Clearly Now, the Rain (19 page)

Hey, bro, I
. . . I can't break then, but I'm threatened with it so I stop, swallow, set my jaw.
Thanks for being so fucking brave.

Luke's surprise at this caliber of compliment from his asshole older brother swells in his gaze for a moment. But then he waves it off, hugging me quick, telling me to go shower, he's got some ideas to pursue. He calls the police and they send an officer. Then he starts calling private investigators.

I dump every illegal item in the apartment into pillowcases and take them to the basement, then carefully empty Serala's bag and search every cranny, assuming, in my naïveté, that the cops will at least root through it. But the serious, by-the-book lady officer barely glances at her photo. She explains that we can file a report, but it won't do any good except to identify Serala if she turns up in a hospital—or elsewhere. She tells us with tight lips that the police never look for a missing person actively unless they are a danger to themselves or others—and hunting heroin doesn't count. We slog through the paperwork and she softens toward the end, smiles sadly once—I imagine at her impotence as much as our fear—and wishes us well.

When dark falls Luke, Hugh, and I choke down some food, gather all the information that we have, excavate old hunting knives and lengths of iron pipe from the basement, withdraw a lot of cash, and drive downtown with short breath in our breasts.

The private investigator is in Belltown, only a few grimy blocks from where the taxi took Serala. The PI is kind and competent; she takes our cash and Serala's picture and excuses herself to get to work. Idle and sliding evermore toward panic, we put up our hoods and hit the street, heading for Second and Pike.

At that intersection a diner looks out on all the shady happenings. The bar is packed with worse-for-wear characters and an occasional scary one. The waitress is plump, and weathered, and tough, and she sets down our Bud Lights, wipes her hands, and takes a look at the photo. After a minute she starts shaking her head.

Honey, I get so many people through here, I can't say. I know hundreds of faces 'cause I got hundreds of regulars, but I don't know her.

We turn back to the hookers and dealers, the drunks and addicts, all milling around one another. Certain currents peel off a duo or trio here and there, carrying them into an alley, like a great group dance on the hard, cold stage of Seattle winter. I step out to call my mom, who's been slightly panicking since she heard from Luke about the scenario. While I hunch on the leeward side of a trashcan, a black woman with an expectant or excited look on her face hurries past and I see her, through the window, appear next to Luke and Hugh in the diner. I end the call and go in. The woman is tapping her press-on nail against the gloss of the photo—
snick, snick, snick
—and exclaiming.

I know this girl! I seen this girl! Last night I seen this girl, I swear I did! I seen her up on Capitol Hill like real late last night. She was with two ugly white dudes, one of them with a big ol' steel thing through his nose—he was kind of touching her pockets as they walked and they was walking fast.

We're trying to keep our poker faces because none of us are suckers; we've all grown and wizened in this city and we know Oscar-worthy performances can leap from the minds of desperate people. This woman is moved now, though, telling us through tears that her sister is missing, too, and she'll do anything she can to help us, and do we have a phone number, and she's going right away to see if anyone knows, and we just need to pray to God Almighty and wait. Luke hands her fifteen bucks, a photo, and his number. We enter the slummy streets.

So Luke talks to dealers leaning on building facades; we find a security guard on a bike and he accepts a copy of the photo; we march dark blocks, shying away from the groups of crackheads, stopping random people and cops. We go to police precincts and drop off photos, since the police have no internal system for even circulating a picture of a missing girl. We drive to halfway houses and down notorious smack streets, passing the photo around, gripping the weapons under our jackets, leaving the phone number, floating suggestions of rewards.

Finally, I've got to call her parents. I suck down a cigarette in three drags and dial them while standing outside, in the penumbra of a cop shop. They are both on the line instantly, the terror in the back of their throats already cracking words, and I tell them very carefully everything we've done and are doing; I tell them that I let Serala go last night to score; I do my best to be honest but reassuring. We give them the PI's number, the case number, our apologies, our love. They react with the strained serenity that they have learned over the years, through a series of accidents and emergencies: concern is immediately appropriate—concern is always appropriate—but, like me, they will not allow her to yet panic them. In sober voices, they tell us to keep them posted and that their suitcases will be packed by the front door.

We go back to the Irish bar, to the last place we saw her, and it breaks me as I step over that curb. I go to the restroom to pull myself together. What knots itself in my gut is not just fear, guilt, and anger, but also disbelief, deep regret. I look at my eyes in the greasy mirror over the urinal: to think that I believed myself ready, impervious, accepting. To think that I had peace.

