The Rainy Season

by James P. Blaylock

  “Can you keep something?” Betsy whispered.

  “I suppose I can. What is it?” Jen pushed herself up onto her elbows, blinking sleep out of her eyes.

  “This.” Betsy reached into the book bag, past the stuffed animals, and took out the leather bag. She laid it on the bed, carefully untied the drawstring, and shook the glass dog out onto the bedspread.

  Jen sat looking at it for a moment without speaking, and then slowly closed her eyes. She opened them after a moment and asked, “Where did you find this, Betsy?”

  “In the tower,” Betsy whispered. She knew now that what this contained was much bigger, much more powerful, than the kind of memory that lay in the inkwell. Last night she had dreamed of the things she had seen in the tower—lucid dreams of an empty, windowless, candlelit cellar room. It had rained incessantly in her dreams. People came and went, people whom she half-recognized. There were times in the night when she dreamed of running across open fields, of chasing sticks that traveled on a little stream of running water, of riding a horse, although she had never in her life actually ridden one. It seemed to her even now that she could recall the smell of the horse, the silky feel of its mane against her hand. The dreams had gone around endlessly in her head until she had awakened in the morning from a nightmare in which she was entrapped in a wooden box, suffocating, trying to scream, her mouth filling with icy cold water that poured in around her.

  “I don’t want it,” she said to Jen.

  “No. Almost nobody wants it. Do you know who put it in the tower?”

  She shook her head. “I think it was there a long time. I think it’s old.”

  “I believe it was put there by your grandmother,” Jen told her. “I think she wanted to hide it. It isn’t like the inkwell. This didn’t belong to her.”

  Betsy nodded. “Can you take it? For now, anyway?”

  “Yes,” Jen said, after a moment’s hesitation. “I’ll take it, but I can’t keep it. I don’t think either one of us should keep it for very long. I think I know where it should go.”

  “Okay,” Betsy whispered. “You could take it there?”

  “Yes,” Jen told her.

  Betsy turned and hurried out of the room, heading for the stairs again.

  PHIL WAS HAPPY to see that Betsy was carrying all three of the Pooh dolls when she came back downstairs, especially the new one. She still didn’t look overjoyed to be going out with Mrs. Darwin, but she wasn’t sullen about it, either. The outing might go a long way toward restoring Betsy’s friendship with Mrs. Darwin, or at least Phil hoped it would. They had to try, at least. He watched them climb into her rental car and head on up the driveway, and he found that he was unsettled in his mind for reasons he couldn’t quite specify. It was probably some kind of separation anxiety, an inescapable part of being a parent.

  He walked around the side of the house and across the lawn to the shed, where he took out the key and opened the padlock on the door. He had no intention of waiting for the mysterious priest to contact him again. It was quicker and cleaner to deliver the bones to the mission himself, which was something he could do this very afternoon. He swung the door open and looked into the room, which was lit now by morning sunlight, and at once he saw that the bones were gone. He stepped in, bending over to look under the stair. He found a single rosary bead on the floorboards, almost hidden in the shadow against the back of the bottom step.

  Who? he wondered, slipping the bead into his pocket. He walked to the window, where he could see at a glance that the sill was wiped clean of dust. There were handprints on the top of the window frame where somebody had pulled the window open and climbed out. And now that he looked he could see that someone had gone up and down the stairs, too. The dust was disturbed by footprints, small enough so that it was likely the intruder had been a woman. Betsy? He looked more closely. They were tennis-shoe prints, small enough to be Betsy’s, although Betsy clearly wouldn’t have gone anywhere near the bones. Who could it be except Elizabeth? She’d been skittish as hell yesterday afternoon. …

  He found that he didn’t really give much of a damn about the theft. It was good riddance, actually. He went back out again, locking the door after him, and headed for the house, more anxious than ever to get out into the sunshine today, somewhere quiet, empty, and sane.

