One Hundred Days of Rain (9 page)

67.

Today at last a gift of clear sky. Sunshine even, she thinks peering upwards. Quick, let's get out there into the world and soak it up. My God they are pale plants. Look at her in particular: weedy & thinned, like something reared in darkness. Her limbs clotted milk.

Too late. The sun gone that sudden, disappeared behind another cloudy curtain. And now she begins to track its oscillation, here and vanished, the sun a veiled dancer on the sky's wide stage. Sun is the star of the show, the one everyone's come to see, but the sightlines in this cabaret are too bad. Sun is visible only behind a shoulder, over a bald head, one bare ray excitingly cocked. Then that disembodied limb withdraws and again she has to guess at what sun is doing.

Let's pretend. Ignore this wind-ridden edge of damp. Imagine a world of sun. What kind of people would they be, if they didn't have rain to contend with? Would they grow expansive under the warmth? Would their natures become sweet and pliable, softened by the sun? She tries to remember warm people. How boring it was, in California: day after day of blue. How tediously predictable. How they stood it. The people bland too, smiling, smoothed.

I hate it here, says the woman who cuts her hair. The people here are shit. The other day I fell full-length in the crosswalk and nobody even stopped to see if I was okay. I was dressed nice too. The car that had to drive around me didn't even roll down his window to ask if I was all right. I made eye contact with this one woman and she went Humph. People are awful. I started to cry because nobody helped me. My umbrella got all broken when I fell on it.

68.

Sun again today. In the forecast more sun for the first time she can remember since they slid back into the primordial ooze weeks or months or years ago. Oh please let it be spring, not the tease of a day or two clear and then the relentless sock of weather's worst. On Friday's square, though, clouds mass.

Going round to see lawyers who are too busy to see her. Too busy herself. Crafting affidavits in response:

No.

No.

No.

That's not how I remember it.

That's not true.

And finally, stiffly: the Plaintiff exaggerates her role.

After all the child has a mother and father already. How much he can continue to be divided, the question.

69.

Across the sky, above them, complaints of seagulls. Mommy, said her son, the first morning they woke in this apartment, on this street. I can hear the roosters howling. It was the gulls calling, far above them.

On the way to the bar a single songbird trills in a tree at the corner of Adanac and Main. Querulous, confident, the bird repeats its song. As often as necessary. The cherry blossoms are out. The SkyTrain station down the street is awash with them, on the pavement above the stairs leading down to the platform. She walks underneath gazing up in a kind of wonder. There's no profit in this profusion, no private enterprise. The blossoms are waxy and thickly clustered, their colour the lightest, most bare blush of pink. The petals drift down a different sort of rain, a kinder one.

70.

Cloudy sky again today. The panes of glass on the angled roof opposite opaque with that featureless white nobody could love. The clouds have socked them in, leaving few clues to what will come. The season is changing but here at the edge it's impossible, really, to see what shape it will be. Whether rain will move away for good and, if it does, what exactly will take its place.

In midafternoon it is sunny contrary to the forecast. A stiff wind worries the world. By evening as she and the boy hurry out to dinner the first drops have begun to fall. Portents, they warn her of what will coming. What she can expect. Nightfall comes late, at least according to her usual timetable. Winter is ebbing and she must adjust just as she adjusted to the creeping dark, the fading light. Just as the year was nibbled away to a thin grey sliver it now turns back towards her shimmering.

Saturday cleaning. The child is caught by the excitement of washing walls, wiping mirrors: he swipes barely with a rag, wanders to the next spot. Surfaces, and their potential transformation. A scrim of cloud drifts across the morning sky: promises, portent, imagine.

71.

In the daytime the sky is cloudy with rubbed-away parts like a slowly tarnishing piece of silver. Rain holding off for now. As the blue deepens into dark a pale circlet of moon comes up low on the horizon. A ghost or exposure of planet riding there at the threshold of consciousness.

She returns to the bicycle rack outside the station late at night to pick up her machine. What are you doing there, she says to the man who starts up. He has been standing, leaning over the rack. Not waiting to see his bolt cutters or lock pick, his bad bicycle intentions. Assuming his guilt quicker for them both.

Get away from my bike.

Loud protests. I was just sitting here, etc.

Her reproaches mechanical, without heat. You ought to be ashamed. And unshackling her bicycle – her decent, law-abiding bicycle – she wheels it away.

72.

Last night
S
came to town. They went home together as always.
S
's body so known to her she could trace its outline in the dark. Their rehearsed sleeping.
S
's night sweats and insomnia. Her morning litany. I was up for hours last night,
S
will say, while you slept. I heard the sirens going by on the way to the hospital. Rarely she wakes and it's true:
S
, lying on her back, eyes open.

This morning
S
has a new report: it rained last night. Then again, a question: Did it rain last night?

Outside, blue sky. So it wasn't real: a dream, an apparition,
S
's imagination. And then the clue: a few drops clinging still, to the glass opposite.

She reads about her neighbourhood in the newspaper she fetches from the mat in front of her door. Sitting up in bed with tea in a thin china cup.
S
's coffee in a gleaming silver mug. Their routine of displacement, one or the other not at home, visiting always. According to the organizer of “Save St. Joe's,” the old Catholic hospital nearby will move. His group wants it to stay in the neighborhood. The public consultation, he says, will be a sham. The only part of the hospital that will stay on the current site is the brick main building, which will provide services to addicts.

Nonsense, says the hospital spokesperson in the same article. This is his counsel, if people would only listen. His high-powered advice. The lesson he would like everyone to learn: what you can't see, isn't happening.

73.

Her child's father is in love with somebody else.

