After a while my body began to respond and we made fumbling love, both of us too excited, too nervous, too frightened. We had to stop a couple of times, and even then it didn’t last long. But it was the best lovemaking I’d ever had.

  Later, lying atop the bed on our backs, only our hands touching, our breaths slowing, I said softly, “It’ll get better.”

  She giggled breathily. “It was great.”

  I laughed. “It was. Not technically. But—great.”

  “I love you, Ben.”

  “I love you.”

  We lay there for a time, our breathing returning to calmness.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked.

  “Yeah. I am, actually.”

  We found the room service menu, ordered sandwiches. We said little while waiting for the food, our bodies wrapped contentedly together. Finally there was a knock and Sherry slipped on a robe to open the door. We devoured the sandwiches, sitting cross-legged on the bed, naked and giggling, spilling crumbs everywhere. When we were finished we lay down again.

  After a long time Sherry turned over and looked at me, propping her head up with her hand. She played with the hairs on my chest.

  “Ben?”

  “Mm.”

  “I’m sorry about...how it ended.”

  “Don’t. Forget it.”

  “No, I have to say this, Ben. I did a—terrible thing. That night? I was drunk off my ass. I didn’t know what I was doing. Peter and I—yeah, we’d been getting kind of close. We’d kissed once or twice. But that night...” She shook her head. “I just—it wasn’t working, you know? You and me. I wasn’t happy. You seemed so happy. I wasn’t. I just wanted to go home. To Stone’s End. But I was afraid to tell you. I knew you wouldn’t want to go back. So I...I don’t know. I convinced myself that everything would be okay if Peter and I got together. I liked him. He was good-looking. Smart. Funny. I—I never meant for it to happen like that.” She pushed some strands of hair out of her eyes. “And then—we went off to his hometown—in Texas, remember? But we hadn’t been gone for a week before I realized I’d made a terrible mistake. Peter was shallow, he screwed around with other girls...the whole thing was just a disaster. I thought of trying to go back with you, but I figured you wouldn’t have anything to do with me. For good reason.” She sighed. “Anyway, you and that girl—Rachel—you were involved for a while, huh? I remember her calling Peter a few times.”

  “For a while,” I said.

  “Funny, to think of you with her.”

  I didn’t speak.

  “Anyway, the whole thing went kablooey. Peter and I had broken up within a few months of running off together. I went home, to Stone’s End. Stayed with Mom and Dad for a while. Then I went off to San Francisco State.”

  “Ever hear from Peter?”

  “Peter? God, no. I have no idea what ever happened to him.” She plucked at the bedspread. “Good riddance.”

  We were silent for a while.

  “I just needed to tell you that I’m sorry, Ben. For what I did. All those years ago. I’ve never stopped being sorry about it. If I hadn’t done it...Who knows what might have happened?”

  “We probably would have broken up, so
oner or later. You would have gone back to Stone’s End and done everything the same way.”

  “You might be right. I don’t know. It just seems like...we lost it, somewhere. The two of us.”

  “We were kids, Sherry.”

  “God, we were, weren’t we? Were we ever really that young?”

  “We were. The world was.”

  She dropped her head onto her pillow.

  “I’m sorry about it, Ben.”

  I reached my index finger to her lip. “I heard you the first time. It’s ancient history. Forget it. It’s time to move on.”

  “How?” she asked. “It’s been so long. We’re different people now.”

  “We’re not different people. We’re the same people. Just older.”

  “Wiser?”

  I laughed. “Older.”

  “It’s so weird, being with you. It’s like...we’ve been apart forever and yet...it’s like you’ve been in the next room, all along. All those years.”

  I touched her cheek, dotted a few of her freckles with my finger. “I have been. I guess we both have. We just didn’t realize it.”

  “What now, Ben?”

  “Well...” I thought about it. “When do you fly? How long an extension did you get?”

  “Until Tuesday. But I can make it longer. I might...” She seemed to hesitate. “I might even be able to look into a transfer. They have an office here, you know. In D.C.”

  I smiled and stroked her cheek.

  “Would that be okay?” she asked.

  “That would be wonderful.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “I travel a lot. I’ll be gone a fair amount.”

  “We’ll work it out.”

  “Do you—after your divorce is done, I mean—do you want to get married, Ben?”

  “Yes. I do.”

  She looked at me and suddenly laughed. “This is going so fast!”

  “It’s not so fast. We’ve known each other since we were little kids.”

  “What about Rae, Ben?”

  “I’ll talk to her. Do you think you can stand living with a sometimes surly teenager?”

  “I can try. I’ve always wanted to be a mother. A good mother. Maybe I can be a good stepmother.”