Every Year, Rain is an in-progress, serialized supernatural thriller. This is Chapter Two. You can read Chapter One HERE.
Back in Chapter One, Everett met a homeless man with intimate knowledge of Everett’s thoughts and past. Everett was forced to make an impossible choice.
In this chapter, Everett chases a myth and wrestles with the past.
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“The Cruellest Month”
April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.
—T.S. Eliot
Beyond the fog of glass, out in the light morning rain that tapped on my windshield like an insistent fingernail, a child was singing.
When I tried to sit up, a pain like lightning struck my hip and threw me against the reclined seatback gasping. The singing kept on as I caught my breath. I wrapped my arm around the steering wheel, gritting against the pain as I slowly forced my body upright. The pedals cramped my feet, making it difficult to keep my leg extended, but I managed it and wiped the condensation from the window with my bandaged hand.
In the yard, the singing child swung a pink umbrella above her head, skipping through the puddles on the walkway to her blue-gabled house. Except for her rain boots, she was dressed for ballet, and her dark hair bobbed in a tight bun above her head. I was caught up in the sweetness of her singing, almost believing perpetual innocence was possible for this stranger child.
Then the nausea of exhaustion swept over me.
A hopeless denial had kept me awake since I’d last seen Malmacchío. Each night, I’d lain still as a corpse in bed, but sleep never came. I’d hobble to the bathroom to take a piss then lean against the wall by our nightstand, checking for a response to the unread text I’d sent to Daniel. I’d jockey my stiff leg back into bed, Jess would roll over, and the next minute, my phone would be back in my hand searching for new articles about Daniel Simmons. When the obituary populated the search results a few nights later, I’d had just enough time to catch a red-eye to Baltimore where I rented a car and drove the rest of the way to Connecticut.
But the memory was faint, and I couldn’t remember where the hell the turnoff was. During a midsummer day, I’d have been hard-pressed to distinguish between any of the roads that ran through those backwoods New England towns. Beneath a spring night’s clouded sky, sleep-deprived, I hadn’t stood a chance.
I’d driven through the town until the headlights revealed only smears of objects that my eyes could no longer hold in focus. Only then had Death’s cousin finally enticed me to pull off the dark road and shut my eyes.
As the little ballerina twirled in her driveway, I coaxed my palm over my swollen thigh, vainly trying to force the muscles to relax. The skin was as taut as a balloon stretched over a bowling ball—a hematoma, the nurse had told me after Jess dropped me off at Urgent Care. A sallow liquid had started to seep through and stain the bandages on my hands. Every bit of me ached. Just getting the cap off the Excedrin was a struggle, the bottle spinning in my gauzy grip until I leveraged my weight against the container and the dash. I popped a pill in my mouth.
When I looked back out the window, a man in a canvas jacket was strolling across the lawn, like a bulldozer toward the last remnant of affordable housing in a booming city. The man jabbed his finger toward the ground, presumably indicating where he intended to put the creep who’d been watching his daughter play. I put the car in drive and tore off, lucky to be able to see over the wheel considering how reclined I kept the seat to accommodate my bad leg.
Every countertop stool was occupied when I stepped into O’Rourke’s. The sizzle of bacon. The crunch and chime of eggs shattering against the rims of pans. It was a boy’s club of Irish and Italian vets in bomber jackets shouting to be heard over each other. I slid into the furthest booth, keeping my leg propped on the black cushion of the bench. The front of the diner was all glass block with the veiled gray light collecting like lost halos at their center. The sandstone cathedral of St. John’s, its arched windows and slate-tile steeple, rose up past the trench where unused railroad ties and old train cars lay forgotten amidst the faded spray of graffiti.
In the next booth, a man with the clean-cut look of a freshly shorn sheep eyed me uneasily and tucked his chin until the collar of his puffer vest shielded his face. It didn’t bother me. I tipped my head against the window. My eyelids felt like weights, and they slipped down easy.
A waitress cleared her throat.
“Can I help you with anything, sir?”
“Waiting on a friend,” I said without opening my eyes.
“I'm afraid these booths are reserved for customers.”