Then Luke gets a call from the black woman from downtown; she's in the Central District, she says, not a mile from where we are and she knows where Serala is—her boyfriend has seen her. We run to the truck and I push it hard through its gears up the steep, slick streets and thickening fog, all of us saying to one another,
This is probably a setup, let's not be suckers, we won't split up, won't follow them anywhere.

We pull up to a gas station at the crown of the hill, big billows of fog blowing up and over like rivers of smoke. The woman stands in the yellow wash of a streetlight; her man—six-foot-something with faded clothes and a plastic bag—stands beside her. I'm not sure what happens to me in that moment, but I snap—I am absolutely done with fucking around. I pull up close with a shriek of brakes and find myself leaping down from the truck and marching up to them like I'm going straight for the jugular and they're shocked at this, move back a little and Luke and Hugh are out now, too, we're on three sides out of four and I'm saying:

What the fuck is this where the fuck is she I'm not a sucker you fucking know that?

And the tall man's eyes fly to a red Jeep Cherokee. Someone behind the tinted windows cuts it on and it rumbles away and we can tell by silhouette that there's a carload of cats in there and the tall man is whistling after them, but they've seen we're not the victims they were promised. They fishtail left out of the lot and get eaten by the ghetto's shadow. And the tall man is saying:

Well, you gonna have to come with us if you want to see her, my lady here'll stay in the car with y'all while I go up and make sure she's there, it's just down the block—

and it comes down like a guillotine in my mind: bullshit. And I breathe, release the knife in my pocket, step back and tell him:

Look, man, you bring her here and I'll give you five hundred dollars; bring her here and I'll give you whatever you want. But there isn't any fucking way that we're following you down some street—would you do that if you were me?

And he doesn't answer, thinks it's rhetorical, is searching his dopy mind for some other argument. But it's not rhetorical and I say again:

Would you do it if you were me, man?

And he shrugs, and I tell him I thought not, so go get her or stop wasting our fucking time. The woman makes her play then, coming forward with a carefully fixed steadiness in her eyes, the look of someone who has decided they are going to do wrong and do it fully—no half-stepping mumbled lies for her, no, not like her man.

You know that your girl is down there fucking smoking
crack!?
You know that shit? You want her down there in some fucking
crack
house
?
Do you fucking
care
about her? Do you
love
her?

She comes nearer with each phrase and she's done it now, she's convinced herself of her own theater. She's putting force into it, putting behind her words the craving of whatever it is that the reward—the bounty—would get her. And never in my life have I been closer to striking a woman. And the long moment that I spent at the house standing indecisive over the .45 pistol roars back to me. And I suck air through my teeth, and one of us tells them:

Go get her. If you know where she is, go get her. We'll be right fucking here and you can come back and get rich
.

They make sounds of doubt, and shrug, and say,
Okay, we'll try,
and the man shifts the bag to his other hand and they stroll off into the fog.

Hugh says,
I'm gonna follow them, stay here,
and he pulls up his hood, and pulls down his hat, and shrugs the jacket up around his shoulders and he goes. I can't stand there, though, and I tell Luke to stay under the light and I wheel out of the station and through the lightless blocks, devouring all the black with my high-beams, making U-turns in intersections to throw light 360 degrees and there's nothing but a crackhead or two scurrying and I drive back. Hugh is there and he says,
Yeah, they just wandered off,
and we light cigarettes and haul ass to meet Louis and re-plan because the night has only begun.

At Kinko's on forty-fifth, Luke is refining the missing person poster he's put together with the eager-to-help computer geek on the graveyard shift. Me, Hugh, and Louis are sitting on the curb and I can feel tears come and go from my vision like the tide but I won't break, can't break then, and my friends know it, even gentle Louis, and they put their hands on my shoulders, squeeze, and shake resolve into me. With a glossy stack of posters—the picture cropped from one of Serala and me on her mother's couch, both of us smiling halfway—we hit a basement bar and give a stack to one of Luke's friends who will do University Avenue. And then, toting staple guns and tape, posters and knives, we go: up and over Broadway and Capitol Hill, back yet again to the Irish bar; downtown up Third and Fourth, down Virginia and Pike. Louis drives slowly behind while the three of us move up both sides of the street, wrapping every pole with her face, pinning it onto every wooden wall, slipping it under the doors of businesses, of the needle exchange, of porno theaters. When we stop and look back down the rain-glimmering roll of Third Avenue, the streetlights wink on the gloss of her face, as if someone scattered stars down the street.

