Father of the Rain (6 page)

“Please. Please listen to me. They will only fuck you up. Don’t fall in love. Don’t let ‘em close until you know exactly who you are and where you are going.”

“All right,” I say quietly so he’ll take his eyes off me.

He does, and then he looks up at the ceiling and starts to cry. I’ve never seen my brother cry before and he’s bad at it, spastic, his mouth contorted and his hands flailing around his face like they don’t know where to go. I don’t really recognize him as my brother anymore and I put my fingers on the inside of his arm to reassure myself it’s still him. He seizes me, pulls me into a hard, tight hug. My head bobs on his chest as he sobs. Just as suddenly it’s over and he says fuck and shoves me off him and leaves the room.

In Heidi’s room their voices start off quiet again but soon my brother is screaming at her. And she’s screaming back but then she’s doing something that’s not screaming. There are no words anymore; it’s like the horrible yelp I heard earlier but it doesn’t stop; it’s a long deep pitted howl that goes on and on and I feel in my own stomach
that need to howl, and for a few seconds I get scared that I am actually the one howling, so hollow and jangly is my stomach.

After that it is silent and I lie all the way down on the bed and fall asleep. When I open my eyes again, the sun is gone and the night outside is a pale green haze. I hear voices in the living room and follow them. My brother and Heidi are facing each other on the couch, eating noodles from blue bowls.

He says something and she giggles and then they both look at me.

“Grab some chow on the stove,” Garvey says.

“Let me see if we have any milk left.”

“Milk? She doesn’t drink milk with dinner. She’s not four.”

“Kids need milk, for their bones.”

“Yes, little mama.”

“We don’t have any,” Heidi says, shutting the fridge hard, her voice suddenly flat. When she comes back to the couch with her bowl, she doesn’t sit as close to my brother.

“Sorry,” I hear him whisper behind me as I get my food. “I’m such an idiot.”

I sit on a foam chair.

“So Heidi went with me last weekend.”

“To Dad’s?”

“She got the full monty. ‘Patrick, where’s that puppy?’” My brother can do the most amazing impressions of my father, making his voice just as rough and cracked and pissed off. “‘Goddammit, did he run off again? You kids have got to keep an eye on him!’”

“‘Did he pee in the pool?’” Heidi says, but her imitation is rotten.

“‘No, I think he shat on my tennis whites! Goddammit, that’s a golf ball coming out of his ass!’”

Heidi breaks into peals of high-pitched laughing. I can tell they’ve been doing this all week.

“Mom has a new name,” Garvey says.

“What do you mean?”

“She’s not Mom or Meredith. She’s Your Fucking Mother. You better get used to it. ‘Do you know what Your Fucking Mother did?’” It’s amazing how he can just switch into my father’s body. “‘She literally stole the family jewels!’ Did you know that, by the way?”

I don’t know what he’s talking about.

“I think I’m going to lie down,” Heidi says.

“I’ll come,” my brother says, taking her bowl and putting it by the sink, then coming back to help her up.

“I’m fine,” she says, but she lets him. Then she bends back down to me and gives me a kiss on my forehead like my grandfather did at bedtime. She smells nice and I hope my brother will marry her like he said. They call good night to me over their shoulders and disappear, arm in arm, into her room.

I do our dishes. There’s a TV in the corner and I would turn it on but I’m scared Deena will reappear and want to talk to me again, so I go back to Garvey’s room, read more about the man who is a breast, and go to sleep.

I forget to go to the bathroom, so I wake up in the middle of the night. As I quietly open the door and cross the sticky hallway, I keep hearing my brother imitating my father.
You kids have got to keep an eye on him!
I can see that twenty-five-dollar mutt and his prickly hair and long ugly face.
You kids. You kids
. And he isn’t talking to me or my brother anymore.

I don’t flush or wash my hands for fear of waking someone, but as I cross back I look down the hallway and see that someone else is up. Garvey. I can see the narrow outline of his back. He’s moving, stretching or scratching, tilting his head to one side. I want to go back to bed, but I have a feeling he needs me, wants some company.

“Hey,” I whisper as I move closer, but he doesn’t hear.

