The Rainy Season Read Free Page A

drawn to a ceramic angel on her windowsill, and she shook out the contents of the velvet bag onto the bedspread—a misshapen glass inkwell about two inches high, the glass cloudy, like glass that had been through a fire. She slipped the angel into the bag, turned the light out again, and went back down the hall and into her mother’s room, anxiously putting the bag back into the tin box and the box in the drawer. She rearranged the socks, sliding the drawer shut. The clock in the living room chimed, and at the sound of it she was suddenly full of an urgent fear, and she hurried back to the darkness of her own room, where the inkwell still lay on the unmade bed, catching a ray of moonlight through the partly open curtains.

5
    PHIL LAY IN bed thinking, although his thoughts were disconnected. He felt the lonesomeness of the old house, which was somehow made more lonesome by Marianne’s death. Light from the stairwell lamp faintly illuminated the hall outside the open bedroom door, and the muslin window curtains caught a suffused light. In the slight draft they shifted like airy ghosts. He closed his eyes, but in his mind he could still see the shadowy lumber of furniture in the room and the pale moving curtains. He got out of bed finally, dressed, and started toward the stairs to the attic bedroom, which would be Betsy’s bedroom in a couple of days. It had only begun to settle into his mind that his solitary life was a thing of the past, and that he would suddenly have a child around the house. The idea of it was exotic. Softball and piano lessons? School—he’d have to get her into school. He remembered the asphalt playgrounds and tetherball poles and weedy baseball diamonds of his own childhood, suddenly part of his life again.
    An idea came to him, and he returned to his bedroom and took a shallow cardboard carton off the closet shelf. He went out into the hallway again, climbed the stairs, and set the carton on the bed in the attic, switching on the bedside lamp. Next to the lamp sat a mason jar that had belonged to his mother, and he stood for a moment regarding it. Inside the jar lay several trinkets, like old-fashioned carnival prizes. The lid of the jar had been dipped in wax, although there was no liquid in it and nothing in the jar that would spoil. There was an old pocketknife inside with a handle that might have been carved out of antler, although it might as easily have been chipped out of petrified wood. There was a thimble, too, misshapen and decorated with a tiny smudged picture, and a hatpin with a lump of red glass knob on top like a piece of slag. There was a thumb-sized iron animal, perhaps a horse, and a cut crystal shot glass so small that it couldn’t have held more than half an ounce of liquid. He wondered for a moment if he should put the jar away, but it was the sort of thing that Betsy would like, so he set it now on a shelf near the window before switching off the light again in order to get a view of the moonlit night. Outside, the rain had stopped, and the clouds were ragged and windblown.
    From the window there was a view of the grove of avocado trees behind the house and of the creek and arroyo beyond that. A path skirted the lower edge of Santiago Creek, along the back edge of the grove. …
    He was startled to see someone—two people?—moving along the path in the light of the moon. And then, almost as soon as he noted the two shadows, they disappeared, which meant that they had either slipped into the grove itself or—not as likely—had descended the wall of the muddy creekbed. He waited, barely breathing, but they didn’t reappear. The arroyo beyond the creek was overgrown with wild bamboo and willow scrub, thousands of acres of marshy bottomland that stretched away toward the foothills in the north and the park in the east. Now, in the moonlight, the scattered rocks of the sandy arroyo shone chalky pale, and the skeletons of late-winter castor bean and mesquite stood out starkly