Where There is Rain  by  Anne Valente   

     A light rain pelts the bar-room windows, the glassy panes reflecting pairs of headlights as they cut through the evening fog outside.  The bar is dank, near-deserted save for two guys shooting pool in the corner, their FedEx uniforms still on after a long day of work.  Adrian and Nick sit at the bar, the only other two patrons in the entire place, and the 9 o’clock news hums on a television screen above their heads.  Adrian can hear the hollow clinking of billiard balls as Nick rambles on, waving a Miller Lite in one hand and an unfiltered Pall Mall in the other.  Adrian hates the smell of smoke, but he nods and listens anyway as Nick’s cigarette carves trails of white in the air, the tendrils escaping toward the ceiling. 

            “And this new guy we’ve got working in the planetarium,” Nick is saying, his eyes wide, “I don’t think he even knows what the Hubble Telescope is!  I mean, Jesus Christ!  Who’s working in HR that gets these people hired now?”

            He takes a swig of beer and crushes the last of the Pall Mall into a glass ashtray, where three other crumpled stumps already lay.  He starts to reach into his back pocket for another, but interrupts himself before his fingers make it.

            “It’s just so goddamn frustrating.  I’m telling you, the Public Museum is a piece of shit.  At least the Art Museum is an institution you can be proud of.  And you can actually tell people you work there, you lucky bastard.” 

            Adrian smiles faintly, but says nothing.  His eyes are on the pool table, where one of the FedEx guys has just sunk the eight ball.  The newscast turns from a local homicide to national and international developments.

            “Hey, are you even listening to me?” Nick’s fingers have found their fifth cigarette, and he fidgets with a Bic lighter that sputters on low butane. “We didn’t even have to come out tonight, but you said you wanted to get out of your apartment.”

            “I did.” Adrian picks at the corner of his Newcastle coaster, the thick cardboard splitting into layers.  He thinks of his empty apartment, then of ordering another beer, the one in his hands already half-empty.

Having lit his fifth Pall Mall, Nick leans his head back to exhale, and his eyes rest on the television above them.  A suited anchorman is reporting live from New Delhi, where a severe drought grips the country after monsoon rains have failed to come.  Nick takes another drag from his cigarette, the lit tip glowing orange.

 “Christ, sucks for India. Too bad they can’t have some of our shit weather.” He waves his cigarette toward the windows, where tiny drops of rain streak paths down the panes.

            But Adrian isn’t listening.  Without looking up, he already knows.  As he stares down into the cavernous bottleneck of his beer, its label already peeled back and tattered from sitting in his hands too long, something just clicks.  He doesn’t even have to look at the television screen.

India.  Of course that’s where she is. 

            He thinks of his apartment again, and when Nick asks if he wants another beer, he doesn’t resist. 

            The sunlight is what wakes him, at 8 a.m. as it streaks through the blinds of his bedroom window and hits his unshaven face.  He wakes up dry-mouthed and hung over, his side of the bed rumpled and messy while hers remains untouched, the pillow undented and the sheets smooth as glass.

            As Adrian shuttles through his morning routine, a half-hour behind schedule, he knows that this is what it means to be with her.  The late nights, followed by hastened mornings of spilled coffee, unironed dress shirts and the realization that he has forgotten to brush his teeth when he’s already in the car, halfway to the museum, the heat just starting to kick in – these things are what life must be, if she is to be in it. 

            She never tells him where she’s going, when she goes.  It always just happens, without much warning save the few times that he’s caught her, in the middle of the night when he’s gotten up for a drink of water or to use the bathroom, and he’s found her lying awake, her knees pulled to her chest, her darkened eyes staring vacantly toward the bedroom window as if focusing on some distant point that no one can see but her.  Those instances were never evidence enough for him to say anything, and he always fell back asleep without much thought.  But looking back now, he sees the correlations, and he knows that each of those times, it was only a matter of days before she was gone again. 

            This time, there were no midnight warnings.  He had simply come home from work the week before, dropped his keys on the kitchen table, and understood the eerie calm to be another absence that he still, even now, can’t prepare himself to accept.

