Lullaby for the Rain Girl

by Christopher Conlon

  “Jane,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Jane. Hooper.”

  “Well, I knew your name, Jane.”

  “No, you didn’t. You haven’t used it once.”

  “Well, I knew it. You must really think I’m a bastard if you believe I could go to bed with someone and not know her name.”

  She sighed, shakily. “It’s Jane Hooper, Mitchell.”

  “Okay, Jane Hooper.” He really wanted her to leave, but with his arm around her and her body so soft, so pliant, he quickly found himself thinking of other possibilities. She let his hands roam across her shoulders, her belly, her thighs. He began to smell the coffee in the other room.

  “Mitchell—I don’t—”

  “Shh.”

  “Really—not now, I’m—I—”

  He covered her mouth with his own and her quiet protest stopped. There was still something odd about this girl, this Jane Hooper, an odd odor maybe, something unsettling. But what the hell. She was here, he was here, they were naked. He pushed her gently back onto the pillows, thinking both of her and of the coffee he’d be enjoying in only a few minutes.

  “Mitchell—I don’t know if—”

  But she didn’t resist as he opened her legs and moved to mount her, kissing her lightly on her face. She wrapped her arms around him and made small whimpering sounds as he settled himself atop her. But suddenly and with an overwhelming revulsion he pulled himself away, crying, “Oh my God!”

  “What?” she said, eyes wide. “What is it?”

  He stared at her, aghast.

  She was cold inside.

  # # #

  They sat at the breakfast table. He sipped his coffee slowly, hoping the hot liquid would calm his jitters. She stared silently at her cup, not touching it. He had put on his bathrobe; she was wearing her clothes from last night, a simple blue shirt and old jeans.

  “You need to go to a doctor,” he said finally. “Do you have one? An HMO or something?”

  It was some time before she responded. “No.”

  “Your job doesn’t give you any health insurance?”

  “I don’t have a job.”

  “Oh. Well, I think there are some free clinics around. We’ll look online.” He still wanted nothing more than to get rid of this girl, but there was obviously something seriously wrong with her. He had to at least push her in the direction of some medical attention before he kicked her out. It would be easy enough to find a clinic and point her toward the subway.

  “Drink your coffee,” he said finally.

  She raised it carefully to her lips, then hesitated. At last she put the cup down again.

  “I guess I don’t want it,” she said.

  “Something wrong with it?”

  “No. I just don’t want it.”

  “Do you want those eggs?”

  “I…I don’t think so. I’m not hungry.”

  He frowned into his cup. No coffee, no food. He had done what he could do for this girl. It was time for her to move on. “Okay, then,” he said, standing, “let’s look up clinics.” He moved to his computer desk, sat, turned on the machine. As it was starting she stood and came up behind him, arms folded under her breasts.

  “It takes a minute,” he said, glancing at her and trying to smile. He hoped his voice didn’t sound as impatient as he felt; on the other hand, she didn’t seem to be taking the hint. Glancing down at her feet, he said, “Hey, better put your shoes on. You’ll want to get to the clinic as soon as you can.”

  She looked at him for a long moment, then turned and dropped onto his sofa, tucking her feet up under her and keeping her arms tightly around herself.

  “I don’t think I’d better go to a clinic,” she said finally.

  “What?” He turned to her. “Why not?”

  “I don’t think I’m sick.”

  He stared at her. “Well…What are you, then? Are you okay?”

  “I’m dead, Mitchell. That’s what I am.”

  “Oh, crap. You’re not dead. You’re talking. You’re breathing.”

  “I’m not.”

  “What?”

  “Breathing.”

  “Of course you’re breathing.”

  She looked at him, her eyes hurt, haunted. “C’mere.”

  “Jane, don’t be stupid. C’mon, I don’t need to check if you’re breathing. If you weren’t breathing you couldn’t…Well, shit, you couldn’t talk. You have to have air in your lungs to talk. You get air in your lungs by breathing.”