A few more steps and the whole scene changes, from Garvey alone itching his back to something else altogether. The hand on
his back is not his own and it’s not a hand but a foot and a shin. There are two of them, locked together, moving together, kissing, twisting, all in complete silence. And then they turn, Garvey carrying her in a frontwards piggyback, his legs buckling slightly as he moves toward the couch, her legs wrapped around him, both of them naked, scraping against each other, and then falling into the cushions, her enormous breasts flopping to the sides and Garvey scooping them and shoving them into his mouth, all the while his bum moving up and down and her hands down between their legs, and her face, Deena’s face, in a silent scream.

On Monday my mother picks me up and we drive straight to Ashing. It feels like I have been gone many years. We pass the Christmas tree farm, the inn at the corner of Baker Street, the Citgo station, and then my mother, instead of driving through the middle of town and up the hill to Myrtle Street, turns right onto Water Street and then left into a parking lot. It looks like a miniature motel, beige with white trim, with six apartments, three up and three down. My mother pats my leg. “We’re home.”

Our apartment is on the bottom in the middle. There’s a large
2
on the door, which she opens with a key she’s already hidden in the little lantern above the doorbell.

“I don’t think either of us want to bother with carrying a key,” she says. We never, as far as I know, had a key to our old house. I don’t even remember there being locks on the doors.

All the furniture has been moved in, chairs and couches and beds that used to be on Myrtle Street. I sit on the sofa with yellow flowers that used to be in the den. Is my father sitting on the floor now?

“Come see your room.”

I follow her down a long hallway. My room is small and dark. The one window looks out at our car in its spot. But my old beds are in there, with the same white bedspreads, and all my stuffed animals are on top. I forgot to pack any of my stuffed animals in June, and now they seem strange to me, stupid, with their puffed-up bellies and sewn-on smiles.

“Well?”

“I like it.” I hate it. “Can I see yours?”

Hers is at the end of the hallway, as large as the living room, with French doors that go out to a deck, and the canopy bed she took from the guest room. All my life I’ve been asking to have that bed in my room.

“We need to hang things on the walls, buy some plants, but it has potential,” she says. “And it’s convenient, being downtown. You can meet your friends whenever you want.”

I nod.

“Does Dad know we’re back?”

“I have no idea,” she says.

“Can I go up there?”

“Now?” She looks at her watch. It’s only two-thirty.

I get my bike out of the car and put the wheels back on it.

It’s Labor Day, and Ashing is clogged with cars and pedestrians streaming off the train from Boston, making the trek to the beach. Some kids my age are hanging out on the steps of Bruce’s Variety. I recognize a couple of them, but I don’t know anyone’s name. I’ve gone to the same private school all my life and only know the kids from Ashing who go there too.

“Reggie,” one of them says as I pedal by. I’ve heard this word before. I think it’s a blend of rich and preppie. I don’t know, when they say things like that, if they know me specifically, or just that I don’t go to school with them.

I live in Water Street Apartments now, I want to call out. My mother doesn’t have a job and she’s worried my father won’t pay the child support.

I pass the yarn shop. No orange Pinto. I look for Neal in every face I pass. When I get to Dad’s I’ll call Patrick and find out everything about the summer. Mallory’s at her aunt’s on the Cape until Wednesday.

I ride straight up the hill and then take a right at the blinking light to the stucco house on Myrtle Street with the halfmoon driveway. I stop there, like a tourist. The front of the house is a facade
no one but the mailman uses, with pretty white stones instead of regular gravel, and slate steps that wind up through the rhododendrons to a wide terrace. Through the windows is my father’s den but he wouldn’t be in there during the day unless it was raining. Once, when I was in second grade, I was dropped off here after a birthday party by a parent who didn’t know any better. I climbed up all the steps and was greeted at the top by a stray dog who was lapping up rainwater that had collected in the wide saucer of a planter. He attacked immediately, knocking me over, ripping open the skin on my arms and left ear. I screamed and screamed but no one heard. I remembered the goody bag full of jelly beans in my coat pocket and tossed it down the steps. The dog leaped after it and I got myself inside. I still have faint lines on my arms from that attack. The front of this house is fake; all the activity is in the back. I can hear shouting coming from the pool.

I keep going down Myrtle Street and ride up the back driveway, through the small patch of woods where sometimes in winter rain will gather and freeze and you can skate all around the trees, to the poolhouse and the hum of its machines. Home. Finally I am home.

