Bring the Rain

by JoAnn Franklin

  I picked up Kahneman’s book, and some more papers fell out as I slid the book back inside the briefcase, trying and failing to think of something appropriate to say. That feeling was back—that none of this mattered—while another part of my brain protested that Lea was right.

  When I picked up the papers, I realized what they were, when I’d written them, and that I’d forgotten about what I’d discovered. I couldn’t believe I’d done that. I couldn’t believe it.

  “I’ll see you next Monday, Lea,” I said, gathering up the rest of my stuff, eager to get to my office so I could think about what was happening to me.

  Lea stopped smiling and looked at me as if she saw me, not the me who could advance her career, but the real me.

  “What’s wrong, Dr. Sommers?”

  The papers that I’d stuffed in the back of Kahneman’s book were notes on Hendrix’s publications and the discrepancies I’d found in her publishing records when I went searching for the articles she’d published with Rosa. The inconsistencies I found within a few publications led me to cross-reference all of Hendrix’s listed pubs on her vita with the original journal articles. The notes I had taken documented the differences between the originals and what Hendrix had put on her vita.

  I should not involve Lea in this, but I needed a second opinion on what I’d found. Professors were a means to an end for graduate students and postdocs, the established route they had to walk toward expertise so they too could become worthy of trust. Our brains were technological tools they used to make themselves appear more competent, successful, and capable. Rarely did the relationship become one of caring. Educators and physicians were odd that way, so very intimate, one with the mind and the other with the body, yet distant from one another because of the professional barrier that protected and isolated student from teacher, patient from doctor.

  And something else occurred to me. If I did this, if I confided in Lea, this could be the end of my relationship with Ash, especially if I was right, but that’s why I needed Lea. She would double-check what I suspected and make sure I was right before I went to Ash and destroyed Hendrix.

  “Lea.”

  That inquiring, hopeful expression she turned toward me twanged my guilt again. If Hendrix ever found out she was involved, Lea’s career would be over. But I had to do it. I had to know that I wasn’t wrong, and I could trust Lea to find the truth.

  I steeled myself and said, “I want you to do an internet search and see if you can find these publications.” I gave her the list of publications from Hendrix’s vita that I had concerns about, but I kept my notes about the discrepancies to myself. If she found what I found, then I would know I was still tracking right. If she didn’t, I would go to the farm and talk to Robbie. He would know why my mind betrayed me. He always knew.

  “I want you to find the original journals and check the details against these documents in the folder. Specifically, I want you to check that the titles are the same, that the authors are the same, that the sequence of authors is the same.” At her confused look, I said, “First author, second author, third author, etcetera,” and I saw that now she understood. “Plus, I want you to read the conclusions in the published document and the conclusions in the documents I’ve printed for you and see if they match as well. Can you do that for me?”

  Lea nodded. If Lea did as I asked, and nothing else, she’d be safe from any harm, but I feared that she wouldn’t because as she leafed through the publications, I saw comprehension dawn and something worse: satisfaction.

  NINE

  “DART, HAVE YOU HEARD from Bill? Has he found Ellen?” Lynn asked as she, Mary Beth, Susan, and I sat down for our Sunday night meal. Classy had always served hot dogs and potato chips on Sunday evening and since she’d left, nothing had changed. Since we’d agreed that wine didn’t seem the appropriate complement for hot dogs, Susan poured water for all of us.

  I looked at Susan. “While I appreciate that you put the chips in my mother’s crystal bowl, I thought with Classy gone, our meals might improve,” I said, thinking of my pledge to eat more vegetables, more grains. Even as I spoke the words, I couldn’t take my eyes off the scrumptious half of a New York cheesecake that Susan had set in the center of the table for dessert.

  Susan defended herself. “I did add the carrots, but I couldn’t resist dessert.” The cheesecake did look good—with a lighter top layer, a creamy thick middle layer, and a golden graham cracker crust that looked sweet and crunchy.

  “Dart, Ellen?” Lynn reminded me.

