The Rainy Season (2 page)

“At a friend’s house, apparently.”

“Thank God.”

“A neighbor’s with her now. Hannah. Darwin … ?”

“I know her,” Phil said.

“Even so, the sooner you can get a flight out here, the better. It would be good for Betsy to be on something like solid ground again.”

A minute later, after Phil had hung up the phone, he stood for a time in the kitchen, watching the rain slant past the window, illuminated by the yellow bulb of the back porch lamp. His mind was agitated but empty. He was struck with the futile desire to tell someone else, to talk to someone, but he could think of no one, and it was too late at night anyway to start making phone calls. Abruptly he thought of his father, a man whom he had never even known. There was some chance that his father was alive somewhere in the world … but then there had always been that chance, and Phil had never pursued it, and neither had Marianne.

Had
he seen Marianne’s death coming? The antidepressants she had taken in the years following her husband’s death hadn’t helped her much. Phil hadn’t been able to help much, either. Because Marianne lived in Austin and he lived in California, he had been comfortably far removed from his sister’s troubles, although there was no comfort in that now.

Just last year, when Marianne and Betsy had come out to California for a visit, and Phil had agreed to let Marianne put his name in the will, his sister had seemed optimistic for the first time in years: Betsy was playing the piano and pitching softball. Marianne had a new job. Things were looking up for them. Still, she had seemed distracted by the idea of planning for Betsy. She’d had a horror of Betsy’s living with strangers, of the government deciding Betsy’s fate, and Phil was happy enough to be named her potential guardian, although he hadn’t really thought it would matter anyway. It had seemed to him to be a formality, the kind of thing a single mother would do as a matter of course, and so he had agreed to it without thinking about it for more than fifteen seconds. Now, in an instant, everything had changed.

He opened the white pages, picked up the receiver, punched in the number of Southwest Airlines, and booked an early-morning flight into Austin. When he walked back into the darkroom it was only to turn out the light. He looked at the photo on the top rack again. It needed something human, he saw now, something to balance the dark enormity of the cloudy sky and the morbid age of the drooping oaks.

THE PRIEST STOOD
in the shadow of the old water tower and garden shed, watching the house through the rain. Vines overhung the narrow wooden roof of the latticework shed, and the musty smell of sodden leaves and wet earth rose on the air around him. Inside the house, some fifty feet away across the lawn, a light shone from the second story. It was impossible that anyone within could see anything out in the darkness, and unless the priest was immensely mistaken about the man who owned the house, there was no reason to believe that he would suspect prowlers on a rainy night like this. The priest wondered why the man was so apparently restless: he had moved from room to room for the last hour, turning lights on and off, as if he were searching for some lost thing.
I hope he finds it
, the priest thought, turning his attention once again to the stone-walled well that he had come to observe.

Clouds hid the moon, although now and then the clouds parted and the moon shone briefly. Tonight the priest was a student of the rain. He had made a study of rainfall over the seasons, and he had a particular knowledge of subterranean water, of intermittent streams and hillside springs, of dry wells and dry riverbeds and of all the high water years since the century had turned. Over the long years he had come to love the rain, and like a greedy man, he could never get enough of it, although that attitude was starting to look shameful to him now, since southern California would drown itself wholesale if the rains kept on like this. Already hillsides were sliding, and the Santa Ana River had twice gone over its banks despite Prado dam upriver, something it hadn’t done in sixty years. There had been wild floods in the county in 1916 and ‘26 and ‘38, but the water that had poured over the banks of the Santa Ana River and Santiago Creek in those years had been the result of devastating, passing storms. The annual rainfall had not been particularly high. Then in 1940 there had been nearly thirty-three inches of fall and winter rain, the wettest season in southern California since 1884. This year might surpass it.

He watched the well through the curtain of rain off the shed roof, aware that his shoes and trousers were soaking wet. It was senseless to invite pneumonia, since he was probably too old to survive it, but he was compelled to stay here, to wait things out. There was something out of the ordinary in the atmosphere tonight, something in the music of the rain that recalled old memories, old dreams, something that kept him here waiting for the rising of the water in the well, which, in rare decades past, had occurred very nearly on the instant, like an Old Testament miracle.