  “I didn’t even notice until a couple of minutes ago,” she said, staring at the carpet in front of her. “I only inhale when I need to speak. Otherwise I’m not breathing. Not at all. Look.”

  “I’m not going to look,” he said firmly. “You’re acting crazy. Maybe you ought to leave, okay? I don’t know what your problem is. I tried to help. But maybe it’s just time for you to go.” He stood, resolved. It was time for him to shower and get ready for work, anyway. “The computer’s here. It’s online. Why don’t you look up clinics? I’ll give you a couple of minutes while I take a shower. Then you’ll have to go.”

  The steaming water helped clear his head. This Jane Hooper was crazy enough to make him start thinking crazy things, too. No heartbeat. Not breathing. I’m dead. She was dead all right, he thought. A mousy little woman with no personality, nothing going for her. He remembered her from last night, sitting alone at a table with her hair pulled back so severely it looked painful. Later, when they were together in the apartment, she had pulled her top over her head and glanced awkwardly at him.

  “I’m sorry, Mitchell,” she’d said quietly. “That they’re so small.”

  She even turned out to be lousy in the sack, as far as he recalled; timid, shy, one of those girls who came to bed more for praise and reassurance than for fucking; the type that never responded, that just laid there and let you do it as long as you kept telling her how pretty she was, how much it meant to you that she would share herself with you, what an honor it was to be with her. Jesus Christ.

  He knew he had to stop. He was thirty now. Thirty and his life hadn’t amounted to a damned thing—he was nothing but a floorwalker at Sears, selling TVs and VCRs and electronic gadgets to flabby middle-aged nobodies. It was hard to remember sometimes that he had an honest-to-God college degree. A fat lot of good it had ever done him. He had a few buddies, mostly guys from work, but they were really just people to drink with on a Friday night. What did he have in his life? A little eighth-floor apartment in uptown D.C., a small paycheck every two weeks. No family. Nothing.

  That is, nothing but girls. He knew he was supposed to think of them as women but inside himself they were always girls. He was a good-looking guy, he knew that, but it was something more. Always had been. Girls went for him, that’s all. He didn’t really know why. They went for his looks, his line of chatter. They went for him. He rarely came home from a bar alone. They weren’t always the prettiest—increasingly, now that he’d reached thirty, they weren’t always the prettiest. College girls had become hard to get. But there was nearly always someone, and not some broken-down slut, either. Average girls with average lives, like this one now, this Jane Hooper. Nothing spectacular. But easy to meet, easy to take home, easy to get rid of.

  Or usually easy.

  Which was why—he shut off the water, toweled himself dry—he thought again, as he’d thought many times recently, that maybe it was time to stop this. Knock it off with the girls, look for a better job, maybe in another city. He was getting old for this life. And the weird ones he encountered along the way didn’t help. The ones who would call and call, leave tearful messages. And now this one. Jane Hooper, the dead girl. It was definitely time for her to go.

  He turned toward the door, moving to put his towel on the rack, when he realized with surprise that she had come in, was standing there by the sink watching him.

  “Oh,” he said. “Hi.”

  Her dark eyes locked on his, she moved quickly forwa
rd, took his hand, and placed his palm in front of her open mouth. He realized immediately that she wanted him to feel for her breath. He pulled quickly away.

  “Stop it, okay?”

  “Just hold it there. Please.”

  “No. I don’t want to.” This was just too bizarre; he was beginning to get creeped out. “Look, Jane, just put on your shoes and go. That’s all. Just go. I’m leaving for work as soon as I get dressed.” He moved past her, to where he had left shorts and T-shirt on the toilet tank. Suddenly he wanted to be dressed. He felt uncomfortable being naked in front of this girl. Who knew what she might try? She might very well be dangerous. Hell, she might already have stolen stuff from the apartment…But that was okay, he realized. She could have whatever she wanted as long as she would leave.

  He slipped into his underwear. “So…are you going to get your shoes?”

  She put her hands together, wrung them nervously, chewed on her lip. She turned and left the bathroom, stood with her back to him on the main room’s carpet.

