Lullaby for the Rain Girl

by Christopher Conlon

  “I know. And I love you. I’m sorry I don’t always—always show it much.”

  She took my hand and held it for a minute. It felt good.

  “See you later, Ben.”

  “Bye, Sis. Thanks for everything.”

  I stepped out of the car onto the curb, shut the door behind me. She waved at me as she pulled away.

  9

  It was mid-afternoon when I returned home. I opened the door softly, nearly wincing with anxiety as to what I might find there. The apartment was quiet. Rae was still in my bed, in her rumpled pajamas, the blinds closed in the room: I stepped close to her, studied her profile in the semi-darkness. For a moment I wondered if she was breathing at all. Then suddenly she inhaled, as if waking from a very deep sleep, and turned over onto her back, throwing her arm across her forehead. She opened her eyes. They were huge dark saucers set within a face that had lost all softness, reconfiguring itself into the hard planes and angles of longstanding hunger. Her shoulder blades seemed to stick out from her skin. Her wrists were hard branches, her fingers pale white twigs.

  “I’m back, sweetheart. I had to go out.” I sat next to her.

  “I know,” she croaked, her voice cracked and dry. “I read your note.” It was no longer attached to her sleeve, I noticed.

  “I’m sorry. I thought about waking you, but then just decided to let you sleep. I had to go see my dad, Rae. My sister’s had to put him in an—an old folks’ home.”

  She stared at me expressionlessly.

  “It was—sad,” I said. “Seeing him there. And my sister—Alice, your—your aunt—it’s hard on her. She’s had to take care of him, make the decisions. It’s just—difficult. For everybody.”

  She turned her face away slightly. “You forgot about me.”

  “What?”

  “You did. While you were gone. You forgot about me.”

  “Honey, I did not. I thought about you all the time.”

  “No, you didn’t. Not all the time.”

  “Well...” I had thought about her, damn it. I knew I’d thought about how I would introduce her to Alice and her family. But she was right, of course; I hadn’t thought about her all the time. Guilty, I supposed, as charged.

  “Honey...nobody thinks about another person all the time.”

  “I do. I think about you all the time. I never think about anything else but you.”

  “Well, I...You think about other things too, Rae. When you read a book. When you watch TV.”

  “But I don’t stop thinking about you. I think about those things but I think about you at the same time.”

  “Well...sweetheart, the point is, I’m here. I’m home.” I touched her forehead, reflexively; it felt hot to me, but I was still no expert in telling kids’ temperatures with the palm of my hand.

  “You have to think about me all the time.”

  “I...honey...”

  She looked at me. “All the time, Dad.”

  “Honey, are you okay? You don’t look very well. You’re sick.”

  “Not in the way you mean.”

  “What—what way, then?”

  She took my hand. “Dad, you have to love me.”

  “Rae...” I felt defeated. Visions of my mad father rattled around in my skull, competing with the whispered complaints of my impossible daughter accusing me of not loving her enough. I was suddenly tired. Exhausted. I wanted to sleep for a day, two days. At least until the millennium had passed, until all the bad things that were going to happen, that couldn’t happen but which I knew were going to happen, had swept over the earth. Until all the planes had exploded and the elevators smashed to the ground and the patients flatlined on the operating tables. Until darkness had descended, water stopped flowing from the faucets, until we found ourselves in some sort of post-apocalyptic landscape of violence and death. At least I’d know where I was then. I’d know the rules. Kill or be killed. Survival of the fittest. Here, now, I had no idea what the rules were, or even if there were any.

  “I’ll—I’ll make us some tea, Rae,” I said, standing, my throat tight. “I’ll make us some tea, okay?”

  I stumbled into the kitchen, put on the water. I went to the living room windows and stood looking out at the blue winter sky, at the cars and gray cement buildings far below on the street.

  Shithead! Fuckin’ Shithead!

  Love me. You have to love me....

  I must have remained there a long while; I suddenly realized that the teapot was whistling. I stepped back into the kitchen, passing by Rae, who seemed to have fallen asleep again. I made tea, stood there stupidly watching it brew.

