Father of the Rain by Lily King

Author:Lily King [King, Lily]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0802145345
Amazon: B00AF55XPC
Publisher: Grove Press
Published: 2011-05-09T08:00:00+00:00

12

If I sleep, my dreams are a continuation of my thoughts and my thoughts are like muscles, flexing and twitching inadvertently and repetitively, squeezing but never quite hard enough. I feel certain, as one does in bed in the dark, that if I can line up the right sequence of thoughts I can solve the problem of my father, the problem of me and my father in the same room. My mind circles. But at some point through the thin lids of my eyes I begin to feel the slightest lifting of the night from the sky, and then I’m liberated from the cell of these useless thoughts, and I see eucalyptus trees, a narrow road, and a yellow door with a pale green window. My heart begins to pound. I’m free again. The little hollow of the driver’s seat is waiting for me. The radio works. Jonathan had it fixed for me last week. I’ll stop at Howard Johnson’s for breakfast. I’ll sit in the booth my mother and I sat in on the way to Lake Chigham. As I pack up my few things and make the bed neat and tight, just as she taught me, I’m aware of how mercurial my emotions are, how last night my mother felt lost to me in a terrifyingly permanent way, and today she feels close by. Death is like that. Death is mercurial, too.

The hallway is dark, the air moist. I smell the cedar balls in the old chest as I pass it. If I go down the front stairs I’ll see my father, who always leaves his door ajar. But the back stairs are a straight shot to the kitchen and out the door. These steps are steep and I take them slowly, the wallpaper with its relief of ivy and berries beneath my fingers as I descend, the worn steps full of old smells, and then the humming refrigerator at the bottom, the little wedge of space between it and the wall I used to fit in neatly, so warm in winter. The big dogs are downstairs for some reason. They leap to their feet when they see me.

“Don’t get up, fellas,” I whisper, giddy. “Please.”

They try to block my path. For the first time since I’ve been here, they seem to think I’m in charge. They seem to think I should be feeding them, and they push their noses into my thighs.

The table is clean, cleared of dishes, the blue cloth still on it with just a few grease spots from the lamb. In his careful, slanted boarding-school script my father has written: The pills should do the trick. Goodbye, Daley.

There are neurologists who postulate that we have not one but as many as eight brains tucked in our heads. At that moment I’m proof of it. Some of my brains are trying to misinterpret his words. Pills for the dogs? Antidepressants he didn’t tell me about? And some of my brains just want me to keep moving.

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