Clearly Now, the Rain (7 page)

Nine

Hugh and I had technically first met on a soccer field our freshman year of high school. It was one of those late autumn games in the Northwest with pellets of rain like frozen grapes. Everyone was taking a lot of dives into the mud-and-rock mixture that they make soccer fields with, and blood was flowing. I had a temper, and I may or may not have clipped a couple of midfielders a bit hard when I went for the ball. At a break in play, Hugh, who played for the other team, aimed himself toward me. I knew who he and his brother were quite well and I swallowed hard. He was mud-splotched, muscular, square-jawed, and very confident in his power—yet he possessed light eyes that were somehow sensitive. They did not, however, blink when he told me:
Trip another one of my players and me and my brother gonna jump you at school.

I stepped cautiously into the hallway the next day, but when I crossed paths with Hugh, both of us late for class, I just took a deep breath and stuck out my hand. After he let me sweat for a moment the granite of his face reformed around a toothy and childlike grin. We were sealed thereafter. The anchoring pin of our brotherhood was set later, just days after his brother ended his life, when Hugh called me and a few select others to his family's home. I sat on his brother's bed and mixed my cigarette ashes with his last ones. I leafed through the artwork and journals that he'd left behind, bound with string in a folder, “The Pages of Truth and Love.” I held onto Hugh when he finally broke and his thick body shook in my arms.

After that, there had been nothing to prove to each other (though we would prove loyalty, quite literally, with blood, sweat, and tears). There was only the question of growing to expect the other's presence, at the best moments and the hardest. Hugh was there every day that I asked him to be while my father languished in that god-awful hospital; Hugh was there to sit silently with a heavy hand on my shoulder, there to stare down nurses who treated my father badly, there to kick through the front doors at the end of visiting hours and go drink and rage in the nostalgic nests of our city parks.

But there was little in our history richer or better than the afternoons in June and July of '99, full of color, running on young legs.

We figured it out real quick: the land that my mother owned in the Cascade Mountains was abandoned and in need of a lot of attention. My mother and stepfather were making comments about moving there. Hugh, though forged by the inner city, seemed to be a grizzled mountain man by nature. Once he spent a few weeks up there and his body turned brown with sun and dust, his eyes got even lighter, and beard rioted across his face and neck, it was hard to imagine him anywhere else. He had a lot of healing to do still, because glimpsing his brother's ghost at every turn in the city, watching his parents' marriage crumble under so much grief, had prevented much of it.

So, suddenly, Hugh and I had unsupervised jobs to do in a place that was as close to home as I had. We were free, taking long hikes up ridges and hurtling back down, We were wild as the early summer flowers—the mule's ears, the lady's slipper, the Indian paintbrush, the bluebells—that we trampled in our descents to the cold, emerald pools of the Wenatchee River, thousands of feet below.

I like to think Serala cooked up the idea of moving to Seattle while sleepless and missing me. But it was just as likely born of caffeinated conversations between her and Cassie in a diner, or racing down the back roads of Connecticut in June.

Monty, she claimed, was no longer a factor, just like that.

The night that they are due to arrive Hugh and I quit early at our efforts at turning a nineteenth century homestead into firewood and head down to the swimming hole to bathe.

But they are coming—their caravan of Desert Storm and a big U-Haul—through wicked western storms. Night arrives long before them. By the time they appear in the small hours, both Serala and Cassie are frayed, and Cassie is more than ready for sleep. Hugh passes out, too, but Serala and I are awake, kissing in the gray mountain pre-dawn.

We're tangled in flannel sheets in a tiny room. Her eyes are ravenous while her hands roam over my body, but it's not a sexual need, really. It's more like we need to touch one another to make sure the moment isn't dream. She's on top of me like the first time back in Connecticut, but now we're clothed and I can see her clearly in the swelling morning: locks of hair have slipped the wooden clip and flop down over one eye; she shakes them aside and leans forward, her forearms on either side of my head, till our faces are inches apart. Her stare is absolutely transparent, vulnerable, and insecure—she is undone, I suddenly understand, by where she finds herself.

