A Gentle Rain Read Free Page A

school I was known as P-P-Porky Whittenbrook. Later, when I overcame the stutter, I was k nowm merely as Porky. At Yale I became a semi-vegetarian. Fin was fine. Fur was foul. I lost most of the weight and was then known as Carrot Whittenbrook. Did I mention my frizzy red hair?
    I was grown before my peers called me only by my given name, Kara Whittenbrook. By then, the psychic damage was done. I had become one of the world's few shy heiresses, and a bona fide recluse who preferred the rainforest to the so-called realworld.
    Plus I hated both pork and carrots.
    Mother and Dad didn't quite know what to make of me. They'd hoped I be a queen bee, not a reclusive worker bee. "Where's your passion for leadership?" they asked. "What is your grandest dream?"
    "To earn two doctorates and re-invent the Dewey Decimal System before I'm thirty-five?" I had no grand dreams. And I always posed my goals like a question.
    "That's not what we mean."
    What did they mean? I never understood. Goals that seemed so easy and off hand to them required all my devotion. I slaved as an undergrad and even harder as a graduate student. At the preserve, where I catalogued the customs, language and rituals of Amazon tribes, I was a frenetic little sponge of over-achievement, absorbing, relating, and meeting goals with feverish determination.
    I didn't have time to be a dreamer.
    I was an accomplisher.
    Didn't my dual masters degrees in library science, world cultures and language matter? And what about my Juilliard-trained harp playing, and my skill at cooking? All seemed to be no more than precocious cartoon drawings Mother and Dad patiently displayed on their refrigerator door.
    In their minds, librarians, harpists and cooks don't save the world. Unless you count writing harp solos and creating culinary masterpieces with soy cheese as milestones of human achievement, I hadn't been put to any real tests.
    Until now.
    aaa
    The human body looks so alien in charred pieces.
    I stared numbly at the carnage of my parents' small plane among the giant trees and ferns of Dos Rios' most remote region. Mother and Dad could not be dead. They were immortal. At least, I had always thought so. I was wrong.
    "What would you like us to do first, Kara?" a guide asked gently.
    "Collect the remains gently," I told him. I spoke to the tough gauchos and Indian trackers in soft Portuguese, the language of Brazil.
    "Turn away, don't look anymore. We will do this for you. And for your parents. An honor for us."
    "Thank you, but I have to help. I'm their daughter."
    The strong, bronzed men nodded. For a moment I turned my face toward the sweaty brown neck of the small horse I'd ridden to the crash site. Inside, I fractured into a thousand grieving parts.
    Connecticut
    Mother and Dad's memorial service
    "Let us b-begin," I said. My voice shook. Abject shame rose inside me. My stutter was back. It surfaced occasionally and with no warning, but I hadn't suffered an outbreak since grad school, and I was thirty-two now. I thought I'd finally outgrown it. But no.
    I took my place at the front of a historic Connecticut church filled with several hundred of the world's richest mourners, many of them my relatives. I felt awkward and unnatural in an impeccably respectable black wool dress with matching pumps and demure heirloom pearls. I tried a second time. "Let us begin."
    What was that odd scent? Grief Grief and fear? No, just the synthetic fragrance of white winter funeral roses flown in from Holland by the thousands. Just the raw tang of blood in my sinuses after weeks of tears.
    Stop thinking so hard. Take a breath. Don't stutter. Don't.
    Bodyguards and Secret Service agents lined the church's back walls. Two former presidents, several former vice presidents, and one member of England's royal family-a cousin on my mother's side-occupied a front pew near Dad's older brother, my uncle, Senator William Whittenbrook.
    Uncle William smiled at me beneath puffy eyes. He, at least, mourned