Monsoon Season (7 page)

I flinched. ‘We broke up,’ I said, pressing my hands flat against the table top, stretching my fingers apart. Riley used to tell me she loved my hands.

‘Ooh.’ Amy nodded with her mouth full of lettuce. She was a vegetarian. I wondered what else vegetarians put in sandwiches. ‘That explains it. Well, what happened?’

I was avoiding eye contact. ‘Stuff.’ Riley liked to hold hands about all the time. When I was driving, she’d lay her hand over mine on the gear shift. We’d listen to the radio and she’d squeeze out the beat to songs she liked.

‘Hmm. Stuff.’ Amy was waiting for me to go on. ‘Is Mom home?’ I asked, knowing full well that she was.

Amy sighed. ‘Yeah, she’s upstairs reading.’

I nodded, still looking at my hands.

‘So that’s really all you’re going to tell me?’ she asked, her blue eyes wide with exasperation.

‘There’s nothing more to tell,’ I answered.

Amy got up and put her empty plate in the sink. ‘Well, I’d love to grill you further, but I have to get to work.’ She put her hand on my shoulder. ‘I hope you feel better.’ She grabbed her purse off the counter and walked to the bottom of the stairs. ‘Mom, Ben’s here with a broken heart,’ she called. She spun around, blew me a kiss, and skipped out.

In moments, my mother was sweeping down the stairs, one hand on the banister, looking like something out of an old Hollywood movie. She wore a shapeless white dress with buttons down the front. Her pale-blonde hair was twisted up and held in place with a pencil. She was still wearing her reading glasses.

I stood up and she threw her arms around my neck, kissing me on each cheek. ‘What a lovely surprise.’ She beamed. ‘Can I get you something to drink? I didn’t hear you come in. Your sister’s not a very good hostess, is she?’

She flitted over to the cabinet to get glasses and then to the refrigerator. It looked like a dance. She could easily have passed for twenty years younger than she was.

‘This is freshly brewed,’ she explained, handing me a tall glass of iced tea. ‘Let’s go sit outside.’

I followed her to the patio. She turned on the mister overhead and we sat in the shade cast by the upstairs porch. It was 110 degrees.

‘I think we lost Buddy to the
javelinas
,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘He hasn’t been home since Thursday.’

Buddy was our cat. He was probably twelve years old. I wasn’t really sure how I felt about him being eaten by wild pigs. I thought it should have bothered me more. I didn’t really know what to say about it so I just shook my head the way my mother was shaking hers.

‘I like you with a beard,’ she said cheerfully. ‘But you really need a haircut. I could do it for you if you want.’

‘That’s okay.’

‘I could go get my scissors and just give you a trim while we talk.’

‘No, thanks.’ If she’d asked once more, I would probably have given in. Her energy was making me tired.

Less than a month ago we were all sitting out in the yard – Riley, Amy, my mother and I. It was a comfortable, almost cool, night. Riley and I were sharing a lounge chair, snuggled up, watching the fire in the sky. Mount Lemmon was burning. During the day, all that was visible was the smoke. At night, the blaze glowed brightly through the darkness.

Riley and I stayed in the yard all night, long after everyone else had gone to bed. Our first date had been at the top of Mount Lemmon. We’d had pie at the little tourist village called Summerhaven, where the altitude keeps temperatures about twenty degrees cooler than the city. She’d ordered blackberry and I’d had chocolate cream. We traded plates back and forth across the table. Once the pie was gone, we drank cup after cup of coffee until the sun set and we were shivering.

That night in my mother’s back yard, the two of us watched the flames as if we could will the fire to stop. By morning, only three hundred acres had been lost. We went back to our apart -ment feeling a mysterious power and celebrating our victory by going to sleep. We woke up from our nap to find that the wind had picked up and the flames had consumed the village and another four thousand acres of trees.

Riley sat on the floor in front of the television, watching the news footage with tears in her eyes.

‘Are you crying?’ I asked, making an effort to chuckle. On the television screen, the mountain looked like a volcano.

‘No,’ she said, scowling. She tried to blink them away, but a tear slid down the end of her nose and fell onto the carpet.

I sat down on the couch behind her. I never knew what to say when people cried. It made me feel itchy.

‘It’s just—’ She took a deep breath. ‘I was thinking. Now it isn’t going to be there, you know, years from now. We won’t be able to bring our kids there.’