  “Could I…stay here a while?” she asked in a tiny voice. “While you’re at work?”

  “Better not,” he said, moving past her toward the bedroom. “Did you find the clinic?”

  “I didn’t look,” she said, following him. “I…I don’t want to go to a clinic.”

  “Well, look,” he said, pulling his shirt and slacks from the hangers in the closet, “you need to leave here. Go home. Do whatever. But I’m leaving.”

  “I don’t have a home,” she said, sitting slowly on the bed, hugging herself tightly.

  “What do you mean, you don’t have a home?”

  “I don’t. I was evicted.”

  “Well—where do you stay?”

  “No place. Around.”

  “You don’t look like a homeless person to me.”

  “I haven’t been homeless very long. Only since last week.”

  “Well, shit, Jane, you must have some friends you can crash with. Or your family.”

  “No. I don’t.”

  He pulled on his trousers. “This is not my problem, okay? I’m sorry you’re having troubles. But that doesn’t mean that I have to solve them for you.” It was harsh, but it was time to cut the crap with this girl. “I brought you home. We fucked. You spent the night. I offered you breakfast. That’s the end of my obligation to you. Please put on your shoes.”

  She unfolded her arms, then pressed her palms to her legs and rubbed them slowly.

  “Can I just stay here a while? I won’t do anything. I just…”

  “No. It’s time for you to leave.” He slipped on his shirt and buttoned it.

  She didn’t move, stared pensively at her legs.

  “Guys always want me to leave,” she said.

  “Oh, come on,” he said, exasperated. “I’m not listening to any sob stories. No one forced you to come home with me last night. Shit, you said yes after one beer. If you didn’t have a good time I’m sorry, but I sure didn’t force you.”

  “I didn’t say you forced me.”

  “Well, shit.”

  “You didn’t force me,” she insisted. “It’s just that guys always seem to want me to leave, that’s all.”

  “I have to go to work.”

  She looked at him, her eyes large. “Did you like fucking me?”

  He scowled. “Not really.”

  Her eyes dropped again. “I didn’t, either.”

  “Well, then why did you do it?”

  “I needed a place to stay,” she said. “And you seemed nice.”

  “Well, I guess you found out that I’m not.” He reached for a tie from the closet. “So put on your shoes.”

  She moved glumly to her socks, which were lying haphazardly on the floor. He watched as she began slipping one on and, satisfied that she was finally making progress, he moved out to the kitchen again to put together his lunch. The usual: tuna and lettuce on wheat bread, an apple. He didn’t eat much; it was one of the secrets of keeping his physique. He found a brown bag, put the sandwich and fruit into it, and moved to the hall closet for his blazer. He put it on, glancing out the window again. Sleet was spraying the glass with a tiny hard sound. He cursed silently: they would be short-handed today, for sure. He could already think of a couple of people who would beg off work because of the weather, but living such a short distance from the store left him no excuses. Sighing, he grabbed his umbrella and stuffed his lunch bag in the pocket of the blazer.

  “Jane? You ready?” he called.

  No response.

  “Jane?”

  The sleet hissed against the window.

  “Goddamn it,” he muttered, furious now. He marched toward the bedroom, resolved to throw her out bodily if necessary. Shit, at this point she was trespassing. He’d call the police if he had to. This was his apartment and he wanted her out.

  But when he looked into the room and saw her lying on her side, facing away from him, one thought slammed instantly and inescapably into his brain.

  She’s dead.

  He stared at her. She had finished only the one sock; her left foot was still bare. There was something pitiful about the sight. His eyes moved up her body, across her legs, her arms, her shoulders. That was it: that was how he’d realized immediately that she was dead. She wasn’t breathing. Her body was completely still, still and heavy-looking the way dead bodies always were. He remembered looking at his mother and father just after the accident, when he’d staggered from the back seat of the car and seen them both lying in the street: they’d had the same look. Thick, leaden. Graceless. Dead.

  He stepped toward the girl with a feeling of horror, his breath short.

  “Jane?” he whispered.

