The Rainy Season Page 11

  “I’m sorry,” she said finally.

  “Don’t be sorry,” Phil said. “It’s time that I thanked you for everything. I had no idea.”

  “No, you didn’t. You couldn’t have. If anyone’s to blame, I am. I knew how bad it was for Marianne. I should have written to you. But I … I was hoping every day that I didn’t have to. It all went downhill very fast.”

  There was a silence, the sound of rain on the roof overhead. “Mr. Benner has told me about the other will.”

  There was another silence as Mrs. Darwin looked at him, perhaps finding a way to say what she meant. “I believe that Marianne wanted me to care for Betsy,” she said finally, folding her hands in front of her, still clutching her handkerchief. “That girl’s life can go right on, uninterrupted, if she’s in my home. She’ll have support, stability, love. I can tell you right now when her next assignment’s due in school. She’s got one of those salt-and-flour maps of the state of Texas that she’s got to work on. We found a recipe in an old cookbook in my kitchen. We drew out a big map on a piece of plywood from my garage …” She wiped her eyes, breathed deeply a couple of times. “I’m carrying on again,” she said.

  Phil couldn’t respond. He realized that none of this could make any real difference to him, no matter how sad it was. Clearly it hadn’t made any difference to Marianne.

  “All I mean is that I can give her everything she needs, Phil. I’m not a wealthy woman, but Marianne told me about her money in trust, and I can tell you that I’ll look after that money like she was my own daughter. Honest to God I will.”

  “I believe you absolutely,” Phil said. He felt hollow inside, as if he had flown out here from California both to bury his sister and to tear Mrs. Darwin’s heart to pieces: Marianne’s life was gone, Mrs. Darwin’s might as well go too. He wondered vaguely how Betsy would respond to all this, and he suddenly saw more value in Benner’s questions and reservations. Obviously he had to make himself clear to Mrs. Darwin right now.

  “I can’t say what was on Marianne’s mind when she came to Mr. Benner to have the new will made out, Mrs. Darwin, but she was in great spirits at the time. She was happy, she liked her job, she was active with Betsy. She was on top of it, even if she didn’t stay there. When she asked me to be Betsy’s guardian, she seemed to know just what she was doing. If I thought she didn’t, I guess I wouldn’t know what to say right now. I can’t tell you why she did it, but whatever Marianne wanted, that’s what she put into the will. And that’s what I’ve got to give her.”

  “I’m not sure she did know what she was doing, pardon me for saying sol She was a very impressionable woman.”

  “She never seemed all that impressionable to me,” Phil said evenly. “If you’re suggesting that I changed her mind, though, you’re wrong. She handed me the will ready to sign.”

  “Someone put the idea into her head.”

  “She was capable of having a few ideas of her own,” Phil said to her. “I’m sure you were a great help to her and to Betsy, but I knew my sister well enough to know that she wasn’t all that helpless. She refereed some of those soccer games, if I’m not mistaken. And she gave Betsy a hug now and then, too.”

  “What would you know about that? You were a thousand miles away. And what experience do you have with children? I know enough about you to know that you were a basket case when your own wife died. Marianne and I talked about it—how she was worried about you, how you couldn’t hold onto a relationship with another human being, how you ended up living like a hermit in that house!”

  She slammed her hand onto the tabletop now, arid Phil regretted that he had set her off. She was distraught as hell. Phil had been telling the truth, defending Marianne and himself. But there were times to tell the truth and times to shut the hell up. Clearly he had misread this one.

  “I don’t think that this line of discussion is healthy for either of you,” Mr. Benner said calmly.

  “Healthy! Who cares about Betsy’s health?”

  “All of us do,” Phil said.

  She looked hard at him, as if for two cents she would slap his lying face. Her own face was red and her hands shook on the table. “And if Betsy objects?” She choked the words out.

  “That’s a bridge we’ll cross when we come to it,” Mr. Benner said, standing up. “We talked about this yesterday, Mrs. Darwin.”

