Lily King - Father of the Rain

He pulls me on top of him. I feel him hard beneath me under his jeans. I push against him lightly, then harder, feeling the rush, the swell, the want. “Everything on earth should be just this simple,” I say. I take his earlobe in my teeth and feel him moan. “Tell me what it’s like again,” I whisper, still grinding against him, feeling the exact shape of him through our clothes.

It takes him a second to find his voice. “You know it’s Paloma Street when you see the big fence covered in bright red flowers. And then five houses down you see a tree out in front. Enormous. Maybe a eucalyptus. Please take off your clothes.”

“Tell me about the front door.” He flew out to California last month and found the cottage for us.

“Yellow. It’s yellow.”

“And the little window in the door?”

“The color of pale green sea glass. Please.”

I pull off my jeans, clumsily. I’m like a drunk when I’m horny, completely without fine motor skills. Jonathan scoots himself down and pushes my legs apart. He grins up at me, then slides a finger up inside me. I’m wet and swollen and it goes in easily. He pushes it in and slides it out and pushes it in again. Unable to wait, I press myself to his mouth, feel the warmth of his tongue on my clit and the finger drawing back and forth inside me. I can feel the orgasm now, assembling in the distance then moving swiftly in, opening up, opening me up, coming, coming closer, coming to split me down the middle.

But the sudden ring startles me. “Just the phone, tweety,” he says without lifting his head.

Three and a half rings, then the machine catches it. The orgasm veers off. My brother comes on. “Jesus Christ, Daley. Where the fuck are you?” There’s a panic in his voice I’ve never heard before.

“Don’t,” Jonathan says as I pull away from him. “Please don’t.”

But I’m already across the room, reaching for the receiver. “Garvey, what’s wrong?”

“Oh fucking Christ. There you are.”

“What’s going on?”

“Oh my God. Dad. Dad is what’s going on.”

“Is he okay?” I feel that cool whiteness that happens just before you hear someone is dead.

Garvey starts laughing or crying, I’m not sure which. “No, he is not okay or I wouldn’t have been leaving you so many goddamn messages.”

I look at the machine. A red 5 flashes. “Please calm down and tell me—”

“You haven’t been here. You have no idea what I’ve seen in the past—”

“Garvey, you are scaring the shit out of me. What’s going on?”

“Catherine left him.”

He’s alive. That’s all I care about. “When?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a week ago.”

I wait for the rest.

“He is a fucking mess .”

I snort. “Tell me about it.”

“No, Daley. He’s totally lost his shit. He’s threatening to kill all his dogs. And Hugh fired him. It was Hugh’s wife who called me. He’s drunk ‘round the clock. He’s unrecognizable.”

“Unrecognizable would be Dad sober. Dad drunk is not at all foreign to me.” All those years that I had to go up to Myrtle Street every weekend, every vacation, while Garvey showed up for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners.

“Daley.” His voice cracks. I haven’t heard him like this since Mom died. “You gotta come here and help me out.”

“What? No, Garvey. I’m driving to California tomorrow.” He knows all about Berkeley. He calls us Malibu Smart Barbie and Black Marxist Ken.

“He’s talked about offing himself.”

“Oh, come on. He’d destroy every living thing on this planet before he’d kill himself.”

“No, Daley, you have to believe me. I think he might hurt himself. I need some backup here.”

“I’m not coming. Not right now. I have a job that’s about to start in California.”

“Stop saying California like it’s so important. I’m in Massachusetts and I need your help with our father . Two, three days, that’s all I’m asking. Just to kind of settle him down. You’re good with him.”

“Yeah, right.”

“You are.”

“I couldn’t even get there tomorrow. I’ve got to send out this article I just finished and have lunch with my advisor and—”

“I know. You’ve very busy. Get here when you can. Just for a day or two.”

“Goddammit, Garvey.”

“Thank you,” he says. “Jesus Christ, Daley, thank you.”

Jonathan is sitting on the side of the bed, his head in his hands. I sit beside him. I have no clothes on.

“I have to, Jon. I have to. Garvey sounds really freaked out.”

“He always sounds freaked out.”

“Not like this. My stepmother has taken off and my father is falling apart.”

“What can you do in two days to fix that? Nothing.”

“I don’t want blood on my hands. I don’t want to hear that my father shot himself while I drove to California.”

“That’s just Garvey being hyperbolic.”

“He needs my help.”

“I don’t think you’ve spoken to your father since I’ve known you.”

“Probably not.”

“But within seconds you’ve decided to fly off in the wrong direction to a man who’s not even a part of your life.”

“Garvey needs help.”

“Are you going to tell your father you’re moving in with a black man?”

“Not if there are any knives around.”

He doesn’t smile. “Don’t do this. Don’t go back there.”

He’s still trying to persuade me to head west when I squeeze into my car the next afternoon.

We’re tired. We’ve argued in circles since last night. And now I’m doing it — I’m about to drive away in the wrong direction.

“Daley,” he says. He squats beside the open car door and holds my hands. It’s still the same feeling from the general store, every time our hands touch. “Please be careful.” He, too, has an uneasy relationship with the future. We understand each other in that way.

“I’ll be fine.”

“Your father has a lot of power.”

“You’re confusing me with Julie. My father has no power over me. He wasn’t even a father.” I see he is scared for me, far more scared than I am. Clearly I’ve told him too much.

“He still has the power to hurt you.”

“No, he doesn’t. It’s all scar tissue now.”

“I’ll be at the yellow door a week from Monday,” he says, kissing me one last time.

“I’ll see you through the sea glass window.”

And then I start the Datsun and drive east.

You can’t get to my father’s house from the highway without passing the Water Street Apartments. I didn’t mean to come here first. I meant to go straight to Dad’s, but I find myself peering into my bedroom window. It’s someone’s home office now, with two computers, a fax machine, and a leather swivel chair. The posters of Robert Redford, Billy Jack, and the Fonz are gone. Paul would have taken them down when he moved out the summer after my mother died. I’m certain he’s rolled them up neatly in tubes; he’s saved everything for Garvey and me in storage somewhere.

My mother died instantly. People tried to comfort us with that. But to whom was that a comfort? To me? I would have liked to see her one last time, no matter how crushed her body was; I would have liked to say goodbye, even if she couldn’t have heard me. Was it a comfort to her? Who would choose to die instantly, without a chance to process the transition? But then, I don’t like to be startled. I don’t like to be surprised. She and Paul had eaten dinner in Boston, he’d gone to get the car, she’d decided to cross Tremont to make it easier for him to pick her up, and a car had struck her. The driver had had a few drinks in him; my mother was prone to daydreaming. It’s hard to say what really happened. No one claimed to have seen.