  45

  PHIL REJECTED THE idea of sneaking Jen off the property in the trunk of the car, and compromised by hiding her in the backseat, where she lay out of sight as Phil drove out Jamboree Road toward the freeway. He kept his eye on the rearview mirror, watching for suspicious cars, just for the sake of taking the priest seriously, although he had no idea what constituted a suspicious car. He pulled off at the edge of an avocado grove, sitting for a couple of minutes in the shade, letting the traffic pass. No one, apparently, was in the least bit interested in them, and when they set out again, Jen sat in the front seat, buckled in, holding on tight to the hand-grip built into the dashboard. After a few minutes, though, she relaxed, laughing out loud, pointing out that with her eyes closed there was virtually no sensation of speed at all, and that a galloping horse was immensely more thrilling.

  She scanned the radio dial, settling on a classical music station, and asked an incessant string of questions about billboards and shopping centers, parking lots and freeway travelers. Airplanes passed overhead, descending into John Wayne Airport. There were so many people moving, all of them going somewhere in a terrible hurry. Phil couldn’t tell her why. To him it was a sort of modern insanity, something he didn’t notice much, even though he himself was caught up in it. Jen seemed to see it as a curiosity and a wonder, and as they drove up the Ortega Highway toward Caspers Park, with miles of open land spread out beneath them, she sat staring and transfixed until a curve in the road hid the lowlands from view. They passed out of the edges of the suburbs and into the oak and granite wilderness of the foothills.

  THE TRAIL BACK into the upper reaches of Cold Springs Canyon had been heavily washed by winter rains, and the going was rocky, especially on the steeper sections of trail. There was water everywhere, dozens of little rills and freshets and springs, and the rain-fed vegetation towered overhead, the alders and sycamores already leafing out. The late-morning sun shone through new foliage, and the heat that settled into the canyon felt like vitamins to Phil after months of cloudy weather and rain. There were fresh clouds in the northwest, a new storm front moving in, but with any luck the afternoon would remain sunny, and occasional clouds would simply provide a little shade.

  The canyon was a habitat for matilija poppies, hand-width papery white poppies with yellow centers like immense fried eggs. The poppies reproduced after a fire, and although Cold Springs Canyon itself hadn’t burned since 1958, a couple of small side canyons had been touched by a fire that had climbed over the ridge from Crow Canyon a few years ago, and if Phil was lucky, and the poppies had started to bloom, he could spend a couple of rolls of film on them. He had packed light: only his 35 mm Nikon, two macro lenses, and a plant clamp that he’d made out of nursery canes, a paper clip, and modeling clay. He had spare batteries, film, filters, and a new graphite tripod, which was compact, lightweight, and stupidly expensive.

  Jen hiked along twenty yards ahead of him. She wore a pair of walking shoes, jeans, and a blouse that had belonged to Phil’s mother and which must have dated back thirty years. The idea of dressing “like a man” hadn’t concerned her for more than a moment, and the shoes were especially wonderful to her, although she had laughed at the sight of herself in the mirror. She said almost nothing as she walked up the trail, and the higher they climbed into pristine territory, the less often she spoke, so that for the past ten minutes she had said nothing at all. Phil found that he wasn’t inclined to talk, either, as if the very largeness of the world around them made all human thought seem small. He watched the way she trailed her hands through the ferns growing up out of the shadows, and how she stood still in patches of sunlight for a moment before going on. She stopped to s
tare at the purple and blue lichen on an outcropping of granite, as if she were seeing such a thing for the first time.

  Phil spotted the dense spikes of purple bush lupine in a narrow clearing beside the path twenty feet farther along, and he found himself reflexively digging out his 100 mm lens. But then he glanced at Jen, who looked pensive to him, lost in herself, and he put the lens back into the pack. The camera equipment felt suddenly heavy to him, an encumbrance, and he wondered why he had brought it at all, why he hadn’t read this better and simply left the camera in the trunk of the car. There would be other days to photograph wildflowers. Today the camera lens might simply steal the soul of the place.