  She made an obvious effort to compose herself, breathing deeply a couple of times and closing her eyes for a moment. “We did talk about this yesterday. And you know what I think of the law in cases like this one, Mr. Benner. The law doesn’t have any regard for love and for what’s right. The law is about power, about winning and losing.” She stood up, stared hard at Phil for another moment, and then seemed to relent. “Let’s be friends at least. I’m sorry to be so strong about it. But I feel very strongly about it.”

  “Not at all,” Phil said to her. “This is a hard thing. I didn’t know it was going to be this hard, and I’m probably not saying anything very well today. I will say, though, that I appreciate what you’ve done, all of it, and that I’m going to try to measure up. For what it’s worth, you won’t have to worry about Betsy. I’ll take care of her.”

  She nodded, tried to smile. “Who’ll take care of me?” she asked. Then she walked out without another word, clutching her handkerchief to her face.

  Santiago Canyon

  1958

  22

  WHEN COLIN HAD awakened an hour ago there had been a brief look of puzzlement on his face, which made May nearly certain that for a moment, right on the edge of sleep, he had thought she was Jeanette. There had been disappointment in his eyes, too, although he had brushed it quickly aside.

  They sat downstairs now, drinking coffee. It was late evening, but she wasn’t sleepy. She had slept for a day and a night when she’d first come, and now she was restless—partly, she knew, because Colin still hadn’t mentioned the glass dog. Out of guilt, perhaps?

  “If Jeanette walked in through the door right now,” she said abruptly, “what would we say to her?

  “About what?” he asked. He was evidently startled by the question.

  “About us. About our lovemaking.”

  “I guess we would tell her. I don’t know. … She won’t, though. The question’s moot.”

  “We were both in love with you, you know? Jeanette more than me, but I was in love with you, too. We used to joke about it, she and I—which of us would set our hooks in you.”

  He looked away uncomfortably.

  She realized that she was talking in the past tense. All this was in the distant past. “It wasn’t as funny to me as it was to Jeanette, though. I always knew the answer. There was something about Jeanette that everyone loved, even Alex in his way.”

  “Let’s leave him out of the conversation.”

  “Happily,” she said. “Anyway, I still don’t have my hooks in you. You’re still waiting for Jeanette.”

  “I don’t know what I’m waiting for.”

  “I do. Tell me. Did you know that I once bore a child?”

  He shook his head.

  “I was eighteen. That was before you came out here from the East. I simply kept to the house all those months. The child was delivered. I wasn’t allowed to hold it, which was a mercy, I suppose. It was given away. I wasn’t told whether it was a boy or a girl child, although I always fancied that it was a girl because of its first cry, which sounds silly, of course, although it’s really not. I’m quite certain I’m right. I’ve been thinking of her off and on this evening. She would be nearly eighty years old now, if she were alive. It’s almost funny, isn’t it?”

  “In a sense, I guess it is.”

  “Part of my memory is gone, including the childbirth itself. Most of my memory has come back to me, but not that. I know it happened, all right, but I have the vague idea that I’m not remembering the incident itself, but that I’m remembering memories. I recall the months that led up to it, but the day itself is vague. I’ve been s
itting here wondering where it went.”

  “I have it,” Colin said.

  “You have it?” She looked at his face. He apparently wasn’t making fun. “What do you mean, you have it?”

  “As I said, that’s the cost of what happened to you, to all of us that day. That kind of traveling exacts a toll. Wait here.”

  He got up and went to the side porch. When he returned he held a small velvet bag in his hands. He sat down, pulled the mouth of the bag open, and spilled the contents out onto the tabletop next to May’s chair. The object was an inkwell: misshapen, cracked, and dirty, as if it had been salvaged from a burned-down house. She had the uncanny feeling that it belonged to her, that it had always belonged to her, although she was certain that it hadn’t. The dark cracks seemed almost suggestively hieroglyphic, as if they spelled out familiar but forgotten secrets in an arcane way.

  “Take it in your hand,” Alex said. “But be ready to drop it. You can drop it any time you want. Remember that.”

