The Man Who Rained Read Online Free PDF Page B

shoulder, watching the flames play
among the cindered logs of the fire they had built, she took deep breaths of the timber smoke and felt the luxurious heat of the late lazy sun, the quick heat from the flames and the inner heat
she’d absorbed from the bottle of red wine they’d shared as they set the logs to burning. Peter opened another bottle, freed the cork with a whoop and filled her glass. The leaves
swayed, feather-light. Two squirrels whirled from trunk to trunk. A bird whistled as it flapped through the glade. And then he did the thing that broke her.
    ‘Elsa,’ he said, as he reached into the pocket of his jeans. He pulled his fist out, clenched around something. He opened his hand and a ring lay there in his palm.
    ‘Elsa ... will you marry me?’
    She stared at that small golden loop. Its diamond eye stared back. Her eyes followed the band’s circumference, round and round and round. When she picked it up the world seemed suddenly
very heavy. Leaves and blades of grass lay flattened, weighty as ornaments. She looked through the ring as if it were a spyglass and saw the woods leaning in, the twigs scratching, the bird leering
beady-eyed from a bent branch. Her stomach lurched. The world changed, realigning like a dial.
    ‘Elsa?’
    She dropped the ring back into Peter’s palm and choked back a sudden barrage of tears.
    His eyebrows knotted. ‘Elsa ... Elsa, I love you.’
    She wept. When they had first started dating they had agreed with cool cynicism that love was just chemical flushes and electrical signals flowing through the brain, something tacky that
belonged in souvenir shops. ‘Love,’ she had declared once to Peter, ‘is just the heart on an I Heart NYC baseball cap.’ And he had agreed with her.
    Yet here and now he was deadly serious about it, down on his knees and looking up at her.
    And she did not love him, even if she cared for him deeply, and she did not know whether she even believed in love, and she had lost her father, and she wanted to go like he had, up with the
tornado to see him in whichever place he had left the earth for, and she could not explain that to Peter and could not explain why she was falling apart like this, and she did not know anything
about herself any more.

 
3

CLOUD ON THE MOUNTAIN
    The next morning, in the scorched front yard, Elsa found Kenneth Olivier hard at work digging out weeds with a trowel. He stood up straight when he saw her, dusting the
bleached soil from his fingertips.
    ‘Off exploring again?’
    She nodded. She had her sunglasses and a thick layer of sunscreen on, as well as a water bottle in a bag hanging against her hip. ‘I’m going up to the mountains.’
    He looked reflective. ‘Which one?’
    She paused, then pointed. ‘That one.’ Three of the four peaks were visible from here. The fourth, the Merrow Wold, was hidden behind a low cloud in the south. The rest of the sky
remained an unbroken blue, but that cloud above the Merrow Wold was bleached like ash. In the north the broken pinnacles of the Devil’s Diadem glimmered in the sunlight, while to the east the
face of Drum Head was slowly emerging. Elsa, however, pointed to the western mountain, the hump-backed rise with slopes as dark as soot.
    ‘Old Colp,’ said Kenneth.
    ‘Yeah, that’s the one. On your map it says there’s a viewpoint. Near to a windmill, if my map-reading’s any good.’
    ‘Hmm. That windmill’s not there any more. The wind it was milling saw to that.’ He chuckled uneasily. ‘Be careful up there. These mountains are full of old mine
entrances. Some of them are only half-sealed.’
    ‘Don’t worry. I might look like a city girl, but I grew up in a spot even more remote than this.’
    He nodded, although she could tell she hadn’t convinced him. He looked embarrassed. ‘I beg your pardon, Elsa, I’m just an old man, fretting. I’ve been fretting a lot ever
since Michael went away.’
    She put a finger to her lips. ‘Don’t worry