Vanishing Rain (Blue Spectrum Chronicles Book 2) (23 page)

Other Books by L.L. Crane:

Mark of Power Series:

From the Mountain

To the Moon

Into the Black Night (to be released)

Blue Spectrum Chronicles:

Forbidden Rain

Rain Born (to be released)

For more information:

www.llcrane.com

[email protected]

Author’s Note

Thank you for reading
Vanishing Rain
.  I am busy at work on the third book in the Blue Spectrum Chronicles,
Rain Born.
  You will find out if Rain can make the best out of her situation and forge a family of her own.  And, of course, you will get to meet some new arrivals.  Rain has changed so much since the first book,
Forbidden Rain
.  You will love how she actually turns into a true Lordess and mother!

I was recently asked, before I even finished
Vanishing Rain
, who my favorite character in my books would be, and I had to say Orion.  But by now, it’s a toss-up between Orion and Troll. 

Have you ever loved two people in entirely different ways?  I have.  Orion started out in my head as some beefy guy who dumps a girl when he finds out she’s pregnant, but he changed into an entirely different person along the way.  What greater gift can you give someone than something that person asks for?  Rain wanted Ice away from the Clinic, and Orion made it happen.  Orion makes a lot of things happen.  That’s one of the many things I like about him.  

However, my true intention of this series was to bring awareness about the plight of autism to readers in an interesting way.  As an educator, I regularly work with autistic children, deal with their parents, and know the horrible statistics that are bearing down on us as of 2015.  One boy in 50 is now being born with autism.  One girl in eighty-eight is.  The prognosis is dim if we stand by and do nothing about it.  Many of these autistic children are nonverbal, locked in their own silent hell.  They will need round the clock care when they grow up, often needing up to two people at a time to care for them. 

Sadly, we won’t have the resources for this, and it is a cruel burden to pass on to our non-autistic children.  I certainly hope it doesn’t get to the point where autistic people are dealt with as they are in this series, and that is why I wrote about it.  What I didn’t plan on?  A love story.

Orion and Rain, of course, have that chemistry that almost everybody has shared with someone at some point.  I enjoyed watching Orion grow up and change.  I kind of fell in love with him myself!

But Troll, oh what a sweet, good soul he is.  You will find out more about just how much he loves Rain in
Rain Born
.  I kind of fell in love with him, too.  He reminds me so much of my one true love.  Tony is resourceful, funny, kind, and always thinks of others before himself.  He loves with all of his heart and asks for nothing in return.  That is love!

And that is what brings me to this next part.  I don’t know if you noticed that this book is dedicated to Lily, and the lyrics from the song
All I Need
by Awolnation, next to it. 

I figured that Rain had held up pretty well considering all she had been through.  I loved her determination to keep her baby, even if it might have autism.  She was scrappy underneath all of that obedience, and she deserved someone to love her unconditionally.  At first it was Troll, but one day while I was editing the book, I realized that Rain needed a dog.  But not just any dog.  She needed Lily.

We all needed Lily.

Lily was real and looked exactly as described in the book.  She acted exactly as described in the book.  My son was seventeen when he found her running wild on a highway.  Someone had dumped her and she was starving.  I was in the middle of working three jobs, having a new house built, taking care of three children, and not wanting to face the fact that I was in a failed marriage.  The last thing I needed was another dog.  How wrong I was!

My ex-husband loaded Lily into the car and drove around all day, but there wasn’t a dog shelter around that would take the pitt bull mix.  He brought her back home, and I sent Nathan back to where he found her in hopes that he could find the owner of this huge, wild, untamed and unwanted dog.  Some neighbors told him that she had been abandoned.  Her name was Lily.

My heart seized.  Lily was ours. 

Never was a dog happier with a family!  She rode in go carts next to the girls as they made mad circles of dust.  She swam in our pond daily.  She stared at the endless dog food in her dish by the hour, letting out the most gigantic sighs of contentment.  She was afraid to take her eyes off of that dog dish for about a year, afraid that it might disappear. Lily couldn’t believe her good fortune, and yes, she got a little overweight. 