  Then he heard her inhale. “Mitchell, please let me stay. Just for a while. I’ll leave later. I promise.”

  He sat on the bed. He reached out his hand to her shoulder, but pulled back before he touched it. He felt sick.

  “I—” His brain seemed to freeze. He could think of nothing, absolutely nothing to say to this girl, to this impossibly talking, moving dead girl.

  “My family,” she said at last, “had a history of heart problems. Both my parents died of heart attacks. My dad had four—the fourth one was the one that killed him, when he was thirty-nine. My mom just had one, when she was forty-two.”

  “How—how old are you?” he heard himself asking in a whisper.

  “Twenty-six.”

  “That’s—that’s…rare…”

  “My uncle, too. Uncle Pete. He took me in after my mom died. I was twelve.”

  He listened to the sleet on the glass, feeling as if he were somewhere else, as if this were not happening at all, could not be happening. “That’s…good,” he whispered. “That he took you in.”

  “Uncle Pete?” She was silent for a long time. Then: “Uncle Pete was into guns. When he fucked me he used to hold the muzzle of a cocked pistol against my forehead, right here.” She pressed a spot on her forehead with her finger. “He would show me that it was loaded first. He used to tell me that one of these days he was going to blow my head off at the exact moment he came, that he wanted to see my brains splatter all over the pillow as he shot off into me.”

  “He—?”

  “Sometimes he would put it in my mouth while he did it, make me suck on it.”

  “He—Jane—”

  “And he died of a heart attack too,” she said flatly. “I don’t know how old he was, exactly. I was fifteen.” Her voice held no emotion in it; she might have been reciting a bus schedule.

  He opened his mouth to speak, but he had no words. He made a small gasping sound, reached to touch her again, pulled back again.

  After a long time he stood, stumbled wordlessly to the door. He made his way into the hall, to the elevator, through the lobby, and to the street below. Umbrella forgotten, he staggered along the ice-encased winter street feeling chips of sleet making their way down his face and neck. There was nothing in his mind. He had no thoughts at all.r />
  # # #

  He came home early: the federal government declared a weather emergency in the mid-afternoon and shut down, so the store followed suit. Everything in the neighborhood was rapidly closing, doors shutting, neon lights clicked off to darkness. And it was dark, the clouds above the city thick and gray-black, the sleet falling, falling. The cars on Wisconsin Avenue crawled sluggishly, timidly along, their tires sliding in the slushy street. He slipped three times on the two-block walk home, once crashing down onto his left knee and sending a jolt of pain through his whole leg.

  When he arrived home he entertained a brief notion that nothing that morning had really happened, that there was no girl in his apartment, that everything was as it had been before last night. But no: as soon as he opened the door he smelled a sickly odor of urine, of diarrhea. He moved quickly to the bedroom.

  “Jane?”

  She was on her back on the bed. Her eyes were closed, her mouth wide. She had taken off her clothes: she looked small, emaciated. There was an old towel wrapped around her pelvis, a towel that was stained with big brown blotches.

  “Mitchell,” she said, her voice cracked and broken, much weaker than before, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Mitchell. It—it just came out. I didn’t…”

  He sat next to her. The odors of shit and pee were overwhelming. He could see that some of it had soaked through to the mattress beneath her.

  “Jane, we have to call a—”

  He didn’t finish the sentence because when he looked at her he realized again that she was dead. That was why her body had voided itself. She was dead.

  “I’ll—I’ll clean you up,” he said, voice quivering with cold, with fear. “I’ll try to clean you up.”

  “I’m sorry, Mitchell.”

  For a long moment he didn’t know where to begin. He stood there helplessly. Finally he realized that he was chilled to the bone, and so began to remove his wet things. He found some old jeans and a sweatshirt in his closet, put them on.

  “I felt so weird,” she said. “I…not hot, exactly, but something. So I took off my clothes. That was when I—oh, God, I’m so sorry about your bed…I grabbed a towel as fast as I could, I…” She lay there unmoving, crying quietly.