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

horror and the shame only break like the dawn does, well after the facts are in. I imagine that by the time she is home, running the shower to get it hot, to wash off the filth of that vanished man, she sees her eyes in the fogging mirror and finds nothing but a deep silence in them. Because she’s discovered something terrible: she can endure what has just happened—and not even make a sound.

Six
    Back at Sage Hill in September, in the ascetic basement dorm room Serala has christened the Batcave, we sit and smoke, sifting through her notes from Europe. A blear has ruined the sky, I am nursing a tequila hangover, and she is quieter than usual. I’m vaguely frightened of the things she might tell me about France; I’ve ascertained that the relative cheer and optimism I read between the lines of her letters rotted and fell away nearly as soon as she returned stateside—certainly by the time we returned to Riverside. The worst thing was not Monty’s repeated cheating while she was away, but it wounded her more than I might have guessed.
    Read this,
she says,
this is how I feel
.
    he looked at her through hunger,
    and her white silk slipped off,
    pooling on the ground
    like spilled milk.
    I was honored to be allowed to see the human, scorned-lover kind of pain that was antithetical to her act.
    Well, I think you’ve nailed down how it feels, I say carefully. I mean I know how it felt when I got cheated on. He’s a fucker, you know?
    He could have done worse, you know.
A pull off a Pall Mall, blown through her bedroom window.
Everyone slips—don’t I know it
. A long pause and her eyes turn to a far corner.
I can’t shop for gems when I’ve got no cash, you know?
    On a gloomy October evening at an outside table at St. Charles Café, I ask Serala if the poetry she’s writing helps her spirit, if she feels more human laying it down. She says
no
, sharp as a rifle crack, and I say,
That’s bullshit
. She has a drag of smoke in her lungs. She turns bloodshot, unslept eyes on me that ask:
How dare you—who do you think you are?
The waiter grabs a dish and turns away and she says, bittersweetly,
Fuck you
,
Eli Hastings,
and I smile and she fights her smile, but loses.
    There were so many times when one of us stopped on the edge of the unsaid and we were synched enough to know the rest of the sentence—maybe that was good enough. A nod and a swallow of wine, the gaze breaking away only with effort, but still a table between us, still tables of strangers to rein us in. I remember looking away those moments, at the peak of one of our exchanges, and catching a half dozen pairs of strangers’ eyes before they could turn away, back to pork chops and salads and gumbo.
    So I’ll say now all the things that I didn’t say explicitly then, to make damn sure it’s not only Serala’s dirty laundry that’s hung across these pages: with the autumn came the inverse of all the healthy, hard-won faith of the summer. I was driving some nights with eight kids in the Buick, the top down, on Route 66 and off again to the side streets, a fifth of tequila in my body, racing other blacked-out men, no idea where the car was in the morning. My father was hurtling downward again too, brushing death, risking his life and others’ everyday, driving through the narcotic fuzz of OxyContin self-righteously, because he wasn’t sure he cared anymore. And I was learning of the futility of changing others when I couldn’t even answer the dark questions boiling in me. Because there were times I got so sad without knowing why that it whispered over into rage and I found myself in the kitchen with a knife against my hand, amid smashed dishes and overturned furniture in Samar’s cookie-cutter apartment. There were times in those months when I let the sick giddiness—like going up on psychedelics—ride its way through my mind and I could picture me and my