Are you glad for this?
She asks, so close that I can't get away with anything but the truth. I nod, keeping that truth vague and the small doubt muted.
Good,
she breathes and lets a cautious smile unfold. I put my hands on the small of her back and she shuts her eyes in what looks like rest. Her lips are on me as the first ray of dawn cuts through the glass into my eyes and I finally close them.

Back in the city, my father had just remodeled his basement into an apartment, forming a triplex out of his house. When he heard Serala was moving out, he postponed renting so she and Cassie would have a temporary base while they searched for something permanent. Meanwhile, the couple that had lived upstairs in the mother-in-law apartment suddenly moved away. Despite all common sense, the upstairs was handed over to eighteen-year-old Luke for a while.

My brother Luke and I had been on rough terrain: he was doing a lot of drugs; I was being a judgmental and falsely authoritative big brother. He basically wanted me to fuck off and I basically wanted him to listen to me.

We'd been able to set all this conveniently aside for the last couple of years, as he stepped into teenagehood and we had the crisis of dad's accident to unite us. But it was coming time for us to settle up for ugly epochs behind. He was finally done taking shit from me and was, rather, waiting for me to apologize—or at least begin to treat him with respect. But in this era, I wasn't in touch with my crimes. All I knew for sure was that our father was on a precipitous descent into addiction and Luke was, once again, about to shrug free of it all and shove off for half a year of traveling abroad while I was to juggle college and Dad. In my heart, I wanted to make up and go with him, of course, but there was no proclamation of heart's truths between Luke and I then.

It was the Fourth of July, 1999, when my dad and I drove north to get me a golden retriever puppy. He was weaving the Subaru from his OxyContin high.

That night there is a party at high school friends' house. I show up early to catch up with my people before the place is all elbows. I find that my former best friend, Dean, is there, moving around the edges of the scene in a trench coat and sunglasses. Dean and I had split when our mutual love for LSD, adrenaline, and spiritual exploration tripped hidden wires in him and his latent schizophrenia bloomed like a fungus. I'd held on as long as I could but just about the time I'd headed off to college, his paranoia had turned him against me and we'd left things sour. So this night, Independence Day years later, we greet one another warmly—explosively in fact, so warmly that one might suspect the veracity of the warmth. In the early evening, Seattle going all blue like it does in the summer dusks, I walk outside and see Dean with my new puppy, Kaya, in his arms, a huge grin on his face, her sleeping soundly as he rocks her like a child. It unnerves me, deeply.

Serala appears later with Cassie, both of them aggressively uncomfortable, overcompensating with swigs from a half-gallon of Jack Daniel's. I soon lose her in the swirl of people. When things get too hectic in the backyard—blotto boys are lighting high-powered firecrackers that tip over and blast into the crowd, sending bodies diving—I come inside to find her again.

She's in an upstairs bedroom with a handful of others; it's opaque with weed smoke and I'm unhappy, firstly, to find Kaya sneezing in the corner. When I glance over and see that Serala is holding hands with Dean, the scope of the rage I feel is immense, irrational, and instant. Dean chuckles at me with his eyes. I imagine that I recover enough to shake my head at Serala. She says something like:
Hey, maybe you shouldn't be so judgmental. There's a lot he has to say to you, to offer.

Dean smiles at me with uncontainable glee, mock-innocence widening his mouth and eyes. Maintaining composure requires me to stay for a hit of the pipe, but I leave quickly and I leave her with a blade of a glance.

I was in that boozy twilight zone where an emotion flows pure and fast. I was on my way—foolishly—to my car when she caught me. The street was deserted and the party sounded like a distant reality. A yellow fingernail moon hung with a trio of stars. A breeze ushered me up the block but she caught up, a terrible desperation in her face, as if she thought I was leaving her forever. I knew then that Dean had somehow connived her into saying what she did; she was horrified at the prospect of having betrayed me. But I still wanted to punish her.

What is it, what? I'm sorry, what is it?

