#13: Aftershocks
"Rain. Always rain. Rain. Relentless. Untiring. Unending."
(Last time, Charlie found out about a letter—and disappointed Bonnie.)
The rain traced narrow bars down the motel window the next morning. Last night, when we had returned, I had taken off my sopping clothes and wordlessly rolled my sleeping bag around myself like a winding sheet. Yesterday morning, everything had seemed touched with butterfly wonder, and now drops of lead fell into an endless, blank horizon. A bony hand squeezed my ankles, neck, and shoulders. The dancing shoes kicked off, my feet throbbed. My back felt like a broken spring.
The flatness and emptiness reminded me of so many other days I had endured. Flaccid with exhaustion, I savored the aches, the oiliness, and the old rigidities the way a wine connoisseur sifts through a favorite merlot. I rolled around in my mouth the taste of day-old barbecue and cheap beer. No hint of the sweet polish of a girl’s lipstick lingered on my lips. No, not even the tiniest shred. The emptiness—the absence—coated my lips instead.
Standing underneath the running water of the shower, I remembered how I had walked back to the car like a sopping scarecrow. The rain had blotted out the moon’s golden glow. As the fog of the mirror receded after the shower, I could see the fine red cracks running through my eyes. So this was reality.
Everyone else woke up. As Danny spoke to Marnie on the motel phone, Pat grumbled from underneath his pillow, “Could you dampen the sound just a little? Some of us have a headache.”
Danny cupped his hand over the receiver. “How many beers was it, Pat?”
A growl. “It wasn’t the beer. It was the bourbon.”
“Maybe it was the bourbon.” Ralph’s voice limped along. “My eyes aren’t exactly parallel.”
“OK, Marnie, well, gotta go. See you soon!” Danny hung up the phone and turned to us. “OK. Time to get going. We’ve got a long drive ahead of us.”
And so we did. Hours and hours of rain. The cars ahead ground the water up and threw it at us in a spinning rebuke. The buildings along the highway passed like shadows.
Rain. It fell in jackhammers and hatchet-chops and sledgehammers. Rain. Always rain. Rain. Relentless. Untiring. Unending. Every sweep of the wiper gained only a thin angle of vision, before new drops devoured it. The rain fell over everything. It ran down the sides of festival tents and against the stained windows of churches. It washed away the make-up of carnival masks and turned to mud the green fields. Rain. Rain. Rain.
I slumped next to Danny in the front of the car. I folded up the coat from yesterday and tried to use it as a pillow against the window. Last night’s storm had renewed its mustiness. Behind us, Pat and Ralph snored.
“Pat almost sounds like he’s choking,” Danny said. “Are you supposed to wheeze like that?”
“We’ll find out,” I said. We drove over a bump in the highway—a jab at my temple in the darkness.
We drove in silence. Danny didn’t really like the radio on—“too distracting,” he would say. More jabs in the darkness.
Then, Danny spoke again. “I want to tell you something.”
“What?” I opened my eyes.
“I didn’t know. About the letter. Or going to Seattle.”
“I know, Danny.” I smiled. It was hard to not talk to anyone.
“I just wanted you to know I would never keep that a secret from you.”
“I do.” And I did. The same kind of care that Danny showed in middle-school science experiments was reflected elsewhere in his life.
“And…” And then he hesitated.
“And?” I asked.
He took a breath. “And I get that you’re angry. I would be, too. But Pat and Ralph—”
“Should have been honest with me from the beginning. Maybe if they had been honest with me before, yesterday would have turned out differently.” Of course, if I dared to be honest with myself, the sudden souring of that magical night had been about my choices—what I had said, how I had flinched.
“Sometimes,” Danny said, “the way forward isn’t the direct one. You know, sometimes, when a bone sets bad, it needs to be rebroken to be fixed or an infected scab need to be cut open so that you can clean the wound.”
“Oh yeah, oh yeah.”
“It’s true.” True. Danny’s voice kneaded that word, as though that truth were a kind of balm, a bandage for—no, an eraser of—a jagged wound.
