Lullaby for the Rain Girl

by Christopher Conlon

  She smiled. “You deflowered yourself.”

  “Actually that’s right. Well, still. You helped.”

  “I just sat there.”

  “Ah, but that was more than enough for an eighth grader. And you let me feel your boobies.”

  “One booby.”

  “Ah, but what a booby.”

  She smiled again and wandered down the hill, the big oak tree casting its shadow over us.

  “Seems like a long time ago,” she said.

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “Everything was so different then.”

  I stopped her, held her by the shoulders. “Not everything.”

  She looked down, her expression suddenly glum.

  “Everything,” she said. She looked up again, casting her eyes all around. “It’s like...it’s all here, but we’re not. I miss this place. Don’t you?”

  “No. I don’t.”

  Our eyes met. “Well,” she said, “there you go.”

  “You really want to come back? To Stone’s End?”

  She turned away. “I don’t know. No. I wanted to go home. But this isn’t home anymore. Still, I’d like to be closer. I’d like to...Santa Barbara isn’t my kind of place, Ben. It’s too...” She shook her head. “I don’t know. Surfers. Beach bunnies. I feel lost.”

  “We don’t have anything to do with that stuff,” I said, “except to go to the beach now and then.”

  “I know. I...” She shook her head. “I can’t explain it. But I want it to work between us, Ben. I never imagined myself with anybody but you.”

  “Well, same here. With you.”

  “But things are changing. I can feel them changing.”

  “All we can do,” I said, “is work at it.”

  “We will, right? We’ll keep working at it?”

  “Sure we will.”

  # # #

  But in the final weeks of the semester nothing changed. There was a distance between us now that hadn’t been there before, even though, to look at us, no one would have noticed anything amiss. It was internal, between the two of us. Maybe as a reaction to the inexplicable thing that was happening we partied more, encouraging Peter and Rachel to invite over their friends while we brought in people we knew from school. A great deal of beer was consumed at these get-togethers, and lots of pot. For the first time our landlord, Mr. Bogg, started calling us or knocking on our door and telling us to keep the noise down. Couples made out on the floor in the main room. Things got broken. People we didn’t know—people we assumed Peter and Rachel knew—would show up, drink, get belligerent. Fights broke out a couple of times. For a short while, our apartment was Party Central for Santa Barbara’s wilder kids.

  Sherry and I would fall into bed drunk, try to make some sort of sloppy love at three o’clock in the morning, both of us wasted out of our minds. It was better than the silence that otherwise obtained between us, a silence all the more profound because it existed between and under our words. We would sleep late, wake with excruciating headaches, miss class. Both of us barely finished the semester.

  But I understood nothing of what was really happening until the party we held at the end of the school year. It was a scene like before: the place crowded with people, the booze flowing, the pot odors permeating the apartment. I’d just been looking out the window to see if any police cars seemed to be headed this way when I turned and stumbled into a girl who spilled beer on my shirt. She laughed and staggered into someone else. I needed air, I knew. I scanned the apartment and saw no one I knew except for a couple of school acquaintances. I moved toward the front door, determined to escape at least for a moment. On my way I took a half-empty Heineken sitting on the floor and swallowed all that was left in it. I turned to the door again, was stopped by some guy I vaguely knew who wanted to talk to me about buying houses, a subject I cared absolutely nothing about. I moved past him. The door seemed very far away. Before I reached it I glanced to the side and saw another door: the one to Peter and Rachel’s room. It stood ajar. Through the haze of marijuana smoke I saw Peter, nothing on but a pair of shorts, at the foot of his bed. A girl’s naked legs enveloped his head. I couldn’t see the girl’s face. I didn’t need to see the girl’s face. I knew the girl’s legs. They were Sherry’s legs.

