One Hundred Days of Rain Page 5

  Rain as a constant condition is unknown to the ancients, or at least invisible in the writing left us. Perhaps before rain was at least partially thwarted by our waterproofs and rubbers, nobody went out in it. Perhaps it was too banal. Perhaps you ignored rain, and this was a rule that everybody knew. A self-evident injunction, not even worth writing down.

  41.

  There is some shining there, where rain is, some dancing in the air. Some shimmering swaying streaks too small to follow. Making important things easy to ignore, as she knows to her cost. Cars, pedestrians, even lights blaring sudden yellow.

  Rain dampens her shoes and curls them, and soaks the leather until it is dark with wet; and when the shoes dry, unless the glue is good, sole and upper will part in mutual disgust.

  Rain brings the oil that lies in the million little holes even pavement has to the surface: planing on it, her steed’s rubber slide towards traffic’s red glow, oblivion.

  Rain works its way into the crannies and nooks at the top of the house where she lived once. Rain swells there, in the dark. The smallest of plants find that moisture, like a gift, and fall to feeding. High up, inside, the wall’s corner turned dark, almost ominous. They’ve painted it over but the mildew remains, inside, growing.

  42.

  Rain pulls the green from the young shoot and she rejoices to see it. Rain makes them wet & plump. Rain deadens and dances the incessant noise. Rain washes everything: people, the streets, glass. It washes down two alleys at work & home.

  Rain goes down to the river. Rain goes down to the sea. Rain carves a path. Rain a funnel and conduit. Rain finding a way. Rain goes through, goes under, goes around, always ever in the same direction. Rain a constant. Rain fights and hammers. Rain is the loudest of weathers. Rain tells her to go inside. To stay there. Rain reminds her of the weight of even small things. Aide-mémoire, understanding. Rain niggles and invites and at the last mirrors.

  Rain fills up the reservoirs. Rain raises the level. Rain gives her what she can take. And then some. Rain is a creek carving squiggle into the loam. A rivulet. Rain changes things. Nothing is as it was after rain.

  43.

  Rain today is a smattering. A muttering, a pattering on high.

  Is it raining again, she says.

  Sort of. Maybe.

  Take the first time M grabbed her. Was it beyond the pale? Was it a sign? Could she, should she, have taken it more seriously? Should she have known that the few drops are precursors of the flood? M had a normal family after all. Normal, that strange word. Two older brothers, an idyllic childhood, so M said, on the islands, raised mostly by the soft-voiced housekeeper. You were in my way, M told her.

  She said nothing. Had they done the same to her, those bigger boys, only M had never mentioned it? She would have sworn she and M had told each other everything, in those months leading up to their union. Her early hopes for the violin and odd uncle. M’s past loves and their sweet, sad, inevitable partings. Nobody’s fault, it seemed. Nobody to blame.

  It’s abuse, M screamed that day, standing in the door when someone wants to leave the room. I called the helpline and that’s abuse, that and withholding the household money: you’re abusing me, you’re the abuser.

  Surely she made some reply, surely bitter words rose in her own throat, surely she gave as good as she got?

  44.

  The little ferry to Granville Island moves sideways across the entrance to the creek. All kinds of vessels emerge from this mouth come summer: kayaks, big yachts, tug-tugged barges. The channel empty now, in late spring, but for hardy wetsuited rowers, harried by motorboats, their drivers shouting. She rides the ferry to fetch donuts. At water level the rain a shifting shower & curtain. The little windows of the tubby boat turning to cloud as it chugs along cheerful. Oh my hat, she murmurs.

  She walks through the market and out again, carrying her brown paper bag. Smudge of grease hinting at its contents. Outside, in the grey flat sky, the rain invisible. Crossing the parking lot, wet blossom underfoot her only clue. One drop glazes her face, then another. Still looking up she sees nothing.

  Later the rain turns solid and dark, hems her in. Later still she and her son ride the bus home thankful. A girl in the handicapped seats turns a face smooth as a plate towards them. Smiling, bland, ticking. Remember me?

  She does, now. A teenage neighbour from the summer campsite. What has the girl heard is the question.

  We’re not together anymore, she says about her and M, hastily, to forestall any inquiry. But there wasn’t going to be one.

  I know.

  And she won’t let me see her and I’m mad, pipes her child. She sets her face and schools herself, saying nothing. Someone having to be the adult around here. This exercise like so many others. Don’t get what you want, don’t complain, don’t protest, don’t try to correct the record. Let the story stand.

  45.

  The sun is shining and it has begun to rain. But this too changes at once and in the middle of the downtown, in the city streets so built for purpose, so crowded with striding properly dressed citizens – business, all business – it begins to hail.

