Lily King - Father of the Rain

“I’ve been inside for so many days. Do you mind if we stay out here?”

I get a jacket and we go over to the lawn chairs by the pool. The pool is covered now by a taut green sheath, but we haven’t put the chairs in the shed yet.

Neal sits in one of the recliners and pulls me down with him. We lie sideways, his chest against my back, his breath in my hair. It feels so good to be held.

“Is this okay?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“I hate seeing her strapped down. I don’t care what she says. I can tune that out. But the look on her face. And her body all cinched up.”

“How often does it happen?”

“The longest she’s gone between episodes is two and half years. But normally it’s a shorter cycle.”

“I had no idea.”

“People have been discreet. It’s a good town in that way.”

“And this was happening when we were in school together?”

“All my life. They used to pack me off to my aunt’s in Maryland for the summer.”

“Every summer?”

“The bad ones.”

He comes most nights after that, tapping at the windowpane, lying with me on a lawn chair in the dark. When the nights grow colder he brings a blanket. We look up at the autumn stars and can only name a few. We spoon, and sometimes we push against each other slightly, but we never kiss.

His mother comes home from McLean’s and he opens his shop back up. “No one even noticed I was closed,” he says.

We talk, but it’s more like thinking aloud. I’m often not sure what I’ve actually said. On clear nights the stars pierce a million holes in the darkness. Jonathan said once that the stars made him feel powerful.

“That’s weird,” Neal says. “They make me feel minuscule.”

“Me, too. Maybe it’s an Ashing thing.”

“Do they make you think of God?”

“No.”

“You don’t believe in God?”

“If there is a God, we haven’t been introduced yet.” I stare at the dark vault above, the little pinpricks of light that are really balls of fire, many bigger than the earth. All these things we’re meant to believe. “Stars just make me think of death.” I tell him about the first time I had the dead star feeling. I don’t say I have it now, that it seems to have set up camp in my chest.

He says he likes the theory that the universe expands and then contracts, over and over, that your life comes around again, every sixty billion years or so.

Another night I ask him, “Are you writing a novel that begins freshman year of college and ends at a Pottery Barn?”

He doesn’t answer and I start laughing.

“I hate you.” He squeezes me harder. “I hate being a cliché.”

He has three different jackets, his brother’s old leather one, a brown canvas one, and a red-and-black wool lumberjack one. The lumberjack one is an extra large. He wraps it around me and buttons me in, my back against his chest. Sometimes I see him during the day on the street in that jacket and I smile.

“Is she like your mom?”

“Who?”

“The Dead Girl.”

“No. Yes. I mean she’s not cuckoo crazy, but she has a lot of energy.”

“My mother always thought it was important to be bubbly.”

“I like bubbly. But it has to come with some gravitas.”

“And the Dead Girl has gravitas?”

“Being dead helps.”

“Tell me her name.”

“No.”

I make guesses: Megan, Susan, Leslie. He says no to all of them. “Good. I hate the name Leslie. No, that’s not true. I hate the name Le ss lie. Le z lie’s fine. But if you ever call a Le ss lie Le z lie look out. It’s spelled the same so how are you going to know?”

He takes his hand off my stomach and puts it over my mouth. “Her name’s not Leslie.”

“Molly?” I say, through his hands.

“Nope. No more guesses. You’ve used up your weekly ration.”

The next night he says, “I didn’t say you were concave. I said I wouldn’t care if you were concave. Which you weren’t. And certainly aren’t now.”

“Now he notices,” I say.

And then there is the night we hear the geese, just a few, not even in a V. They are flying too low and at first they make no sound. And then I hear it, a thin frail cry and then another one, more dire, starving maybe.

“They’re too late,” Neal says. “They’re not going to make it.” And then says, “Hey, hey,” but I can’t stop crying for those geese.

One night when I’m buttoned into his red and black jacket he asks, “What would happen if you rolled over and faced me?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t know either.” The smoke of his breath drifts past my ear up toward the stars.

Then he doesn’t come for three nights in a row. I stop by his shop. It’s only four-thirty but it’s nearly dark. Streetlights and headlights are all on. It’s cold enough to snow. I’m wearing my old Michigan parka. I got it at the secondhand shop for ten dollars. It’s orange and slightly misshapen, and Jonathan called me the UFO when I wore it.

Neal is with a customer when I push open the door, their backs to me, looking up at a shelf near the ceiling. They turn at the same time. Neal grins at me, apologetic, grateful, happy. The woman’s cheeks are flushed. There is a suitcase near Neal’s desk.

“The Dead Girl,” I say, before I can stop myself.

“The Dead Girl,” he says.

“ What ?” she says, wheeling around. She is lovely, of course, with round brown eyes and a wry smile.

“I’m Daley.” I put out my hand.

“You really call me that?” she says to him.

“What’s your real name?”

“Don’t tell her!” Neal says, but too late.

“Anne.”

“Anne?” I look at him. I could have gotten Anne.

He shrugs.

“It’s an awful name,” she says. “I hate it.”

“Not as bad as Lesssslie, though.” He looks straight at me, seeing if I understand how it is. I do. I always have.

“Not half as bad,” I say.

And then it’s Thanksgiving. Cold, overcast, the way I always remember Thanksgiving in New England to be. Despite weekly urgings, I couldn’t get Garvey to come. I did get him to talk to Dad. It was a brief conversation, stiff but benign. Maybe, Garvey told me, he would come for Christmas.

My father has his meeting at one that day, and then we go to the Bridgetons for lunch.

They live north of town, down a long wooded road. All the leaves are gone from the trees. Every one. When we’re almost there, my father says they talked about Grace today.

“Grace?” I don’t know who Grace is.

The car stops. The road has ended at the ocean and the Bridgetons’ house. “Patricia said that grace is accepting love, that we all spend so much more time resisting love than just taking love. It’s funny, isn’t it, to think of rejecting love. What a stupid thing to do. But I guess we do it all the time.”

“I guess we do.” I am very flat. I hate Thanksgiving.

“Yeah. Well.” He opens the car door. “Let’s eat some turkey.”

The Bridgetons have their own rocky beach below the green clapboard house. I might have said I’d never been here before, until I stand on their lawn looking down at the rocks and remember climbing on them with an older blond boy, falling down and scraping my knees. Through a window I see the mudroom with a sink in it where my mother washed my cuts and put on Band-Aids.

My father and I cooked and baked that morning: green beans, garlic mashed potatoes, and an apple pie. He can now make five different main courses, and he does his own laundry. We walk around to the front of the house with our platters of food. My father insisted I dress up a bit, so I’m wearing my interview outfit, a beige suit and boots with heels.