  He named the flowers for her, and pointed out a stand of tiger lily, already chest-high but still a month away from blooming. They moved on, up a narrow defile between sheer granite and sandstone cliffs. The trail opened up again, and ahead of them stood an immense oak, the curve of one monumental limb actually reclining on the ground. Jen sat down on the limb and looked off toward the high peaks of the Elsinore and Santa Margarita ranges that rose one beyond another to the south and east. Gray remnants of storm clouds clung to the upper slopes, and in the cloud shadow the mountains were iron-black. Phil realized now that Jen was crying silently, purposefully keeping her face turned away from him, and for a moment he didn’t know what to do with himself. But this was no time to do nothing, and so he set his day pack on the ground and sat down next to her. Immediately she put her hand on his, as if she had been waiting for him.

  “I’m being silly,” she said. “But this is more than I expected.”

  “That’s why I come out here,” he said. “There’s something about winter that reminds me of the things that have gone out of the world, and then every spring I come out here and discover that the world is still here, and so I know that it’s something that’s gone out of me, instead. It gives me a certain amount of hope in that way.”

  “I wonder how May felt when she knew she would never go home again.”

  The mention of his mother threw him. He had no idea how to answer, since he had never considered his mother as a person with a past, with an identity other than as his mother. Their life together had clouded his perception of her. He had never really known her.

  “She had a family that cared for her, and she lost them. I had no family, really—not out west. I came out by rail from Iowa when I was eighteen, with the idea of teaching school. I lived in a cottage above Handy Creek on a ranch owned by a family named Fillmore. I might never have returned to Iowa. The years slip away, you know, and I didn’t bring any happy memories of them when I came west. There’s that old saying about absence making the heart grow fonder, but I didn’t find that to be true. Sounds ungrateful, doesn’t it?”

  “It just sounds truthful.”

  “Betsy told me that I reminded her of a story in a book. It’s funny, but that’s just how I feel, that the story of my past life ended with the disappearance of the heroine. All of the characters existed only because she existed.”

  “And now she exists again.”

  “But they don’t. They’re gone.”

  They sat in silence for a time, watching a hawk swing down over the canyon, circle out over the ridge and disappear, and then reappear again, dropping slightly lower over the canyon floor before swooping away over the ridge again. Above and behind them, cut into the canyon wall, was the dim mouth of a shallow cave, hollowed out of sandstone by eons of weather. He saw that there were clusters of hen and chicken cacti growing at the edge of the cave mouth, and that the cacti were in bloom.

  The hillsides themselves were knee-deep in dense grass. The heavy vegetation would make for a perilous fire season in early autumn, but that was the cost of this kind of spring. The chaparral burned off once every few decades, and yet the canyons recovered in just a few seasons, and the hills and meadows that they looked at now were as utterly wild as when the world was new. The hawk turned over the ridge and started downward again as a cloud covered the sun, and Phil imagined that he could see against the sky the hundreds of thousands of concentric and intersecting circles of all the hawks that had hunted these hillsides over the centuries.

  With the clouds, the canyon fell into deep shadow, and they heard the distant boom of thunder. A scattering of big drops fell. They could hear the rain falling on the oak leaves over their heads and see it beating the grass out in the clearing beyond.

  “C’mon,” Phil said, getting up. Wind gusted through the canyon, blowing the rain in under the canopy of leaves. He grabbed Jen’s hand and started up the sandstone hillside, ducking into the shelter of the cave mouth just as lightning flashed over the hillsides. Rain fell harder, slanting down in heavy drops that hissed against the stone, but already the cloud overhead was moving on, and soon sunlight swept across the meadow again as if chasing the shadows away. The horizon was blanketed with clouds, though, and Phil thought about Betsy out with Mrs. Darwin and wished suddenly that Betsy were here with him and Jen instead, sitting in this cave and watching the rain fall.

  “I looked into your friend, Mr. Colin O’Brian,” he said to Jen.

  She nodded.

  “There’s a Colin O’Brian in Capistrano. That’s how you said he spelled his last name? With an A?”

