The Rain

     Rain falls, soaks, inebriates; it pounds away all that is left, all that remains. What remains are the feelings that persist, the feelings that can only be stripped away from one by an outside source. What that source is, only one can decide.
     To some people, rain brings life. To others, it brings death. It was raining that day.
     Many people came to offer their condolensces and ask if there was anything, anything at all that they could do. At the reception they hung around the buffet tables, feeding their faces and making comments like ‘we’ll miss her so much’, and ‘she was a dear lady, a beautiful soul.’ Then they went back for more shrimp. I stood in the corner of the living room, just watching and listening to them.
     The people we called friends would come and pat my head once in a while; they would say they knew how sad and frightening it could be for a twelve-year-old. They said they knew.
     My older sister locked herself in her room and cried the whole time. Although she was sixteen, she didn’t understand that tears don’t bring back what’s lost.
     Dad tried to smile. He forced a laugh here and there to make the guests believe he was okay. I knew he wasn’t okay. I knew he needed all those people thrown out of his house, far away so he could run his fingers through his thick, dark brown hair and realize where he was and what wasn’t there. I knew him. He needed to get out. However, he screamed on the inside versus the outside; he held it in, and broke himself for it.
     Days passed slowly and the meals slowly dwindled to a dinner once a week; the last dinner was left on the lonely doorstep, cold and forgotten. It was okay; I didn’t like pasta anyway. Of course, Dad’s dinners were much worse; I often had stomach-aches after a regular meal of burnt chicken and stale french fries.
     My sister cried every night. She’d be bawling her eyes out on her bunk below me while I’d stick my fingers in my ears and make futile attempts to sleep. What’s worse, Dad would put on their favorite song. I could hear his feet scuffling across the floor as he danced with himself.
     School came the next month. Our lives were again filled with textbooks and the smell of chalk. For some reason my friends didn’t like me anymore. They would shuffle their feet and make any excuse they could think of to get away from me. I was forced to spend my time alone, reading under my favorite oak tree in the playground whose thick branches blocked out the sun.

     Christmas came. Dad tried his best to cook us a Christmas dinner but after three unsuccessful attempts to cook the stupid bird we ended up having three Grand Slams at the Denny’s down on Baley Street. It was a refreshing change from stomach-aches.
     After dinner we came home and sat down before a scantily decorated tree with a few presents under it. As my sister gently opened a small package, I hastily tore off the wrapping from a swiss army pocketknife and held it up to examine. My sister then lifted the lid from the box she had begun to open and revealed a bottle of perfume labeled ‘vanilla musk’. After gazing down at it for a few minutes she started sobbing uncontrollably and slammed into Dad’s huge arms, and together they cried. Meanwhile, I went outside and retrieved a small twig from the naked trees outside so I could whittle it to pieces with my new pocketknife. I whittled so much that a pile of wood chips was created in front of me after fifteen minutes.

     After the holidays we trudged off to school again, this time in pouring rain. I liked the rain. I liked how the water dripped from my hair to my nose to my shoes. I liked how it stung my cheeks, poisoning them a furious red. I liked the sound of it, the ‘pelt, pelt’ on the sidewalk that stretched out before us. Unfortunately, we each had our new jackets to keep the rain from reaching our hearts.
     When we got to school I threw off my coat with fury and stuffed it in my locker, desperately hoping that I wouldn’t have to wear it again; along with the jacket went the bologna sandwich Dad made every morning. I hated bologna. After school I dejectedly walked home, disappointed that the rain had stopped. All that was left were puddles.

     My sister started dating. She would come home late at night, sometimes as late as two in the morning, either in a daze or crying hysterically. She was an emotional hurricane. When she wasn’t going out she complained about this guy or that guy that had the nerve to tell her the truth about her; that she needed to get a life. So she tried harder and dug herself deeper, hoping to find some solace in anything that came her way. She went to parties, sometimes without Dad’s consent, and would have a grand old time, then feel absolutely rotten the next morning. Too little or too much of something. Finally she realized that this wasn’t getting her anywhere and she decided to lay off the parties and the guys for awhile. This was a great relief to me, since my ears were getting sore from all her whining. Dad wasn’t too fond of it either, to say the least.
     Dad was getting better; he stopped dancing at night. He still played the song once in awhile, but not over and over like before. One day he met my sister and I after school and we went to lunch at Kentucky Fried Chicken. He tried to make conversation with us.
     “Hey guys, what would you think if I went back to school? You know, took a couple night classes; or maybe on the weekend…. Would you mind?”
I thought about it and decided to let my sister answer.
     “What classes?” she questioned.
     “Well, I was thinking of slowly getting my AA degree in engineering. I don’t know if I’ll go all the way, but I’ll look into it. It wouldn’t hurt to try, huh?” He nudged me with his elbow.
     “Yeah, I guess.” What else could I say?