“A coffee, then.”
The only sound was grease frying, and I thought she had walked away, but a moment later she said, “Will you be able to pay for that coffee?”
I opened my eyes then. She wore a green apron tied above her waist and had twisted her brows into a shape she likely thought demanded to be taken seriously. The row of bomber jacket vets had stopped shouting, trying their hands at discreet observation. The whole diner seemed to be watching how things would play out. I stared down at my damp coat and the soiled bandages that peeked past the sleeves. I didn’t look like I could pay for a coffee.
The bell above the diner door jangled, and Nick stepped in, then stopped like he’d just found himself in a stranger’s apartment.
“You could hear a lease expire in here,” he announced as he folded his sunglasses onto the zipper of his track jacket.
I raised a hand to signal him to my booth. He had an athlete’s gait and a pair of skinny jeans that probably still had the tags on them. This seemed to satisfy the waitress, and she walked around the bar, and the usual din resumed, albeit somewhat subdued. Nick slid in across from me.
“Is this the look now? Tumbleweed couture? You look like you rolled across the country to get here.”
“I feel like I did,” I said.
“You already order?”
“Just coffee.”
Nick waved the waitress back to our booth even though she was already on her way with my mug.
“Bring us two orders of banana bread French toast, some corned beef hash, and eggs on the side; poached, easy. Another coffee while you’re up.”
He settled against the black cushion, stretched his arms over the bench back, and stared at me nodding.
“Yeah, I still see him. The old Everett King, somewhere in there. Back after forty years in the desert.”
“I’ve only been gone five.”
“Either way,” said Nick. “Looks like you had a fistfight with a burning bush. I gotta be honest, I’m surprised as hell to see you here.”
“It’s Daniel,” I said. “We were close. I had to come.”
The waitress slid a mug in front of Nick, sloshing coffee onto the table, then threw a pile of napkins down and walked away. Nick picked up the mug and wiped at the mess, looking sidewise at the waitress in disgust.
“There’s a pretty operative word in that sentiment,” he said. “You were close with a lot of people. How many of them have you kept up with since you and…” He twirled his mug in the air to conjure the name.
“Jess.”
“See, I don’t even know her name. And I can’t help but notice, she’s not here.”
I could still hear her voice following me as far as the porch before I drove away: “Why won’t you let me understand?” As if I were withholding simply out of spite. It was wholly another life, filled with people she did not know and places she could never picture. It would have been like trying to define the logic of a dream.
“Don’t get me wrong,” said Nick. “I’m glad you’re here. I don’t mind saying Sam and I’ve missed you. Daniel did too. He was always talking about ‘Everett this. Everett that.’ Always looking for you. But you never looked back.”
“You never visited.”
“Never got an invitation.”
He tore a bag of sugar and tipped it into his coffee. Then another. It was hard to resent Nick for making me feel guilty. He wasn’t the kind to wound with malice. And he was right; I’d tried to let them all slip into the past. But April always came around.
“Did he ever tell you about the stone throne?”
Nick shook his head. He dumped another bag of sugar into his mug.
So, he didn’t know.
In the woods of a small town, a seat made of stone breaks the ground between two elder oaks. Thick cords of vine leech hairy tendrils into the bark, weave around the trunks of the oaks, and hang from their boughs in lazy arcs, crisscrossing through the canopy that shrouds the throne. Kids of any age seek it out, often just to look at it. They whisper to each other in its presence, and to the uninitiate, they reveal with those whispers that anyone who dares to sit upon the throne is doomed to die, seven years later, an amount of time as abstract and distant in their futures as the past they can remember having lived. Long enough for the claim to be forgotten. To remain untested. They never said how you’d die.
“Seven years ago,” I said. “We dared each other to sit on that throne.”
Nick stared at me as if he were waiting for a punchline that never came. He chuckled anyway and took a sip of his overly-sweetened coffee.
“Kids and their silly superstitions,” he said.
“You don’t think there could be anything to it?”
Nick cleared his throat and rubbed his fingers viciously above his eyebrow like he was trying to scrub a stain from skin.
