“Not watching. It’s hard to explain. Just...being. Near. Most of the time I didn’t actually know what you were doing. You know, doing. Like right now you’re sitting on the sofa, drinking tea. I wouldn’t have known that. It’s more like...” She sighed. “It’s hard to explain. It’s more like sensing you. Your presence. I stayed near in that way. It...” She shrugged. “It made me feel less lonely.”
“How did you—how did you learn things? Reading, writing?”
“It’s easy to learn things when you’ve got nothing else to do.”
“So you are a ghost.”
“A ghost is the spirit of somebody dead who once lived. I never lived. And so I never died.”
“You’re...in between.”
“In between.”
I sat for a long time, looking at her, this impossible girl, my daughter.
“What about—Rachel? Your...mother? Have you ever...seen...?”
“Seen her? No. If she were to show up, she’d be a ghost.” She smiled. “That’s a different department, you might say.”
“Are there ghosts?”
She shook her head. “I don’t really know.”
We sat in silence for a very long time. I listened to the elevator, to the distant traffic.
“Want some more tea?” she asked finally, gesturing at my empty mug.
I chuckled. Then I laughed aloud.
“What?” she said, grinning curiously. “What’s funny?”
“I—” My heart was racing, but in an inexplicably happy way, a good way. “Honey, you drop all this about—about Rachel and...and soul-catchers and...being with me ever since and...and you ask me if I want more tea?” I chuckled again, shook my head.
“Well? Do you?”
I looked at her, smiled. “As a matter of fact, that would be nice.”
She jumped up from the sofa and, taking our mugs, went to the kitchen. I heard her rustling around with the tea kettle. The scene suddenly seemed so ordinary, so pleasantly mundane, so prosaically real. At last I got up and followed her, stood watching her in the kitchen as she fussed with the tea bags.
“So you haven’t been...watching me, exactly. This whole time.”
She shook her head. “I told you, that’s not how it works.” She grinned. “Don’t worry. Your sex life is your own business.”
I laughed and felt myself redden. “Thank God for that.” I thought. “But the tape—Rachel’s and my tape...that’s when...”
“When you made me. Or what would become me. Whatever I am.”
“My God. A child witnessing her own conception.”
“Not a child, exactly. But yeah.”
She stood profile to me, staring at the mugs with the waiting tea bags. The water roiled in the kettle.
“So...” I struggled again for words. “So...now you’re here.”
“Now I’m here.”
“But how? If you were just this...floating...I don’t know, spirit, or whatever...You weren’t really in this world...No one could see you, right?”
“No one could see me.”
“Then why can I see you now? You’re here. You’re...” I reached out, touched her shoulder. “I can feel you. You’re real. Why the—the change? What brought you—here?”
She was silent for a moment. She didn’t look at me. Then she said, quietly: “You did.”
“Me? How?”
Finally she looked up. “You needed me.”
“I...? Honey, I didn’t know you existed...”
“That doesn’t mean you didn’t need me.”
“I...” I scowled, trying to think it out. We stood there for a time.
“People like me,” she said, her voice low, “or, not people, but—whatever we are—we’re not ghosts. We’re not spirits. We’re...we’re fragments. Partials. Incompletions.”
“That doesn’t tell me...how you came here.” My throat was tight. “What I had to do with it.”
“You called to me. From a deep place. Deep calling to deep. Need calling to need. You didn’t know it was me you were looking for. But when you found me you brought me here.”
“Without knowing it?”
“Part of you knew. Didn’t you?”
And I realized in that moment that she was right. Part of me had known, from the first day I ever saw her. Known that we were connected. I had no way of expressing or understanding it. But I’d realized it somewhere, yes, deep within myself. Deep calling to deep....
“But how can I have that power?” I asked. “To conjure...to call...”
“It’s not a power,” she said quietly. “It’s more like a lack of power. Weakness. Despair. Need.”
“And you...decided to come...?”
“I just came. There was no deciding.”
“Your...your face, your body...the way you look...?”