Are you seeing anybody, she asks him on the phone. At the other end, through the uniformly bad connection, the crackle like poor weather, she hears him caper and dance. He flips and rolls and whoops and finally comes to a sort of stop. Yeah.

Are you in love with her. Again the show. Now she can hear instruments, a tambourine, bells on a strap, electric mandolin. She waits, schooling herself to a patience she doesn't feel.

Why would you ask me that, he asks, the shimmy & tinkle slowing finally to silence.

Our son said you were.

Whooping, weaving, ducking, he goes off into peals of theatrical laughter. She's already bored in her unwilling role of audience, it's a thankless one. She'd like to do a little performing of her own: yawn audibly, crack her knuckles, hold a conversation with someone else while still on the phone. Laugh at something on TV, except she doesn't have one. But of course she doesn't.

Yeah, he says finally, thoughtfully, as if it's just occurred to him himself. I guess I am.

74.

She is disappointed in weather. She thought that when rain ended her troubles would be over. But the clear sky brings her more bitter cold than she thinks she has a right to expect. Walking in the alley in the crisp morning air, sharp as a just-bitten apple, she measures the circumference of the big jots of rain that sit like cushions on car roofs. They've driven in that morning, from Abbotsford or the Townships, with their cargo of weather. Two blocks away is the photocopy shop next to the court, where the clerk helps her make three copies of her latest affidavit: denunciations, denials, I verily believe it to be true. Her response incomplete & mistaken, no doubt, as usual. She'll take the copies to the court registry, be told by a barely civil clerk that they won't do, maybe be told what to do to make them right. Maybe. The clerks aren't supposed to help her: it falls under the category of legal advice. Mercy's opposite. She already knows she's a fool at this kind of thing, she doesn't need to be told again, but there's no choice in the matter.

It was hailing at three o'clock last night, says the man in the photocopy shop as the machine whirrs and illuminates between them. Hailing and snowing.

What were you doing up?

I came down here. I had something to look after.

She brings this knowledge like a gift from outside to her own office when she trickles in later. Somebody said it hailed at three in the morning downtown.

Where'd you hear this?

At the copy shop.

And the guy in the shop told you this?

Yeah. He said he was down there in the middle of the night.

Sounds like a worried man, says her boss. Nobody comes down to his business at three in the morning, not unless he's worried about something.

75.

A bigger apartment is available upstairs in her building. She goes to look at it. They need more space she's aware. The thin life of a bachelor apartment unsuitable for two really. Her boy is growing.

Number eleven is crowded with someone else's belongings, the two slipcovered, oversize sofas, the table and chairs. There's an inside room in which, the landlord says, the current tenant is asleep. They tiptoe like unwelcome visitors, at least she does. The sink is minute and encased in a tall cabinet: she sees she will have to stand on a stool to do the dishes. Three steps up to the small bath. Perhaps this apartment by the front door belonged to the caretaker once. How bad can it get. She imagines drunks leaning on the intercom at four in the morning.

The apartment is on the northeast corner of the building, looking out over the street. There will be the constant noise of traffic. She meets the tenant who wants to take her old place, who's moving in turn from the front. Musical rooms. It's the noise, the tenant explains, staring. I can't stand it any more.

But you get used to it, right?

Six years and I never got used to it.

She pretends she can adjust to anything but there's her son to consider. She goes to see the child at his father's, sits on a leather sofa, begins seriously to talk about the new apartment, but almost at once her child interrupts.

Yay. Let's move.

She reminds her boy of the noise, the lack of a window in the one small closed-off room, but her child disregards both of these things.

The child's father comes into the room, looks round complacently at his yolk-coloured walls. He's moved himself, she remembers, from the back of his building to its front. She never saw the old place: they weren't speaking then. I had a real freakout when I was trying to decide about moving in here, he says unexpectedly. My friends told me I was crazy. Then I got in here and I was like, Oh yeah. Light. Air.

She wakes far too early the next morning, in her bed in the middle of the room, that she closes like a drawer in the daytime. This one room has been so many different things. Dining room, living room, study, office, bedroom. The simplicity pleases her. Still it's true they have outgrown their current space. Her boy's feet dangling off the edge of the mattress. There will be windows on two sides in the new place, downstairs. Friends can hail them from the street if they want. Traffic swishing outside. Even more places to watch rain as it falls.

76.

Easter. A time of renewal or so it's said, bruited about even, the possibility of growth. So many chances for anniversaries and fresh starts and here is another. She arises from her dented bed filled with resolution. She will sort that errant paper, the piles of it she's been augmenting all year. She will put her taxes into order this time, really. Everything due at the library will be returned, all the languishing dry cleaning rescued, perhaps she will even begin cleaning for their move. The sills and lintels can't accumulate much dust in a month, can they? It isn't too early to wipe down her fridge now, surely?

And all this virtue deserves its reward. She will actually find lingerie this time, not just poke dispiritedly amongst the piles before giving up and going away again. Sets of it, in cotton candy colours: pink sherbet, lavender, innocent blue. She will shop for candy too, the good kind: dark chocolate Easter eggs, pretend carrots in a twist of orange foil. What about music? She hasn't bought any in years, it's a disgrace. Perhaps she'll even find a suit, a new suit for Easter, now that would be nice. Why she's got so much to do.

The sky outside, what she can see of it from her window, abets her in these fine resolutions. It is blue and strewn with fat tufts of cumulus. They move in a lazy panorama, not hurrying.

But what's this? When she glances at the sky again the white has begun to silt in, filling up the cracks between clouds. The sun recedes behind these wispy layers, a faraway friend getting smaller, waving, waving helplessly. Mouthing advice. Soon rain will come, listen to what it wants, do its bidding.