One Hundred Days of Rain Read online

  Nurse stretches out a hand, takes hers, touches the circlet on her third finger. Why do you still wear this, Nurse asks. The answer obvious, to her at least. Because I’m still with M. Only half here. Nurse tucks her in, brings her drinks. She should tell her, say: You know this relationship – significant pause – Isn’t Going Anywhere. But she doesn’t. Too cruel. A different kind of cruelty, sin of omission, what she’s doing now. Back to health. Mum’s the word on the nights she and Nurse are apart. Nights she can’t sleep, thinking of M.

  So many betrayals. Blood under the bridge as her boss would say.

  87.

  Today rain only threatens. The newspaper says it will come later. Speckles on the glass: ghosts of old dirt or the precursor of things to come, it’s hard to say.

  Nurse I’m sick. Take my temperature. Intubate me Nurse. Nurse, feel my heart. Right here. Is it beating? How strong is the pulse, Nurse? How much time do I have left?

  Nurse take me to your kind glass-walled condo. Carry me inside, in your strong arms. Stagger under my weight. I need looking after, like a baby. I picked you for a reason. Can’t you see I’m sick, can’t you see what’s wrong with me? Can’t you tell? Bring the cart. Don’t send for the technician. I need you.

  Is there anything you need, Nurse asks, passing the bed where she lies. The tall bed on its risers, in the tiny room. The chocolate comforter. Anything I can get you.

  No. I’m fine, she says, and turns her face, resolute, to the wall.

  88.

  She imagines herself in another world. Downstairs. How their surroundings will shape them, how they will expand once they have the space to do so. She’ll buy furniture, she swears, she’ll look on Craigslist, maybe she’ll meet someone, when she goes to look at that midcentury sofa. Someone attractive. Maybe someone who doesn’t know about her, about her past, about all her mistakes. She’ll paint. She hasn’t painted but she can, why not, there’s no law, nothing to stop her. In this eternally damp weather it’ll take a long time to dry but it doesn’t matter, she’ll keep the big windows she saw along one wall open, she’ll let it cure, or whatever it is paint does. The hardware store will know, they’ll sell her some paint that’s good for kids, that won’t kill them with its fumes. She’ll paint a nice, rosy pink, salmon-coloured, so everything gets a warm glow. That’d be nice. Or, no, blue. Tiffany blue, that’s it. Her new place will look exactly like a jewel box, the kind you open with trepidation and delight. She’ll be expensive, that’s it. No greys. Nothing dark. Nothing to remind her of rain.

  89.

  Today it rained. Yesterday it rained. The day before it rained.

  She stares out unseeing. Behind her she can feel the weight of the future pressing down on the back of her neck. Have to call. Need to fix. Wipe and wrap. Her favourite word, organize. So often anticipated, so never happening.

  I’m moving, but I’m still here, she writes her friend finally, via email. Her friend, her brief ex. The only one who ever said: I’m getting a desk.

  What for? Her ex was a chef, all she needed was a kitchen.

  For you. So when you come here, you can write.

  Tomorrow it will rain again, she wants to tell her. The day after, more rain. And you know how it is: each day the rain ends up being different. Sullen rain. Rain that leaks out of the sky, like an orgasm out of a rock. Mean. Thin. Cold. Rain that lets go. Rain that opens up like a sluice, like internal organs sliding free. Slop and slip. Rain that starts, and stops, and starts again, and peters out, and finally whips itself into a . . . no. Rain that never commits. Rain that should be committed, it’s so crazy.

  I’m fine, she ends finally. How are you?

  90.

  She stares at the screen for so long her foot goes to sleep. When she gets up she lurches across the floor like Frankenstein’s monster. Frankenstein is the doctor, which is easy to forget.

  She’s weary of the confessional. Can’t she get up off her knees now? It’s not like she doesn’t have plenty of other things to do. Moving day a faroff train with its single purposeful light bearing down. And her, stuck on the crossing with taped-together boxes.

  Just let me get this stuff.

  She’s waiting for phone calls or to make them. For once she hasn’t planned anything. She’d better start cleaning. She’d better start a lot of things. She’s always hated moving. Begin packing things she needs between now and then, and later go helplessly through boxes trying to find them? Or wait until the last minute, keeping out everything she might possibly need, and do it in a rush and forget things and pack them sloppy so she can’t figure out where anything is when she needs it later? The jumble box, the last one, into which you thrust everything that remains in despair, and then keep on a shelf for years or decades, until the next time you have to look in.

  She’ll need to make a bunch of phone calls. She’ll call her father. He can’t help but he listens. She’ll go to the neighbours’ wedding. They didn’t invite her but it’s fine, it’s casual. Time like a tap: so much, suddenly cut to nothing. This weekend will be different though. Not her usual Saturdays and Sundays, the leaden weight of days undone, followed by the inevitable last-minute panic.

  Believe it or not at half past six it was beautiful out here. Beautiful. Now the sky is filling up, cloudy and white. The colour of the day leached away bit by bit, turned down by degrees. Don’t forget. Need a coat.

  91.

