Loving the Rain

by Jeff LaFerney

  As she cried, Jessie caught her hurting husband’s moist brown eyes, and he began to control her mind. “I want you to forget what happened this afternoon,” Clay calmly said. “As soon as you knew something was wrong, we rushed to the hospital. You are not to blame. You gave birth to a beautiful baby boy, and you will love him with all your heart.” Jessie was staring intently into Clay’s eyes. “Jessie, forget this afternoon. You did nothing wrong. Do not ever believe in any way that you are at fault. Our only child is perfect.”

  “Our only child is beautiful and perfect.”

  “Yes,” Clay said.

  “There’s no need for me to blame myself. It wasn’t my fault.”

  “That’s right, Jessie. I love you.”

  “I love you too, Clay.”

  CHAPTER 1

  Standing outside the grocery store with his 17-year-old son, Tanner, 40-year-old Clay Thomas was watching the pouring rain. He hated it when it rained. He always had, as far back as he could remember. It had poured at his mother’s funeral. He recalled standing at the gravesite, twelve years old, feet soaked from the splatter as he stood under an open black umbrella, staring at his mother’s grave while it filled with water. He recalled stories about how he and his mother had both almost died during his childbirth, a delivery in an ambulance on the way to the hospital. Ironically, ten years later, Clay’s mother had again almost died while attempting to save Clay from drowning in a lake. Lightning was flashing in the distance, so Clay’s mother called for her son to leave the floating dock and return to the shore. He wasn’t a particularly good swimmer, so when he began tiring, he panicked and started flailing in the water. His mother was carefully watching, so she dove in to help him. Neither mother nor son was doing well when Mr. Thomas rescued them with two floatation cushions from the pontoon boat that he was returning to the dock. Once the family was all safely on the dock, the rainstorm descended and Clay’s mother started laughing from relief. The near drowning, and somehow the thunderstorm, had made a greater impression on his memory than his mother’s laughter.

  Even as an adult, Clay was haunted during every rainstorm by his mother’s funeral. He would always recall trying to stand at attention while water was gently streaming in at one corner of the grave just feet from where he stood, adding to the accumulation six feet below the ground. The night of the funeral, while sleeping, he dreamed that his mother was floating in her coffin, tiny bubbles emanating from her nose and mouth. The dream gave the distinct impression that she was drowning and the family had killed her when they allowed her to be placed in that sopping hole. It was a nightmare that haunted Clay many times over the next several years.

  Nine years after the funeral, on the way to his own wedding, Clay had decided to get his car cleaned. It was a beautiful, bright, sunny day as his car was pulled along the track through the car wash. Water sprayed, brushes spun, and soap appeared and disappeared as cloth strips slapped across the windshield. Already dressed in his tuxedo, Clay was excitedly but also nervously thinking of the upcoming wedding to Jessie, the woman to whom he had given his heart. After the reception, they would leave in their shiny car and head to their hotel at the airport in Detroit. From there they would fly to Arizona for their honeymoon. However, when he emerged from the wash, it was raining so hard that he never saw the trashcan he plowed into, leaving a slight dent and a permanent yellow streak on his bumper. And moments later, when Clay pulled his muddied car into the church parking lot, he stepped in a water puddle up to his ankles as he exited his parked car. He endured the entire wedding and reception while his socks squished with each and every step.

  Now here he was standing under the overhang at the grocery store with his son, Tanner, grocery bags in tow, but the car 45 yards away at the back of the lot. With no jacket or hat, there would be no escaping a soaking unless they waited the storm out.

  Clay only remembered liking rain two times in his life. The first was when there was a rainstorm of epic proportions when he was a young boy living in Haslett, Michigan. His city street flooded and every kid in the neighborhood waded into the river that had developed between the sidewalks. Clay hadn’t liked the storm much, but the end result was marvelous. To seven-year-old Clay, it was like having the mighty Mississippi in his own front yard. For a day and a half, he was Huck Finn skipping stones, fishing, or riding a steamboat past the banks of his own front yard. The second time he felt appreciation for rain was while pitching at a baseball game. Less than a month before, Clay had acknowledged with young teenaged certainty that he had special “powers” to influence the way people thought, but he had determined not to use those powers at this one particular game, and he was getting hit hard by the other team. Luckily for Clay, lightning, thunder, wind, and rain swept in, and a great storm caused the game to be cancelled in just the third inning. Clay was spared further frustration and humiliation. It was while sitting alone in his bedroom during that storm, at the age of just thirteen, that Clay began deliberating as to how he was to live out his unique existence. As far as he knew, he was the only one on the planet with his ability, and he wasn’t sure if it was to be a blessing or a curse. At that time, the only thing he knew for sure was that he wasn’t going to tell anyone about it even though he somehow knew that his silence would almost certainly haunt him the rest of his life.

  “I hate when it rains,” Tanner echoed his father’s thoughts as he and his father sprinted through the parking lot, splashing puddles and dodging traffic as they went.