            He pulls into his parking spot, the same space that has housed his teal-blue Mazda for two years now, and walks into the museum, wondering whether there might be a stray piece of gum in his desk that will mask the cotton breath that his toothbrush forgot to eradicate.  As he walks, his coat shielding him against the lakefront winds that whip through Milwaukee, he also thinks about his computer and how the first thing he looks up today will be the weather patterns in northern India. 

            It is a familiar feeling, really – the obsession with climate, the fact that the Weather Channel’s website tops the bookmarked pages on his internet server.  He checks the weather hourly, once he knows where she is, and waits for the rain to come.  Because once it does, once the pixels and data scramble through time and space and reassemble themselves on his computer screen to report the first appearances of precipitation, then that is when he knows she will finally come home.

            She never tells him before but only afterward, once the news breaks and conditions start to improve.  In the past it was better, when she was closer, like when wildfires broke out in Colorado or when the expense of irrigation began to overwhelm Arizona.  In those times, it was only when he saw the salvaging rains on the news that the phone call came, her voice floating hushed but firm across the line: “It’s done – I’m coming home now.”  But this time, when in the first few days he heard no news of drought within the continental states, he knew it had to be farther.  And then, last night, he had known without a doubt.

            When he reaches his desk, he rummages through the drawers and finds no gum as he waits for his computer to boot up.  Once he logs in, he waits with a fixed gaze until his internet homepage pops onscreen, and he clicks straight to the weather page.  He types in the location, and sinks a little in his chair when he sees that India shows no sign of rain in the coming days.

            When Adrian returns home from work, his Mazda settling into the off-street parking behind their building, he checks the mailbox on his way up to the second floor and finds nothing of consequence, only an Ameren bill and a coupon leaflet.  He drops both the mail and his keys on the kitchen table, then moves to the kitchen sink where he stands for a minute, taking in a breath.  The refrigerator murmurs, and he can hear his laptop droning quietly from the bedroom.  The apartment buzzes on through its daily routine, and the sound of his own breath mingles into its steady hum.

            Adrian reaches up and pulls an old, plastic Chicago Cubs cup from the cabinets overhead, a relic from the summer he spent in the city two years ago.  He’d had an internship at the Art Institute that summer, and that was when he had met Nora.  She had been bartending at a little pub in Lakeview, just around the corner from the studio apartment he had subleased for the summer, and he had gone in regularly to watch weeknight games after commuting back from downtown.  It wasn’t the greatest place to watch a Cubs game, with one small TV up above the bar, but it was close to his apartment.  She had a tattoo of a dragonfly on her left bicep, a conversation point that got them talking, and it was only later, once he had explored the entirety of her body, that he also discovered a constellation of Aquarius on the small of her back.

            He fills the Cubs cup with tap water, which spews from the faucet at full force, and he takes it out to their balcony where he waters Nora’s basil and sage plants, both in clay pots on the ground.  The November air is starting to affect them, he can tell, but he waters them anyway.  Nora has set up tiny scarecrows made of chopsticks in the potting soil, to keep the birds away, but he’s not sure if they’ve helped.  He can see little nicks in the basil leaves, and the sage looks sparser than three days before, when he last watered both of them.

            As Adrian returns to the kitchen and begins heating up a can of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup, he pulls the New York Times crossword from his workbag, a mid-day reward that he hadn’t gotten around to over the lunch hour.  It is Wednesday, and the puzzle is already bordering on too hard, but he begins scratching in letters nonetheless as he waits for his soup to finish heating.  It is only when he arrives at 16 down, the clue reading “conveys water from one place to another,” that the memory of the first time she told him suddenly overwhelms him.

            It had been three months after they’d started dating.  He was back in Milwaukee, working at the Art Museum for what had been a month now, and she was up visiting for an unseasonably cold weekend in early October.  They were sitting on his balcony as the sun slipped behind a pair of maple trees, discussing the details of what would soon make it their balcony.  She would move in December, and he would start sending out feelers for bars that were hiring.  He was in the middle of saying that he’d seen a “help wanted” sign at Murphy’s Pub on Wells when he noticed a shadow pass across her face, her brow furrowing just slightly. 