  I wondered why I hadn’t answered her question, because I was worried about my cousin, but that cheesecake looked delicious. Susan poked me and nodded at Lynn who sat across from me. I tried to forget about dessert. “I heard from Ellen, not Bill. She’s still in Mexico, but she said she’s happy and healing.”

  “Bill should have gone after her,” Susan said as she passed the hot dogs.

  “She didn’t want him there,” Lynn said.

  “Doesn’t matter, he should have gone after her.” Susan shoved the potato chips toward Lynn to emphasize her point.

  “Anyone know how Classy’s doing?” Mary Beth had changed the subject just in time. Lynn passed the carrots to me.

  “She isn’t in Southport,” I said as I fished a carrot out and passed the rest to Mary Beth. “We haven’t heard the Seneca Guns lately.” My home was one block from downtown Southport, and if Classy had been in town with Sandy, we would have heard the noise.

  “Seneca Guns?” Mary Beth asked.

  “You know, that big bang, the windows rattling, that would have been Classy detonating,” Lynn said as she munched on a carrot, her mind on something else.

  “I’ve always wondered, what causes the noise?” Mary Beth asked.

  “No one’s ever figured out that out,” Susan said. “Lots of people experienced the phenomenon, but no one knows, or will admit to knowing, if they are sonic booms, earthquakes out in the ocean, or some phenomenon we haven’t heard of. Blaming Classy has more probability though than tectonic plates jamming together offshore,” Susan said as she picked up her hot dog, looked at it for a moment, shrugged her shoulders, and bit down.

  I had already finished mine, or at least I thought I had; there wasn’t anything on my plate but a pile of chips. I picked up a chip and said, “Sandy’s going to be lucky if he survives her cooking.”

  “She thinks he’s going to get healthier eating like this?” Susan indicated the crumbs of the hot dog she’d finished.

  I pulled the cheesecake closer, took a slice, and put it on my plate. I knew these three women. If I didn’t grab it now, I wouldn’t get any. The first bite tasted so good, I took another, and another.

  My phone rang in the living room.

  “Might be Ash,” Susan said.

  “No, he’s at a conference in London,” I said, taking another forkful of creamy goodness that melted in my mouth. “He won’t be back until late tonight. I’ll be glad to see him. It’s been a week since he left.” The last thing he’d said to me was that I was to relax, and take it easy. As if I could manage that with my workload.

  The phone rang again, and again.

  “You going to answer that?”

  I got up and went into the living room. “Dart here,” I said.

  “I’d like to speak to Mary Beth.”

  “Mary Beth who?”

  “I believe she goes by the name Shaker since she’s been living in your house.”

  “Who is this?” I frowned at the phone.

  “Her daughter.”

  Now that was interesting. I didn’t know Mary Beth had a daughter. I returned to the table. “Mary Beth,” I said, holding the phone out to her.

  Mary Beth raised an eyebrow, asking me who the caller was, while Susan took the largest slice of cheesecake and put it on her plate. Lynn took her own slice and Mary Beth shook her head when she was offered a slice. The cheesecake looked very appetizing and I hoped they’d leave some for me.

  “This
person says she’s your daughter.”

  Susan and Lynn stopped eating. Good. Maybe I did have a chance at dessert. The hot dog hadn’t filled me up.

  Mary Beth went white, got up without touching the phone, and turned toward the doorway.

  I put the phone back to my ear. “Tell her not to run away again,” her daughter said.

  I let the phone drop and said, “Mary Beth, she says don’t run away.”

  Mary Beth stopped, turned, and I held out the phone again, hoping she would take it. That cheesecake was almost gone. I should grab a piece while I could.

  Mary Beth shook her head. I turned on the speaker phone so that everyone in the room could hear. “Mom?” said the disembodied voice. I set the phone in the middle of the table and reached for my share of desert. Only two slices left. Graham cracker crust crumbs littered a plate in front of me, so I exchanged the dirty plate, someone else’s plate since I didn’t remember eating dessert, for a clean one and took a slice.

