One Hundred Days of Rain Read online

  They run through the rain for the open maw of the boat. Her son is game, his superhero knapsack bouncing behind him as he trots with great concentration. The workers await them on the ramp, their pickup truck drawn up with lights flashing. Inside, the echoing hold is stained with the wet tracks of their predecessors. The ferry workers direct them up the stairs with a fine offhand concern, one that feels almost like love. The kind she wants, not the kind she can get.

  62.

  In the morning in the unfamiliar room (three beds, no table, no chair) the mist is a low-lying thing on the rooftops. Gathered rain and leaves lie in the hollow of the flat roofs.

  You come to Nanaimo to get away from rain? snorts the woman in the polyester housecoat, the one who lives here for the winter. She has waffles and syrup for breakfast, taking up the last of the sweet with her spoon. Good luck.

  She is a know-it-all, this woman. She is disappointed that they are locals; otherwise she could give them advice.

  There’s a great train trip, she turns to the two girls with accents. You go up to Prince Rupert. Across to Jasper.

  You can’t do everything, one of the girls murmurs, before they shoulder their giant packs. They take everything with them, like extra bodies they must heft from place to place. Once she too took that long trek to a faraway continent and for some reason it was equally important that she bring as much as she could carry and more. But why? Surely when you are going here and there only a couple of outfits suffice, nobody’s going to see you long enough to notice, for one thing. But how fragmentary and partial it seemed, that heavy bag of hers! She had not yet learned how little she needed really. She hadn’t even gotten rid of her parents.

  The best laid plans of underpackers are felled by rain. You need a couple of heavy outfits, one to dry while you wear the other, especially if the rain continues. One summer biking in Europe she took one of those instant raincoats, the kind packed into a baggie. It didn’t rain once that trip and she was grateful. So she didn’t use the coat until she was on a ride up to Lion’s Bay with some insanely chipper members of the local bike club. She stayed behind in the corner store, drinking coffee, while they went up a mountain just for the fun of it and came back.

  To her mind the route they took to the village and home was a joke, a cruel one. The road undulated, a picture-book snake. Up the hill. Down the hill. Up the next hill. She imagined planners chortling as they decreed: put up the signs here, tell cyclists they are welcome. If they survive.

  The familiar drops began to stipple her in warning on the return. She stopped at the top of the hill, and unfolded her raincoat. She was pleased with her foresight. The plastic was much thinner than she had expected, its area enormous. She arranged the thing over her clothes as best she could and set off. As she gathered speed a flapping, crackling noise grew around her. It was the giant garbage bag of the raincoat, catching wind like a sail.

  63.

  Her son away tonight, rain holds off. In the clouds as she leaves work, though, a muttered threat. Rain tonight puts her in mind of toughs who pass a bit too close in the school hallway, bump you sort-of accidentally into the lockers. The cool and clang of it. Go ahead, complain. Come on, report us. The menace of rain, impending.

  She chains up, walks quickly through the whooshing automatic doors of the store. Dinner to get. Something to eat. Her head bowed, face averted: no-see-um.

  Out on the street again, the rain takes its first tentative shoves, tries its weight, like a bully dancing on tiptoe. Water, skycut, jabs unprotected faces & necks and as quickly retreats. She picks up her steps, hurries a little faster along the ugly street of shops. Almost done now, almost time to turn towards home.

  Inside her own door at last, barricaded behind stone and brick, she is brave enough to face rain foursquare. Curled lip. Ostentatious flick of sleeve: see, dry.

  Imagines herself, good as untouched.

  64.

  Today rain falls faster than ever, as if human hurry is catching. Rain a sudden model of efficiency. The consultants came some time ago. They crowd the clouds, measuring drops per square inch. They catch and weigh individual drops, calculate area saturated by length of time. They have reports to make, procedures to recommend. Good news. With proper use of technology, they declare in triumph, rain can be made to fall that much faster.

  It’s true rain has never been exactly, how you say, career weather. Drifting and dropping, that’s pretty much the extent of rain’s job description. If rain had a resumé it would be a little puffy thing, a breath of wet air that disappeared when someone opened the envelope. Someone in a little room in a little office into which no rain is allowed, ever.

