Year of the Monsoon

by Caren J. Werlinger

Leisa stared down the hall at Nan’s retreating back. She heard the study door click shut. Bronwyn pushed her wet nose under Leisa’s elbow, squirming onto her lap. Leisa sighed and hugged her. “Not sure why we bothered to wait.” She clicked the television off. “Come on. One more time outside, and then off to bed.”

  In the study, Nan opened her e-mail. There it was. She hadn’t really had time to read this message carefully when she first saw it. Vaguely, as if she were observing someone else’s behavior, she noticed that her fingers poised over the buttons on the mouse were trembling. She read the message through a couple of times before deciding to delete it. She made sure she deleted it again from the “Deleted Items” folder.

  Chapter 3

  NAN GAVE HERSELF A mental shake, hoping she hadn’t betrayed her momentary inattention to her client. She tried to focus. Damn, it felt like this week was never going to end. And the tension between her and Leisa wasn’t making time go by any faster.

  Leisa had been a little cool this morning after Nan was so late getting home, and even through her own pre-occupation, Nan had picked up on it.

  “I’m sorry I was so late last night,” she apologized, coming over to where Leisa was waiting for the toaster to pop and giving her a hug from behind.

  A smile tugged at the corner of Leisa’s mouth. She never could stay angry.

  “Tell you what,” Nan continued. “Let’s go down to Fell’s Point this weekend. We can bring Bron and spend the day together, just us.”

  Leisa turned to hold Nan. “That sounds good,” she said, her voice muffled as she nuzzled into Nan’s neck.

  “How has your week been?” Nan asked as they each finished getting breakfast ready.

  “It’s been kind of a weird week,” Leisa replied. “You remember the little girl I had to go to the police station for? Well, yesterday –”

  They were interrupted by the ringing of Nan’s cell phone. “This is Dr. Mathison,” she said. It was the ER of one of the downtown hospitals informing Nan that one of her clients had been admitted. Nan looked at her watch as she hung up.

  “I’m sorry, hon, I’m going to have to stop by there on my way to the office,” she said as she abandoned her cereal and filled a travel cup with coffee.

  “But you haven’t even had breakfast,” Leisa protested.

  “I’ll grab something later,” Nan assured her. “See you tonight. Love you,” she said as she gave Leisa a quick kiss.

  “Love you, too,” Leisa said as she sat with her toast.

  As Nan reflected back on that conversation, she realized Leisa never got to finish whatever she had started to say. “I’ve got to remember to ask her,” she said to herself when, at last, she finished her last session of the day. She gathered up her things and hurried out to her car.

  Why is Friday traffic always so much worse than other days of the week? Nan wondered as she drummed her fingers impatiently on the steering wheel, oblivious to the fact that the soothing Native American flute music playing on the stereo wasn’t calming her in the least. When she finally got home, she parked quickly behind Leisa’s Sentra and ran up the steps to the front porch. Inside, she could hear Leisa’s voice coming from the family room. Something was wrong.

  “I don’t understand,” Leisa was saying in a choked voice. When Nan entered the room, she could see that Leisa’s eyes were filled with tears. Leisa handed the telephone wordlessly to Nan and collapsed on the ottoman.

  “Hello?” Nan said cautiously.

  “Oh, Nan,” came Jo Ann’s voice, “I’m so glad you’re home.”

  “Jo, what’s wrong?” Nan asked in alarm.

  “It’s Rose.” Now, Nan could tell that Jo Ann was also crying. “She collapsed this afternoon. They rushed her to the hospital. They said it was a heart attack. She’s dead.”

  “Are you sure you’ll be all right for awhile?” Nan asked the next morning, holding Leisa closely. Neither of them had slept for more than short bits and the little they got wasn’t restful.

  “Yes,” Leisa sniffed.

  “I’ll be home as soon as I can,” Nan promised, holding Leisa’s face and kissing her tenderly.