Right away, I sent one of the kids in to have her inoculated, spayed, and micro-chipped.  Like playing a board game, we knocked the pieces of Lily’s life around, cards being dealt out according to the busiest schedule.  As luck would have it, I was designated to pick Lily up from the vet’s.

I waited in the room for her, and finally they brought her to me, a big cone wrapped around her head.  She instantly fell to the ground and started crying, terrible howling sobs.  At first I thought that she was in pain, and then I realized that Lily had thought we abandoned her.  She had probably never been to the vet before. 

When we got home, Lily was elated!  I didn’t think her tail would stay on, she wagged it so much.  Lily wanted to make sure that we knew what she went through, how abandoned she felt at the vet’s office.  She would come up behind us, with all one hundred pounds of her body, and knock us around with her cone.  We called it being coned by Lily.

We were all relieved when that cone was taken off and we wouldn’t have to be coned again.  Little did we know that a cone would one day become a major part of Lily’s life.

Lily was mine after that, following me around every step I took.  Like Rain and Troll’s Lily, she growled protectively when anyone came by.  She was the weather map of who to trust and whom not to trust.  A woman alone in the country with three kids needs a Lily. 

Lily was loved.  Lily was part of our family.  Lily was perfect.  Daylon, one of Nathan’s friends would come over and yell, “Where’s my perfect dog?”  Lily would come thundering in, her tail wagging and her tongue hanging out of her mouth.  They would wrestle and carry on for quite some time, a couple of crazy kids.

As things happen in life, my marriage ended, my husband left, and the kids and I were giddy with it. The black cloud that had hovered over our family for years was gone.

Not long after, I met the love of my life.  We had gone to high school together, and he looked me up.  Even in your late forties, you can fall in love, and we did.  We talked on the phone for endless hours after the kids were in bed, and I would tell Tony how much I missed him.  “You have Swamp Thing to snuggle with,” he would tell me in a joking voice.  He had met Lily, and of course after all that time in the pond, she didn’t exactly smell good.  To Tony, Lily would always be Swamp Thing.

After about a year and a half, it was evident that I couldn’t continue with the lifestyle we were used to living.  I wasn’t getting child support, had one kid in college and two in high school, and the big house on ten acres that Lily and the rest of us loved so much would have to go.  With sad hearts, we moved.

I rented a place to temporarily tide us over, but we had too many dogs. “You’ll have to take Lily,” I told Nathan, who was about twenty by then, living on his own.  So, he took Lily.  Two days later he returned with her.  “She misses, you, Mom,” he told me.  “She’s not happy.”

Lily stayed with me. 

Just not long enough.

I think Nathan missed Lily, too, because he moved back home not too long after that.  The girls, who were fifteen and seventeen, shared a room for the first time in their lives, and Lily would often be flopped on their beds, Nathan’s bed, or my bed.  I awoke many mornings, snuggled up to this great big sloppy, happy hound next to me in bed. 

Life chugged along like that.  We were busy.  We were happy.  There was a steady parade of teens and college kids in and out of the house.   But I wasn’t prepared for what was to come with Lily. 

I remember it vividly.  Lily had a sore on her stomach that wouldn’t heal.  She ended up having two operations and was given a cone to wear to keep her from licking the wound.  That cone, and many others, would become a part of Lily that lasted throughout the remainder of her short life.  We became accustomed to getting coned again.

I was fretting about Lily.  She wasn’t getting any better.  Natalie had just graduated from high school, and Tony came for her graduation.  The house was full of company, but I made an appointment for Lily at UC Davis.  Tony and I loaded the big dog in the back of the 4Runner and she sat in the back seat, happy for a car ride.  Lily always loved car rides. 

We still laugh about Lily’s cone.  She was so big that she regularly ruined them with her huge head, and I got tired of paying for new ones, so we used duct tape to keep the cracks together as long as we could.  Of course, I prefer the pretty colors and designs of duct tape, so this particular cone was held together with baby blue and white polka dotted duct tape. 