  This is the way of the new world and rain can’t fall behind. Hurry up, faster. Check your phone. Text someone. Check the website, get directions, grab another coffee (large, larger, largest: you decide), check your email, check your texts. Text someone else. Go over here, go over there, send another email, try to set up a meeting, try again, try one more time, give up. No! Giving up isn’t allowed.

  In the office they are packing boxes. Outside rain falls on the alley, muffling in its effect. The phone rings: it’s M. Now that the criminal aspect has been decided, M can call anytime. And does. M wants to discuss some detail of the child’s rota of pickups and drop-offs. Some question M’s decided needs clarification.

  I’ll tell you if there’s a change in the schedule. Goodbye, she says, and hangs up before M can reply.

  Are you so desperate to talk to me, she wishes she’d said, to make up all these excuses to call? So many things M could do, to start making amends for her monstrous wrongs. Set the record straight. Admit her culpability. Calling her at work nowhere on the list. Why infuriate her needlessly when she is the one ensuring M’s visits, ensuring the child has time with M – she who honours the child’s wishes, to a point at least? Oh how noble. Please.

  She thrills at the prospect of speaking her mind to M, even in fancy. But mostly she’s astounded at herself. How is it, this far from their abrupt division, that M’s voice still moves her to trembling fury? That she loses her powers of speech in rage?

  Rain can be all these different things, she tells her co-worker Romany.

  Nah, says Romany. Rain is rain.

  65.

  Surprise. A process server lurks outside the door to the alleyway. Rage & violation. Another set of documents. Requisition, affidavit, writ of summons, notice of motion: she hardly knows, and reading won’t enlighten her, experience has taught, only panic. Something to do with her separation, with the child’s visits, no doubt. Her finances yet again, a few pieces of paper discovered missing in the reams she’s passed over. Why the bundle has to be given to her this way, like a drug or a secret, cash in a sack, another legal mystery.

  But she takes the papers as she’s supposed to, shoves them in her bag for later, when her chest will slow its twitter and thrum. Time enough to read them, then, and puzzle out what they are telling her. Such a nice man, the process server, for someone nobody ever wants to see.

  The rain continues. All day there is a solid wall of it wherever she turns, rain hemming her in. Too wet to bike. Too wet to do anything but try and stay out of it, behind the windows of the bus.

  The thin man who lives next door to her son’s father gets on the bus. He embraces her as she’s reading the papers. M’s requesting more time with her son, this time confirmed by the court. M proposes a complicated schedule which, as she reads it, reveals itself as an increase in the time M will have with him. M’s suggesting a report by a qualified psychologist who will spend time with them all and interview the child. Who will make a recommendation regarding custody and access. She remembers how she and M fought fiercely against the possibility of this same report, in court, when her son’s father wanted one. How bitterly M railed against the possibility of intrusion.

  Everything will work out, the thin man says. You’re the mom.

  If only everyone understood this. If only she could be so sure.
Break the surface for a moment, rise above the undertow. Instructions she wants to give. Her own: trust self. Trust things to work out. To M: give it up. Give thanks for what you’ve got. Stop bothering me.

  66.

  Finally even she begins to talk about weather.

  This rain is killing me, she says.

  Four of them are sitting at a long table with a view of the harbour. Outside the port glows with harsh orange light and outsize painted machinery. Humming helicopters skim angular towards the heliport. Cutting rain into mist. Below, where she can’t see unless she walks to the window itself, boxcars painted brown & orange clash on rows of rusty tracks. Everyone nods at her words.

  How are you, she asks the woman at the tea store. They talked so nicely last time she came.

  Fine, the clerk lets out, clipped. Her face grim.

  She leans forward and confides: This weather is driving me crazy.

  The clerk nods.

  How are you handling it, she asks the waiter at a restaurant later. She has these secret intelligent conversations with her servers these days. Co-conspirators. She’s one of them or they’re like her. Hard to tell.

  Last year was the worst, he allows in turn. My first winter here.

  But last winter it didn’t rain as much as it’s raining now, she counters. Arguing though there’s nothing to argue about. Neither of them having to turn to the window behind her table, so sure are they already of what’s to see: the streaming damp, the fast-walking pedestrians, their collars turned up and faces averted from rain’s punishment.

  I don’t know, he answers. Seems like it rained pretty much every day then, too.

  That’s when she remembers the woman’s reply, as she hands back the change: I think it’s driving everyone crazy.

  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 sp
okesperson 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.