Father of the Rain Read Online Free PDF Page B

so many stars it’s hard to find the dippers or Cassiopeia. They seem to all be receding even as I watch them, but everything feels far away this summer; everything feels like it’s backing away from me. Heidi explains to me that most of the stars we’re seeing don’t exist anymore. They’ve died. But because they’re so far away and their light takes so long to get to us, we can still see them, even though they’re not there anymore.
    “Aren’t there any new ones?” I ask.
    “Yes, but we can’t see them yet.”
    I crane my head up and stare at the dead stars. I don’t like that we’re seeing light from things that don’t actually exist. I feel how flimsy a life is, how flimsy the universe is. I’m just going to die and not even leave a spit of light behind. I jerk my head down to the earth but itdoesn’t help. There are no streetlights. I can’t seem to take a deep breath. My hands and then arms begin to tingle, like they have fallen asleep, like they can’t get enough blood. In a split second, for no good reason, my heart starts racing, faster than it ever does in the post office, so fast it seems like there’s nothing for it to do but explode. I’m dying. I feel suddenly sure of this. I keep walking but I feel like crouching, curling up in a small ball and begging someone to make the feeling pass. My brother and Heidi walk ahead and it seems like they are about to step off a huge cliff and I know that I’m dying but I can’t call to them. My voice is gone. I’m disappearing. They turn back down the point road. I urge my legs to follow them.
    “No they’re not,” I hear my brother say.
    “Yes they are.”
    My brother laughs and for a second he sounds just like my father. He taps her head. “What do you have in there, marshmallow fluff?”
    “It’s true. My dad and I used to take walks at night, and he taught me about the stars.”
    “The french fry maker is a closet astronomer?”
    She punches him. Hard. He laughs, then punches her back just as hard.
    I can’t get enough air. I can’t get my heart to slow down. I can’t even feel any space between the beats.
    “Screw you,” Heidi says, and takes off running.
    “Garvey,” I begin, wanting to tell him that I need to go to the hospital.
    “She’s not mad,” he says. “She likes to play a little rough sometimes.”
    The sound of his talking to me is soothing. “She’s nice,” I say. My voice is strange, like from a tin can. But I hope he’ll keep talking and he does. He tells me that she has this birthmark on her hip that drives him wild and that she kisses like a catfish in heat.
    When we get back to the house she isn’t there. Garvey calls for her and she answers from far away. We find her sitting on the grass outside Cousin Jeremy’s house.
    “All the driveways look the same,” she says.
    My brother leans down and she pulls him to her and I don’t stay for the rest. I decide I’m not going to die and go back to my grandparents’ house.
    Every Friday morning, my mother drives down to Boston to see her lawyer. She stays in the city for dinner, and I fall asleep on the couch waiting up for her. She brings back a present each time: a jump rope, a deck of magic cards, a Watergate coloring book about people called the Plumbers and a hippie talking to a faceless man named Deep Throat in a parking garage. The rest of the days she stays on the point with me. She says I can take sailing lessons, but I don’t want to. I like being with her. We listen to the music I brought—Helen Reddy, Cat Stevens, The Carpenters—in our room. We ride bikes to the ice cream shop on the main road. I teach her how to play Spit but she never beats me. She never leaves to go to a luncheon or set up a fundraiser or attend a rally. When she has to fill a prescription, buy a present, or get her hair done, I go with her, like I used to go everywhere with my father. She tells me stories about her relatives, about her childhood, about books she’s read