Lullaby for the Rain Girl (37 page)

“Here,”
the county seat, was a flat, featureless conglomeration of squat brick buildings—a little place that sold groceries, a hardware store, lumberyard, pool hall, a few local government offices, a bank, a library, and, Mina noted with a grim smile,
three
bars—which hunkered defensively against the wind and sun, surrounded on all sides by dirt, scrub brush, distant brown fields.

“You almost sound,” Mina said, “as if you’re trying to talk me out of it.”

“Oh no,” the woman smiled. “Not at all. I’m delighted—
we’re
delighted—to have you here. To have you
back.
A native. It’s just very unusual. I’ve lived here since I was born, and when people leave—they never come back.”

“Well, it’s my home.”

“Yes. Yes, it is.”

She’d bought it sight unseen, having been assured that, yes, the house was inhabitable. There was electricity. The telephone service could be reinstalled (no cell phone would function there). Structurally, though in need of improvements, the place was intact.

“There’s just nothing out there,”
one of the agents said, clearly puzzled by her decision, as they signed the documents at closing. “We have some very nice properties closer to town, where you’d be…”

“It’s my home,” she insisted.
Out there.

The long drive across the mostly dirt roads had caused the memories to come pouring back. She had forgotten how vast the plains were, how flat the land, how huge the sky. And how quiet, how forlorn. This was a land that killed people—swallowed them up. They bought their little house and their bit of land, thinking to become hardy farmers in the bold American tradition, only to discover that the soil was never good enough, the rain wasn’t sufficiently steady, crop prices were always too low. Suicide rates had been high here ever since the first European settlers came in the early 1900s—higher even than the old statistics indicated, probably, since so many people who died in “accidents” back then seemed to have had trouble stepping off railroad tracks to avoid onrushing trains.

And there was no help for it. No one to rescue them. Just the hard land, the unforgiving land.

The buildings she saw after she’d passed out of town were mostly shattered wrecks. Houses that had clearly been uninhabited for decades, their paint faded and peeling, windows hollow, glassless, screen doors collapsing crookedly off their hinges. Abandoned barns with no roofs, sometimes only three walls standing. And old cars: here and there, colorless heaps without doors, missing wheels or tires, their insides exposed to the elements for decades and so tattered, ripped, burst apart—home, no doubt, to mice, rats, birds.

When she saw the house for the first time, there ahead, far from the road, she was surprised at how small it looked. And how isolated. It was a plain two-story structure, dirty white, that looked lost amidst the endless brown buffalo grass, like something out of Edward Hopper. As if no one had ever lived there, or ever would. As if it hadn’t been built by people at all but instead had simply appeared there one day, exactly as it was now.

Pulling up the weed-laced dirt track to the front door, she knew that it had not always looked this way to her. She’d had her girlhood here, after all. Parents who’d loved her. Even friends, a few, at her alma mater, Hartlow Combined School, which had taught the elementary students in one building, the high schoolers in the other. She’d gone there for twelve years. It was difficult to believe, now. The school had closed its doors forever a few years after she’d gone.

Stepping from the car, she immediately felt the hard, hot breeze in her face, smelled the unique odor of the High Plains: part dry grass, part dust, part something else, something indescribable. Home. The house itself had changed little, despite her initial impression. The front porch was more weathered than she recalled, badly in need of paint, yet it seemed sound. She could picture herself as a girl on this very porch, swinging lazily on the porch swing they’d had, reading library copies of her early favorite poets, Poe and Dickinson and Millay. She would have to order a porch swing now.

Inside the house was also familiar, though everything seemed smaller than it had then. The ceilings felt lower. The previous owners had torn out the carpet that the Greenwoods had had, exposing the bright pine wood underneath and polishing it: a good decision, though the floor was chipped and dingy now. There was no furniture anywhere except an old kitchen chair sitting, for some reason, in the middle of the living room.

The kitchen was familiar, too, except for a somewhat newer refrigerator than the one she remembered. The stove and oven were the same. The countertops. The cabinets. They were all worn, scratched, stained. The kitchen really needed refurbishing, but she doubted she would ever do it. The downstairs bathroom seemed in fair shape, also easily recognizable despite a different sink and mirror; everything worked, at least.

She wandered to her old bedroom, which was at the back of the house—she’d slept downstairs throughout her youth, first to maximize the distance between herself and her parents (not in a negative way, but simply for what she thought of then as independence), later to keep away from her desperately ill mother upstairs. How tiny her old room was! And yet the view out the window was instantly familiar—she knew that exact perspective as well as if it had been tattooed into her DNA. That precise box of sky. The slight undulations in the buffalo grass. The little mound in the distance, off to the right, not enough to be called a hill.

Upstairs was worse. Clearly the previous owners had let things go. Old wallpaper was dropping from the walls in strips everywhere, including her parents’ old room. Windows were cracked. The floor had holes in it big enough to fit her foot. The toilet, long dry and dirt-streaked, was lying on its side. The entire upper part of the house was “inhabitable” only in the most marginal sense.

Mina quickly decided to shut off the upstairs completely. She would live down below.

Later that day a delivery truck made its way to the house—
Boy oh boy, ma’am, you really live out in the country!—
and the two men unloaded her sofa, chairs, bed, bureaus, books. By the time they’d gone, it had become a place where a human being could live again. It was home.

# # #

The clothes dryer was on the fritz, so after she’d run the sheets and blankets through the washing machine twice, Mina used the old clothesline out back and some clothespins she’d found under the sink to hang everything out in the wind. The blood, she knew, would never come out completely; she needed new bed things; but for now, these were all she had. They flapped in the breeze like old battle flags, tattered and stained.

