The Rainy Season Read Free

center. There was something frozen inside the oval of moonlit glass: a painting of a face, barely human in appearance, distorted as if from some strong and unpleasant emotion.
    As if by reflex movement, he tossed the thing out into the center of the well where it sank, glowing a faint and misty green that dwindled in the black depths until it passed out of sight, and then, feeling bone weary and shivering in the damp night, he trudged tiredly back up toward the road.

4
    BETSY HAD FALLEN asleep twice and awakened again in the night, both times to the thought that the house didn’t sound right. She lay in bed listening to the muttering of voices in the living room—the television turned down low: laughter now, followed by applause, and then talking again. Her mother had generally gone to bed earlier than Betsy did, and it was Betsy who had gone into her mother’s bedroom to kiss her goodnight and to tuck her in. So it simply felt wrong that the television was on. Everything had been wrong today, but she hadn’t known how wrong until she had gotten home from softball and found her teacher, Miss Cobb, sitting in the living room along with Mrs. Darwin and a woman whom Betsy had never seen before.
    It had been Mrs. Darwin who had told her about her mother. Miss Cobb had cried, and that had started Betsy crying until her throat hurt. The first time she had awakened after she had gone to bed, she had cried herself back to sleep, thinking about kissing her mother goodnight, about her mother tucking her in. She quit thinking about it now, and lay there listening to the television.
    Abruptly it occurred to her that this was nearly her last night in this house in Austin, Texas, in this room and in this bed. Mrs. Darwin was sleeping over tonight and tomorrow night, but after that … Betsy’s mother had told her that her Untie Phil in California would be her guardian if anything ever happened. Mrs. Darwin had said that Betsy would simply move in with him. This was confusing, but tomorrow Uncle Phil was coming, and they would work it out. What it meant, either way, was that her room wasn’t hers anymore.
    She got out of bed, took her Winnie the Pooh flashlight out of her bedside stand, and opened the door, slipping noiselessly into the dark hallway. She heard snoring now—Mrs. Darwin asleep on the couch. She thought about going in and turning off the television, but that might wake her up. She stood there for a moment watching the nearly dark living room: the shadowy piano with the jumble of music and wooden metronome on top, the vase with its peacock feathers, the plant stand with its fern. Her mother had bought the fern last week—a bird’s nest fern, she had said. It was a pretty shade of green, but it didn’t look like a fern and it didn’t look like a bird’s nest. Already it was turning brown and getting wilted-looking.
    Betsy turned quietly and walked farther up the hall, past the open bathroom door to her mother’s bedroom. She pushed the door open and walked in, sitting down on the bed, listening to the night sounds of the dark house, smelling the wet air through the half-open window, the scent of rain mingling with the perfume smell of the bottles on the dresser. Her throat tightened, and she blinked hard, standing up and crossing to the dresser, opening the top drawer, where her mother kept her socks. She felt in the socks, pushing them aside and shining her flashlight in among them until she found a tin box with a little lid on a hinge. The box said Pear’s Soap on the lid, and there was a picture on it of an old-fashioned woman in a bonnet. She opened the box and took out the velvet bag inside, feeling the hard glass object inside through the soft cloth.
    She held her breath now, listening again for the sound of Mrs. Darwin’s snoring. Hearing it, steady and louder than ever, she left the room carrying the bag and went back into her bedroom, shutting the door and flipping on the light. Immediately her eye was