Search and Rescue by Michael Chitwood

Author:Michael Chitwood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 2018-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

For the Rain and All

In the shower, she was thinking of her late mother, of what she might have wanted that she never got. She used two towels coming out, one for her hair which she bundled up turban-style and one around her torso after she had dried with it. The man was standing beside her bed. The tips of the fingers of his right hand touched the bed spread. He had the magazine from her night stand in his other hand held out in front of him. He had been looking at the cover, a woman in a jogging suit with a headline promising fitness.

“What do you want?”

“This says you can live longer. Do you know how?”

“I haven’t read that article.”

“Why not? Don’t you want to live longer?”

“Yes. Would you please leave my bedroom.”

“Is this your room?”

“Yes, it is. Would you please leave.”

“Do you have a roommate?”

“I have a husband and a daughter.” She had read that you should say something to make yourself a person, give yourself a life.

“What do you want,” she said as she inched back toward the bathroom door. Maybe she could get it locked before he could get to her. Then what?

“I’m not sure I want to live longer,” he said. “I think I’m finished. That’s what the rain, when it rains, sounds like to me. It sounds like finished.”

“I’m sorry.”

“For what?’

“For the rain and all.”

“Don’t be,” he said. He turned to put the magazine back on the night stand.

She lurched into the bathroom and slammed the door, turning the latch to lock it. Then she listened. She took the towel from her head and covered her shoulders with it. She opened the medicine cabinet and got a nail file that she clutched in her fist, and she pressed the palm of her other hand against the locked door. She listened again. She couldn’t think of anything else to do. She said “Help me” to the tile floor. She waited.

She got chilled and pulled another towel from the linen closet, making sure to close the door without a sound and wrapped it around her waist under the one around her torso. Then she picked up the nail file again. She put her ear to the door. Would that really make a difference in what she heard? She waited. Two, three hours? She couldn’t tell how much time had passed. She looked at herself in the mirror. She started to comb her damp hair but thought, no, she shouldn’t do that. She was beginning to look like her mother. She rubbed some moisturizer under her eyes.

She couldn’t stay in here forever. She’d heard nothing. Was he still there? What had he wanted anyway? He’d seemed mild, maybe even slightly retarded. She’d rehearsed what he was wearing so she could describe it later. Brown cargo pants. A T-shirt that said “Switch.” White male. About 5’10.” Maybe 190 pounds.

She turned the latch as quietly as possible. What good would that do? Then she decided she should fling open the door, show some defiance.

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