Tony and I checked Lily in and were sent to an elaborate waiting room.  It was full of the cleanest, most pure-bred dogs and cats you would ever see.  One had his own bed that the owners traveled around with, and here we were with this mutt of a dog with a duct-taped cone.  Lily announced her presence as always with a “wooo, wooo, wooo.”

A woman actually came up to me and asked me where I got the decorated cone for my dog. Her dog was “lily” white, perfectly groomed, but had severe allergies and had to live with a cone.  I glanced down at Swamp Thing, her huge tongue lolling out of her mouth and her big tail flopping happily against the floor.  I told the lady it was just duct tape.  She asked me where I got it.  I answered, “Wal-Mart, Target.”  I was kind of embarrassed.  About the duct tape.  Not Lily.  Never Lily.

We were definitely out of our league at UC Davis, but that that didn’t slow Lily down.  She went through the series of tests with a style and grace that no other dog could.  By the time we left, though, we knew things weren’t so good with Lily. 

The next day I got a call from UC Davis.  Lily had cancer, and it had metastasized.  I cried, the first of many tears for Lily.

The next week, my daughter Natalie and I took Lily to our local vet.  I was sure we could get chemotherapy for Lily, make her life longer. I was selfish.  I just didn’t know it at the time. It was early June.  Lily hadn’t dropped any weight, hadn’t slowed down much at all.  She announced herself as usual when we got to the vet’s.

“Woo, woo, woo,” she howled, wagging her tail ferociously.

The receptionist, without even looking up, said, “Lily’s here.”

We met with Dr. Valeneti, and I will never forget her words.  “You could put one hundred thousand dollars into this dog, but it won’t save her.” 

Natalie and I cried, and I think I saw a tear in Dr. Valeneti’s eye.

Lily had one more operation, and we took her home to die.

At that time, my youngest daughter, Nicole, was having serious health issues of her own.  She and Lily would lie on the floor by the hour, snuggled up next to each other and listen to Awolnation sing, “All I need, all, all I need is you…smiling.”

If ever a dog could smile, even in death, it was Lily.

After her last operation, Lily wasn’t supposed to jump or it would pull all of the stitches out of her stomach.  I woke up one morning with Lily on my bed, lying beside me.  She smelled of medicine and death.  Swamp Thing had disappeared. I snuggled up next to her, knowing it would be the last time I would wake up by her side.  It was. 

Lily had a host of medications I gave her daily, and each time we took her to the vet, they marveled that she held her weight.  I fried hamburger for her and gave her home cooked turkey, chicken, spaghetti, leftovers.  Canned dog food went by the wayside.  Lily would have nothing but the best.

By late August, Lily quit eating.  I tried everything.  I don’t know how much money I wasted on meat and foods she once loved, but she turned her nose away from it and would just stand over the air conditioning vent panting.

This went on for three days.

I knew it was time.

I drove to work.  Since I owned my own business, I knew I would be alone.  I picked up the phone and with shaking hands dialed the number to the vet, tears streaming down my face.  I made the appointment to put Lily down.  It was the hardest phone call I ever made.

It’s odd when you know someone is going to die.  You try not to gauge time by days, hours, or minutes, but that’s what you do.  My heart was breaking, thinking that this was just a dog, not a human, not a person.  I knew of people who had lost children, spouses. My friend, Robert had just lost his mother to cancer.  He held her hand as she left this world.  I couldn’t even begin to understand what it was like for them.  I just knew what it was like with Lily.

Thursday came too soon, and I loaded Lily up in the 4Runner.  By then she was shedding something fierce, and the entire back seat was filled with white hair. For months I left it there, refusing to vacuum up what little I had left of Lily.

The girls drove in Natalie’s pick up and met us at the veterinary clinic.  Eric, Natalie’s boyfriend came, too.  He loved Lily.  Everyone loved Lily.

Lily wagged her tail happily the entire way, and we just talked, the two of us.  It was nice to see her without a cone on her head.  I had come to associate those damn cones as being part of Lily.