  “Yes,” she said softly.

  “Does it seem reasonable to you that he might be a priest?”

  She nodded. “Very reasonable,” she said, looking at him hopefully.

  “Well,” he said, “maybe everything’s not gone forever, you know?” The sun glistened on the wet vegetation.

  She smiled at him now. “Where can we find him?”

  “On the way home,” Phil said. “At the mission.”

  46

  THERE WERE SEVERAL booths open at Watson's, the drugstore on the plaza. Mrs. Darwin led Betsy to one by the window. The afternoon was overcast, but still dry, the first nice day in months, and the plaza was active with people going in and out of the antiques stores and bank buildings. Betsy remained silent, looking out through the window. When a waiter brought menus she let hers lie on the table. Mrs. Darwin watched to see if she would pick it up, but the girl was apparently willing to be just a little bit sullen, even after a wonderful two hours of shopping at the mall.

  “Phil tells me that they have a wonderful milk shake here,” Mrs. Darwin said. “Doesn’t that sound nice?”

  Betsy nodded.

  “Are you hungry, child?”

  She shrugged. “I guess.”

  “Of course you are. Phil told me that you hadn’t had breakfast. I’m surprised he doesn’t feed you more regularly.”

  “I didn’t wake up yet.”

  “Well, you must be hungry if all you had was a cookie at the mall.” She signaled the waiter. “We want milk shakes,” she said to him. I’d like boysenberry. Betsy?” Betsy shrugged again. “Chocolate?” Mrs. Darwin asked. Betsy nodded now. “And what to eat? A hamburger?” The girl nodded again. “Let’s have two of the hamburger plates, with fries,” Mrs. Darwin said to the waiter, who wrote it down and left. The two of them sat in silence again. “What are you watching so intently?” Mrs. Darwin asked after a moment. She craned her neck to see what it was that Betsy saw. “Do you know someone out there?”

  “Uh-huh,” Betsy said. “Elizabeth.”

  “Who? I don’t see who you mean. Who’s Elizabeth?”

  “She went into a store over there.”

  “I see. How do you know this Elizabeth?”

  “She came to see Uncle Phil.”

  “Ah. I suppose a man like your uncle Phil has a lot of women come to visit him?”

  “I don’t know. I only know about Elizabeth.”

  Again there was a silence. “Do you know, Betsy, you and I are going to have to learn to talk to each other again. Sometimes things happen to us that change us, but we’ve got to be careful not to let them hurt our friendships. We can overcome things if we stick together. Your uncle Phil hasn’t said anything against me, has he? Anyth
ing bad about me?”

  “No.”

  “Because I’ll admit that we had some trouble in Austin, when he came to get you. I want to show you something.” She opened her purse and took out the paper that Marianne had written the first will on. “I want you to read this.”

  Betsy read it and shrugged, as if it meant nothing to her. The waiter brought the milk shakes and set them on the table, and Betsy dug into hers with the long milkshake spoon.

  “Do you know what this is, Betsy?”

  “My mother wrote it.”

  “Yes, she did. She wrote this so that if anything happened to her, I would become your mother. I know I couldn’t become your real mother, but I would be your adopted mother. Do you know why she wanted me to be your adoptive mother?”

  “I guess.”

  “Because I helped raise you. I knew how to cook for you and how to sew your clothes and help you with your homework. She knew that I love you. Are you listening to me? Slow down for a moment.”

  Betsy put the spoon down and looked out the window again. This was apparently hard for her. The poor child was at loose ends. She had been sent away with a man she hardly knew and stuck away in an attic. This was the first time, probably, that she had been out of the house. It had taken someone from halfway across the continent to buy the poor girl a milk shake! “I showed you this because I wanted you to know what your mother wanted for you. Phil is a fine man, from what I know about him, but your mother wanted you to live with me, Betsy. It was important to me that you knew that.” She folded the will and put it back in her purse.

  “Are you listening to what I’m saying to you?” she asked after a moment.