  “Come home, Mom. Dad’s gone, he can’t hurt you anymore.”

  “He’s gone? I don’t believe you.” Mary Beth stepped closer to the phone.

  I ate more cheesecake.

  “He died in his sleep a week ago, just as he wanted. And he never pressed charges, Mom. I talked him out of that plan. I heard him ask you for the pills. You did what he wanted you to do, and you didn’t know they would put him in a coma. He woke up two days after you ran, and I’ve been taking care of him ever since.”

  Mary Beth looked close to tears. “I never wanted that burden for you.”

  “Then come home, Mom.”

  I ate another bite as I listened to their conversation. The creamy smoothness coated my tongue and stimulated my taste buds. Experts said nothing tasted as good as the first bite, that taste buds became saturated with flavor after that introduction, but they hadn’t eaten this cheesecake. As Mary Beth’s daughter explained how she’d found her mother two years ago, and that the little girl she’d played with on the beach was actually her granddaughter, Mary Beth started crying. Lynn and Susan were dab-bing at their own tears.

  While they were distracted, I noticed the last slice of cheese-cake on the plate and grabbed it for myself because they would eat it all if I didn’t, and that cheesecake looked good.

  “Hey,” said Lynn as I cut into the piece I’d taken. “You already had your share.”

  “No I haven’t.” I ate my first bite of cheesecake.

  Mary Beth was promising her daughter that she’d be on the next bus home, and that meant that the Raindrops were down to two. “You’re going to desert me just like Classy did,” I said to Mary Beth after she disconnected from the call. She had a pleased smile on her face. I pushed away the last remaining bite.

  Susan and Lynn stared at me as if they couldn’t believe what I’d said.

  “What’s wrong? She’s going to leave and the think tank is dead if she does. First Classy left and now Mary Beth’s going. Which one of you will be next?”

  “You ate the last piece of cheesecake,” Susan said.

  “I had one slice.” I started to gather up our plates, feeling sorry for myself. I didn’t have kids. All I had was my job, The Raindrop Institute, which was dying, and Ash, who was in love with his dead wife.

  “Dart,” Susan’s voice had me looking up from my task, “you ate three slices.”

  “No, I didn’t.” I couldn’t have eaten three pieces. “I had one, and I was lucky to get that. You and Lynn could hardly wait to get at that cheesecake.”

  “Lynn, back me up here,” said Susan, giving up on convincing me and turning to Lynn for support. Her dreadlocks swung about her face. My palm itched to touch the patterns that the movement revealed.

  “Doesn’t matter, Susan,” said Lynn. “There was enough for all of us to take what we wanted.”

  “You saw me take three slices?” I couldn’t believe she’d been counting.

  “I wasn’t counting, Dart,” Lynn said, “but I know you had two.”

  “She had three. I saw her take three.”

  But despite what Susan believed, I didn’t remember taking three.

  “I might have had two slices, Susan,” I said, masking my confusion with something plausible because I didn’t remember eating that third slice or for that matter the second one, “but not even I could eat three slices of cheesecake. You know how sick I get when I eat too many sweets.”

  “I thought I saw you take three.” I heard the doubt in Susan’s voice.

  Lynn said, “It doesn’t matter. We had plenty.”

  Susan bit her lip and shook her head. The movement of her hair, so enticing. The intricate patterns begged for my touch. Susan’s dreadlocks swung about her face as she nodded her head in response to something Mary Beth said. I almost reached across the table, but I didn’t understand this new compulsion. I knew what black people’s hair felt like. I’d touched kinky hair a lot when, as a new college graduate, I started teaching a kindergarten class. I’d even braided Susan’s hair a time or two in the six years she’d been my renter.

  Mary Beth came over and hugged me. “I know that you think I’m deserting the Institute, but Dart, I’ve missed two years of my granddaughter’s life. I won’t miss any more.”