  Monday dawns unsettled. Streaks on the windowpane, dribbles on the fall. All weekend it’s been raining off and on and then when she gets outside finally nothing but glorious sun for miles. She and her friend Trouble go shopping.

  This dress looks okay, she says, pulling it on over her own clothes.

  It’s twenty dollars, Trouble replies. You can’t afford not to buy it.

  She and Trouble are well-worn, so much so even they get the joke. Trouble buys everything, she nothing.

  Nurse buys a suit to take her to the formal dinner. A man with a leer attempts to pick them both up. She’s never had this happen before although she’s heard of it, everyone has. She guesses Nurse must be cute in guys’ eyes: first time for that. Another reason they don’t belong together, Nurse and her. Same sign, semaphore, washroom symbol.

  After the dinner rain begins to spatter. The diners hurry to their cars in their formal attire. The women’s spindly shoes and the dresses that don’t keep them warm.

  I had something like that happen once, Trouble tells her when she confesses how much she liked the man with the leer. I wanted the guy so bad I couldn’t even walk straight. He was mildly brain-damaged from sniffing glue, and he smelled. It’s cuz I was ovulating.

  Oh. Turns out she’s ovulating too.

  92.

  Today it will rain. Showers, tapering to more showers.

  Yesterday was barely raining. Even though rain covered the tops of puddles in a series of circles, even though the surfaces it touched had reluctantly turned, their pale aspect becoming dark and saturated, there was a lightness to rain. Rain hadn’t dug in, taken hold. Rain was liquid rather than solid. She could slip through rain, in her straw hat, without worry. Rain barely touched her.

  She is like this with M now. She doesn’t turn a hair or rather a hair doesn’t tighten to a curl at the thought of M. It has taken a whole year and more. Without a qualm she reports the date of her separation for tax purposes, answers whoever asks.

  It’s moving that unmoors her. She shouts at her child who’s desultorily packing a hundredweight of small plastic parts. Washes the walls until the water in the pail cools, turns muddy and opaque. She’s gone down another dress size, the number a ridiculous one. When this happens she watches what she eats, but in reverse. She looks for the foods highest in fat, the dense kind filled with calories. Spies a bit of pudge spilling over her belt, now. Good.

  93.

  It’s been raining now for days, the rain of spring, cherry blossoms still lining the gutter. On a white-blossom apple tree near the elementary school, one branch sp
routing pink among its paler fellows. She pauses, looks up. Can this be nature, or graft?

  She gets on the bus with her son. They cross the bridge, go up and over the hill, and descend into the cove. Before them ferries move across the water, melting into the grey dissolving sky. Sea reaches up, its boundaries unstable, for the water that rains down on it. Once on the island they don’t even go down to the beach, her Island friend, another single mother, and her. The children are downstairs playing in the damp, their voices muffled. Their mothers huddle under the eaves, on the deck, smoking cigarette after cigarette. Futile puffs. Glasses of wine. The next day, back in Horseshoe Bay, a bus driver taking his break turns the pages of a newspaper. It’s still raining.

  Everything turns foggy. It’s hard to see very far. She loves and hates this cotton batten existence. Like living inside a quilt, buffered. Untouched, unspoken, undelivered, unmoved. Inside the rooms where rain doesn’t go she shakes off her lethargy, speaks crisp words into the phone. Outside rain waits for her and everyone else, patient. Rain older than time, made today, somewhere in between, but fated always to cover them.

  94.

  On the day she removes it rains. She rises with the sound twisted into her waking in the night. Her body hobbled. So much to be done. Outside rain falls heedless.

  The new apartment’s inner room is beautiful and serene, quietly lit. The outer room large and blighted by the roar and rush of cars on the street before her. She can see people walking by, under the windows, their heads level with the ivy twined outside the glass. It’s just as she imagined, only more so.

  Her mattress, too big for the new frame, curls up supine. She lies there unable to sleep for hours. At first light she is awake again, suddenly, like a cat.

  Some showers, the report says. Outside it is grey.

  Some people pass, carrying umbrellas. Now will you believe in weather? In its permanence, rain’s duration, the span of years?

  95.

  In her experience bitterness has a flavour. A quick sharp taste in the mouth, like a little stab. Sugar’s opposite. Times she can still savour it, if that’s the word. When the police call or, even better, visit. Lucky for her she works in a small office, knows everybody. Someone’s good taste. Times she tells her story again, willing herself to tell it straight, this time, ha ha. Not the same flavour as rain, that bitterness, not at all. Rain blossoms, the wet a tiny explosion bursting across lips and teeth, and then the taste of dust afterwards. The dust rain carries, that it brings from above, best not considered too closely.

  She’d like not to think too much. That would be nice. She’d like to be happy although it seems the only way to do that is to forget. Forget all the things they said to each other, forget all the cruel words and reproach. How could you. Why can’t we. Remember the good things, the good times. Just one problem, one question. Were there any?

  96.

  Somewhere below or beside her the sound of an alarm clock’s hootenanny chorus. Sound hard to locate exactly, rising in this warren.