  Clay couldn’t help but wonder when his son would decide for himself what he liked or didn’t like, knowing that when Tanner was seven years old and the Thomases were at a family reunion getting splattered by gusting sheets of rain, Clay had said, “I hate the rain and you do too.” As Tanner locked onto his father’s eyes, his mind was instantly and permanently manipulated. Clay felt immediate remorse when Tanner emphatically stated, “I hate the rain too.” Tanner should have been allowed to make up his own mind, but Clay had been irritated with Jessie when she smiled and took in a deep breath while his plate flew away in a whirlwind and he realized that another car washing was being ruined. Clay had long since decided to give his son the opportunity to change his own mind, but he wondered if Tanner ever would.

  Tanner was now 17 years old, a senior in high school. Just like his father, he had recovered from his own difficult childbirth. Clay liked to remind Tanner occasionally how he emerged from his mother’s body in perfect shooting form, foreshadowing his awesome basketball career. In the hospital, Clay’s father, Tanner’s grandfather, had explained to the family that Clay had had a similarly traumatic childbirth with his mother in the ambulance. He too emerged nearly strangled to death and semi-conscious, paramedics applying emergency resuscitation techniques. Like with Clay, only time could tell what affect the trauma would or would not have on Tanner’s brain. Fortunately, both father and son had grown up to lead normal, productive lives. At least Tanner had thus far. Clay could never quite see himself as “normal,” not with his secret ability to control minds.

  One time Tanner tried to actually pinpoint when it was that he had decided to hate rain. He thought that it was at a picnic before recalling that it was at that family reunion many years before. He remembered because a geeky boy with whom he supposedly shared a great-grandparent was in attendance, and the kid somehow managed to get attacked by a porcupine. Before the reunion meal commenced, a large number of family members were involved in a softball game. The nerdy second cousin, Tanner recalled, held the ball bat with his fists approximately five inches apart. There was no convincing him that this was not the correct way to hold a bat. When the pitch was slowly tossed in, he was standing on the right side of the plate, but he managed to take an aggressive left-handed swing, letting loose of the bat, which propelled into someone’s grandfather behind the plate. Eventually, with his father’s help, the boy finally made contact with a pitch and then proceeded to sprint exuberantly down the third-base line and into the outfield, where he gra
bbed a ball glove from a little girl and threw it out of play. When faced with rules and expectations for the game, the boy whined and complained so much that his father finally shooed him off, and he went exploring instead.

  When Tanner’s second cousin discovered a brownish-yellow colored porcupine cornered in some scrub brush near the woods, the timid animal turned its back to the boy, hiding its snout between its forelegs. There was nowhere for the mammal to run, so it simply raised its quills and waited. The boy zoologist correctly deduced that porcupines weren’t aggressive animals, so he decided to make a pet of the prickly rodent. He grabbed at its rump with both hands, incorrectly deducing that the porcupine was willing to submit peacefully. He screamed bloody murder as a hundred or so of the 30,000 three-inch long quills ended up imbedding themselves in the boy’s hands. The child’s father tried to pull several of the barbs out, to no avail, so the parents hurried him into their parked Volvo and headed for the hospital. Then grace was said and the potluck dinner began.

  Tanner recalled how proud he was of his father, who had hit two extremely long home runs in the softball game, and he was pressed up closely to his dad at the picnic table. The food was fantastic. His father was enthusiastically eating some strawberry-rhubarb pie for dessert when the dark clouds rapidly rolled in. There was a rather close bolt of lightning followed by a tremendous peal of thunder. Then Clay’s plate, pie and all, was torn from his hand, the wind carrying an amazing torrent of rain that splashed down on the pavilion. Tanner remembered his mother, Jessie, smile a glorious smile and Tanner, who liked the smell of rain, inhaled a deep breath of the humid air. He thought it was funny watching people scrambling for cover under the pavilion and at the same time was enjoying the refreshment and coolness that the sudden storm brought. And then all at once, after looking into his father’s frustrated eyes, Tanner decided that he hated rain and an irrational anger welled up inside him.

  ***

  Jessie had wanted lots of kids—well, at least four or five. Clay had been a high school math teacher, working diligently on his Master’s degree in math while also coaching the school’s varsity baseball team; Jessie worked as a medical assistant for a successful pediatrician in town. They loved kids and believed they’d be great parents. But after the birth and ensuing surgery, Jessie and Clay had to settle for just one child. Jessie had figured it was her responsibility to furnish Clay with the whole starting infield for his high school baseball team, but that was not to be so. Clay often thought of how he had made her believe she wasn’t at fault and forget about the events of that fateful day, and then he justified his actions by telling himself that he did the right thing for the woman he loved because she needed to be happy and to snap out of her despairing thoughts. From the moment Clay had met Jessie, he knew that he would choose to love her for the rest of his life, but he also decided that he wouldn’t make her love him back, nor would he take away any of her other choices in life. At that moment in the hospital, he had broken his promise to himself to never control Jessie’s mind, and he had taken away her own right to sort out her own emotions and deal with her guilt in her own way. It was what Clay had decided was best for her, but it left him to somehow feel he was deserving of blame and to feel even more determined to never manipulate her mind again.

