Lily King: Father of the Rain

Out the window my brother and Heidi are walking away, down the sidewalk, not touching. Garvey told me last night that they had to run an errand in the early morning and they’d be back by ten. I stay in the room as long as I can, but my hunger and need to pee drive me out. The bathroom is filthier in broad daylight. I don’t let my skin touch the toilet seat, the way my mother has taught me. I find cornflakes and milk in the kitchen, and just as I sit down with my big bowl on the couch, Deena’s door opens and a man comes out, naked. He’s very hairy.

“Hey,” he says, reaching for his jeans and T-shirt, which are beside me on the couch. He leaves, still naked, out the swinging, knobless front door. I hear him dressing in the hallway, then his bare feet sticking on the stairs on the way down.

The heat has retreated slightly; a breeze, an actual breeze, comes through the windows.

Deena’s door opens again. “Shit. Is he gone?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“Shit.” She looks down at a pair of glasses in her hand. “Shit.”

She throws them out the window. Then she stretches her long arms up to the ceiling and side to side. She is naked too, and her breasts are enormous, three times the size of my mother’s. She’s thin so they don’t even seem to fit properly on her chest, the nipples nearly facing each other. Her waist tapers in and then her hips flair out and her thighs are thick and strong. Her body is fascinating to me, womanly in a way my mother and my aunts in Chigham are not.

“I’ll get something on and join you,” she says, noticing my stare. She comes back in a short shiny robe that barely covers her bum.

“So your parents are splitting up,” she says, sitting beside me where the man’s clothes had been.

“Yeah.”

“How does that feel?”

How does that feel? The question echoes. I shrug.

“Was it hard with them fighting all the time?”

“They never fought. They didn’t really talk to each other all that much.”

She laughs. “I guess you and Garvey had different parents.”

“No,” I say quickly, before I get what she means.

“He tell you where he was going this morning?”

“No,” I say again.

She pushes her thick lips in and out, thinking. If I ask I know she’ll tell me but she strikes me as dangerous, full of things I don’t want to know.

“He is really fucked up. You know that, don’t you?”

My heart starts beating really fast, the beginnings of the dead star feeling. I put my bowl in the sink and go back to Garvey’s room. I lock the door. When I glance out the window, there they are in front of the house, not moving. The top of Heidi’s head is pressed into my brother’s chest and his arms are wrapped awkwardly around her. It looks like he’s the only thing keeping her from collapsing to the ground.

A half hour later they come inside. I wait for Garvey to come back to his room to check on me but he doesn’t. I hear them moving things around in Heidi’s room, then a kettle whistles and my brother calls, “Milk and honey?” down the hallway and she says, “Yes, please,” her voice low and ragged like she hasn’t used it yet this morning, or maybe has used it too much.

They settle in there, on the other side of the wall from me. Their talk is quiet and intermittent, calm, like little waves lapping against a hull. Then I hear something awful, a sort of yelp, like the wail of an animal in the woods, impossible to tell if it is male or female, only that it is coming from the room next to mine. Then it’s quiet.

I find a thin paperback on the floor called The Breast . “It began oddly,” it begins. “But could it have begun otherwise, however it began?” I read a few chapters. A regular guy has turned into a big hundred-and-fifty-five-pound boob. His penis changes first, into a nipple. Only Garvey would own a book like this. When I get tired of reading, I try to snoop but there is nothing, no secret notebook or hidden scraps of paper in his drawers. I’m angry at him for forgetting about me and I want to find something terrible about him that I can shove in his face.

When he finally does come in, he drops down face first on the bed and doesn’t move or speak for a long time. His threadbare flannel shirt has risen up with his arms and I can see the pale skin on his skinny lower back and a patch of dark hair at the bottom of his spine. His bum is flat like my father’s, the jeans covering it nearly black with dirt. I can tell he isn’t sleeping; his breathing is loud but uneven, as if there are words attached that I can’t hear. He looked at me when he came in, but now I’m not sure if he saw me. Then he flips over and fixes his restless eyes directly on mine, breathes another lungy loud breath, and says, “Please, Daley, whatever you do, don’t let any guy touch you. Ever. Not until you’re thirty. Or forty.”

I think of Neal, how I will see him in less than two weeks, how he never wrote.

“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.