In bus stops, unhappy clots of drunks and graveyard shift workers huddle, awaiting off-hour shuttles. They watch us work, some impassive like they've seen a quartet of men do this every night, and others transfixed, watching Serala's gaze go up like the dawn to haunt them from all sides. If there is recognition in any of them, there is also a veil.

At home around 3 a.m. we gather on the floor, her sleeping bag threaded around us, Dad's shrine sparkling with candles, and we put on one of her mixes and take turns looking in one another's eyes and saying,
It's going to be okay, however it turns out.
I'm left to face that lie inside my own head because it belongs only there, not on the slumping shoulders of my brothers: how could it be okay if she has to keep on living now? How could it be okay if she doesn't? However it turns out, nothing is going to be okay. But her music is throbbing around us and I focus on that, try to let it lead me to some approximation of sleep.

With the dawn comes an end to winter's hiatus. It is cold and the rain is in earnest—Seattle at its loathsome best. The dread of facing the day, I think, gives me a taste of how she lives. How the only thing you want to do is crawl back under the covers and vanish, drive your car into the ocean. To simply go to sleep, for God's sake, and never have to rise. But there are things that have to be done.

After calling all the hospitals, the morgue, and the investigator with no results, Luke, Hugh, and I climb back into my truck. We go to saturate University Avenue more thoroughly, partly because rain has already taken some posters to the ground and mostly because we don't know what else to do. We are a spectacle of misery, inching down that busy street, jumping out like deliverymen to tack Serala's gorgeous face in every business that will allow it. We give copies to street musicians and street kids, slap it on trashcans and windows. When a man at his gyro counter refuses to put up the poster, flipping it back at me like it's my change, I come as close as I did the night before to violence and I know I need to get off the street. I find Luke and Hugh huddled outside our rendezvous, a coffee shop, Luke sucking on a raspberry smoothie in lieu of real food.

As the weepy sky intensifies its deluge, drops the size of dimes now smacking our skulls, we decide we need to laminate the posters. Just as we're about to reach Kinko's, though, Luke's cell rings and I brake in the middle of the street. I stop to hope and stop to dread. I stop to find out what it is that comes next.

Twenty-Three

Luke tells us to get out and we do. He's on the phone, and shaking his head, and marching back and forth and then he stops: pallor floods his face, like someone pulled the drain on all his blood, and he turns the receiver away from his mouth, and breathes once and says she's been found dead in an alley downtown.

I want her closer now. I want her to look closer, to not flinch, to picture this:

Hugh is crouching under the eave of a garage, rain overflowing the gutters above him so it's like he's behind a waterfall. But I can see that he is weeping, with the stoicism that is his alone, hat pulled low, just letting the tears leak out with no expression, eyes on the winter skyline, now and then using the cuff of his coat to stab at his cheeks, the coat she gave him for Christmas four days ago. I haven't seen Hugh weep since '95 when his big brother quit the world.

Luke curses one time—
fuck
—and his right arm windmills up with the smoothie, comes down with all his strength plus gravity and the cup explodes with a
smack
in the middle of the street, a red starburst on the wet pavement, a flared wound in the side of the city. He's still young enough that when he cries he looks like a child, like someone you want to take into your arms and hush, or carry to the embrace of a mother, any mother, to comfort him. He's pale and shaking now, the phone call is done, and I know in that moment that this is how he looked when I had to tell him from ten thousand miles away that our father was gone. And now he's crying again with abandon like I've only seen when that one song is played, that song that Serala introduced us to, that song that ushers us through hard anniversaries, blasts a hole in the day clear through everything. But there's no music now, only the perpetual madness of rain, a perfunctory honk from the drivers tangled at the on-ramp. The high song of tires from Interstate 5.

And me? I'm back in the truck, brutalizing the steering wheel, my sobbing convulsive but empty and dry, and all it does is assure me of how long and far this pain will go, that I don't even get to the trailhead today, that I should have started two days ago, when I knew without knowing and put a lot of bravado and booze around me instead. And now I get out of the car and suck enough of the rain-cleaned air to make my voice work, and I dial her brother and speak the hardest words I can imagine, each syllable a marathon.

And
that
, as she used to say,
is that
.