  At first there is disbelief. Soon everyone is looking around and up as the little orbs bounce on the ground. The tourists are amazed. Hail is the word in every mind, on every lip. Some let it escape despite the universal prohibition on speaking aloud. The hail too extraordinary for normal precautions. The women hold out their hands supplicating, palms to the sky. Their little shoes and hose no protection against rain turned sudden hard. Rolling pebbles gathering white in the gutters.

  Under her feet now stars burst, each small ball spread and caught against grey concrete, an intricate expanding pattern of splayed ice. Footprints outlined against the flattened hail underfoot. Preserved but the permanence is illusory. A degree or two rise and hail will vanish as if it never existed. Only those out in this imperfect hour, eleven o’clock, too late for coffee too early for lunch, will be able to attest. A whole morning might pass before anyone inside thinks to glance through their windows, to observe the outside world. Nonsense, they’ll say. It’s just rain. Looks perfectly ordinary to me.

  46.

  On weekends it rains. In the morning mother and child rise no later than usual but in no hurry, that’s the great thing. Saturdays miss the paper, stay in bed. At leisure clear the tea things, tray and pitcher and little pot. Up crank the oven, match to flame: a small enamelled oblong, white with stains of half-century. Modern Maid.

  She bakes. Cornbread, banana bread, puffed yellow German pancake. Something hot to table. Inside they sit ignoring the streaming gloomy world. Lifting cakes still warm to their mouths, buttering the crumbly slices with voluptuous concentration. Their world shrunk to yellow box, small and warm and most importantly dry.

  47.

  For days weather has toyed with them. A few drops here and there, heralds, and then above, the innocent blank sky. Promising permanence.

  But she knows otherwise. That the sun showing like a disc of mirror through a cloudy scrim is illusory. That rain always comes back.

  Standing in the park where the dogs run and run or worry at bones, their flanks splashed and rubbed with the mud of the field. The rain has wet the earth that comes up amongst the too-thin grass. The dog owners are out in all weathers, perfectly comfortable, they are used to it and stand astride as in their own hallways. She stands, too, looking after the dogs in their curious pack-like symmetry. In this position the whole of the sky is open to her. She can see weather coming. Closer to the water, at the end of the street, the clouds break and wander off. The lowering sun ducks under their edge in curiosity, its pale red-gold glow irradiating the silvery edge of the water.

  48.

  Suddenly August. Sun swims up to every day’s allotted square, turning the forecast into a repeat. The people have waited so long. In Vancouver sun is a kind of fruit, seasonal. Everyone has the same urge, to gorge. To go down to the sun. To bask in it. To forget there is such a thing as
rain. Collective amnesiacs who stare each autumn in unfeigned dismay, faces blank. What, this again? It’s raining? Forgetting as an act of self-preservation. Nonsense, they say. It doesn’t rain like that. It can’t. There’s no way. A hundred days of rain one after the other? Certainly not. And the thing is, nobody lies, not consciously.

  She knows she and her son need to soak up enough sun to see them through, it’s a physical necessity. She insists they visit the beach every night after work, after she fetches the child from camp. The days are long, there’s plenty of time.

  We’ll have fish and chips again. These can be sublime, or greasy and soaked, depending on the teenager wielding the fryer. They aren’t always the sharpest, these concessionaires. She asked one to heat up a baby bottle for her once and the girl obligingly unscrewed the top and started running hot water into the milk.

  Yay, fish and chips. It doesn’t cross her child’s mind to resent her attempts at bribery. Or they take picnics. She wraps up fried things in bread, wraps those in turn in brown paper fastened with elastic bands. Leftover squares of wax paper if she can get them, if she’s bought meat at the deli this week. What a luxury, forgetting it rains.

  49.

  Now you, he says. It’s the first and last month of summer. They’ve come for the day: she, her son’s father, her son, a neighbour to take her son on the Ferris wheel and pirate ship. The mother and son have already done all the rides the mother will go on without balking: the Tilt-A-Whirl, the bumper cars, the Scrambler. Rides that stick close to the ground.

  No.

  Come on.

  I don’t want to.

  You’re going to.

  She looks up at the rickety wooden structure of the roller coaster, listens to the clack-clack of the cars going up. Screams from the far side, the drop. That lurch in her stomach as they stand in line. It’s a long lineup she tells herself but it seems only moments before they’re at the front.

  Get in.

  I don’t want to.

  She finds herself on the small bench seat. He crowds in beside her. They go up. Then the poised instant, in the sky. She screams as they fall, as she knew she would, as you do in nightmares, and as in nightmares the wind catches the scream from her.

  That wasn’t so bad, was it?

  No. Staggering out, her knees knocking.

  Let’s go again.

  Okay, she says, despite herself.

  50.

  Across town, on the side of the hill overlooking the river, her old house. M in it still, barefoot, padding. Rain pattering on the porch, collecting in pools, the wood they needed to do something about. In the corner of the wall, under the eaves, if you knew where to look, the plaster worn away, exposing the lath. In the far yard, morning glory mounding the fence. Its trumpet flowers turned up to the sky triumphant.