            “I need to tell you something,” she said, pulling her green sweater tighter around her body and squinting into the sunset. 

            He felt something drop deep inside him, with the familiarity of words that never brought anything good.  He stared into the twilight with a vague awareness that the muscles in his jaw had tightened, steeling him against the news that maybe she had met someone else, or that she had simply decided to stay in Chicago after two months of long-distance phone calls and promises that the miles between them were only temporary. 

            But it was neither of those things.  Not even close.  He heard her exhale sharply, then she blurted out five words that he was still trying to make sense of, even now, after two years of knowing that this is their reality, that this is what must be because this is who she is.

            “I can make it rain.”

            He had turned to her, a strange sense of both release and contraction brimming within his chest, and had searched her face, looking for some sign that would instruct him on how to interpret what she’d said.  She still wasn’t looking at him, but in profile he could see the dark expression begin to melt, her eyes filling with tears. 

            He had sat silently, perhaps stunned, as she then began to describe something that she herself didn’t seem to understand, but told him what she knew.  Nora had first discovered it in fifth grade, in the girls’ restroom at her elementary school, when a group of her classmates had tried to summon Bloody Mary in the bathroom mirrors after three of them had seen a PBS special on urban legends the night before.  Nora said that she hadn’t even know who Bloody Mary was, that she had simply followed the girls into the bathroom during recess out of curiosity, but that once the girls had started chanting the name over and over into the water-flecked mirrors, she had covered her ears and started screaming, eyes clenched shut.  She said she couldn’t really remember what had happened next, only that once she had opened her eyes and looked around, every sink faucet was gushing water and all the girls had run from the bathroom crying, except her friend Jane who just stood there, staring at her, a urine stain creeping down the legs of her jeans.

            It hadn’t happened that way again, she had said, only rain thereafter.  She couldn’t explain it, she had told him, wiping the tears from her eyes with the back of her green sweater.  She didn’t even know how she did it.  She only knew that she could squeeze her eyes shut if she wanted, and once she opened them again the heavens would have broken loose, and rain was everywhere. 

            Adrian snaps to attention when he hears a sizzling from the stove, the soup boiling over and bubbling onto the red-hot coils.  He jumps to remove the small pot from the range and pours the soup into a ceramic bowl, garnishing it with oyster crackers.

            As he brings it to the table, he remembers her words that night, her eyes still on the trees that were just silhouettes now, the sun descended into dusk.  I can use this for good. 

She would move to Milwaukee in December, and she would do it to be with him.  But the bartending, what she’d initially told him was extra cash to eventually fund a master’s program, was for plane tickets instead. 

            Adrian blows on his spoon, the chicken noodle soup still too hot.  The spoon’s metal will scald his tongue, he knows, so he continues studying the crossword, waiting for the broth to cool.  He’s scrawled out half the board by now, but 16 down is still vacant.

            As he concentrates on the black and white boxes, he finds himself wondering how she just knows where to go.  He has never known why she can’t tell him, before she goes.  He figures it is as much a mystery to her as it is to him, but he doesn’t know for sure.

            He picks up his spoon and takes a tentative sip, and just as he registers that the soup is no longer blistering hot, he visualizes the right answer on the grid before him.  He scrawls aqueduct into the vertical boxes under number sixteen, sets his pen down, and eats his dinner amidst the kitchen’s quiet hum. 

            After work on Friday, Adrian swings by the Public Museum to pick up Nick, and they head to the Water House Brewery for their weekly standing happy hour.  Adrian can’t remember a Friday when they didn’t usher in the weekend this way, ever since he met Nick at a conference for Milwaukee museum employees two years ago.  Most of Adrian’s college friends had moved away by then, to Chicago or down to St. Louis, and he had found Nick’s easy, immediate company comforting somehow. 