  She looked at him for a moment, mystified. And then, carefully, she picked up the inkwell and held it in her palm. …

  Immediately she lay in her own bed, at home. She gasped for breath as the pain of her labor diminished. Jeanette, she saw, sat in a chair by the window. The midwife stood by the bureau. For a time she lay in perfect tranquillity, too worn out to think, and then, sharply and suddenly the pain started again, and she stiffened, heard herself gasp out loud …

  She found herself sitting in the chair again. She had dropped the inkwell, which lay next to its velvet bag again. Slowly, as if by evaporation, the memory of childbirth, of the joy and sorrow of that afternoon, faded from her mind now until she could hardly recall it. She looked at Colin, seeing sorrow in his eyes.

  “What did you lose?” she asked him.

  He shrugged and shook his head. “I only barely know. Like you said, I can remember memories, but the day itself…”

  “Did it have to do with Jeanette?”

  “Yes, it did. We went out to the picnic grounds at the park on one Tuesday afternoon. I remember that much, because it was nearly deserted, which it wouldn’t have been, say, on a Sunday. We … what I remember is that we were … happy together. I’ve retained that much, because that’s what I took away with me, if you see what I mean, but it’s futile to try to remember more.

  I wonder if old age isn’t like that, a closet full of memories long removed from their objects.”

  “It’s worse than that, I suppose. When you were in the well, in the water, what was it like for you? Oblivion?”

  “No. Time passed. I can’t say how or how much. They say that a person faced with death recalls his own past. I don’t know how to say this clearly, but I felt as if the bits and pieces of my own life revolved around me like a mill wheel, like stars going round. I wonder if our lives aren’t simply the sum of a thousand trifles.”

  She nodded. “I felt the time passing, too.

  “Did your life … pass before your eyes, as they say?”

  “Yes. Along with the certainty that my life, that all these things, were falling away from me. And then when I awoke, and I found myself here, all of it turned out to be true. I’m no older, really, but all of that life is in shadow now, isn’t it? All of it has passed away. That’s …difficult.”

  “You’re young,” Colin said. “You’ll have a new life.”

  “I was tolerably fond of the old one.”

  “So was I.”

  There was the sound of shuffling then, of quiet footsteps on the wooden floor behind them. Colin stood up suddenly, his eyes staring. May thought of Jeanette, and turned to follow his gaze. But it wasn’t Jeanette; a man stood just beyond the doorway, half-hidden in the darkness of the porch. Colin reached for the leather bag that lay on the table.

  “Let it lie,” the man said.

  For a moment May couldn’t breathe. She recognized Alex’s voice. Age hadn’t changed it. He held a pistol in his hand, which was extended into the light.

  “Hello, May.” He stepped forward into the room, and despite his obvious effort to appear to be indifferent, he stared hard at her, reacting, perhaps, to the years that had come between them, to her having traveled through those years unchanged. He looked old to her, unhappy. “Sit down,” he said to Colin, and he gestured with the pistol at Colin’s chair. “What do we have on the table?”

  “Not anything that you would want,” Colin said.

  “I want very little beyond settling a score.” He looked down at the inkwell, then looked at May. “It’s hers?”

  “Yes,” Colin said.

  “I’ll take it. You’re right that it’s not what I want, but I’ll take it. And now that that’s settled, I’ll take the glass dog, too.”

  “She doesn’t have it. It’s still in the well,” Colin said.

  “I think you’re lying. But I don’t think May will lie. You brought the girl’s memory along with you, didn’t you, May?” He winked at her and smiled.

  “To hell with the glass dog,” she said. “And to hell with you. I don’t even know you. I never knew you, and I certainly don’t know you now. You’ve changed out of all recognition, Alex. The years have worn you away even further than you were already worn.”