  Then I remembered Sherry. Splashing some water on my face to freshen myself, I went over to the phone and dialed. I was connected quickly enough to her room.

  “Hey, Sherry.”

  “Hey, Ben. What’s up?”

  “Oh...kind of a tough day. But I’m home now.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  “Alice put Dad in a rest home. I went to visit him today.”

  “Oh, Ben, I’m sorry. I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Yeah, well, it...He’s pretty much crazy, as far as I can tell. I don’t even know if he remembers my name. He didn’t use it once while I was there. But he did call me ‘Shithead.’ Over and over again. He remembers that, anyway.”

  “Oh, Ben. That’s terrible.”

  “Yeah, well.” My eyes stung. “Have you been out to see any sights?”

  “No. I was waiting for you.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “Ben, we’re still saying ‘I’m sorry’ to each other.”

  “Well, I am sorry, though.”

  “I think you have a pretty good excuse. How’s Rae?”

  “Rae? She’s...” Well, how was she? How was this teenage girl who couldn’t possibly exist, who went from sunny, bright health and happiness to a pale sickly exhaustion in a matter of minutes—and then back again? “She’s taking a nap at the moment. She seems to be a bit sick. I’m not sure. I’m making some tea for her just now.”

  “What a good dad.”

  I smiled grimly. “I try.”

  “Do you want to postpone the sightseeing, Ben? You sound tired.”

  “Well—I am. Sort of.”

  “It’s okay. You’ve got a lot on your plate.”

  “But I want to see you. Definitely.”

  “Will you be seeing your dad tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow? No. Definitely not. Not tomorrow. I couldn’t take that again tomorrow. So tomorrow would be great for us. Yeah. Tomorrow morning.” We discussed the details for a moment. “As for Rae,” I said, “I’ll leave it up to her.”

  “She’s welcome to come, Ben. I’d love to see her.”

  “You sure? After last night?”

  “Ben, I told you. I understand. It’s a girl thing.”

  “Well, you’re very—understanding.”

  She laughed.

  “You don’t mind?” I said. “Postponing?”

  “I don’t want you dragging around on my account, Ben. I’ll go amuse myself this afternoon and look forward to tomorrow.”

  “God, that’s—thank you. That makes things so much easier.” It makes them possible, I thought. Possible with Rae. I could spend the rest of the day and evening with her, give her all the attention she so desperately craved. As for tomorrow...Well, we’d have a wonderful time today and see what tomorrow would bring.

  Sherry and I said our goodbyes and I brought the tea into the bedroom. Rae sat up, took her mug. I sat in the chair next to the bed.

  “So, kiddo,” I said, “what do you want to do for the rest of the day?”

  She looked at me. “You’re not seeing—her?”

  “I’m not seeing anybody but my favorite girl in the whole world.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  She smiled hugely, her face almost literally blossoming before my eyes. “You haven’t done your exercises today,” she said, “did you? I
’ll bet you skipped them.”

  “Guilty.”

  “Okay. We’ll start with your exercises. But wait.” She put down her mug and scrutinized me carefully. “Lean close to me.”

  “Hm?”

  “Lean close.”

  I put down my own mug and did as she asked. I thought she might kiss me, but she said, “Breathe. Through your mouth.”

  Puzzled, I did.

  “Good!” she said, sniffing. “I was making sure you weren’t sneaking cigarettes.”

  I laughed. “Jeez, what a detective! No. I’ll confess that I thought about it...”

  “I know you did.”

  “...But I did not succumb to the temptation.”

  She patted me on the head, grinning. “Good boy. We’re learning.”

  “I’m learning how to live healthy,” I said. “You’re just learning how to be a smart ass!” I grabbed her by the waist and tickled her, which sent her into shrieking, kicking convulsions on the bed. We play-fought, Rae grabbing my wrists, me pulling loose and pinching or goosing her. Both of us were laughing hysterically. At last we stopped, both of us breathless.

  “You don’t fight fair!” she said, giggling and taking up her tea again.

  “You get what you deserve, Miss Smarty Pants.”