Louis came home from work shaking, a pale face and eyes glassed over, sick that he'd not been with us for the arrival of this pain. After that, the night was composed of predictable elements: chugging whisky on our knees in front of photos of her; shaving our heads in some vague, monkish demonstration of mourning; blowing out all the speakers in the house with Neil Young. There was the destruction of an entire wall in the apartment with heads and fists, bruised and cut knuckles and faces, furniture flying off the balcony, getting kicked out of bars and, finally, collapsing into a plaster-, blood-, and liquor-stained four-person heap when we just couldn't go on any longer.

We had a window of days before we were due in Connecticut for the funeral. We headed for the mountains and all that blessed space to absorb our raging. It was a New Year's tradition for my family, something Serala was really looking forward to—a plan we had made. I'd told my mom not to cancel the festivities, not to scuttle the holiday for her gaggle of friends, but it was rough for us to mingle—though mostly everyone there wisely kept their distance.

When the time came for the bonfire—a shanty-sized pile, stacked and covered through the summer—we lit it with Molotov cocktails, a huge surge of rage spent in that one small motion. Eventually the flames were the size of horses, riding up into the swirl of stars. Luke had brought the remaining box of posters and we huddled on the sidelines of the party, slowly drawing an
X
through the MISSING and an RIP with magic markers beside Serala's green eyes. When midnight approached we split the posters four ways and I turned to the dozen or so people gathered there.

My best friend was found dead in an alley the other day,
I said
. For all the years that I knew her and loved her, all that she wanted was to die. So I'd like to ask you for a moment of silence while we have this ceremony and then what we'd really like is a celebration, because that's what fits.

In that moment, I felt something heavy slip into place in the middle of me. For the first time I got a shred of what I'd always thought I would feel when she went: relief and peace. I'd been so foolish, so young, so fucking wrong to think it would come immediately and naturally—to actually think I'd already done the work. But in that moment beneath those flames, I got a sip. But I also accepted how much I was going to have to suffer.
So bring it on,
I thought,
bring it on. If my grief will pay the passage for her out of this world, I want to feel every fucking last stab of it.
Give me the fuel I need to stay open to the world.

We circled the fire clockwise, scoping out gaps between logs to float the posters. The embers were a huge spill of searing heat and it was hard to get close enough. We managed to, though not without burns. One by one, stepping in enough to singe our brows, to release and back out, like a martial art or a dance. Her face whirled and slid with the air currents around that massive blaze, falling with something like grace into the pulsing white center, curling into the holy nothingness of ash, delivered through the whirling smoke to the impossible silence of the sky.

I wish I could say that the funeral was good, an homage to her, something appropriate, something distinct. There were a lot of people there, but the majority didn't know my best friend, and I knew only a handful. Ceremony is good to hold families and communities together, I suppose—and, as with my father's death, the family must offer everyone the gift of closure. And dear God how her family did; I think they wept the least. When we pulled up and I saw her parents I started trembling. I climbed carefully out of the rental car and walked toward them—framed against a row of headstones and stark Connecticut sun. I wish I hadn't broken then, but I did. And I begged forgiveness for letting this happen on my watch and they held me, and hushed me, and even thanked me.

But it wasn't her. It wasn't her in that casket, almost as white as me, dead six days. A pathetic shell that didn't seem capable of having carried her and all her love through the shit world. And it wasn't her I saw mourned there, but an idea of her: a hardworking corporate VP who misread her prescriptions. But the strength in Luke's eyes was her, when he grabbed me by the shoulders in the middle of the cemetery and held me still, silent tears streaking his cheeks, a huge smile on his face as he promised me, over and over:
She's sleeping, bro. She's sleeping.

Me, Jay, Louis, Hugh, Samar, Luke, and Adaline hit the highway hard, determined to honor Serala in a way that would have befit her. Samar and I slept, tangled together, most of the way back to Brooklyn, filling the truck with Springsteen. When we arrived, everyone was recharged for bitter celebration. We headed down to a Spanish restaurant in our funeral finery. Jay took the reins and turned it into an appropriate homage: pitchers of cosmopolitans and a massive, sizzling platter of different meats. He, the righteous vegetarian, even ate some—after a lot of loud hemming and hawing. I liked to imagine, and I suppose that he did, too, Serala arguing with him, calling him asinine and absurd. The hours that unfurled over that table will always be the crowning memory of her passing: love, friendship, history. The photos are all goofy and joyous, full of direct gazes, into the heart of the photographer, into the heart of the viewer—like her gaze, which will hang forever on my wall and peer out into my heart, my life, from that poster.