“Daniel died because he was driving recklessly on a rainy night. Not because the time ran out on some curse’s clock,” said Nick. “Plus you’re still here.”
“What do you mean?”
“You should be dead too,” he said. “You sat on the throne, and here you are.”
I couldn’t bring myself to tell him I’d reneged on my part of the deal.
“You’ve got a point.”
When the waitress brought out the food, I didn’t have an appetite. Watching Nick scarf two orders of French toast and corned beef was like watching a lion gorge himself on wildebeest. When the plates were clear he settled back against the cushion with a satisfied smirk and placed his hands on his belly.
“Where have you been staying?”
“Slept in my car last night,” I said.
“Why does that not surprise me?”
Nick pulled something out of his jacket pocket and tossed it across the table. I lurched forward to grab it. I caught it with a grunt and had to brace myself on the table and bench back to let the pain in my hip subside. When I opened my bandaged fist, a key sat atop the gauze.
“I’ve got a couple showings lined up this afternoon,” said Nick. “But make yourself at home. I’ll have Sam grab something for dinner.”
He threw a few twenties on the table, slipped his sunglasses on, and slid out of the booth.
I called after him, “Thanks.”
With a wave and without turning around, he dismissed my gratitude, and the door jangled and closed.
The clouds had inexplicably parted late that morning, one of those meteorological oddities of April that entice you with the hope of beauty before cruelly washing it away. A crescent of lunar light was vanishing to nothing as the sun neared noon. Since I’d landed beside the bed of ashes listening to the coyotes crying out for blood, the moon had not left its post in the sky. Every void in the clouds revealed it there, cycling through its monthly phases in a day’s time, like the slow-spinning beacon of some celestial lighthouse.
That evening, waxing toward fullness, it was nearly covered again, and Sam’s pale hands tucked a sheet around the pull-out mattress she had inherited from her grandmother’s late love. She was whistling a Portuguese tune, Pimba, Pimba, whose chipper melody could get lodged in your head for a week, even facing a funereal dawn. She took one look at my backpack and my rumpled clothes, and the song died on her lips.
“Is that what you’re planning to wear tomorrow?”
“It’s all I brought.”
“I’ll get you one of Nick’s suits to wear. What’s that face for?”
“No, it’s just my leg’s all… Anyway, in its current condition, it’s not squeezing into any of Nick’s slacks.”
Sam rolled her eyes.
“So, I’ll get you a shirt and jacket, and we’ll throw your pants in the dryer. At least then you’ll look halfway presentable.”
She disappeared around the banister and came back with the promised clothing, as well as some fresh gauze. Sam laid the shirt on the dining room table and hung the jacket across one of the chairs. I was struggling with the Excedrin bottle again.
“Let me get that,” she said.
I took two more pills and unwrapped my soiled bandages at the sink. Blisters wrinkled the backs of my hands, knotty as mountain ranges on a topographical map and red as Mars. I couldn’t quite get my thumb to my palm to grip the fresh gauze. Sam took my hands and gently swaddled my burns.
“When are you going to learn to take care of yourself, Everett?”
I thought that’s all I had been doing.
When Sam and Nick had gone up for the night, I tried to find the strength to sleep. The button of my pants clinked arrhythmically within the dryer’s hum. Occasionally car headlights would leap through the parted shades and sweep shadowed columns across the wall to collect in the corner. They left behind only the orange glow of the streetlights. Then the heat kicked on and set the shades to swaying. The orange light began to dance before me, and as the clack-kickickkick-clack of the dryer transformed into the popping of wood set to flame, the coyote grin of Malmacchío spread like a stain in the shadows, taunting me with the impossibility of Daniel’s salvation from the stone throne’s fate. Could I have died in his stead? Would anyone have cared if I had?
The dryer’s cycle ended like a basketball buzzer, and I pushed myself out of the dead man’s hand-me-down mattress as quickly as my leg would allow. I pulled on the clothes Sam had laid out for me, leaving the button-up open to my undershirt. I brought the jeans back to the pull-out couch and had to lie back down as I shimmied the warm denim up my legs. With the button undone at the top of my fly, I snuck out the front door.