            “I almost didn’t make it out for lunch today, what with all the fucking school buses parked in the lot,” Nick says from the passenger seat as he fumbles through his workbag, looking for a cigarette. “We had a million kids in today, all flocking to see Tom Hanks narrate some shit about the moon at the IMAX.”    

            Adrian thinks about his own workday, and how the past two days have been nothing but checking membership records and scanning the online weather report.  He knows he’d easily take a day of Nick’s job over this, maneuvering around schoolchildren and running the sound board for astronomy presentations, but he doesn’t say anything.

            The bar is packed when they arrive, with men in ties and women in A-line skirts, all having come from offices across Milwaukee.  They find two seats at the bar, where Nick orders a Miller Lite draft, Adrian a Budweiser bottle. 

              “So where’s Nora been?” Nick asks as he scans a menu of bar food, eyeing the appetizers.  Adrian stiffens to the question, knowing that it would have had to come sooner or later but having no response prepared. 

            “She’s on vacation with her sister,” he says, taking a sip of his beer. “Sometimes they take these trips together, I think this time they drove out to the beach in North Carolina.”

            “You think?” Nick signals to the bartender and places an order for a basket of cheese fries. “Well, Murphy’s is the place to work then, isn’t it?  Seems they don’t give a shit how much vacation time you take.” 

            Adrian looks out the window, which is beginning to darken as the day’s sunlight slowly fades.  He notices a couple standing next to the window, a guy in his mid-twenties with his hand on the small of his girlfriend’s back, while she laughs with a beer in her hand.  Adrian wonders how long they’ve been dating, and if it’s been awhile, how well the guy really knows her – if he knows whether she has attached earlobes, or whether the smell of gasoline is strangely the most appealing scent she can imagine.

            As he watches them, Adrian remembers that the smell of laundry is Nora’s favorite, from a time last year when they’d been folding a fresh batch of clothing and she’d suddenly pulled him into the pile of still-warm sweatshirts and linens.  As they had lain there, burrowed together beneath layers of dryer-warmed cotton, she had told him that she’d always loved the smell of newly-washed laundry – it was only two hours later, long after the warmth of those clothes finally wore off, that they had actually gotten around to folding them. 

The laundry, he knows for sure.  But as he watches the couple, now sneaking a quick kiss as the woman sets her beer down and heads to the restroom, Adrian scans his brain for an image of Nora’s earlobes, finding nothing.   

            “So when is she coming back?” Nick asks as the bartender sets the basket of cheese fries down on the bar.  Nick orders another Miller Lite and asks for a shaker of salt.

            Adrian looks down at his beer bottle, tracing his index finger around its translucent rim.  The smell of grease is beginning to nauseate him. 

            “I don’t know,” he says, waiting for the pointed, puzzled response.

            It is late when Adrian finally climbs the stairs to his apartment, unbuttoning his coat, the warmth of liquor making the strain of physical exertion all the more uncomfortable.  He fumbles with his keys, dropping them only once, and it is the alcohol that makes him forget to check the online news when he finally falters through the front door and into the bathroom.

            As he brushes his teeth, which he has this time remembered to do, he wonders how much longer he will do this, how long it will be before these departures erase not only her earlobes but also the laundry, that jasmine is her favorite type of tea, that she wears jackets in seventy-degree weather because she has poor circulation, and that she likes to roll down the windows when she sings in the car.  He thinks of them as a helix, two strands of the same DNA, as it is the only image that comes to him at this hour as he stands before the bathroom mirror, wondering who will unravel first, which of them will come undone, who will break under the weight of her burden.

            He removes his smoke-filled clothing and edges into bed, using only one side of the queen-sized mattress out of habit.  He is almost asleep when the phone rings, on his bedside table, the mobile’s vibrations sending it chattering across the wood finish. 

            He doesn’t have to check the caller ID to know that it will be an unknown number, originating from a pay phone or calling card, and that despite all misgivings, despite the apartment’s constant drone and the plastic containers of half-eaten canned soup he has carelessly left on the kitchen counter, he will pick up the phone and feel his chest flood and spill over when he hears her voice, soft and steady, a bridge extended across the void, “It’s done – I’m coming home.”