Chapter Two: Rain
"You won't have a dining room, but there's a nice little breakfast nook just here." Mrs. Lassiter was saying on the day I moved home, patting her hand on the back of a plastic chair. I looked it over, not really caring about the renovations. It's a big 'whatever' from me, but I don't say that out loud. The apartment had lain empty all this time, no one wanting to move into it and no one having the power to demolish the building. I'd received offers to sell to this or that individual or firm, but I'd turned them all down. Like I knew what to even do with an apartment building.
There were only three tenants, and only one of them had been there when Daddy was still alive. Blind Mr. Mayfair, shuffling around his four rooms with the carefully arranged furniture, his rent checks paid by his son in Bangor. They came like clockwork, forwarded to me, and my uncle had known what to do with them. He found the addresses where I'd need to send tax payments, what building codes I would need to keep up with. He put the surplus into an account for me, made phone calls, handled it all until I could get to my feet and handle it myself. All the while, I waded numb and emotionless through the haze that follows agony, my thoughts on nothing except drawing that next breath. Letting it out. Taking another.
But now I'm here. Here, back in the apartment where it all began. It's been thoughtfully repainted and refurnished by the concerned members of my old church. Christian guilt at work, for the inability they had to lift a finger while my father touched me and whispered to me and beat me to silence. But hey, it's paid off in a nice new sofa, so I guess we're square. Thanks, congregation.
Three days in. I don't have to work. Dad's life insurance through the hospital job left behind almost a hundred thousand dollars, and of course this crumbly old building that's paid for. I haven't decided if I want to apply to the community college. There's no course offering for 'Clown Slaying', or 'Home-Based Survival Strategies' or maybe a degree in 'Not Being a Pussy'.
I don't have a skill set that I even care enough about to hone. And I don't feel like doing anything other than sit on the landing from sunrise to sunset, watching the people in the street move by and pointedly refuse to look back at me. There's hollowness in my stomach. I rarely smile. I'm waiting for something, but I don't even know what yet. On the evening of the third day, it rains. One of those fresh clean late summer rains that make you want to toss on a slicker and run out into the warm falling water and see where the rivers that form in the street lead you. Splashing through puddles, laughing. No one's doing that here, though. What's wrong, kiddies? Afraid to leave your homes? But you can, you know. For at least another couple of decades, anyway.
I stand up, rubbing at the sore backside that sitting still for so long has given me. Fuck this. When did rain become a trigger? But it is. I'm triggered. Happy, cumulonimbus clouds?! Happy, shitty little town of deaf and dumb people who don't let themselves see what's happening?! HAPPY?!
Before I can even think about stopping myself, before I can do something intelligent like grab a coat or a sweater or change out of my grubby sandals into a pair of sneakers, I'm stumbling down the metal steps. Out into the gray curtains of rainwater, breaking into a run, tears streaming down my cheeks. Running. Running until it hurts. I run, and it's not rage or terrors that motivate me. It's something else. Dreams, the psychiatrists said. Post-traumatic stress disorder. No clowns. No creatures that shapeshift and eat fear and kill children in creative and awful ways. Nothing like that exists, has ever existed. She needs rest and these pills. Green pills, blue pills, white pills, red pills. It's not real, Miss Marsh. Come now, take a rest.
But I knew you were real. I saw you. I fought you. I didn't fear you. You held me up off the ground and choked me and showed me the light within the dark and somehow, in that terrible moment of letting go, you freed me from everything. Floating in the darkness, I felt at peace for the first time in my life. But then they had come, and Ben pulled me down and kissed me like a damsel in distress. There had been no distress. I was free of pain. Floating, dreamless and beyond all fear or agony. If you are real, if all of that was real...then I am not crazy. I am not blind. I am not condemned to live out the rest of my life here in this town with my ears dulled to screaming and my eyes unable to look too long at missing children posters. My mind trained to forget, forget, and forget some more.
The rain is up to my ankles as I run, looking into every sewer opening, watching for blood. Looking for a torn coat, a stray boot, a little paper boat coated in wax that was lost so long ago and never sailed to paradise. But of course there's nothing but the rain. The swirling dark water. You're not here. We killed you. Whatever remains now is probably lying in a heap of moldy satin at the bottom of a well in the ruins of the house on….
Oh God.
I stop, soaked to the skin and out of breath, and the rain all around me is a pounding cacophony of sound that even a child's scream could not be heard above.
Suddenly, I know where I'm headed.