  First Classy had left; then Ellen, who had always been eager to discuss TRI’s possibilities and options, wouldn’t talk to me; and now Mary Beth was leaving. They’d all walked away from making a difference as if that opportunity didn’t matter, leaving me to animate the think tank’s carcass without its heart. How was I to fulfill my promise to my father if the think tank disinte-grated? Three of us weren’t enough, we needed more brainpower, and when Lynn went to distribute the folders waiting for us on the sideboard for our weekly meeting of The Raindrop Institute, I waved her away.

  “Go and help her pack. I know you want to.”

  “Are you coming?”

  I shook my head. “I feel kind of sick.” They would too if someone had ripped the heart out of their life’s work. How would I present TRI at Salzburg if the think tank no longer existed?

  “You shouldn’t have eaten three pieces of cheesecake,” Susan said before she followed them upstairs.

  I looked at the empty dessert plate. I didn’t remember eating even one slice of cheesecake, much less three. Susan had to be mistaken. No one could eat three slices of cheesecake. She’d mis-counted. Normally, I never had more than half of a helping of dessert as I didn’t like sweets that much. Eating one slice would have been unusual, two slices definitely out of character, but three, that would have been unbelievable. She had to have miscounted, but Susan was a whiz with math.

  She hadn’t miscounted, which meant this symptom was something new . . . or maybe not. Stress eating happened all of the time, and tonight had certainly been stressful. With Mary Beth’s departure—and she was upstairs right now packing to go home—The Raindrop Institute was doomed. Unless. . . .

  And I knew what I had to do. After tonight, there would be two Raindrops left and myself. I had to have a plan to recruit more Raindrops or the Institute would collapse.

  The note from Ash was in my work email. He wanted to see me in his office whenever I had a moment and could stop by. He’d returned from London just yesterday so maybe, my heart sped up a bit faster, he wanted to talk about our plans for this weekend.

  Or maybe Hendrix had complained. Or maybe he’d heard about Mary Beth leaving. Or maybe Lea had talked to him about my MOOC and my disinterest in doing the job. There were all sorts of reasons why Ash might want to talk to me. Most of them were not good.

  Undecided, I thought about not going, then decided I might as well get this done. I put Brown Bear back up on the highest book shelf in the office and walked downstairs. As usual, the waiting room remained open, but the door to Ash’s office was closed. So much for the open-door policy the dean said he advocated. That closed door was such a common occurrence, professors and staff started joking about waiting five minutes rather than fifteen made yo
u a person of importance.

  The dean made me wait for five, which qualified me as an important person, before he opened the door and gestured for me to come in. Ash looked better than he had before he’d left for London. He looked rested, and I liked the pin-striped suit. The same suit he’d worn when he came up to my office and kissed me. The suit jacket still fell just right. I wanted to count the faint stripes of light gray on the dark gray suit jacket that echoed the lighter threads among the darker strands of his hair. But now, as with Susan’s hair, I had the compulsion to touch, to trace with my fingertips as if touching the pattern would make it come alive for me.

  I sat down at the familiar round table. He sat down beside me. That wasn’t normal. He usually fussed with papers at his desk first while he marshaled his thoughts, then he would acknowledge my presence with a smile that begged my forgiveness for how busy he was, before he would pull out a chair—across from me, not beside me—and the meeting would begin.

  He’d broken his pattern. My breath hitched. Hendrix then. I should have known.

  “How are you?” Since I feared antagonizing him, given that Hendrix had already made up his mind for him, politeness seemed a safe enough opening for me to take.

  Ash didn’t look happy with me. “You’ve been avoiding me. When you didn’t call Sunday or answer my calls, I knew I’d said something wrong.”

  Not Hendrix at all, and I felt relief until indecision as to how to handle this new twist in our relationship emerged. He never brought our personal relationship to the office. I looked down at my lap, at the tabletop, out the window as the students walked to class. Outside, the day remained bright and blue without a hint of fall.

  “Aren’t we good friends, Dart? I know I’ve made you uneasy, but our relationship is important to me.”