  6

  I spent that night on the beach, watching the surf tumble and roll in the moonlight. I smoked a lot of cigarettes, one after another, tossing them into the surf and immediately lighting the next. I only stopped when I ran out. The wind came up after a while, whipped my hair over my face. Whatever buzz I’d had from the beer and pot completely evaporated and I sat there feeling heavy, leaden, dull, useless. I wasn’t angry—I didn’t have the energy to be angry. I felt as if I were sick, physically sick, my vitality drained away to nothingness. I didn’t blame Sherry. I didn’t blame Peter. I don’t know why not, really. But somehow things had fallen into place. Sherry’s behavior over the past couple of months, her insistence that I not leave her, her paranoid suspicions about me and Rachel. It was her own behavior making her paranoid about mine. She’d assumed that I might very well do what she was already doing, or thinking of doing. Of course.

  My mind ran around and around on it. I’d seen that Sherry and Peter liked each other, but it had never occurred to me that it would become anything more than a friendly relationship. But then it had never occurred to me that Sherry O’Shea would ever have anything to do with anyone but me—vainglorious man! So many things that had been mysterious were suddenly clear. Her odd moods. Her distance.

  It had been apparent since we’d returned from Stone’s End that things hadn’t changed between us. We’d hoped for a new start, but there was nothing new. What I didn’t know was what we might do about it. Sherry O’Shea was the only girl I’d ever had any involvement with in my life. It was literally unimaginable to me what my existence would be like without her. We grew up together, for God’s sake. We were George and Mary from It’s a Wonderful Life. Everyone knew that. Now...

  And what of Peter Welch? What kind of a person went down on his roommate’s girlfriend? I thought that I couldn’t imagine it, but quickly realized that I could: yes, that’s exactly what Peter Welch would do. He was charming but not particularly aware of other people, not especially concerned about them except as they impacted him. I remembered what Rachel had said about the band, how it had all been his idea, how he had pushed her into the singing she really didn’t want to do. His charm is what caused such things to happen. He seemed so pleasant, so helpful and positive, that people wanted to be with him. I felt it myself. I still did. Part of me didn’t want to blame Peter at all for what had happened. But it was impossible for me to blame Sherry.

  I felt too rottenly feeble to think it out any further.

  Many of the beaches in Santa Barbara, at least in those days, could be very quiet at night, and I don’t believe I saw a single human being during all the hours I sat there staring at the sea. There was the occasional slow-moving light at the edge of the dark horizon. Once a seagull flapped past me. Other than that there were no signs of life at all. Part of me kept hoping that Sherry would suddenly appear behind me, weeping and apologetic (though how she would find me, my fantasy left unexplained). Part of me wanted, as Sherry had desired earlier, to step into a time machine, go back to Stone’s End a year ago or two or five, and return to things as they were. But things would never be that way again. As I sat there I had the sense that perhaps I really just wanted something to happen: but nothing did. Hour after hour, nothing happened.

  Except that the sky began, very slowly, to lighten. What had been a dull black or deep blue slowly turned purple—the color, I thought, of bruises. The purple eventually gave way to a dark red, then to a blood-red, then brightened to something like pink. A couple of crack-of-dawn joggers trotted along the shoreline in running gear. I wondered how long I’d been there: four or five hours, surely. I was neither hungry nor thirsty. I was nothing.

  Finally it was day, earl
y morning in early summer. It looked to be a beautiful one, but then every day was beautiful in Santa Barbara. The cool ocean breezes touched my cheeks and ruffled my shirt. A few people wandered by, not particularly noticing me. At last I stood, my legs creaky and sore, my back tight and uncomfortable. I knew I would have to go back, I knew there would be a scene. I knew Sherry’s and my relationship was over. But what did that mean? Where would I live? Where would she? Would I continue in school? Would she leave the area to return to Stone’s End? Was she going to stay with Peter?

  I didn’t want to face any of it. Instead I made my way from the beach into a little shopping area and sat down at a café, ordered coffee and a bagel with cream cheese. To my surprise, they tasted good. I had two cups of the coffee and wolfed down the bagel. I paid—I had little money on me, I barely managed the bill—and then wandered in the oceanfront shops for a while, utterly aimless. There was something of a feeling of power to it. Whatever was going to happen, it couldn’t happen, I thought, without me. Perhaps they were sitting there even now, Sherry and Peter, worried, wondering where I was, fretting that I would come back angry and explosive. Maybe they were calling friends to try to track me down.