I took the highway north and west, back to the town where the previous morning had found me dozing at the curb. Beyond the gas station right off the exit, there wasn’t a business or a streetlight in sight, though utility poles disappeared into the darkly leaved understory of forest that crept right to the edge of the road. I’d grown used to the expansive horizons of the Southwest, lonely stretches of mesa where the giver of good things is a miser abiding only a solitary shrub’s desperate clinging to life. Here life abounds and hems you in. The trees extend their arms like seas of beggars whose every need is met. Yet still they cry out for more.
Had it been this far off the highway?
At the end of a long stretch of stone wall, a gap in the trees revealed a trail just wide enough to permit a car. It was rutted and potholed and littered with stones such that the rental car dipped and tossed with chaotic frequency, and by the time the trail narrowed beyond passage, my hip throbbed in protest. I put the car in reverse. Turning around in my seat was out of the question, so I had only the mirrors by which to navigate and a faint taillight luminosity that failed to pierce the resuming rain. I laid on the accelerator, eager to put that dead end behind me. Just before the road came into sight, one of the trail’s many vagaries thrust the car into the air and sent it back down with a calamitous thud. My vision grayed like television static from the pain in my hip. When my vision cleared, I stepped on the accelerator again. The wheels spun in vain. I shifted into drive, but the tire was wedged and made no forward progress.
I wasn’t getting out of there without a tow truck. I fished my phone from the cupholder. No service. A tree directly beyond the driver’s door prohibited my opening it more than a couple of inches, and keeping my bad leg straight while I crawled across the passenger seat required a level of contortionism I hadn’t practiced since my high school days of “breaking and entering” friends’ houses through unlocked bathroom windows. At least there was no risk of falling into a toilet as I dragged myself out the passenger door.
I stumbled down the trail, the cuffs of my jeans absorbing mud, until I reached the road. A single bar of service, but it would do. With the tow truck ordered, I slunk back to the tree line and hunched beneath the sparse leaves to wait where the driver could see me. Stray raindrops found their way through the canopy, striking my shoulders, my head. Passing cars threw up fine mist from the asphalt and gradually dampened my clothes.
Maybe the memory had been false, and Malmacchío was a mentalist who’d planted it there through insinuation. There was no throne, no curse, no retribution. Even granting that there were such things, with Daniel gone, the memory now belonged to me alone. And I had no problem taking that memory down to the root, burning the branches.
Gray light brightened the sky hours before the tow truck shuddered to a stop in front of the trail. The driver had a coat-rack build, and his mechanic shirt flapped wildly in the wind as he hopped out of the cab.
“Where is she?”
I threw a thumb toward the trailhead, and the man pursed his lips and shook his head.
“Well, that ain’t great,” he said.
“Can you save the commentary? I’ve got a funeral in forty-five minutes.”
“Don’t know how far I can back her in there. Can’t even see your car. Chains are only so long, you know.”
He walked down the trail some, stretched his arms to take its measure, then put his hands on his hips.
“Suppose we don’t have any other choice.”
The driver backed the truckbed as far down the trail as the trees allowed, which wasn’t far. The tow chains rattled behind me as I led the way to the rented car. They came up short about six inches. Pushing from the front bumper, we were able to roll the car a little way up the rock, but not enough to free it and not without slipping to our knees in the mud.
“Let me show you where to hook ‘em. See if I can’t push it far enough for you to get a chain in there.”
I hobbled to the backside of the car, and the driver went around front. I was skeptical he could manage it with his slight build, but the rear of the car inched closer and closer, and I was finally able to hook the chains to the bumper. He hauled me back to the road, and I thanked him and took off for the funeral home.
Back in civilization, my hometown had no shortage of churches. Old Catholic and Episcopal spires pierced the humble skyline, guiding your attention to heaven on Sundays but perhaps warning its deity the other six days, spearheads reminiscent of the consequences that come with walking this earth.
I parked along the street in front of the old funeral parlor and ambled under the black awning that projected out of its white face. A cluster of older guests, seeing each other for the first time in months or years, gathered in the anteroom, talking quietly about somber things—who else they had lost to the reaping of time, the waning months until their own harvest would be gathered.