Mrs. Tabor, water sluicing off the bottom of her bikini, is just stepping out of the shallow end of the pool.

Patrick’s clipping the grass around the little toadstool lights. He’s the first to see me. He drops the shears.

“Daley,” he says.

“Daley?” His mother laughs, as if he’s making an old joke. And then she sees me and says, “Oh my God.”

It’s a little bit like coming back from the dead, a little bit like Huck and Tom when they show up at their own funeral. Only Frank, Patrick’s older brother, ignores me, launching himself off in a swan dive and gliding along the bottom of the pool like a stingray.

“Sweetie pie, when did you get back?” Mrs. Tabor says, quickly putting her head through a terry-cloth dress before coming over to me.

“Today.”

She hugs me. She’s cold from the pool and water from her hair drips down my neck. Her black hair is no straighter wet than dry and hits the small of her back in a straight line. She is normally pale but now her skin is like copper. She must have spent a lot of time beside my pool this summer.

“Well,” she says, looking down the driveway, then at the house. I wait for her to start asking me questions—she was always so full of questions for me when I went over to Patrick’s house. “Your dad will be sorry he missed you.”

“Where is he?”

“Radio Shack. Isn’t that where he went?” she asks Patrick, who nods. “Can you come back later?”

There’s something strange about the way she’s standing, I feel like if I try to take a step closer to the house, she will tackle me. I glance at the garage to see if my father’s car is gone; it is.

“Hey.” Patrick hits me on the arm. “I gotta show you what we got for the pool.”

His mother starts to say something and stops herself. I follow Patrick into the poolhouse. It’s mostly the same, except for some of the towels hanging on the hooks. Patrick leads me to a new little cabinet next to the bar and tells me to open it. Inside is a stereo with a turntable, an eight-track, and a radio. He pushes
ON
and music blasts inside and out. He points to some yellow speakers in the trees beside the pool. “They’re waterproof,” he says. “For rain. Oh, and I gotta show you something else, too. It’s so cool.”

“Stay out in the sunshine. Don’t go indoors,” Mrs. Tabor calls as we pass her chaise on the way to the house. “Patrick, are you listening to me?” But Patrick keeps on moving, and by the time we reach the back steps she’s lain back down again.

The kitchen table is gone. The only furniture in the kitchen now is a red leather armchair I’ve never seen before. They’ve moved
the table into the pantry and covered it with an orange and brown tablecloth that’s not ours. In the living room there are two new lamps (my mother took the blue and white Chinese ones) that have shiny black bases and silver shades with a kind of veiny green mold design. In the den, where the yellow flowered couch and chairs used to be, are two baby blue recliners. On the mantelpiece is a photograph in Lucite of two old people I don’t know.

Patrick heads up the stairs possessively and into my parents’ room. Same bed, missing dresser, new chair with ottoman. Weird geometric sheets on the unmade bed. He sits on my father’s side of the bed and opens the thin drawer of the bedside table. He lifts up a black plastic thing shaped like a small egg with the top cut off and a bright red button there instead. A cord runs out of the other end.

“If you push this, the police will come.”

“What?”

“It’s called a panic button. Gardiner—I mean, your dad—wired the whole house. Downstairs there’s a box and when you go out you turn it on and if anyone crosses any threshhold anywhere in the house a signal goes off downtown at the police station and they have to come in two minutes or they get fired. Isn’t that so cool?” He’s sitting on a gold velour robe.

In the drawer with the panic button are several old watches, receipts, white golf tees, one cuff link, and a silver fountain pen my mother gave him for his fortieth birthday. I used to play in this drawer on weekend afternoons while my father napped and a ballgame flashed on the TV at the foot of the bed. He slept so deeply I could thread the golf tees through the circles of hair on his chest and he wouldn’t wake up. Sometimes I fell asleep beside him. The drawer, this whole side of the room, holds the smell of him, which is humid and spicy.

In the drawer are two new things: a tube of something called KY Jelly and the note my mother left on the kitchen table on the
morning of June 25th. It’s crumpled and in the back but I know what it is. If I were alone I’d pull it out and read it, but I don’t want Patrick to know it’s there, though he probably already does.