Send Down the Rain(72)

And where most people will tell you that in a time like that they saw some great light, I did not. My world went black. Not a sliver of light anywhere.

Since I was nine years old, while I had tried to force my mind to forget, my body had kept a debt ledger, a record of wrongs committed against it. When those things were spoken out loud, brought out into the open, they were torn from their cages, doors ripped off the hinges. What had so long been imprisoned in me now left my body in much the same way the pain had left Allie’s. Involuntarily and with great speed.

The only way I know to describe what I felt is to say that my chest exploded.

And it felt good.





44

My mother held the draft notice in her hand. Her hand was shaking. Tears were dripping off her chin. She was leaning on the hood of my Corvette, staring out across the water. I turned her toward the beach, and we started walking. For a mile, neither of us said a word.

Finally she spoke. “Bobby never met a stranger. He trusts everybody. It’s one of the reasons I love him, but he won’t last a week over there.”

She was right. He wouldn’t.

She crossed her arms. “And you’ll be getting a notice in a few months.” We kept walking. An endless shoreline. No hope in sight.

Mom had worked two, sometimes three jobs since Dad left. She’d clothed us, fed us, nursed cuts and bruises, put up with us. A single mom raising two boys, she’d given us everything she could. She had denied herself any small pleasure to see that we had shoes like the other guys, so they wouldn’t make fun of us. To make sure Bobby had glasses that allowed him to read the chalkboard. To keep a roof over our heads. When times were tight she shopped at the Salvation Army and then wrapped the clothes in K-Mart bags so we wouldn’t know. Mom had not known a life of luxury or ease, but she’d worked hard to make sure we had not known a world as harsh as the one she was living in. Walking down the beach, she held the piece of paper that was going to take everything she had in this world.

“I’ve got a little money saved up.” She pushed her hair out of her face. “I want you to take your brother and go to California. Maybe Canada. You can come back when it’s over.” She straightened. “There’s no shame in that.”

I eyed the paper. “Does Bobby know?” I asked.

She stared out across the ocean. Shaking her head. “I couldn’t . . .”

Mom stared at the paper, holding it in both hands. Then with anger bubbling, she tore it in two. Then again. Then she just stood there with the four pieces of her heart crumpled in one fist. “I will not live to see both my sons buried. I will not die a childless woman.” She pointed at the Corvette, her resolve growing. “I want you to leave tonight.”

“Mom?”

She knew what I was going to say before I said it. It’s why she had brought me out there. Her lip trembled and she shook her head.

Dark clouds had blown in from the east. The air was thick with electricity. Lightning flashed in the distance. The wind turned and blew in from the south. We saw the sheets of rain rolling toward us. The earth bloomed and smelled of that pungent freshness that rises up out of the dirt just before the rain. I stretched out my hand, uncurled her fingers, and picked the four tattered pieces off her palm.

“Everyone’s always saying how we look like twins,” I said.

She tried to sound strong. “No.”

I looked at my mom. “Don’t tell him until I’m gone.”

She knew I was right. She could keep one son or lose both. She whispered a second time, “No,” but there was no resolve in it. It was as if she were talking to God more than me.

She crumpled into a pile on the sand just as the rain came down in sheets. The heavens opened and rocked the earth. A dozen times, maybe more, lightning flashed. At one point the hair on my neck stood up, and the thunderclap cracked above us.

Mom clenched her fists and tried to hold back the sobs, but soon the wave of emotions crashed over her. She rose up on her knees and screamed at the storm. “They’re all I’ve got! All I’ve got!”

The thunder cracked. Lightning hit the dune next to us.

She turned and spoke into the flash. “What have I left to give?”

Another flash. Another thunderclap. Mom’s voice was broken. As was she. She fell on me, wrapped her arms around my neck, and sobbed. I held my mom and I held those pieces of paper. And right then and there I buried the truth in me.

And the weight of it all crushed me.

Having spent its venom, the angry storm softened and blanketed us in large drops. As the rain washed the anger and tears, my mom stood. Drenched head to toe. She leaned into me and pressed her forehead to mine. When she spoke, she wasn’t speaking to me. “Watch over my boy . . . all the days of his life . . . and let him live to see the rain.” She closed her eyes. “Send down the rain.”


FOR FIFTY-THREE YEARS I’D lived in a storm. Lightning. Thunderclap. High wind. But when my brother told the truth about us in that courtroom, the lies I’d buried came unearthed and my chest exploded, and for the first time since that afternoon on the beach with my mom, I felt the rain on my face. I tasted the drops. And they tasted like tears.

On the floor of that courtroom, something in me came alive, but it wasn’t my heart. At least not the one they were attempting to shock back to life. It was lower down. More toward the center of my gut. While chaos ensued in the courtroom, I lay on the carpet staring into a dark world. Then, without invitation, memories flooded like films across my eyelids. With the truth released, my body remembered the storm that my mind had forgotten. The memories were out of sequence and held no rhyme or reason. They just surfaced. The only common thread was that they were moments charged with emotion, and yet I’d not cried in any of them. I’d felt nothing.