“I have your DNA, you know. And Rachel’s. When I came I took on the appearance I would have had, if...”
“If Rachel hadn’t...”
“Yes. Or most of it, anyway. My appearance. I haven’t actually lived for sixteen years in this world, so I don’t have the lines and the...the look of someone who has. I seem sort of—unfinished.”
“You look beautiful.”
She grinned then, suddenly, hugely. “Thank you.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before, though? When we first met? In my classroom?”
“Come on. How would you have reacted? You would’ve thought I was a nut. I had to be careful. You weren’t ready.”
“But...you said—before...‘need calling to need’...”
“Uh-huh.”
“What do you need, honey?”
“I need you,” she said, “to love me.”
“That’s all?”
“What else is there?”
“Just—to love you?”
“If you can love me—really love me—I might be able to become complete.”
“Complete...?”
“I might be able to become a—person. A real person. I don’t know if it’s possible. I think it might be. Maybe.”
“If I love you?”
“I was never born,” she said. “I never died. My mother’s gone.” She stepped close, looked up at me. “You’re my dad. You’re all I have. I don’t have anything else.”
Involuntarily I took a step back, frightened at the immensity of it.
She stood with her hands at her sides, looking years younger than she was, yet more defined, more specific than before. She looked, good God, like me. A small female incarnation of me.
“Dad? Please—love me,” she said.
Something cracked in me then. Something shattered. Hot tears sprang to my eyes and I stepped to her again, my impossible girl. I wrapped my arms around her and pressed her head to my chest, feeling her hair between my fingers. I felt her arms tightly around me. She was crying. I was crying.
“Dad,” she whispered. “Oh, Dad. Dad. Dad. Dad. Dad. Dad. Dad. Dad. Dad.”
“My daughter.” I choked out the words somehow. “My daughter. My little girl.”
At last the tea kettle whistled and we pulled away from each other slowly. She smiled, wiped her face, laughed slightly, turned and poured the water for tea. We stood there for a long time.
“What,” I said, using a paper napkin to dab at my eyes, “what’s your name? My God, I don’t know your name!”
“I don’t have a name,” she said.
“Because you were never—never born?”
“Because I was never born.”
“What—what do I—call you? I can’t just call you the Rain Girl. I can’t go up to friends and say, ‘Hey, I’d like you to meet my daughter, the Rain Girl.’” I chuckled. “It would sound stupid.”
“You’re my dad,” she said. “You have to name me.”
“I...I don’t know how. I don’t know...know you.”
“You know me better than anyone else on earth.”
I thought about it. I blew my nose into the napkin and threw it into the waste
basket. “I guess I do, at that.”
“Any name is fine,” she said. “Any name that comes from you.”
“I...” I looked at her, noticed again her cheekbones, lips, chin—the parts of her that didn’t come from me. “When I look at you, honey, I—I think of your mother. You look a bit like her, you know.”
“Mm-hm.”
“But I can’t—can’t call you Rachel. It would be too...too weird.”
“Hm.” She seemed to think about it as she removed the tea bags, tossing them in the waste basket, and sweetened each mug. “How about ‘Rae’? For short.”
“ Rae.” I let it play on my tongue. “Rae. I like it.”
“Short for Rachel. You don’t have to call me Rachel. Just Rae.”
“Rae.” I nodded.
“Do you want me to have a middle name?”
“You should.” I thought for a moment. “Grace.”
“Grace.” She pondered it. “Rachel Grace Fall. I like it.”
“Grace was my mother’s name.” For an instant I thought of her: her hands, her skirt swaying as she turned a corner, walking away from me....
“Oh.” She looked at me. “Wow.” Then: “I love it, Dad. Really. I love my name. It’s perfect.”
I sat at the kitchen table. She joined me. “This is an—an unreal conversation,” I said.
“It’s all real, Dad.”
“I know it is.” I studied her. “How do I—explain you? To people?”
She shrugged. “I was born in California. My mother’s dead. You never knew I existed. I was raised by relatives. Or in an orphanage. Finally I made contact with you. We decided that I’d come to live here.” She grinned. “That’s not too far from the truth.”