  And where was Rachel in this? Where would she be? Where had she been when I’d left? I didn’t know. She wasn’t at the party—at least I didn’t think she’d been. Surely Peter wouldn’t have been so reckless as to take Sherry into their bedroom with her there. (Then again, my presence hadn’t slowed him down.) Had she returned, then? Discovered what Peter had been up to? Or had they left her in the dark? Did she have no idea, even now?

  I hated to return, yet knew I had to. But first—I wasn’t sure why I decided to do this—I stepped to a pay phone and dialed the apartment’s number. It rang and rang—like many people in that era, we didn’t have an answering machine. Finally, just as I was about to hang up, someone picked up.

  “Hello?” I said.

  I thought I detected the sound of breathing, but I wasn’t sure.

  “Hello? Hello? Sherry?”

  The line clicked off.

  Strange. I considered calling back, but now my curiosity was overwhelming me. Who had picked up the phone? Why hadn’t Sherry, or Peter, or Rachel—it had to have been one of them—spoken? What was going on at the apartment? I was overcome suddenly by a sensation of dread. I didn’t visualize anything in particular; I only had the sense that something was wrong, terribly wrong.

  When I got back it was obvious before I even entered that I was correct.

  The door dangled half-open. From what I could immediately see, it looked as if a storm had hit the apartment: clothes, books, papers were all over the floor.

  I pushed the door open slowly.

  The wreckage was complete. The tall halogen lamps were lying on their sides. Pieces of shattered dishes glittered in the light coming from the window. Cigarette butts were strewn on the carpet from overturned ashtrays. Beer bottles were everywhere, several of them broken.

  Sitting in the middle of this chaos was Rachel.

  She looked at me, scowling. Her eyes were hard.

  I stepped in, careful to avoid the broken bits of glass in the carpet. I looked into the kitchen, where the cabinet doors gaped. The cabinets were mostly empty, their contents strewn everywhere. Cups, glasses, saucepans, pots. The refrigerator door had swung closed, but not before most of the food had been tossed onto the counter and the floor. Broken eggs ran down kitchen walls. A ketchup bottle had exploded on top of the stove, leaving what looked like blood draining down the oven door and pooling on the floor before it.

  I moved past Rachel to Sherry’s and my bedroom. Nothing had been disturbed here, it seemed. But I noticed that Sherry’s clothes had disappeared. There was a note on our rumpled bed.

  Ben,

  Peter and I are leaving. I don’t know where we’re going yet. I’ll let my parents know where we are.

  This has been coming a long time. But it shouldn’t have happened like this. I was drunk and high both. So was Peter. We didn’t think you were here. Actually I thought you’d gone out with Rachel. But that’s not an excuse.

  I don’t know what to say, Ben. “I’m sorry” is the most stupid thing in the world to say but it’s all I can think of.

  Sherry.

  I read it without any particular emotion. When I finished I dropped the note onto the bed and stepped out to the bathroom. Nothing had been disturbed there. Sherry had forgotten a number of her things in her haste to leave.

  Finally I made my way to the door of Peter and Rachel’s room. The bed was there, and some of Rachel’s clothes were scattered around. Peter’s file cabinet still stood in the corner, but the drawers had been emptied. Some of the electronic equipment was gone, but some remained; the video camera, for instance, stood on its tripod in the corner. I noticed that it faced the bed.

  At last I stepped into the main room again. I sat on the sofa. Rachel was cross-legged on the carpet.

  Finally she reached for her cigarettes. She glanced at me, offering me one. I nodded. She lit two and handed one to me.

  “They were gone when I got here,” she said finally, in a flat voice. “I was at a movie.”

  We sat for a while.

  “How did everything...?” I gestured around at the chaos of broken things.

  “That was me.”

  I wasn’t angry at all. Looking around at the mess I felt nothing.

  “If you’d come back earlier,” she said, “you could’ve helped.” She smiled bitterly.

  “That would’ve been good,” I agreed.

  Silence.

  “Did Peter leave you—a note? Anything like that?”

  Rachel snorted and gestured at a crumpled piece of notebook paper on the carpet in front of me. I leaned down to it, smoothed it on my knee.

  Bye, Babe, it read. Sorry the band didn’t work out. Peter.