‘Our kids?’

She got to her feet, wiped her face and groaned. ‘Never mind.’

I smirked at her as she blushed and looked away. She started to walk to the kitchen but I caught her arm and pulled her onto my lap. ‘You want to have my babies,’ I teased her.

She squirmed with embarrassment. I laughed at her.

She’d been so sure of us then.

The fire was still burning. It had destroyed more than eighty thousand acres by now. Over a quarter of the Santa Catalina Mountain Range. It was out of control. It would burn itself out and leave behind a barren black forest. There was nothing anyone could do. I watched the huge, billowing smoke fill the sky.

My mother sat Indian style in the patio chair, sipping her tea. ‘You don’t return phone calls any more.’

‘Yeah. Sorry about that.’

She shrugged. I was forgiven. ‘All right, so what’s this about a broken heart?’

‘Riley and I split up.’

She frowned. ‘Again?’ She liked Riley, used to joke that she’d be willing to trade me for her.

I gripped my glass of iced tea, but didn’t lift it. It was full and my hands were shaking. ‘This time she moved home.’

‘Where is she from again?’

‘Massachusetts.’

‘Wow. And she moved all the way back there?’

‘Yeah.’

‘When?’ My mother sipped her tea. The ice cubes crashed into each other quietly.

‘I guess about a week ago.’

‘What happened?’

I wished I hadn’t left my sunglasses in the kitchen. ‘We had a fight.’

‘About?’

‘Well, that’s not really important.’

‘No?’

‘No.’

‘So what is important?’

My mother was good at getting right to the heart of a matter. This was the kind of question she asked about most things, about life in general.

I could feel my breathing getting faster. I inhaled deeply and tried to let it out slowly. ‘She made me really angry and I just totally lost it.’

‘What does that mean?’ She set her glass on the table in front of her.

‘I guess I sort of freaked out. I think I scared her.’

‘Scared her how?’

‘Well, it’s just . . . I don’t think she’d ever seen me so mad. I don’t think I’d ever been so mad.’

‘What were you so mad about?’

I fidgeted in my seat, leaning back with my legs wide, then sitting forward, more compact. ‘I don’t really know exactly. She pushed my buttons. I just wanted her to shut up, you know?’

Her forehead crinkled. She tilted her head at me. ‘No,’ she said slowly. ‘So, you scared her with your temper?’

‘I guess. I mean, it was actually more than that.’

‘More?’

‘I kind of . . . I slapped her.’

My mother gasped. The colour drained from her face. Even her lips seemed to turn pale. ‘You
hit
her?’ Her voice was trembling.

I nodded.

‘How . . . how could you have let that happen?’

‘I didn’t mean to. It happened so fast. I—’

She held up her hand and shook her head at me. ‘Stop it.’ She looked like she was going to be sick. She seemed to be ageing decades right in front of me.

I looked away.

‘After what we lived through?’ She shifted in her seat, placing her bare feet flat on the Mexican patio tiles. ‘How?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘It’s my fault,’ she mumbled. She wasn’t looking at me any more. A distance opened up between us and it felt impossible to cross it. ‘I created this.’

‘No, it’s—’

‘Was this the first time?’

‘Yes.’ It was the first time I’d slapped her. I couldn’t bear to confess anything more. I’d got myself off on a technicality.

‘Well, she’s smarter than I was,’ she said, crossing her arms and leaning back in her chair. She held herself as if she felt chilled and stared at me with narrowed eyes, like I was an intruder.

‘Mom.’ I wanted her to remember I was her child. ‘I don’t know what to do. I love her so much.’

She leaned across the table and forced me to meet her gaze. ‘If you love her, you’ll let her go and never bother her again.’ She got to her feet, picked up my still-full glass of iced tea and returned to the kitchen.

That night was the first storm of monsoon season. In a matter of days, the fire was out.

The news was reporting rain in Tucson. Monsoon season was about all the weathermen in Arizona had to live for because it was the one time of year when things were not predictable. They stood in front of news cameras with rain beating and shaking their fragile umbrellas, lightning flashing blue in black skies. Trees fell, roads flooded and they would interrupt your regularly scheduled programming to tell you about it.