By the time we made it back to her pad that night, we mostly sang drunkenly through another couple of rounds and then flopped. But Adaline was more sensible with her drinking. She found herself awake three times that night, eyes snapping open, she swore, on Serala—staring herself down in the mirror, jeweled hands stroking the wrinkles out of her blouse, as if preparing to go to work—or maybe just to walk out that door for the last time when we all did. I don't doubt Adaline for a moment; those white drapes billowed wildly.

In January, not a week after her funeral, my mother invited Hugh to join her long-planned trip to the Caribbean. We started to get a flicker of excitement, started to hope that there might be something soothing on a tiny island parked out in the sapphire water. One of those things, we dared to dream, might be some good loving from the perfect island women we were constructing in our imaginations. A night before we left, this led Hugh, Louis, and I into the recently fallow topic of sex.

Shit,
I said,
she was the only person I've slept with since leaving Montana
.

Louis chuckled a little nervously and started to say something then stopped. I figured it out, though, with a glance, so he went ahead.

Yeah, she's the last person I slept with, too.

We turned to Hugh and didn't have to ask. The laughter came into his eyes and then it came out of all of us: hard, and good, and bracing.

I lifted my bottle.
God bless her,
I said.

God bless her,
they nodded, and we drank.

Did I help her die? Did the way I loved her give her permission? Could I have stopped it and, if so, should I have stopped it? If I, her best friend, had ever confronted her with the clear hypothesis of the cycle: shame, self-hatred, and abuse, would it have gotten through and put her on a new path? In short: should I be haunted by the sweet kiss and broad smile she gave me that night on a rainy Seattle sidewalk on her way off to the end?

But I find I'm no longer much pained by that question since I spent four weeks in a little room in an artist's studio, looking out at a Vermont church and fields of snow and wrote this. I sat with piles of her letters, photos, hundreds of emails, her music, and a decade of memory. And although I had her generous brother to squeeze my shoulders and tell me, right to my face,
Thank you, you did it right, you loved her right,
I had to learn it for myself. I'm happy for her now. All my grief is just for me, just what I have to pay for having had the privilege of her love, and it is worth it. I'll carry this ache for the rest of my days, and I'll shed tears till I'm ancient, and I'll always be desperately lonely without her, but it will never stop being worth it. And it will never stop being worth it for Luke, excelling in his third year of medical school. For Louis, living in Barcelona, married and studying Flamenco. For Hugh, shouldering the world from his new home with his new love in Missoula, Montana. For Samar, fiercely alone and writing her own songs now in a bungalow in Connecticut. For Jay, running a record shop in the heart of old Seattle. For Monty, my colleague and friend, teaching literature and publishing novels not three miles from my home—my home: the same apartment, chock-full of ghosts and dogs and laughter and, also, my powerful Spanish wife and the powerful boy growing inside of her.

Serala's story is composed of the stories of the people who were so fiercely and well loved by her. This is just me and her. Our story is written.

And she came back to give me peace. A sleepless night in a Caribbean cabin less than a month after her death, me tossing and turning with the crash of each wave, tortured by questions: whether or not I told her I loved her, whether I did wrong by not fighting her more, whether a plan with me would have saved her. Wondering if her last hours were terrible. I got up and smoked her cigarettes, and lit a candle by her photo, and wrote to her. I asked her to let me know that she was free. And when I got back in bed and fell directly asleep, she did. She also told me the most important part: that we still have plenty of time.

And when I awoke at dawn, staring out into the sun-blasted, wind-ripped surf of the Caribbean, and I went and stood on that white sand shore, closed my eyes, put my arms out, and let the sound and fury of this world without her push the tears back from my eyes, I was assured and I was ready and I will not detain her or my father anymore. They need each other wherever they are and I need these hands and this heart to build something in this beat-up world.

At the end of the day she died, when we all finally collapsed on the floor, wrecked and spent, Louis had stretched out his arm in front of us and taken a picture—the last one on the roll—with her camera.

I have that picture now; I can see a piece of it right this second. It says it all: us with our puffy eyes, raw from tears and booze, half-smiles on our broken lips, peace (victory?) signs offered up with bloody fingers, resigned:
Fuck you, love. Thank you, love. Goodbye, love. Rest.

So go, Serala, my traveling partner, my counselor, my drinking buddy, my teacher, my lover, my best friend. I can do it now. Go.

You're allowed.