“Well...it’s pretty far from the truth, I think!”
“Maybe. But it’ll be easy to remember.”
“How about...it just occurred to me. You don’t have a birth certificate, a Social Security number...”
She shook her head then, and laughed. “You just realized that I’m your daughter and all you can do is think about stupid junk like that? We’ll work that stuff out! Man, you are lame!” She sipped her tea.
I laughed with her. “I guess I am.”
We drank tea for a while. Finally I took her hand, held it, squeezed it. The grip she returned was firm.
“So,” she said, “do you...do you think you can—you know—love me? Dad?”
I looked at this once-lost child, this crazy, other-dimensional creature that was nothing more than a teenage girl sitting next to me drinking tea. Her hair hung limp. Her face was, objectively speaking, uninteresting, without any distinguishing features other than her big, round, dark eyes. She was, would be, to the world, nondescript, unnoticeable. A face in the crowd. Nothing to remark on or remember. And none of that mattered. As I gazed at her, I felt my own soul opening, felt an overwhelming sensation enter me and infuse every atom of me with love for her. I held her hand tightly, so tightly I imagined that I would never, ever let it go.
“I do love you, Rae. I do.”
3
Over the next few days we did things together. Father-daughter things. We went for walks. We shopped for clothes for her—a few, at least, what pants and shirts and pajamas I could afford, along with a properly heavy winter coat. We made meals in the apartment—healthful ones, of course, decided on by Rae: fruits, vegetables, rice, fish, everything baked or poached, nothing fried. No butter. No salt. And yet it was all delicious, somehow. It was the best food I’d ever eaten in my life.
She slept on the fold-out sofa in the living room and in the mornings she did my exercises with me. It was a simple routine involving a warm-up, mostly stretching, and light running in place while keeping tabs on my heart rate.
“Lift those knees!” she’d command me, both of us running in front of the television. “Come on, soldier, get the lead out!”
I laughed. “Where’d you get that?”
She grinned. “Old movie.”
Walking was part of the rehabilitation too, and so we did a lot of it. Each day I felt stronger, but in truth, I’d felt strong since the night I realized that Rae Grace Fall was my child. I felt wonderful. I’d not felt like this in ten, maybe fifteen years. And I found myself with no desire whatsoever for cigarettes. Once I’d convinced Rae that I wasn’t about to keel over and die, we started taking the Metro downtown and visiting museums, looking at art, at dinosaurs, at airplanes and spaceships. She came with me to my follow-up doctor’s appointment at G.W. and asked intelligent questions of Dr. Nguyen.
And we talked. It seemed that we never stopped talking. My experience with teenagers both as a teacher and as a step-parent had driven home the lesson that young people have absolutely no interest in the lives of older people, but Rae was exactly the opposite. We would sit upstairs at Teaism looking out at the people in their overcoats wandering by on R Street and listening to the jazz coming over the speakers while we drank tea and she asked me question after question about myself, listening raptly to my answers. What was it like growing up in Stone’s End? What did I remember of my mother—her grandmother? What did I like to do when I was a kid? Who were my friends? When did I get interested in writing? Did I remember my first stories? Did I still have any? Could she read them? What was my sister like? How about her husband and kids? What was my dad like? Could she meet him—could she meet all of them? (That was an interesting question, one I’d not yet quite resolved in my mind.) I answered her endless queries as honestly as I could. I felt she literally wanted to know everything—that if she could somehow crawl up into my mind and extract everything in it, every memory, every sensation I’d ever had, she would. But I was aware that I was talking to my daughter—my daughter!—and that she was sixteen years old, and there were some things that I wouldn’t say. Not that I ever had any impression of judgment from her. I felt I could tell her anything at all, no matter how intimate, and that she would simply nod eagerly and ask her next question. But no, some things I kept private. I said little about girlfriends. Nothing about sex. She didn’t push on those topics; she had a hundred thousand other questions, anyway. We spent hours sitting in cafés and on cold park benches and in museum cafeterias and at home simply talking, talking, talking.