During monsoon season, you could run the faucet all day and you’d never get cold water. All afternoon, the moisture hung in the air, grey skies promising the relief of rain but not always delivering on those promises. When it did rain, there’d be a reprieve from the humidity. A few hours of breathable air making it easier to sleep.

The washes would be filling with water by now: those parched river beds would strain with the unapologetic wetness of it. After months of baking in the sun, waiting for some relief, the earth was never prepared for the rain, couldn’t absorb it fast enough. It would fill the empty river, fill it to the brim, and overflow, flooding the streets, forcing cars off the road, pushing debris, transforming the land.

Donna said that every year the rain would take some poor Tucsonan by surprise. They’d be walking a dog in the heat of a July evening, trudging through the caked, dusty ground of the empty river bed. Or sleeping beneath a bridge, using a folded-up shirt as a pillow. The water would rush in so quickly that there’d be no hope of escape. She told me someone would drown every year, without fail. It seemed impossible to me, even knowing the weight of monsoon rain. But that was what she said.

I imagined the way these trapped wanderers would most surely claw at the edge, trying to climb out as the hard earth turned to mud in their hands. Their bodies would be found bloated and floating, the clothing ripped right off them, and they would be buried with clenched fists. Anyone who bothered to pry open their fingers would find two little mounds of red dust in their palms.

After I’d cleaned my knee and thrown away my nylons, I sat on the bed and stared at the phone. Once I told her what he’d done, it would be real. There’d be no going back, no pretending it hadn’t happened. I reached out once, twice, three times. I kept setting my hand back in my lap. It was shaking.

Ten minutes later, Donna let herself in and found me in the bedroom, folding shirts.

‘No time for that,’ she said, and she pulled the drawer from the bureau, dumped its contents into the open suitcase and tossed it to the floor. It made a loud crash, but didn’t break. ‘We’re outa here in five. You can pack it up all neat once we get it to my place.’

I nodded. She reached for my face and I pulled away, wincing.

‘Got any frozen vegetables?’

I grimaced.

‘Ice pack.’ She shrugged. ‘My mom had a boyfriend.’

‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘I’m fine.’

Donna grunted her scepticism, but returned to emptying the bureau. Dave appeared in the doorway with an empty garbage bag in each hand. Donna finished packing the bedroom while I sat on the couch in the living room and pointed out what was mine, the life Ben and I shared reduced to the division of knick-knacks, DVDs and board games.

Dave wouldn’t let me help. He wouldn’t look at me, either. It made me feel embarrassed, the way he seemed embarrassed for me.

Donna pulled my suitcase to the front door and started banging around in the kitchen. She held up a coffee mug in the pass-through, her raised eyebrows forming a question. Ben and I had picked out those mugs the first weekend after I’d moved in. I shook my head. Dave brought the bags to the truck.

‘Ready?’

Donna held the door open and I got to my feet. I hesitated at the TV set, looking at the picture of Ben and me, that lost-little-boy look on his face. Donna was watching me. I had nowhere to put it.

‘Is that yours?’ She meant the television.

‘Nope,’ I said, and walked outside.

Neither of us was a picture person. That was the only photo of the two of us.

I sat on the stone steps to the screen porch, tossing the tennis ball for Gracie. She was hooked to the line that ran between the house and the oak tree fifty feet away. There wasn’t a good way to fence a yard that faced the water, and my parents were less concerned that she’d run off than that she’d go for a swim any time she felt like it. Without that run, Gracie would have trailed mud through the house nine months a year. And in winter she’d fall in an ice hole and never be seen again.

A mosquito alighted on my bare knee. I watched as it poked its needle-nose into my flesh. When I slapped my leg, Gracie dropped the ball and came running.

‘I think you forgot something, silly,’ I said, scratching the top of her head. She sat, panting her dog breath right into my face.

I flicked the dead bug into the grass. The streak of my own blood was the only proof that it had ever existed. The swelling would come later.

It was the Fourth of July. The neighbour kids were setting off firecrackers. The small popping noises came at uneven intervals. They made me jumpy.

I set the pregnancy test on the edge of the sink, sat on the toilet seat and told Donna she could come in. I held my head in my hands as we waited. People always describe these moments in life as seeming to take for ever. For me, it was exactly the opposite. It was like a wave crashing into my body, then rushing away as my feet sank into the sand. I’d barely been able to catch my breath before Donna said, ‘It’s time.’