Let’s Call It Rain

There are times when Ruth can feel it—a flickering in her belly—like she’d swallowed a moth and, inexplicably, it lived. At night, as she listens to William snore and tries to get into the rhythm of his gurgling and choking, the tiny phantom heart beats out a message: I’m still here.

It makes her feel less alone. Less singular.

I’m not just one, she thinks. There’s a life inside me.

Was.

She traces her fingers over her stomach, as if to stroke the baby’s hair and soothe it back to sleep.

William wants them to try again. He is insistent upon it.

“It’s part of marriage,” he says. “Children.”

“We have a child,” Ruth says in weak defence. Everyone around them has broods of four, five, six children playing out on the street from dawn to dusk.

“We always wanted more,” William says, and that’s not untrue. “It’s been four years.”

“Three years,” she corrects him. “Fours months and … six days.”

She could tell him the hour, the minute, if he cared to know.

She looks at Kimmy with sadness that she’d never know her brother, but also resentment—why does all her mothering have to be spent on this one child?

When Ruth came home from hospital after the D & C, William’s sister, Margaret, came to stay for a week while she got back on her feet. Margaret had dinner on the table at six o’clock each night, just the way William liked it, and Kimmy’s hair in neat plaits before the child was barely out of her pyjamas. She kept Kimmy from the bedroom, distracting her with walks to the park and paper dolls, and silently removed the bloody pads from the bin near the bed each morning.

At the end of the week, Margaret packed her bag, gave Ruth a dry kiss on the cheek and said, “There now.”

When Ruth emerged, she found Kimmy sitting at the table with a dot-to-dot book and a pink texta in her fist.

“That’s not how you hold it,” Ruth said and tried to correct the child’s grip. She resisted. Kimmy had drawn a wobbly outline of a rabbit by following the dots numbered one to fourteen. Now she was doing the eyes. Ruth sat and watched, waiting to be asked for help.

 

Sometimes he floats like a cherub—dimple-bottomed and feathery-winged—in her peripheral vision, or above someone’s head as they speak.

Mrs Powers at the corner store asks her again if she wants the devon or the ham, and Ruth says, “The devon. Six slices.”

High in the corner is a convex mirror mounted to the ceiling. It deters any nasty shoplifters. There is movement behind it.

Hello, little one.

She understands Mrs Powers is run off her feet, but not why can’t she remember a simple request—devon, not ham. Ruth will mention the woman’s impending dementia to William.

Mrs Powers and her husband—currently busy doing God-knows-what—are from somewhere in England. Mrs Powers calls everyone “Dot” which makes Kimmy giggle uncontrollably when she hears it. Behind Ruth, two other customers wait.

“Here we are, Dot,” Mrs Powers says, bringing the wrapped devon around to the counter. “What else have you got?”

Ruth looks dreamily up at the mirror, but he’s gone. She passes over the basket containing a loaf of bread, a jar of pickles, and a tin of sliced beetroot.

“Sandwiches for lunch, Dot?” Mrs Powers asks.

She finds something to say about everyone’s purchases, even if it’s just a packet of Life Savers. William finds it presumptuous, but Ruth understands she’s just making conversation.

“Easiest for a Saturday,” Ruth says. “I don’t want to be in the kitchen all day.”

“No,” Mrs Powers says and peers at the cash register as though it had just fallen through the ceiling. Ruth wonders how old she is. Her hair is dyed a coppery-red and the thick white powder on her face looks more like a baking misfortune than a beauty choice.

“Your girl,” Mrs Powers says, jabbing at the cash register. “She must be old enough now to be helping in the kitchen.”

“Yes,” Ruth says, wishing she could lean over and ring up the items herself. “She’s very capable.”

She suppresses the feeling of guilt that emerges anytime someone mentions her daughter and how big she’s getting. If she’s honest with herself—and she likes to think she is—she has neglected Kimmy terribly in the past few years, but the child seems to have thrived nevertheless.