  A few minutes later, Nan jumped as the driver behind her honked his horn irritably at her failure to notice that the light had changed. She was on her way to the office to re-arrange her schedule for the coming week. Bruce had left immediately after Jo Ann called yesterday afternoon, insisting on driving to New York to pick her up and bring her home. “I don’t want her coming back on the train –” He cut himself off before he could add “alone”. They had gotten home sometime around four a.m. Leisa and Nan were going over to their house later to eat lunch and then go on to the funeral home. As Nan wove her way through traffic, she tried to figure out how to prioritize her caseload. Everyone seemed to be in crisis mode lately.

  Going through her schedule at the office, she picked out the clients who most needed to be seen. When she looked at the list, she realized she could still put in half a week seeing them.

  Nan shifted uneasily, recalling a conversation she’d had with Maddie before Christmas.

  “Remember to take care of what’s important,” Maddie had said, refilling Nan’s wine glass.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Nan asked sharply.

  When Maddie didn’t answer right away, Nan said, “You say something like that and now you’re going to get all cryptic on me?”

  Maddie swirled the wine in her glass, watching the ruby reflections on the granite of the kitchen island. “You’re working a lot lately.”

  “So?”

  “So it’s work.” Maddie looked at Nan. “You’re a good therapist, but if you died in an accident tomorrow, your clients would find someone else to go to. Your work is not your life.” She took a sip of her wine, and asked, “Is there a reason you’re working so many hours?”

  “No,” Nan replied emphatically. “No, it’s…” But she didn’t know exactly what it was.

  “Don’t you want to be home more?” Maddie watched her closely.

  Nan lowered her eyes. “Nothing is wrong, exactly, we’re just in one of those phases where we don’t seem to talk anymore. I feel like I might as well be at work,” Nan admitted.

  Maddie reached out and squeezed Nan’s hand. “Remember to take care of what’s important,” she repeated.

  Sighing, Nan looked back down at her list of clients and decided to cancel the entire week. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d taken a whole week off. “Leisa is the most important thing right now,” she reminded herself as she reached for the phone.

  A couple of hours later, she and Leisa were seated at the kitchen table at Jo Ann and Bruce’s home a couple of blocks from their own house and from Rose’s, all within easy walking distance of each other.

  “Tell us what happened,” Leisa said as Bruce laid out a platter of ham and turkey for sandwiches.

  Jo Ann removed her wire-rimmed glasses and wiped her eyes with a tissue. “She was complaining of indigestion,” she explained in a tremulous voice. “We thought it was all the rich food we’d been eating. We went back to the hotel to rest.” She began to cry again. “I heard her fall in the bathroom. I did CPR, but the paramedics said she died immediately.” She couldn’t continue.

  Leisa looked up, her eyes red and puffy. She studied her aunt’s face, so much like Rose’s that people often mistook them as twins. Their dark hair had gone silver over the last few years and they had defiantly refused to color it, declaring that they had earned every one of those gray hairs.

  Leisa looked nothing like them, having been adopted, the only child of Rose and Daniel Yeats. Daniel used to tell her when she was little that they went to the baby store and picked her out, like picking a puppy at a pet store.

  “Your mother and I walked around and around, looking at all the babies there, and we picked out the prettiest and smartest baby girl they had,” he used to say, holding Leisa and rocking her with her blond head resting on his chest so that his voice rumbled
in her ear.

  “I think I was ten before I started questioning that story,” Leisa would laugh.

  Now, they all picked at their food as no one had much of an appetite. At last, Bruce looked at his watch. “We’d better be going.”

  At the funeral home, they met with Horace Spink, a pale man with large bags under his eyes that gave him the appropriately mournful expression of a basset hound. “We’ve been in contact with the New York City medical examiner’s office, and they assured me that the deceased’s remains would be available by Wednesday.”

  “What do you mean ‘available’?” Leisa demanded.

  “After they have completed the autopsy, of course,” Mr. Spink answered with what he obviously thought was a reassuring smile.

  “Oh.”

  He opened a desk drawer and pulled out a leather binder. “Perhaps we should start,” he said, flipping the binder open, “with our casket selection.”