  Afternoon. A neighbour’s computer kicks into life with noisy beeps and trills. Leaning on the buzzer outside, the same woman who’s accosted her before, at the same door. Another day, same sodden set to her clothes, and still visibly drugged, flesh having given up the job. The moral problem of admittance. The woman’s plaint: I can’t get in. She gives the woman the same lecture at which the young woman returns the same acquiescent monosyllables. Yep. Okay. Sure. So many hectoring words the young woman has to pretend to absorb, for the sake of whatever it is she wants.

  At night the sound of people rises outside her windows. They are talking loudly as if in their own homes. Perhaps they are in their own homes six metres from hers in the next building or upstairs, big sash windows thrown open to the cold.

  A young woman’s laugh, a young man’s excited lengthy explanation. Song rises in dissonant chorus from a group of people swaying down the street. Gradually dies away. She sleeps through the small hours, perfectly content. There was a time when she would wake in the night and hear the gasp of women above, their keening and urgency. Now nothing.

  Each hour gradually comes to life in a rising wall of sound. At five a.m. there is perfect stillness, broken only by the occasional car passing on the street outside. By six the sound of engines rushing by has become intermittent. The cars always have somewhere to go and never want to stop.

  By seven the traffic has begun to coalesce into a steady stream: droplets of water joining together to form a spotty rain, then a torrent.

  97.

  Today it rains in stops and starts. There’s a lot of it on her ride in but she hardly cares. She is wearing the perfect outfit: a high-waisted woolen pencil skirt, close black cotton shirt, black thigh-highs and little stiletto boots. Women like her have a faith in correct attire bordering on the alchemical. Only find the perfect dress and the rest of the world will resolve itself as in your dreams. Lovers at your feet. Jobs for the taking. Travel, gifts, your heart’s truest desire. Sunny skies forever.

  After she gets to the office she and her boss drive out to the warehouse in the low-lying part of town. Richmond is flat and held in by banked earth: a few more years and it’ll be under water. She carries boxes of books in her perpendicular heels. Then back to the office to unload. The rain has sputtered to an occasional dribble, not even worthy of the office umbrella. She packs books and makes up parcels and later rides to the bookstore where one of their authors is launching his latest book. After it’s over she walks to a restaurant with her editor friends. Cherry blossom swirls underfoot. Crushed and banked.

  I go in there once a year, the vegetarian confesses as they pass the hamburger stand. For the meat.

  She regards the woman with new respect.

  The next morning the dark grey stains on her boots won’t come off, not even when she scrubs them with a cloth. Permanently marked from their passage. Familiar, that.

  98.

  In her city they are proud of rain or rather proud of themselves for surviving it. They have two modes: the amnesia of summer, and then the self-conscious display of their hardihood in the face of intolerable odds in the interminable wet wintertime. They like to be noticed & admired. They appreciate your marvel although everything must take place without overt acknowledgement. That’s their sweet silent way.

  So they never speak of how it grows into them, this rain. The familiar scent of old mildew that curls up from the collar of a coat wet again for the millionth time. The drip they come to listen for, in the big pipe outside the bedroom window as they lie. Supine again. The blind panic of January, when they swear to themselves they can’t take it for one more second, and then February’s deathlike resignation. The annual suicide of their hopes: rain remains, sun gone, never again to shine.

  Instead, they pretend to hover above these heavenly annoyances. It’s their gift, along with a coloured rolled mat they carry everywhere and that green liquid in a plastic cup they tote from place to place. She watches them. She’s one herself, after all. No need to set herself apart. Raises her own green-brimmed glass.

  99.

  First weekend in May. Back in her usual room: a long, low-slung one, under the eaves, braced with roughly-hewn tree trunks. Outside a porch, and the roof, extending far beyond with its massive beams.

  On her first visit the lodge’s keeper got up, at dinner, to tell the story of how the lodge burnt to the ground in 1985. The family, he said, stood and watched. What are we going to do? he asked his father, while the firefighters’ hoses still played. The father said immediately: “Rebuild it the way it was, I guess.” After all, he pointed out, they know nothing else.

  So the son keeps the new lodge. Genial, faintly remote, passing through. Same faces in the lounge from one year to the next. Only the youngsters serving in the dining room differ.

  Last year she brought M for the first time. They took the Triumph. On the way back it broke down in the lineup to the ferry. M enraged, she shrugging. What do you expect. Their
roles, familiar now.

  This weekend is grey, colder than she’s used to. In past years she’s plunged breathless into the seawater pool, sunned on the rocks. Not this time. The other guests miss the promise of warmth. How nice it would be, in summer, everyone says, wandering over the rocky face. The people she knows vaguely from past years, without knowing their names.

  There’s a type who comes here, to the point. The man is older, faintly amused, as is the woman. They’ve stayed together. They’re comfortable, quiet, they like a glass of wine, she drinks a lot of tea. There’s an allowance and elasticity. Something to teach her. Maybe. Here she is, fifth wheel, sore thumb. By herself in the hot tub, by herself on the balcony. Everyone else accompanied, by friends if not mates.