Mrs Powers places the glasses that are hanging from a chain around her neck on the tip of her nose.

“Three dollars, twenty-six cents, Dot,” she finally announces, as though cracking the Enigma code.

Ruth places a five-dollar note on the counter.

“Any more?” Mrs Powers asks as she puts the items into a paper bag.

“That’s all,” Ruth says, confused. Hasn’t the silly woman just given the total? “Thank you.”

“Kiddies,” Mrs Powers says. “Any more? She’ll be wanting a brother or sister, won’t she, Dot?”

Ruth smiles and shrugs as though to say, who knows?

“Like you’d wish more of ’em on any woman,” says the customer behind Ruth.

Ruth escapes with her groceries, thinking what a nosy parker Mrs Powers is, and runs straight into Shirley Cunningham. When is Kimmy coming over for a swim in their new pool? Charlotte—the youngest of seven blonde-haired Cunninghams—and Kimmy have been friends since kindy. Why, Ruth wonders, would she want more children screaming and carrying on? She asks the broad-hipped, round-faced woman this.

“Kimmy’s a lamb,” says Shirley. “Hardly a peep out of her.”

Ruth smiles benignly and shifts her groceries from one hand to the other.

“Send her over after lunch,” Shirley says, looking up at the sky. The sun is shining weakly through thick cumulus clouds. “Nice day for it.”

The women walk off in opposite directions. Home is fifteen minutes away, twenty if she dawdles and admires the flower garden belonging to the family—Filipino, she believes—at the end of the street.

She imagines that her boy walks beside her, a tenuous grasp on one pudgy finger. She asks him what he wants for dinner, if he wants to take a nap, and as they pass under a tree she points out the ringing of the cicadas. She thinks she will never let him grow past this age.

In the front yard, William is pushing the lawn-mower. This is his Saturday morning chore. Come hell or high water or thirty-degree heat, this is what he does. She hears him whistling as the mower’s engine splutters and stops. His pale calves are hairless due to years of knee-high sock wearing. In summer he goes barefoot in shorts and a singlet.

“Hi, love,” he says and wipes his hand under his nose.

The little finger slips away.

Kimmy comes racing around the side of the house with King on her heels. She leaps over the pile of grass that’s been raked into a mound in the middle of the yard. The dog goes right through it.

“For the love of God,” William starts.

“Settle down,” Ruth says to him. “Kimmy, rake that back up. Put it in the wheelbarrow for your Dad. Then come inside and clean yourself up.”

Her daughter flies past her in a streak of hair and stripes and girlish energy.

“Okay,” she calls. “Come on, King.”

Inside, Ruth finds the clothing in the basket that she asked Kimmy to fold. It’s a task that Kimmy occasionally insists upon doing. Ruth is confounded by her capriciousness—one moment Kimmy wants to learn how to iron, or make her parents’ cups of tea, or vacuum, and the next Ruth can’t drag her away from The Brady Bunch.

She searches in the bottom drawer of Kimmy’s dresser for the swimming costume and beach towel that were one of her Christmas presents. She puts them into a bag and hides it in the pantry. Ruth will wait until Kimmy has eaten her lunch before she tells her about the invitation.

Margaret, who’s more devout than Ruth, and diligent in her duty as Kimmy’s godmother, unexpectedly sends Kimmy a small book: The Lives of the Saints.

“Why?” Ruth asks William. “Her confirmation isn’t for another three years.”

“Don’t ask me,” William says.

“She’s your sister,” Ruth says back.

Kimmy is enrapt by the book and doesn’t tire of it after a week as Ruth anticipated. She’s full of questions: What’s a martyr? Does stigmata hurt? How do saints become saints? She tells them at dinner about Saint Sebastian and the arrows lodged deep in his thigh and neck. She tells them about Saint Timothy who was stoned to death by unbelievers. One stone hit his head.

“Kimmy,” Ruth says, unwilling to have these images thrust upon her while eating, “please.”