  “Sherry left me one, too,” I said.

  “Yeah. I saw it.”

  “Did you—know? What was going on? Between them?”

  She shook her head. “I kind of suspected. But Peter’s always got other girls anyway. That’s just the way he is. He fucks anything that moves.”

  “I didn’t know. About them. The two of them.”

  “Well, now you do.”

  I watched seagulls cruising the blue sky. I must have slipped into sleep, because by the time I was aware of anything again the light outside had dimmed. It seemed to be early evening. Rachel had moved from the floor to the armchair. She stared pensively into space and smoked.

  “So much for George and Mary,” I said finally.

  “Huh?”

  “Nothing,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s from It’s a Wonderful Life. Never mind.”

  After a while I stood and picked up a few of the bottles and pieces of broken dishes. I got the wastebasket from under the kitchen sink and threw them in. Then I brought out the wastebasket and started tossing things into it. After I’d picked up what I could I wiped off the stove and oven door and counter with paper towels. Rachel said nothing. She didn’t move. I wasn’t sure she was even aware of what I was doing.

  It took quite a while, but eventually I had the kitchen and sitting room looking better. All the movement had helped me, a little. When I sat down on the sofa again it was dark outside and I was tired.

  “Do you have any idea where they went?” I asked.

  “I don’t give a shit where they went,” she said flatly. “Fuck ’em.”

  I thought of calling Sherry’s parents, but what would be the point? I considered calling Alice too, but what good would that be? There seemed no reason to call anybody. Sherry and Peter were over eighteen. Legal adults. They were free to go wherever they wanted. There was nothing I could do about it.

  I got up and went to the refrigerator, found some ham and cheese that hadn’t been tossed out. There was bread. The mustard jar was tipped on its side on the floor but hadn’t broken. I made two sandwiches.

  She glanced up a
t me as I held the little plate before her. She opened her mouth to say something, thought better of it, and took the plate. She munched morosely on the sandwich.

  I thought of turning on the TV—Peter had left that, and the VCR; like his file cabinet, they must have been too big to fit into his car. Would he come back for his things? I wondered. Or was it possible that some of the remaining items actually belonged to Rachel? I didn’t ask. We sat quietly. I turned on one of the newly standing halogen lamps to a low level of light. We sat a while longer, finishing the sandwiches.

  After some time I went to our—now my—bedroom, put Sherry’s note away in a drawer, and dropped down onto the bed. I stared at the dark ceiling for a while. I could hear traffic passing by in the distance.

  Rachel turned off the lamp in the main room and I heard her using the bathroom. Then she went off to their—now her—bedroom.

  The apartment was very quiet. I glanced at the clock beside my bed: it was midnight. Then it was one o’clock. Then two.

  I didn’t hear her coming. Perhaps I was dozing. She just suddenly seemed to be there, next to me. We were both still wearing all our things. She lay next to me for some time. I could hear her breathing.

  Later, a few minutes or an hour, she turned to me in the bed. She pressed her face against me, her fists clenched against her chest. I slept a little, groggily.

  Finally she moved a bit and I heard the rustling of clothes. When she lay down again it was with her bare shoulder pressed against me. I could see her outline in the darkness. She had nothing on. My need was suddenly overwhelming: I stripped away my clothing, sat up on the bed facing her. She opened her legs. I plunged in, immediately shocked at how different it felt with her. She was smaller in every way, tighter, harder. Her smell was unfamiliar: muskier than Sherry’s, earthier, raunchier. We didn’t look at each other. She lay there, eyes shut, while I stared vacantly at her hair on the pillow. Other than our genitals banging together, we didn’t touch. It went on a long time, not the long time of great lovers, but of two people assuaging some unnamable hunger: the act was intensely physical, practically violent, as if we were not only pleasuring ourselves but trying to somehow hurt Sherry and Peter at the same time, vicariously assaulting them, raping them by proxy. How tiny she was, tiny yet fiercely strong. She lay scowling, occasionally grunting or sighing, her hips bucking under me. Sweat covered us. I grew tired, thirsty, short of breath. Finally we slowed, then stopped. Neither of us had come.