     Summer was dragged into our unbusy lives. I don’t know if it was the heat or what, but I couldn’t get away from the TV. My boring days were spent glaring at a box with pictures moving on it. What a life. Dad enrolled himself in a few summer classes, managing to keep his work schedule consistent. Sometimes he really surprised me.
     Somehow, my sister found some “worthwhile” friends who introduced her to church. She spent a lot of her time from then on researching on the internet and in the library, sipping her coffee while she looked up this denomination and that. Her summer seemed almost as uneventful as mine.
     Then she discovered the Catholic Church. In a calm, serious tone she announced one night over the dinner table that she was to be baptized on Easter the next year. Dad was deeply impressed; I could tell by the penetrating look on his face. He slowly rose from his chair and embraced her, telling her that he would stand by her no matter what. The next year, in the presence of the family, my sister was baptized and took the name ‘Gemma Marie’. She started going to something she called ‘Mass’ regularly. That was what Catholics did, not only on Sunday, but every day as well. She went to Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament often and stayed there for hours at a time, just praying. She even went to Confession. How this was a life, I didn’t know; but she wasn’t crying at night, so it was fine by me.
     She tried talking to me about God and his incredible mercy, and about the ‘heroic’ saints who led ‘heroic’ lives and left ‘heroic’ legacies. It didn’t make any sense to me. But something she said about hope struck me somewhere. Something about being loved, a deep, penetrating love, and that this love gives the faithful hope. I didn’t know why it caught my attention; I tried to focus on it, but I gave up after awhile and went back to the TV.
     I would walk into our room some nights and there would be candles everywhere, casting shadows on the dim gray walls and filling the air with a stuffy smell of burnt honey. My sister would be on her bunk, kneeling next to her pillow and facing the opposite wall where there was a crucifix. Her lips would be moving slightly; I think she called it meditating. She was somehow relaxed by this particular environment, so I didn’t interfere. I hated the smell though. Too stuffy.

     One day she took me to Mass. They read from the Bible, sang a few songs, and spoke in a different language during one part. My sister said it was Greek or Latin. It was all the same to me.
     But there was one particular moment, when the priest was saying something in that other language, that was different. He suddenly stopped speaking and raised what he was holding, a ‘Eucharistic host’ as my sister called it, for the people to see. He held it there, suspended far above his head, for a long while, and a peaceful silence filled the room. It filled my mind as well. The priest then gently rested the host on the altar and bent his knee before it, his head bent in reverence as far forward as it would go. Then he continued, doing the same thing again, only with a cup this time. I glanced at my sister and saw she was looking at me, smiling a beautiful smile; her eyes said something. They held a secret, something that she couldn’t express with words; a beautiful vow, a prayer. She then turned her face toward the altar and serenely gazed at the crucifix above it.
     She was beautiful.

     After that day I began to notice things around me that I had never noticed before in my life. At least not since Mom had been there. I was more aware of light around me; I noticed for the first time how dust dances on filtered sunlight, and how the moon has a bold glow. I noticed that the branches of my favorite oak tree in the playground gently caress the rays that soak through the leaves. I noticed the color of the clouds when the sun sinks below the horizon, emitting a pinkish orange that penetrates all that stand before the horizon.
I noticed music; I would go to the church and sit in the empty gothic halls as the choir sang in perfect harmony. The beautiful voices drifted through the classic architecture in which my sister sat every morning; in which I had sat not a week before. I began to love the harp; I even asked to receive lessons. I loved the feel of caressing the strings, causing sound to float in the air; beautiful music.
     I began to imagine; I would see angels in my mind’s eye, beautiful creatures that shared my sister’s love for God. Creatures that shared my newfound hope. I noticed beauty; beauty in prayer, beauty in dreams, beauty in life.
     Beautiful life.

     My sister announced at dinner one night that she was going to enter the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration. Dad and I both snapped up from our soup and gave her questioning looks; she glanced at me and smiled that profound smile as she explained that the nuns dedicated their lives to adoring the Lord in the most Blessed Sacrament, praying for the salvation of the souls who neglected the Lord. I remembered that smile, and I finally recognized the secret her eyes held. Why hadn’t I seen it before?, I wondered. It’s all so clear!

     That night, my sister spoke to me.
     “Abby?” she called quietly. “Are you awake?”
     I grunted in reply.
     “Do you wanna talk?”
     I thought for a moment. I wondered why she was suddenly so interested in talking to me. She never had been before.
     “What do you want to talk about?” I asked.
     “Us.” Her voice was strong and willing.
     “Ok,…” I was a little hesitant; I didn’t know what to say.
     “Do you remember Mom? Remember the walks she would take us on? And when she woke us up early Christmas morning to give us our gifts?”
     Again I thought. I did remember.
     “She smelled good, too. Like vanilla candles. I loved how she smelled; I would bury my nose in her hair whenever she held me.”
     I remembered how beautiful her hair was.
     “I loved her hair. It was always so soft and brown. My favorite color was brown because of her hair,” She went on.
     A silence permeated the air. I held my breath for her to continue.
     “Abby?”
     “Mmmm?”
     “I miss her so much.”
     A lump rose into my throat, and my eyes began watering. I wiped them with the back of my hand and said, “I miss her too.”
     “Abby, do you know how much I love you?”
     Something in my chest tightened. I didn’t know what it was; I had never felt anything like it before. I closed my eyes and let my own tears spill over as I heard myself say,
     “I love you too.”
     At that moment the rain softly began outside our window, cleansing my heart.