Clearly Now, the Rain by Eli Hastings Read Free Book Online

as it comes I realize it’s genuine, this notion. Luke nods, swings the lure, toting a length of lake slime into the canoe. He turns and faces me over the tackle, wrestling with a blue spinner.
    I don’t know, dude. But I’ll tell you this much—he’s probably way too stubborn to ever give up now that he’s fought this hard.
    Luke bobs his head and smiles. I don’t tell him that there have been times when I did very much think Dad was going to give up.
    Plink, splash. The racquetball hits the water and Sky is en route. Luke’s blue spinner is a dazzling arc in the afternoon sun. Dad waves again when he sees me looking, just leaning on his cane watching his sons—afloat.
    On the road home we stop at Glacier National Park. While my father and brother and Sky goof around under a roaring waterfall, I sit on a rock and let the Montana sun spread a burn on my shoulders. I can listen to the near voices of my dad and Luke, the pound of the water on rock. Far below a gust of wind clears the throat of a canyon. The lowing of a boat in the lake rises up. But these are sounds that are more like silence—just a backdrop.
    Serala had once seen this country, had known it more intimately than she would have wished: the cobalt blue water, the mountains scooped out, as if by a celestial spoon. Her folks had sent her off, one winter, to the reformatory power of Outward Bound, a survival course meant to knock the trouble out of kids. It was because of her forays into drugs that she was sent (though I doubt her family knew the extent of those forays). She’d fought through it like a champ, blowing off the two-pack a day habit, not to mention the drugs—as did the other torn-up teenagers around her, deprived of other options besides reform school or Juvie. She bent stoically to those weeks in the altitudes where, five people to a tent, one had to be cranking out sit-ups to transfer warmth to the others—all night long.
    I was wired on hope that summer. I reclined on that Montana rock, fresh from ten days of watching my father refuse the straightjacket of disability and live, when only a year before he had plummeted nine stories and been expected to die at countless moments. I was just months departed from my ultimately successful journey to Venezuela where I’d survived alienhood, learned Spanish, and even come to love solitude. Likewise I carried a stack of Serala’s letters from the Old World in my worn JanSport pack, wrinkled pages of blue ink that contained a renewal of determination between the lines. If I’d held back some with her in the past it was because loving her frightened me; while her friendship and loyalty were incalculably valuable, the liability of losing her to the darkness of addiction and its attendant hazards was comparably huge. But I read enough resilience into her letters—perhaps because I wanted to—that I believed she, too, was renewed and would return, like me, stronger. My own narcotics were hope and faith, born of my father’s triumph over death and disability, Serala’s triumph over all the darkness that had tried to drown her over the years, my own triumph over insecurity and lonesomeness in Venezuela. I was inebriated on this brightness on that flat rock in Glacier National Park while all my blessings shimmered around me like the diamonds of water floating free of the waterfall and catching the sun. I even decided to move in with Samar in September—it felt as if everything in the world could work out.
    I love that cocksure twenty-year-old, but mostly I envy him. I’m glad I didn’t yet know a thing about the flawed biochemistry of my own brain, which would slam a cage down over my entire world in a few months’ time. I’m glad I didn’t know what was coming for my father: little pink pills and a blooming death wish. I’m glad I didn’t know about the origins of Serala’s struggle then