  We drank our tea again, peacefully together. In the slatted sunlight coming in through the blinds she looked healthy again, happy, whole.

  # # #

  We exercised, and Rae made sure I took all my medications. After that we went out, the bracing winter breeze in our faces, and did a little grocery shopping. Finally we went to see Robin Williams in The Bicentennial Man, a movie that annoyed me—I remembered and loved Asimov’s story—but which sent Rae into paroxysms of tears by the end.

  “There you go again,” I said, as the lights came up. “No more emotional movies for you, young lady!”

  “You stop!” she said, laughing through her sobs. “You’re mean.”

  “Now is that something to say to a guy who had a heart attack last week?”

  “I don’t see how you could have. You’re so heartless.” She slugged my arm.

  “Oh! Oh!” I feigned chest pain. “The abuse! Parental abuse! Parental abuse, I tells ya!”

  Home, we put away the fruits and canned things we’d bought and Rae set about making dinner. Afterwards, after we’d put away the dishes, I put WGMS on the radio—the pleasant strains of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto filled the room—and we sat on the sofa, quietly listening.

  “I like Mozart,” she said, her head in the crook of my arm. “He’s soothing.”

  “He’s not always soothing,” I said, “but yeah, a lot of him is. We should watch Amadeus sometime. It’s a movie about him.”

  “Dad?”

  “Hm.”

  She played with the button on my shirt. “Would you mind if I looked at—you know, Mom’s stuff?”

  “Not that tape, honey.”

  “Not the tape. I mean the other stuff.”

  “I’m sure you’ve looked at all of it before, haven’t you?”

  “Not with you. I was hoping...maybe we could look at it together.”

  I thought about it. The lovely, serene melody of Mozart’s second movement was, indeed, soothing me. This was my daughter, after all. How could I say no when she wanted to look at things of her mother with me, remember her with me?

  “Sure, honey. Get the box of stuff.”

  She did. It felt very natural, opening it together. I put the tape to one side—actually I dropped it on the other side of the sofa, where neither of us would see it—and we brought out the little collection. There wasn’t much. I took up a copy of the Chicago Quarterly, a literary journal since defunct, and flipped to the familiar pages that held Rachel’s “Shadows” and “Perfume, and Silence.” Rae and I looked at the lines together on the bright white leaves—I was surprised that they hadn’t yellowed, but it was a high-end journal; acid-free paper, no doubt.

  “How did they get published, Dad?”

  “I sent them out. After she died. A few months later, when I was—calmer…about things. I sort of pretended to be her. I didn’t tell them she’d died, just sent them as if I were her. I didn’t want them to be prejudiced, one way or another. By the fact that she was dead. They accepted both of them.” I shrugged. “It was something I could do for her, at least.”

  “Will you read them to me? Aloud? Please?”

  I glanced at her: such depthless need. “Sure, honey.”

  The words were strange in my mouth. I hadn’t read these poems in fourteen, fifteen years; I’d never read them aloud in my life. Strange, remembering the first time I really talked to Rachel, sitting there in the living room of the apartment in Santa Barbara waiting for Sherry and Peter to return, looking at this dark, moody girl with her sticker-covered notebook, inwardly smirking a bit when she told me that she didn’t just write song lyrics, “I write real poems. All the time.” And then my feeling stunned when she handed me her hand-scrawled draft of “Shadows,” a piece that suggested depths I’d had no idea the lead singer of The Raging Hormones possessed. It came back to me as it had in the hospital, only now even more vividly as the words traveled through my eyes, my brain, my throat.

  “Did Mom think a lot about the Holocaust?” Rachel asked.

  “I guess she did,” I said. “I mean, this poem sure proves it. We never talked about it much, though. But she did read books about it. She got them...well...” Oh, why not be honest? Rae needed to know about her mother, and such information couldn’t have any importance now. “Well, she shoplifted them, actually. She used to steal things a lot. She was young. Hardly older than you are now.”

  “Will you read the other one? I love hearing you read her words. It’s like you’re together again, with me.”

