Lullaby for the Rain Girl by Christopher Conlon Read Free Book Online

things to me when I was a teenager.”
    “Just that you’re pretty?”
    “No. More than that, Ben. Like—I don’t know.”
    We drove in awkward silence for a few minutes. I felt strange, off-balance. This was not the kind of conversation I usually had with my sister.
    “Alice,” I said at last, “you’re not hiding something from me, are you?”
    “No.”
    “I mean—about Dad?”
    “No. I’m not. I mean it, Ben, he never—it wasn’t like that. I knew that he was never going to—to touch me, or anything like that. Even when he was drunk out of his mind I was never afraid of that kind of stuff. That wasn’t Dad.” She scowled. “But—sometimes, when you were out on your bike or something and he and I were alone, and he was drinking, well—he would look at me in a weird way. Like—like guys at school looked at me.”
    “Jesus Christ.”
    “No, it—” She stopped, fell silent. She was visibly struggling to express herself, another thing I’d rarely seen with this plainspoken, ultra-confident sister of mine. “He never exactly said anything, okay? And he certainly never did anything. Not at all. Just…the way he would look at me. It made me uncomfortable, just the way it does with Mindy now.  And when he talked to me in those times it was like, ‘Sweetheart, you’re going to break some man’s heart someday.’ Stuff like that. Well, I knew what he meant. It was his heart I was breaking.” She seemed to think about it. “I looked like Mom, you know. A lot.”
    “I guess you did. You still do.”
    “Weird to think I’ve outlived her.”
    “So have I, now.” She died when she was thirty-five; I was three. There was little of her left in me now. A softly-said word, the shape of her hands, how her skirt swayed as she turned a corner, walking away from me. And her voice. I remembered, or thought that I did, how, holding me in her arms, she would gently whisper-sing the simplest of all lullabies to me:
    Rock-a-bye baby, on the tree top,
    When the wind blows, the cradle will rock,
    When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall,
    And down will come baby, cradle and all.
    But maybe I didn’t really recall this. Perhaps it was just my imagination, filling in the vast blanks.
    When it happened last summer I was aware of the exact day when I’d lived longer than my mother. On August 7th  I’d survived more time on this Earth than she had. Yet I didn’t want to say this to Alice—to admit that I’d consciously thought of it that day. It seemed private, something only I and my mother’s shade should know.
    “Jesus, I guess you have.” A smile drifted across my sister’s face, then vanished. “Anyway, he—he gets so confused now. Yesterday I found a cake of soap in the refrigerator, you know? I just—we could keep him for a while, but this thing with Mindy, I’m just—”
    “What a bastard,” I said.
    “No,” she said, shaking her head. “Don’t say that. It’s not fair to him.”
    “Oh the hell with fairness! You just told me you thought that he—”
    “He missed Mom,” she said firmly. “He still does. That’s the problem. And I’m afraid that—well—I just can’t have him around her. Around us.”
    “What do you want to do?” I dreaded the suggestion she might make: that he come to stay with me.
    “I don’t know. That’s why I wanted to see you.” She looked over at me and smiled. “I do miss you, you know. When you disappear for months on end.”
    “You know where I live, Sis. You have my phone number.”
    “Yeah, but you never return your goddamn calls, do you?”
    “A teacher leads a busy life. Don’t be offended.”
    “I’m not offended. I’m sad. I hope you’re at least getting laid a lot, now that you’re single again. How is Kate, by the way?”
    “I haven’t seen Kate in months.”
    “Well, I never liked her, to be perfectly honest. But you knew that.”
    “Yes.” And I knew why, even if she didn’t: Alice and Kate were too similar, shared too