And if he was right, if something
were
pending, then there were likely to be others besides himself haunting these old groves at night, keeping an eye on the weather, on the water rising in backyard rain gauges. He had waited long years for a night like this, perhaps for this
very
night. He closed his eyes now and pictured the rainwater sinking away through the sandy well bottom, allowing his mind to empty itself, to follow the water into the deep and quiet darkness to that deep place where all waters are one water, and where everything is still, and where it seemed to him that he could sense the drifting shadows of human memory pooling in lightless subterranean caverns. Time passed as he waited in that haunted darkness for someone to whisper his name, for a woman’s upturned face to rise out of those depths like a pale, moonlit mask. …

WHEN THE PRIEST
came to himself, the house was dark. He was rain-soaked and cold.
One more minute
, he told himself, more than ever certain that some revelation was near: the ghosts of days gone by, past time welling up, an overflow of spirits long sunken in the earth. The clouds parted, and for a moment the moon illuminated the rain-washed grove in the distance and cast the shadows of the berry vines across the fence and yard. And in that moment he was startled to see that the well was full, the water black and clear. He found that he was holding his breath, and he let it out now. He crossed himself and stepped out from under the shelter, bent over the rock wall, and submerged his arm in the cold water, all the way up to his shoulder, just to make sure that the apparent depth wasn’t an illusion, a trick of the moon’s reflection.

And then he saw that something lay in the weeds on the ground near the edge of the well, something that glowed faintly against the mossy stones. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a glove, and slipped it over his hand. He parted the weeds and found the object—what appeared to be a tiny glass paperweight, unnaturally heavy for its size. He took out a penlight and switched it on, shining the beam of light into its center. There was something frozen inside the oval of moonlit glass: a painting of a face, barely human in appearance, distorted as if from some strong and unpleasant emotion.

As if by reflex movement, he tossed the thing out into the center of the well where it sank, glowing a faint and misty green that dwindled in the black depths until it passed out of sight, and then, feeling bone weary and shivering in the damp night, he trudged tiredly back up toward the road.

BETSY HAD FALLEN
asleep twice and awakened again in the night, both times to the thought that the house didn’t sound right. She lay in bed listening to the muttering of voices in the living room—the television turned down low: laughter now, followed by applause, and then talking again. Her mother had generally gone to bed earlier than Betsy did, and it was Betsy who had gone into her mother’s bedroom to kiss her goodnight and to tuck her in. So it simply felt wrong that the television was on. Everything had been wrong today, but she hadn’t known how wrong until she had gotten home from softball and found her teacher, Miss Cobb, sitting in the living room along with Mrs. Darwin and a woman whom Betsy had never seen before.

It had been Mrs. Darwin who had told her about her mother. Miss Cobb had cried, and that had started Betsy crying until her throat hurt. The first time she had awakened after she had gone to bed, she had cried herself back to sleep, thinking about kissing her mother goodnight, about her mother tucking her in. She quit thinking about it now, and lay there listening to the television.

Abruptly it occurred to her that this was nearly her last night in this house in Austin, Texas, in this room and in this bed. Mrs. Darwin was sleeping over tonight and tomorrow night, but after that … Betsy’s mother had told her that her Untie Phil in California would be her guardian if anything ever happened. Mrs. Darwin had said that Betsy would simply move in with him. This was confusing, but tomorrow Uncle Phil was coming, and they would work it out. What it meant, either way, was that her room wasn’t hers anymore.

She got out of bed, took her Winnie the Pooh flashlight out of her bedside stand, and opened the door, slipping noiselessly into the dark hallway. She heard snoring now—Mrs. Darwin asleep on the couch. She thought about going in and turning off the television, but that might wake her up. She stood there for a moment watching the nearly dark living room: the shadowy piano with the jumble of music and wooden metronome on top, the vase with its peacock feathers, the plant stand with its fern. Her mother had bought the fern last week—a bird’s nest fern, she had said. It was a pretty shade of green, but it didn’t look like a fern and it didn’t look like a bird’s nest. Already it was turning brown and getting wilted-looking.