Naturally she wanted to know about her mother. I told her what I knew, what I remembered. It had all been a very long time ago, but my hospital stay had freshened it in my mind, as did talking about it with her. She listened, listened, listened, her big dark eyes never leaving mine, and talked only when I stopped, only to ask another question.
I edited the truth somewhat, of course, as one does when speaking to a child. But there was only one moment in this multi-day marathon of talking that I said something to her which I suspected might not have been true.
“But you loved her, right?” she asked me, after I’d talked about some of Rachel’s emotional problems. “You loved her?”
“Of course I did, honey,” I said.
But had I? It was too long ago to remember. We’d been left behind by others, thrown unwillingly into a leaky life raft together. Was that love? Had it become love, at some point? Had I known then? Did I now?
“You’re sure?”
“Of course, Rae.” You don’t tell the daughter of your long-dead girlfriend that you’re not sure how you felt about her mother, then or now, or that you find memories of her to be so dark and horrific that you’ve not allowed yourself to think of them for fifteen years.
She looked quizzical, but said, “Okay,” and we talked of other things.
In truth, I remembered little of what happened in the days and months after Rachel’s suicide. The police talked to me a couple of times; I recalled being asked some questions by someone in a lawman’s uniform over a cup of coffee at the police headquarters on East Figueroa Street, not too far from where Rachel and I had lived (and I still did, briefly). It wasn’t a grilling. No one suspected me of anything. One major issue was discovering any next of kin for her. She had no
driver’s license, it seemed, no proper I.D. of any kind. I told them what I knew, that she said she’d come from the High Plains of North Dakota, lived in a town called Harman. The lawman said they’d look into it, and they did; eventually, I recall, a cousin was located who dealt with everything long distance. I never met her. I had no say, of course, in anything; a lawyer called me one day and said that he’d been hired by “the family” to take care of things and he needed to come gather her belongings, which he did. I remembered him. Mr. Bland, a fat florid-faced man wearing a blue suit about two sizes too small for him. He wheezed as he looked into the few boxes I’d assembled of Rachel’s things, asked for help getting them to his car. There were some papers to sign.
What I didn’t tell him was that I’d already hidden what I wanted of her: the handful of items I later put into the blue Nike shoe box. Thank God, I thought, that I’d remembered the tape she and I had made. I didn’t want to imagine Mr. Bland getting back to his office and popping that into his VCR out of curiosity.
“What will happen—to her?” I asked him as we stood by his little brown sedan.
“Already happened,” he answered casually, pulling himself into the vehicle. “Cremated. The family’ll get the ashes.”
I found I felt nothing about it. Rachel was gone; the ashes were irrelevant. Anyway, any “family” back in North Dakota had clearly been unimportant to Rachel. I wondered what they would do with the ashes of a girl they’d hardly known.
“Okay. Thanks.”
“Tough break, kid. My condolences.”
“Thanks. Oh,” I said, suddenly remembering, “she had a safety deposit box. Or she said she did. In Harman.”
“Got the key for it?”
“No. I mean, not that I know of. It may be in her things.”
“Know what bank?”
“No. I don’t.”
He nodded. “We’ll look into it. Thanks a lot.”
He drove away. I was alone; I’d not even told Alice what had happened, let alone Dad. I remember that the day Mr. Bland drove off with Rachel’s belongings I suddenly found myself ravenously hungry, and marched downtown to a restaurant on State Street to eat one of the biggest and most expensive meals I’d ever had in my life. Strange fancy appetizers, an enormous steak, lobster, mashed potatoes, deep-dish blueberry pie—I devoured it all and wanted more. Later I had an extraordinarily vivid time in the Santa Barbara Art Museum, the paintings and sculptures all but alive to me, speaking to me personally, telling me their secrets. It was a little as if I were on acid again, but without any sense of pleasure or discovery.
Lullaby for the Rain Girl Page 26