The wood slat walls of the viewing room were sandwiched between a wood beam ceiling and hardwood floors, all left unpainted. The room felt like the inside of a pinebox coffin after time’s cruel hand had soiled the wood. Besides the wooden pews, flowers filled the space—baskets of poinsettia, arrangements of lilies—rows and rows of petalous blooms that could not excuse the casket’s imposition on the mourners’ lives. Women’s heels clacked atop the floorboards. A queue of somber men and women stood in the aisle, waiting to pay their respects, and I joined them.
Daniel’s smug, stony eyes peered at me from a signboard at the coffin’s head. When it was my turn, I stepped up to the catafalque and knelt as the people before me had. I’ve never known how to talk to the dead. I hoped they didn’t have ears to hear all that still burdened those left in the land of the living. They’d already escaped. Just let them rest.
Daniel’s parents and Chandra waited beside the casket, as though their guests could offer any consolation for the loss they had experienced. Two small braids twisted through Chandra’s hair and merged into one thick, chestnut braid that hung down her back. The high neck of her dress was black lace and lent her an air of austere composure, the red rims of her eyes notwithstanding. She was too young to be a widow. The fact gutted me. If I hadn’t been so busy chasing a myth, I might have prepared to face her pale gray eyes as they struggled to contain her grief.
“You’re here,” she said. “I should have called you. It’s just, you know… all of this.”
She forced a weak smile, looked away with rapidly blinking eyes. I hid my hands and their muddy bandages in my borrowed jacket pocket. Loathed myself for the mess I must have looked.
“I hate that he’s gone,” I said. “I would have done anything.”
“I know.”
I looked back at the line of people still waiting to pay their respects.
“I won’t keep you. A lot of people showed up for him. He was a good man.”
Chandra’s embrace caught me by surprise. I felt treacherous as I slipped my hands from my pockets and around her back.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She let go, smiled again. As I made my way back down the aisle, I tried to disguise my wounded gait, although I knew the chances that Chandra watched me walk away were slim. I spotted the crisp black of Nick’s suit and the way Sam’s alabaster skin set off the onyx sheen of her dress amidst the drabber mourners. Nick gestured to an empty spot in their pew, and Sam's eyes were wide as I dropped down beside her.
"All my beautiful work," she said with a glance at my clothes. "I don't know why I bother with you, Everett."
"You're bad for the brand, man. Bad for the brand," Nick added.
There are some things not even half a decade in the desert can dry out. Seeing Chandra again was proof of that. When her paintings had hung in Klekolo's cramped coffee shop, their aerial perspective tore the ground from beneath you, left you wondering if you were falling or ascending. That was our first impression of Chandra. Setting eyes on the artist compounded the effect, and after Daniel and Chandra had found their footing, I could only stand the plummeting sensation so long. And now that headlong descent had resumed, and her husband was dead, and a perverse part of me was glad of it.
I spun that dagger under the dark cloak of my heart, not noticing the woman returning from the casket with her black umbrella until she was only a few steps from me. The hem of her patchwork black dress was frayed. The chapped-raw flesh of her cheeks shone like pink obscenities as she pressed a note into my dirty hands and continued to a rearward row.
The note unfolded and revealed the worst four words I could have hoped to read: I remember. I believed.
My eyes shot amongst the mourners behind me—through the faces that had belonged to boys I once knew—and sought out the girl. They found her in the back row with her umbrella plumed over the black globe of her topknot, cryptic as a crystal ball. When our eyes met, she dipped her head as some diviner of past and present. She raised her eyes and furrowed her brow, and despite the ruins of her face, I knew that I knew her. And I knew to whom belonged the ashy hands that held open the vellum notebook beside her. I was still haunted by those wolfish lips that moved in what could only have been the hoarse whisper of accursed words. The priest’s voice intoning the funeral mass rang through the stale air. But her eyes remained fixed on mine as she received the counsel of Malmacchío.
Continued in Chapter Three.
Intriguing story. Can’t wait for chapter 3.