  It seemed to Clay at the time that he had done what was best for his family, but Jessie always seemed to have a lingering guilt that she didn’t understand. Clay knew that there continued to be things about her that she would never share with him, almost as if she sensed that there were things about her husband that he would always hide from her. He never really felt completely confident that she loved him, but he took great comfort in knowing that he had never influenced her love. Clay also took great satisfaction in the knowledge that Jessie had been a fantastic mother from the very beginning. Tanner became an honor student, a superior athlete, captain of the football, basketball, and baseball teams even as a junior, and though Clay sometimes felt he had less control of Tanner’s behavior than he would like, he was very proud of his son. He was a mature, handsome, talented teenaged boy who people seemed to like. Clay loved his son, but it was to his wife that Clay gave most of the credit for his development. It was like she gave her one child the love she had planned for four or five.

  Jessie Thomas was a smorgasbord of emotions. She was as volatile as a volcanic eruption, except, with her, the eruptions weren’t necessarily always fiery. She could get angry easily, cry easily, or easily jump to erratic conclusions. But she could also laugh easily and get exuberantly excited. She could be the life of a party, never worried about embarrassing herself. She was able to laugh at herself, and seemingly all people loved her. She was, well, unpredictable. Unfortunately for Jessie, she was not one of the seventy-five percent or so of hysterectomy patients that are cured of PMS, so for about one-fourth of each month, she was extra unpredictable and even more emotional, and Clay and Tanner had learned to steer clear of her. Jessie was smiling now, however. It was raining—raining hard. It was a mid-August afternoon. The grass was dry and browning, and she was having trouble keeping her flowers perky ever since the worst summer temperatures had arrived, but this precipitation was sure to help. She loved the rain. She never could understand why her husband and son couldn’t see how wonderful it was. Of course, she’d heard Clay’s stories about nightmares concerning his mother, and she remembered how much the storm on their wedding day had bothered him, so she cut him some slack, but why did rain make Tanner such an angry sourpuss?

  She remembered the family reunion when Tanner got all red in the face, clenched his fists, and proclaimed that he hated rain just like his dad. She remembered her father-in-law, Mr. Thomas, who always said grace at the reunions, turning his ankle when he stepped sideways off the cement platform under the pavilion while praying for the food. He was praying, then without warning, there was a thudding noise and when Jessie looked up, Clay’s dad had fallen from sight. He picked himself off from the ground, dead grass and dirt clinging to his shoulders and back, and a squashed olive on the side of his face. He was only slightly embarrassed when he said, “God bless it…the food I mean. Dig in everyone!” There were a few embarrassed giggles and then finally laughter erupted and the reunion continued in good spirits—until the abrupt rainstorm, that is. And it was during that storm that Tanner announced his loathing for rain, a tremendous disappointment for Jessie, who loved it.

  ***

  Jessie Thomas was gorgeous—tall, with long, athletic legs and a nearly perfect figure; big, sparkling green eyes that could get a smile from anyone; and full lips covering perfectly white teeth. Gorgeous strawberry-blond hair outlined a stunning, tanned face. Clay recognized that it was difficult for people to keep their eyes off Jessie. He believed that because she was physically so perfect-looking, people were extra-willing to overlook the negative side of her emotions. Clay had figured from the beginning that she was out of his league, so he was especially grateful to have her—about three-fourths of each month.

  As for Clay, he seemed to have a lot going for him. He had just turned 40 and was still fit, showing no signs of graying or balding. He was an intelligent man, kind of logical in his thinking, with brown hair and eyes, and a smile that could light up his face if and when he could find something to smile about. He would smile when Jessie was happy, and he would smile when Tanner pleased him, but more often than not he seemed distant, and that distance had been wearing on his wife for years. He was actually a cup-half-full kind of person, who tried to see the good in everyone and in every situation, but the longer he lived alone with his secrets, the lonelier he felt. Clay had always been a good athlete, and he did his best to be a good teacher and coach who worked harder than most people were willing. He was a good family man who provided for his family’s material and personal needs, and he was on his way up as a teacher and coach, having accepted a professor’s position at Mott Community College where he was also coaching the varsity baseball team. There were rumors that some larger
universities were looking at him to become their next coach. But there was something wrong with Clay. He could make people think whatever he wanted them to think, as long as he looked them in the eyes, so he often would not look them in the eyes, and it made him look to Jessie and sometimes to others that he lacked confidence. Lack of confidence was actually the farthest thing from the truth, however, because Clay knew that he could get anything he wanted out of life; he was very confident about that. But he also knew that using his “powers” to get what he wanted left him unhappy and unfulfilled, which was what was really wrong with Clay—that and his loneliness. He had managed to always keep his secrets to himself. Clay loved Jessie very much, and thus far Jessie had chosen to stick with Clay, but Clay could not help but fear that someday she would learn his secrets and things would be different.

  CHAPTER 2

  When Clay and Tanner arrived home, hair matted down and shirts and shoes soaked from their run through the parking lot, Jessie was on a swing on the porch, sitting and thinking. She had been mulling over a conversation with Clay several months before…

  “There’s a guy where I work out that’s been flirting with me, Clay.”

  “Is that right? Did you tell him to stop…that you’re happily married?”