  I read “Perfume, and Silence” softly, remembering her waiting for me in the darkness outside our bathroom, murmuring, “You can read this one” when I came out, saying nothing about my nakedness, only smiling a little. I felt old.

  “It’s so sad,” Rae said. “But beautiful, too.”

  “Yes. It is.”

  I found the other journal then, the Oregon Review, with “What There Is” inside. It had been the last of Rachel’s poems I’d sent out. I read it quietly.

  “She really had that sister,” I told her when I finished. “That’s what she said.”

  “I remember. You told me. I hope they’re together now. Somewhere.”

  “So do I, honey.”

  “It’s like your story,” she said. “About Mina.”

  “I guess it is. I hadn’t thought.”

  “Like you were thinking about the other Rachel. The one who died.”

  “Yes. It wasn’t on purpose. But I see what you mean.”

  “I wish she was here now. Mom, I mean. Well, and the other Rachel, too.”

  “She would have been your aunt.”

  “Yeah. Mom Rachel and Aunt Rachel. And you. But I only have you.”

  “I’m sorry, honey.”

  “At least I do have you, though.” She rustled in the box, brought out Rachel’s old black notebook, creased and crumpled, still with its old stickers on the cover—Black Flag, DOA, Minutemen. There were only a few pages left in the book; I remembered sadly how Rachel had ripped out, torn up most of the sheets in her last days. I wondered now if I shouldn’t have gathered them up from the trash, taped them together, tried to salvage what I could. Now I wished that I had. Irrationally, I felt a bit like Ted Hughes, who destroyed his wife Sylvia Plath’s final notebooks after her suicide. I hadn’t destroyed anything, of course, and Rachel Lynn Blackburn was no Sylvia Plath—maybe she would have been, given the years I’d given to Mina Lynn Greenwood—but still, it was a strange feeling, looking at the withered remains of her one and only notebook and thinking that, once upon a time, I could have saved the rest if I’d had the foresight, the strength. But then if I’d had the foresight and strength maybe I would have saved Rachel, too.

>   The three saved poems were there. I was surprised to see how rough they were, how sloppy—Rachel hadn’t been one for polishing final drafts, certainly. They were scribbled, sometimes barely legibly, in different inks, sometimes in pencil. It had slipped my mind that in preparing the poems for publication I’d had to make a few editorial decisions, in spots where Rachel had written alternate word choices, sometimes with a big red “???????” next to them, or else with the same two words scratched out again and again as she decided first on one word, then the other, then switched back. Sometimes she’d done this six or eight times, vacillating between the same two words.

  There were only a few other pages in the book, and most of them were blank. She had a few notes on one page, but they were mostly incomprehensible—“Daylight/submerge/stellar—cosmic?” “Blind girl piano.” “Black heart blue heart.—blue tattoo.”

  “Do you know what any of this means?” Rae asked.

  “No. I’m sorry. Ideas for poems, I guess. She never talked about them.”

  But one note was perfectly clear: “Too much DEATH!!!!” We both stared at it for a while, then closed the book. Rae held it tightly in her hands for a long time, then pressed it to her chest, as if trying to somehow absorb whatever essence of her mother still remained in those dead pages.

  My own ancient story, “The Burning Girl,” was in the box too. I lifted up the few browning pages, flipped through them. Rae looked at them in my hands.

  “Will you read it, Dad?”

  “I don’t guess it’s much good. I haven’t looked at it in fifteen years.”

  “I don’t care.”

  I read it. God, Robert and Robin the burning girl. I didn’t think much of this early effort as writing, but as my eyes scanned the lines I found them bringing back, in a way the other mementoes didn’t, how it felt then, how it was to live with Rachel.

  Rae held my arm tightly for a long time after I reached the end of the story. We didn’t say anything about it.

  There were a few old Post-It Notes in the box as wellas well, looking much as they must have looked sixteen years before when Rachel would write them and leave them for me to find. Many of them still clung to each other after all these years: “Running late! Luv U!” “Don’t forget BREAD, Hippie Boy!” I was relieved to see that none of them contained anything embarrassing, but these juiceless remnants of a long-ago life depressed me. I wondered if I’d remembered the bread that day.