So I pivoted. “Do you think Marnie will be ready for the onslaught?” I hadn’t seen her in a long time, not since she had moved out to Iowa a few years ago. She was a vague but slightly sparkling presence in my youth. When I first met her, I was in middle school, and she was what seemed an exquisitely sophisticated high school sophomore, an elevated initiate in the rites of adolescence. Nowhere near as tall as Danny, she had a lithe figure and framed her face in hoop earrings and a high ponytail. Like all the Goldenfarbs, she needed glasses, though she usually wore contacts (unlike all the other Goldenfarbs).
Danny laughed. “Onslaught? She’s always liked you guys.” Danny was the baby of the family, and, though he towered over her, her sense of sisterly responsibility hovered over him—and, by extension, his friends. “Besides, she needs someone to watch over.”
“You mean Jason is self-sufficient?”
“Yes. I think she liked that about him.” Marnie and Jason had met in college. They had eventually moved out to Iowa because of Jason’s family’s car dealership. “But out here in Iowa, what else is she going to care for? She loved the dog and cats at home, but he has allergies. And they don’t have kids yet.”
“So it’s us.” A fissure of a smile spread across my lips.
Danny smiled, too. “Yes. I have this theory that that’s why she became a nurse: her addiction to caring. She just didn’t want to be stuck in a lab running tests or on the phone negotiating with an insurance company. Now, I couldn’t be a nurse. I don’t have that capacity for caring. It would exhaust me.”
“You said don’t have kids yet—wait till she has some ankle-biters,” I said. “Uncle Danny won’t be able to resist them.”
“Can you imagine me as an uncle?” He shook his head. “Can you imagine us having kids?”
“We’re still kids ourselves.”
We continued to drive through the tumbling rain.
Somewhere in Indiana, Ralph let out a ferocious belch. He lurched forward in the seat. “Oh, oh, pull over—pull over!”
“What? Now?” Danny asked.
“Pull over!” He frantically cranked down the window as Danny shifted into the breakdown lane.
But not fast enough.
Ralph stuck his head out the window and vomit sprayed in technicolor streamers through the air. A passing car swerved out of the throw-up’s trajectory.
The rumbling and retching shook Pat awake. “Wha—” he asked.
Ralph’s head hung limply over the edge of the window, as he gave little whimpering coughs.
“PL, you could never hold your—” Then a gag strangled his words.
More spurted out of Ralph’s mouth, and Pat heaved himself out of the car. He collapsed on his knees just underneath the guardrail. The rain splattered on his crumpled figure as he emptied himself with cries that fused a bark and a howl.
Ralph pushed his head away from the window. “It’s it, uh, weird that you can feel cleaner after throwing up? Like you’ve gotten some poison out of you.”
“I don’t think the side of the car is any cleaner,” Danny said.
“The rain will wash it all away,” Ralph said with a shrug.
Pat stumbled back to the car. “Synchronized barfing—now that brings me back. Something about hearing you hurl, PL…” He grimaced like he was gagging on his own mouth. “You got any gum or anything?”
“You know what I think about gum,” Danny said. He thought it was disgusting.
“Charlie?”
I closed my eyes.
“Charlie?”
I stretched.
“What is this? The silent treatment? Are we eight years old again?”
That was a shot to my ribs—and it only hurt because I knew he was right. But that recognition only added an edge to my irritation. I opened my eyes and turned around. “What do you want me to say? No. I don’t have any gum. But do you know what I think is really childish…”
Danny held up his hand. “Let’s—let’s not get into this now.”
“I think,” Ralph mumbled. “I think I’m going to be sick again.”
And so more streams of bile ran down the side of the car, mixing with the rain.
Travel Journal Entry #6
The rain keeps falling. It’s like hammers on the roof. On my brain. What makes disappointment even worse is when you think you’re getting what you want. Two steps down the yellow brick road and the Emerald City in the horizon.…but you end up at the witch’s castle.
Jess was so happy at the wedding. You know when they say a person glows? I get it now. It was like a light filled her and almost lifted her up. The click of her heels was the only thing that told you she wasn’t floating. I’ve never been to a wedding before as an adult. It’s different than as a kid or in some magazine photo shoot. The air is electric and two people waltz off to happily ever after. Or at least that’s how they feel, when a symphony fills the night.
But now it’s raining.
Maybe I need to grow up.