  In the house the bedroom window gives onto a vista, the ground sloping steeply away underneath. Their neighbours’ houses like toys. The screams from the amusement park across the river wafted towards them caught and swirling away, as the roller coaster whips its passengers around.

  Below their hill are the docks. Lights of industry twinkling, empty sidings from where trains once slid to a stop, to be filled or disgorged. The large and mysterious arrangement of buildings without windows or discernable purpose, their lots floodlit, overlooking the water.

  Clouds drift across the face of deep indigo hills on the adjacent shore. In her time she could imagine it raining there, on the other side, as she and M watched the water from their bedroom window. From this far above, the river is planed jade, calm as a just-made bed.

  She had the carpets torn up. Floors refinished. Kitchen painted. M did her part. M had a woman in to paint the guest room.

  Finish it, M told the woman.

  The primer hasn’t had a chance to dry yet, the painter said, pointing to the corner. You paint it now, the mould will just come through again.

  I don’t care. We can’t wait any longer for the office. Within the week the dark bloom back, as the painter predicted, under the new colour: a shadow, an uneasiness in the corner of an eye.

  What about a dormer window upstairs. What about making the front porch bigger.

  She brought home four chairs, a table. They ate overlooking the water. No use. The familiar thickness in the air, broken only by complaint.

  What’s this stuff.

  I can’t eat it, it’s too spicy.

  Everyone but her pushing back their plates.

  Later, M heated mac and cheese in the microwave, in the kitchen at night.

  Unhappiness seemed so futile then and the people that succumbed unimaginative. Leaving was a fool’s answer, too final by half, like suicide. I don’t see why people break up, she’d say. Surely they could do something else, take a trip, move, go back to school. She waited for M to agree.

  She read more self-help books. Should You Leave, and the answer, as she already suspected, always No.

  Then the last day, although she didn’t know it then, had no suspicion this was any different from any other fight except worse.

  Then the police pulling up, putting an end to half measures.

  51.

  Lies come sliding into her office on thin sheets, stamped with the name of a prominent firm of attorneys. It becomes imperative to find her own lawyer, to construct her own misconstructions, to keep up with the Ms.

  At the case conference she leaned over and asked M. Why are you doing this?

  Stop talking to me.

  Why are you bothering? You’ll just have to spend a ton of money and it’ll all go to lawyers anyway.

  Stop it. I said stop it.

  Then she got it. She felt stupid for not having grasped the point earlier. The spending of the money on the lawyers, making sure that none of it reached her.

  The curling paper accuses her of not declaring her assets. She owns, it says, an expensive road bike. A motorcycle. An expensive bike trailer. The list makes her smile.

  Today the rain is back, adding its sibilance to the chorus of traffic. Antiphony, counterpoint. Cars swish in the new wet. The window has been open all night. Her dwarf conifers in a line outside the two windows are brave little soldiers: she hasn’t had to water them once this year. One of them grows slightly crooked, which could be said of the best of them.

  They’re still alive, she told friends at dinner. I don’t know what to do.

  You’ll have to uproot them, her boss said. Container gardening is a brutal business.

  52.

  It rained on her and M’s first anniversary, she remembers. They checked into the venerable island resort where M’s parents stayed the first night of their marriage. They would come back every year, she and M told each other.

  The hotel was on the seafront and everything through the windows was bluey grey: sea, sand, sky. They lay in bed, a year on, the windows open. Conversations from the beach walk below came in as if the people were right outside the room.

  In the morning the motorcycle wouldn’t start.

  Ah man.

  The motorcycle was an old one. It had been her wedding present to M who said she wanted one. M had trouble with the starter, though, and never drove it. She wouldn’t have cared except that in the meantime she’d fallen in love. An accident. Her first drive on the bike was to the garage where she’d found a place to store it until the big day. Another rainy afternoon off the ferry, wet whispering of tyres on the highway.

  She should have been terrified at the ancient engine, the mechanical know-how its age and British engineering, if you could call it that, demanded. But the motorcycle got into her blood instead, and this despite all the times she stood by to watch it be hauled off by yet another tow truck. A profane affair, cyclist run reeking up to the pumps. Shameful and exciting. As she urged the slow engine up the long hill on the way to the ferry the rest of the traffic ran past.

  It was always an adventure seeing if the thing would start. Sometimes she forgot and treated it like an ordinary motorcycle, p
ulled up to the front, driving outfit on, first warm day of the year. She put on the helmet and settled herself astride. Then she stomped on the starter. There was a fatal click and nothing else.

  Oh yeah. That’s right.

  Sometimes it was a little thing they could put right in a moment, sometimes it meant another sojourn at the garage. The morning of their anniversary she and M stood around and waited while the tow truck came. It’d be ready to run again that same day, the driver told them. Nothing but a tripped switch or crossed wire, a battery gone down. See, she said, that wasn’t so bad.