  It seemed there was an endless list of decisions to be made: arranging for the transport of the body, scheduling viewing hours, what to include in the obituary, choosing the floral arrangements, how many death certificates to order. Leisa had helped her mother with all of these things when her father died, but Nan had never been through this process. She felt helpless as she sat back offering nothing but her support.

  Nan had often watched, a bit enviously, as Leisa interacted with her parents and with Jo and Bruce. It was abundantly clear watching them that Leisa was not just loved, but adored, something Nan could not relate to.

  “We just don’t have anything in common,” she had said flatly when Leisa first asked why she didn’t want to see her family more often. “Having them in Oregon and me here works out just fine.”

  Nan was the middle child of three, “the unspectacular one,” she often said. Leisa had met Mr. and Mrs. Mathison once when they stopped in Baltimore on their way to Europe. “Let’s be discreet,” Nan had said.

  Leisa cocked her head to the side and asked, “Are you ashamed of me?”

  Nan flushed and replied, “Of course not. I just don’t discuss my personal life with them.”

  Leisa laughed. “They’re your family! How can they not be involved in your personal life?”

  “You’d be surprised how easy it is.”

  “But,” Leisa sputtered, “but you have a brother and sister!”

  “Believe me, siblings are over-rated,” Nan said sardonically.

  “You wouldn’t think that if you didn’t have any,” Leisa sighed.

  By Sunday afternoon, all the arrangements were made. Nan was lying on the couch reading while Leisa flipped through television channels from the recliner with Bronwyn snoring next to her. Leisa finally settled on a football playoff game. She turned the volume down and said, “I think I’m going to go to work tomorrow.”

  Nan slowly lowered her book. “Why?”

  Leisa stared at the television. “I feel like I’d rather keep busy. I don’t know what I’d do, just waiting for Friday to get here for the funeral.”

  “I took the week off to be with you,” Nan reminded her.

  “I can’t remember the last time you took a week off,” Leisa said.

  Nan sat up, swinging her feet to the floor. “We could go somewhere for a few days if you’d like.”

  Leisa looked over at her. “I don’t feel like going anywhere, and I don’t want to be away if Jo needs anything. I just need to stay busy,” she repeated. “It might be a good time to catch up on all the old files you never have time for,” she suggested as Nan stood.

  “Or it might be a good time for you to deal with your feelings,” Nan said pointedly as she started to leave.

  “Are you angry?”

  Nan stopped, her head bowed as she said over her shoulder, “No, I am not angry. I just think it’s a strange time for you to be at work. And I bet Maddie will think so, too.”

  “Where are you going?” Leisa asked as Nan headed down the hall.

  “To re-schedule some of the people I canceled.”

  In the office, Nan punched her computer keys with angry jabs, despite what she’d just told Leisa, as she entered her password to check her e-mail. Ten new messages. Clicking her way through them, she stopped abruptly at the sixth message. There it was again.

  “Leave me alone,” she whispered through clenched teeth as she hit the delete button.

  Chapter 4

  MARIELA SAT IN THE playroom, cutting shapes out of construction paper. She was singing to herself, using a glue stick to fasten the colorful bits of paper to the aluminum paint can. Leisa sat down next to her.

  “That’s really pretty,” she said, brushing a loose strand of black hair off Mariela’s forehead.

  “They’re flowers for my mama,” Mariela said. As Maddie had predicted, Mariela had slowly begun interacting with people, occasionally playing with the other children, but still often preferring to be by herself. The paint can was always with her.

  “That’s a very nice thing to do.”

  Leisa looked up and saw Maddie watching from the far side of the room. Leisa went over to her.

  “Should we do something?” she asked.

  Maddie considered for a moment before she answered, “Not yet. This is probably the most normal relationship she’s ever had with her mother.”

  They stood side by side watching Mariela continue decorating the can of ashes.

  “Have you ever felt like you wanted to take anyone home?” Leisa asked tentatively. “For real, to adopt?”

  Maddie looked down at Leisa. “Are you saying you feel that way about Mariela?”