Betsy turned quietly and walked farther up the hall, past the open bathroom door to her mother’s bedroom. She pushed the door open and walked in, sitting down on the bed, listening to the night sounds of the dark house, smelling the wet air through the half-open window, the scent of rain mingling with the perfume smell of the bottles on the dresser. Her throat tightened, and she blinked hard, standing up and crossing to the dresser, opening the top drawer, where her mother kept her socks. She felt in the socks, pushing them aside and shining her flashlight in among them until she found a tin box with a little lid on a hinge. The box said Pear’s Soap on the lid, and there was a picture on it of an old-fashioned woman in a bonnet. She opened the box and took out the velvet bag inside, feeling the hard glass object inside through the soft cloth.

She held her breath now, listening again for the sound of Mrs. Darwin’s snoring. Hearing it, steady and louder than ever, she left the room carrying the bag and went back into her bedroom, shutting the door and flipping on the light. Immediately her eye was drawn to a ceramic angel on her windowsill, and she shook out the contents of the velvet bag onto the bedspread—a misshapen glass inkwell about two inches high, the glass cloudy, like glass that had been through a fire. She slipped the angel into the bag, turned the light out again, and went back down the hall and into her mother’s room, anxiously putting the bag back into the tin box and the box in the drawer. She rearranged the socks, sliding the drawer shut. The clock in the living room chimed, and at the sound of it she was suddenly full of an urgent fear, and she hurried back to the darkness of her own room, where the inkwell still lay on the unmade bed, catching a ray of moonlight through the partly open curtains.

PHIL LAY IN
bed thinking, although his thoughts were disconnected. He felt the lonesomeness of the old house, which was somehow made more lonesome by Marianne’s death. Light from the stairwell lamp faintly illuminated the hall outside the open bedroom door, and the muslin window curtains caught a suffused light. In the slight draft they shifted like airy ghosts. He closed his eyes, but in his mind he could still see the shadowy lumber of furniture in the room and the pale moving curtains. He got out of bed finally, dressed, and started toward the stairs to the attic bedroom, which would be Betsy’s bedroom in a couple of days. It had only begun to settle into his mind that his solitary life was a thing of the past, and that he would suddenly have a child around the house. The idea of it was exotic. Softball and piano lessons? School—he’d have to get her into school. He remembered the asphalt playgrounds and tetherball poles and weedy baseball diamonds of his own childhood, suddenly part of his life again.

An idea came to him, and he returned to his bedroom and took a shallow cardboard carton off the closet shelf. He went out into the hallway again, climbed the stairs, and set the carton on the bed in the attic, switching on the bedside lamp. Next to the lamp sat a mason jar that had belonged to his mother, and he stood for a moment regarding it. Inside the jar lay several trinkets, like old-fashioned carnival prizes. The lid of the jar had been dipped in wax, although there was no liquid in it and nothing in the jar that would spoil. There was an old pocketknife inside with a handle that might have been carved out of antler, although it might as easily have been chipped out of petrified wood. There was a thimble, too, misshapen and decorated with a tiny smudged picture, and a hatpin with a lump of red glass knob on top like a piece of slag. There was a thumb-sized iron animal, perhaps a horse, and a cut crystal shot glass so small that it couldn’t have held more than half an ounce of liquid. He wondered for a moment if he should put the jar away, but it was the sort of thing that Betsy would like, so he set it now on a shelf near the window before switching off the light again in order to get a view of the moonlit night. Outside, the rain had stopped, and the clouds were ragged and windblown.

From the window there was a view of the grove of avocado trees behind the house and of the creek and arroyo beyond that. A path skirted the lower edge of Santiago Creek, along the back edge of the grove. …

He was startled to see someone—two people?—moving along the path in the light of the moon. And then, almost as soon as he noted the two shadows, they disappeared, which meant that they had either slipped into the grove itself or—not as likely—had descended the wall of the muddy creekbed. He waited, barely breathing, but they didn’t reappear. The arroyo beyond the creek was overgrown with wild bamboo and willow scrub, thousands of acres of marshy bottomland that stretched away toward the foothills in the north and the park in the east. Now, in the moonlight, the scattered rocks of the sandy arroyo shone chalky pale, and the skeletons of late-winter castor bean and mesquite stood out starkly against the white ground.