She turned on the TV—she received only one channel—and stared at two grinning morning-show hosts trying hard to be amusing. After five minutes she shut it off. She moved to her computer then, which sat on a table in the corner of the living room, and looked desultorily at her e-mail. (The house’s telephone line allowed her Internet access with a very slow dial-up modem.) There was an invitation to do a reading in Boston. A journal editor sending along some minor suggestions for an essay of hers they were printing. Some spam. And a letter from Judy Epstein:
It’s been a month now, kid. Had enough of the country life? I think you could still get your job back here if you want it—I don’t think our old fart of a dept. chair has put out any notices yet. Want me to tell him you’re interested? PS The correct answer to that question is YES. Love you, even if you’re out of your flippin’ head. NYC needs you! Come back! Judy.

She smiled as she read the note. But she was also listening, listening carefully, for any sound that might come from upstairs.

She realized, of course, that her imagination had run away with her. The miscarriage, the scary hemorrhage, the sight of herself in the mirror covered in blood like the surviving heroine at the end of a slasher film
—
all had combined, no doubt with a rat or a mouse with unfortunate timing, to make her think…No. It was ridiculous. She had cleaned the sheets, cleaned her room, it was all in the past now. Today would be a day like any other. She would read, eat, sleep. She would stare at her yellow pad for a while to see if any poems came (most likely, none would; she had written nothing since arriving here). It was possible that she should drive into the county seat to see a doctor; she was monitoring herself carefully for any further blood, any further pain. But there was none. The incident, strange though it was, seemed finished.

And yet she listened. Carefully. For any sound. From upstairs.

The day passed. Her mood was gray, though the day itself was brilliant: at one point she wandered outside for a while, felt the breeze on her face, in her hair, flapping the skirt against her legs. She tried to write, but the yellow pad remained stubbornly blank. Finally she pulled her Dickinson from the shelf—it was curious, she hadn’t read Emily Dickinson in years, yet she felt drawn to a poem which had once been her favorite:

There’s a certain slant of light

On winter afternoons,

That oppresses, like the weight

Of cathedral tunes….

Well, it wasn’t winter now; it was bright spring. Yet she couldn’t shake a melancholy feeling that permeated her bones; the poem, so famously about depression, caught it perfectly: she felt as if the light itself oppressed her. Was she anemic? She’d lost blood the night before, there was no doubt about that. Perhaps that was the cause. Perhaps she should, after all, drive into town, see a doctor. But when she got up to go to the telephone all energy seemed to drain from her, leaving her limp and listless. She had to lie down. Stepping into her bedroom, she pulled the curtains closed. There were no sheets on her bed, of course, so she took a coat from the closet and placed it over her shoulders.

The light gradually faded from the room.

She slept for a time, a deep but uneasy sleep in which odd fragmentary dreams seemed to bob up into her consciousness, only to sink down again. Michael, her long-limbed college boyfriend, who always avoided looking at her when they made love. Her mother’s sagging, wasted face in her final illness, perspiring, eyes blinking fast, mouth gaping spasmodically. A boy—what was his name?—pushing her into a mud puddle with her new dress when she was four or five. Her father, silent in his chair, not reading, not watching TV, not speaking, just smoking his pipe for hours on end, as he often did in later years.

She was somewhere between sleeping and waking, her partly-open eyes staring absently past the door toward the living room, when she heard the footsteps coming down the stairs.

The footsteps did not frighten her. A part of her knew they would come; knew that what she’d heard that morning had
not
been her imagination. But the weight of the dark dream-visions oppressed her, kept her from moving or even considering it. She simply watched the doorway. From her vantage point she could see the bottom of the stairs; she waited for someone to appear there.

Someone did. It was a little girl, perhaps eight years old, in a plain white skirt and stockings. Her shoes were black. She had long black hair and big eyes. She turned when she reached the bottom of the stairs and stood in the doorway facing Mina.

Neither said a word. After a moment the little girl walked up to the bed and sat down lightly upon it.

“Hello,” the girl said.

Mina moved to sit up. “Hello…What’s your name?”

“Mina.”

“That’s
my
name. How did you know my name?”

“It’s my name too.”

“Your name is Mina?”

“Yes.”

“What’s your last name, Mina?”

“Greenwood.” The girl looked at her, a flicker of impatience in her eyes.
“You
should know.”

“I should?” She scowled, studying the girl closely. Yet there was no denying it, of course. She’d known the second she saw the girl. There was a picture of herself at that age, wearing that dress. It had been her one formal outfit; most of the time she wore jeans or overalls. But part of the image was wrong. She hadn’t worn her hair like that at that age; she’d had a short, pageboy-style look then. And her face had been different, her features smaller and more pressed together; adolescence had broadened her face, expanded her features, made her prettier. This girl looked like she did now, only without the crow’s feet, without the wear and tear of years.

The child reached out and took Mina’s hand in her own, studying it closely. She touched the old dark scar on her wrist curiously.

“Did you try to kill yourself?” the girl asked.

“Yes,” she said, after a moment, “I did. A long time ago.”

“Why?”

“Oh…lots of reasons. There’s never just one reason.”

“Sometimes,” the girl said, “I want to kill myself, too.”

“Yes.”

Their eyes met again. “Do you have any food?” the girl asked. “I’m hungry.”

They went into the kitchen. Mina toasted frozen waffles for her and watched her drench them in margarine and syrup and eat them greedily. She herself had a cup of tea. They sat at the kitchen table for some minutes without speaking, a single light on overhead.

“Where,” Mina ventured finally, “where…where do you live, Mina?”