  Leisa shrugged. “I’ve never felt this way about any of the others. There’s just something about her that –” Her throat was suddenly too tight to finish.

  Maddie put an arm around Leisa’s shoulders. “Come to my office.”

  Wishing she had kept her mouth shut, Leisa accompanied Maddie downstairs. Maddie closed the door of her office and sat behind her desk as Leisa took the other chair.

  “How long have you been thinking about this?” Maddie asked.

  Leisa plucked a loose thread off her jeans and twisted it between her fingers. “Actually, she’s been on my mind pretty constantly since the night I was called out to get her.”

  “Leisa,” Maddie said gently, “it’s only been a couple of weeks…”

  “I know that,” Leisa said defensively. “I didn’t say I was ready to do it.”

  “Have you talked to Nan about this?”

  Leisa exhaled in exasperation. “I can’t talk to Nan about anything lately.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know. I guess she’s still angry that I came to work the week of the funeral.”

  Maddie frowned. “It’s not like Nan to stay angry. Do you intend to talk to her about Mariela?”

  “Would you like to have children? Someday?” Leisa had asked Nan once as they were getting to know one another.

  Leisa had always envied her friends who came from large families. Thanksgiving and Christmas had always felt as if something was missing with only her parents and Aunt Jo and Uncle Bruce. Her favorite television show growing up was old re-runs of The Waltons. She had no desire to get pregnant, but had always hoped she would meet someone who would be open to adopting two or three children. “Not just one,” she insisted. “One is lonely.”

  “No. Absolutely not,” had been Nan’s unexpected reply.

  Leisa was caught off-guard by the finality of Nan’s response. Nan, who never saw anything in black and white, who always took the trouble to try and see every issue from the other person’s side, was adamant about this.

  Puzzled, Leisa asked, “Why not? Don’t you like children?”

  Nan’s expression had hardened perceptibly. “No, I don’t.”

  Leisa swallowed her disappointment. She knew she was already beginning to fall in love with Nan, but to give up her dream of a family….

  Over the years, any hopes Leisa had that Nan might change
her mind were dashed when friends began having children. Nan never held the babies or played with the toddlers. She often excused herself from get-togethers where she knew children would be present. Leisa had had to accept that Nan really didn’t like being around children.

  “Do you intend to talk to her about Mariela?”

  Leisa shook her head. “Not now. It’s not the right time.”

  She couldn’t help noticing that Maddie looked relieved. She knew Maddie most likely thought this impulse to take Mariela home was a reaction to Rose’s death. And if Leisa were absolutely honest with herself, “there is a grain of truth in that” she would have had to admit.

  Home was a very lonely place lately, but Leisa couldn’t talk to Maddie about what was going on. She missed her mom so much it hurt. There was a constant emptiness inside, compounded by a sense of guilt that she had told no one about. That day in the car, when she had thought about calling her mother, but hadn’t. “Why?” she kept asking herself. “Why didn’t you call?” She knew the question didn’t really make sense – “how could you have known?” argued a more logical side of herself – but she wished with all her heart she could re-do that day. Nan asked often how she was doing, and held her when she found her crying. But as warm and solicitous as Nan was in regard to Leisa’s grief, there was a distance in her recently that Leisa couldn’t bridge. “It’s nothing,” she said whenever Leisa found her, brooding and taciturn, staring into space. As empty as the world felt without her mother in it, it seemed even emptier with Nan so far away.

  Leisa and Nan climbed into the Mini and drove to Rose’s house, passing beautifully-kept Craftsman, Tudor and Colonial style houses. The early February sky was flat and gray, looking as if it might snow again. Leisa pulled into the driveway and sat there, her hands tightly gripping the wheel.

  “Are you sure you’re ready to tackle this?” Nan asked, reaching over to Leisa’s shoulder.

  Leisa hadn’t been inside the house since Rose’s death. Jo Ann and Bruce were the ones who had come over to pick out clothes for Rose to be buried in; Leisa hadn’t been ready then.