  “I’m hurt by that, May. I truly am. But I don’t have time to go into what the years have done to us. The interesting thing to me is that you no longer have any identity. Colin doesn’t either. Not really. No family, nobody who gives a damn if you disappear. Our world, the ranchos, our houses and families—all of it is gone. We’re all strangers now, aren’t we? Ghosts. We’re all lonely. If I were a sentimentalist, I’d weep, but I gave that up when I was six, which was a hell of a long time ago. Here’s what I think. I think that you’re going to tell me where the glass dog is, May, because I can see in your face that you know. You might be one of the only people left on earth who doesn’t tell lies, which you’ll find is a monstrous disadvantage to you.”

  “I don’t have to lie.”

  “No, you don’t. You’ve already told me what I asked. Where is it, then?”

  “Find it yourself.”

  He stared at her for a moment. “May, I’ll kill Colin. I’ll dump his corpse into the well. No one will ever find his bones, I can assure you. And nobody besides you will care. I’ve waited years, May, biding my time, you might say. I’ve got no more time to bide.”

  There was a noise from outside the house now, a rattling sound. Alex pointed the pistol in Colin’s direction and glanced back at the porch, where the sound had seemed to come from. Although it was dark, May could see that the porch door had swung open, was still open, and she felt the night wind drift into the room like a living presence. Alex stood still for a moment, waiting, listening to the silence. He licked his lips, then leveled the pistol at Colin, who sat transfixed in his chair, his hands gripping the chair arms.

  “Now, May,” Alex said, putting both hands on the pistol grip and stepping back a pace.

  May stared at him, trying to look as impassive as he did.

  “Plead with her,” he said to Colin, who glanced away from the pistol, meeting May’s eyes. Colin said nothing, but May could see that he wanted to. Probably Alex would kill both of them if she let it go that far. Probably Colin knew that. …

  “You don’t want to die after all this time, Colin,” Alex said. “You were very brave by the well the last time we met. You’re no fighter, my friend, but you tried. Try again now. Ask May to give you your life.” He cocked the pistol, then aimed it again. “Five seconds,” he said.

  “I don’t have it,” May said. “Jeanette had it. It’s in the well, Alex, like Colin said.”

  There was the crack of gunfire. May screamed and stood up out of her chair, throwing herself across Colin, who lurched sideways, his own chair tipping over and slamming down onto the tiles of the hearth. Something hit her in the middle of the back and then clattered to the wooden floor, spinning to a stop in front of her face. It was the pistol.

 
Alex lay sprawled across the chair she herself had just been sitting in. She heard the rasping sound of someone trying to breathe, and realized that it was Alex, that it was he who had been shot and not Colin. There was no other sound; no one had entered the house. The porch door was still open. Alex shuddered, rattling in his throat, and then lay still and silent. She listened to the sound of Colin’s breathing, and she realized that Colin was waiting just like she was, but long moments passed before they finally stood up.

  IT WAS THREE in the morning before Colin had finished burying the body beneath the clay floor of the carriage house. A foot or so down the clay had given out, and beneath it lay the sandy soil of an old river bottom. Colin had buried the body deeply, tamping the soil back in around it, breaking up the surface clay and stamping it solidly over the grave, raking it smooth and tamping it down again. He was pale and haggard, and his clothes were filthy, and despite the shivering cold he was running with sweat. The pick and shovel work had blistered his hands, which were bloody, and he worked now to clean the blood off the wooden handle of the spade with a wet rag.

  “I covered his body with lime,” he said, explaining to May. His voice was husky.

  She leaned tiredly against the closed side door of the garage. “I guess I don’t want to know any more about it,” she said.

  “Who shot him, though?”

  “Maybe it was our guardian angel. Alex would haves killed you, you know. I thought he had, at first.”

  “Well, it was hardly our guardian angel,” he said. “Guardian angels don’t carry guns. Whoever it was killed Alex in order to kill Alex, not to save us. Somebody followed him here.”

  “This is a little like a dream to me, Colin. I guess it’s because I’m new to this world, but I can’t care very much who shot Alex or why. What he said was true. I have no family, no friends besides you. I don’t exist—not in any real sense. You’ve had twenty years to get caught up in things again, and that makes you more solid. I’m just a ghost, like Alex said.”