I look at the sickle of moon and frown, shake my head.

You have no possible fucking way of knowing how bad that was.

She has her hand tight on my arm, nearing tears now. Countless phrases that I could hurl tumble in my mind, ways I could make her grovel and fight. I have power over her—this sudden epiphany drops the floor out of my mind because I've never really seen anyone exercise control over Serala. Do I trust myself enough for this? To not hurt her when I can? When, in some vague way she seems to be asking for it?

I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Forgive me
.

I do.

A week later, Luke's high school graduation ceremony is mercifully short and unorthodox; unlike me, he's attended an alternative high school, a “progressive” place where they prize creativity and social works. Afterward, a tall bombshell sidles up to me.

I guess you're Luke's brother, huh?

I swallow my surprise at her approach.

I'm Heidi's sister, Abigail.

I wouldn't have guessed this; my brother's ex-girlfriend Heidi is pretty, but not quite in the ballpark of this creature. She wants to know what's going on tonight.

The night goes well over whisky and innuendo and I convince her that her boyfriend back in California is a jackass—recklessly, not caring, tunnel vision—and she agrees to come home with me. We make a glorious mess of the apartment, Luke fortunately out on another nightlong ecstasy ramble. We have coffee in the morning and I take her home; she's as nonchalant as Serala seems to be. But the moment comes to test that the next day as Serala and I are stuck in U-District traffic, her smoking and banging on the horn, earning looks of disapproval because that's something that drivers simply do not do in Seattle.

So I took this hot girl home the other night.

Serala turns to me, DKNY glasses blocking any guess at her reaction. After a minute she turns back to the road, traffic moves, and she takes a drag.

Good for you, fucker.

Are you mad? I mean . . .

I leave off here, at the trailhead to everything I would have to say if I misread her policy.

No, but don't expect me not to be a little bit jealous,
she says, wheeling fast around the corner, unable to keep the smile off her face now. And then, once more before we are at her and Cassie's new apartment where we go to make love,
Good for you.

In August, Jay returned from Teach for America in Texas. The back of my mind had been a hectic place these last weeks. I didn't know what to expect; all I knew was that I hadn't received a response to the letter I sent, telling him that Serala and I were, well, closer.

At his parents' condo he greets me and Kaya with all the gregarious love he always has. We take to the porch and talk about Texas, and teaching, and all of our scattered friends. The summer sun does its work on our heads till we are lulled toward sleepy and go back inside, leaving Kaya wrestling a piece of rawhide on the deck.

I'm feeling determined to not bring it up. Finally he does so with a sigh.

Yo, so in terms of all that with you and her, man, really
—he pauses here to shake his head at me—
I just don't really give a fuck.

I should be glad at this, of course; of course, I'm not.
Fuck
—the casual violence of that word, still not worn away. But it seems to me it's intentional here anyway, that he wants me to read it as code—but for what? Yes, I'm pissed but I'll handle it? Yes, I'm pissed and you should knock it off even though I'm not telling you to? I'm hurt but I've hurt you before, so I'll get through it? Or is it possible that he really doesn't care because of the emotional distance he's shoved between Serala and himself?

I mean, truly Eli, the only thing I'll say is that I just worry about you.

When Jay falls silent in a certain manner, one knows that one is supposed to urge him on. On some level I know what I am seeing: the inverse of and yet the same thing as what I saw in his dorm room over two years earlier. All of the hurt—so strong it became fear—that had consumed Jay when Serala left him had scarred over into bitterness, disdain. Jay never has said or done things halfway; his passion burns at the center of his words, his life, his music, and his relationships. If he doesn't get to be in love with her, then the disdain will have to be just as white-hot. It isn't hatred, of course, because he will always love Serala.

He looks at me with reined intensity in his wide eyes, broad brow furrowed, waiting for the nudge. KRS-One hollers between bass lines from his bedroom.

Okay, Jay, but what do you mean?

And he takes in a breath, sits up, and shrugs his shoulders. This is it: the response he selected to that crummy letter I sent weeks ago.