William tells Kimmy to write a thank-you note to Margaret. Kimmy includes a drawing of the three children of Fatima who look, to Ruth, grim and unlikeable. Kimmy announces that she wants Jacinta as her confirmation name, not Bridget as previously stated.

William and Ruth look at each other knowingly.

On the telephone to Margaret, Ruth thanks her for sending the book.

“Though I can’t imagine why,” she adds.

“A friend’s daughter is being confirmed and I was buying a gift for her. A medal. I saw the book,” Margaret says, “and just had to get it for Kimberley. I loved mine.”

Margaret has previously expressed her opinion about Ruth and William referring to their seven-year-old daughter as Kimmy.

“Well,” Ruth says, “Kimmy loves it. It’s all she looks at.”

There is a pause and Ruth can hear on the other end of the telephone the same news program that William is watching in the lounge-room.

“Then there’s the new arrival,” Margaret says finally, tentatively. “It might help you choose a name?”

“Pardon?”

“Don’t worry,” Margaret says and lowers her voice. “William swore me to secrecy.”

“I see.”

You stupid woman. It’s me you weren’t supposed to tell.

“You’re cross,” Margaret says. “There’s no need to be.”

When Ruth gets off the phone, she marches down the hall to where William is sitting with his feet up on the coffee table, newspaper in his lap, TV blaring.

“Margaret knows,” she says. “Said she’s praying for me.”

“Now Ruth,” William says.

“She said she knows everything is going to be fine this time.”

“Well it is,” William says. “Come along, darling. You’re eighteen weeks.”

“Don’t you think I know?” Ruth says and stomps back down the hall to the kitchen to finish wiping and putting away the dishes. She knows the clattering of the plates will annoy William. When she’s done, she goes into Kimmy’s room to see that she’s in her pyjamas and remind her about her teeth.

“Mum,” Kimmy says, “what’s the difference between an angel and an archangel?”

“Lordy,” Ruth says, “ask your father that stuff.”

One day she’ll tell her about how William had almost joined the seminary.

Kimmy looks down at the book and then back up.

“What’s Portugal like?” she asks. “I want to go.”

“To Fatima?” Ruth asks with a smile. “Move over.”

They sit side by side on the bed with their backs against the wall. Ruth tells her what she knows about Portugal, which is very little and possibly not true. It’s a small country next to Spain and very similar to Spain in most respects. The people there speak Portuguese and they’re Catholic, mostly. This satisfies Kimmy. Ruth takes her hand and puts in on her belly.

“Do you think I’m getting fat?” Ruth asks.

Kimmy giggles and says, “A bit, yeah.”

“Your brother or sister is in there.”

The child’s eyes grow as wide as they can.

Ruth delays the question of how the baby got in there—she doesn’t know what the middle ground is between biology and silliness about storks. She was the youngest in her family, so has nothing to fall back on.

“What’s your favourite name?” she asks and nods at the book. “For a boy?”

“Bernard,” Kimmy says immediately, as though she’s been waiting for this question for some time.

“And a girl?”

“Bernadette.”

The baby’s hands are constantly clenched into small red fists, as though ready for a fight. William points this out to everyone, although they can see it for themselves if they’ve eyes in their head. Kimmy stands in quiet wonder at the side of his bassinet when she’s allowed to visit. Mostly, Ruth wants him for herself. She wants these moments with him here in the hospital—the same hospital—to caress him, and press him against her. She wants to absorb him back into her body. She’s made a deal with herself, too: while they are here he is that baby. When they go home, he’ll be Bernard. The nurses leave her be—she’s not a first-timer after all—and she cups his head as he feeds, feeling the milk being drawn out of her, feeling herself both empty and full at the same time.

Margaret comes to help, though it’s not required. Ruth and bubby, as Kimmy likes to call him, have been home for three weeks and are settled into a routine. Kimmy races home from school to fold nappies and attach the booties that are always falling off. Now that the umbilical cord has gone—she refused to be in the same room when it was “out”—she’s also attendant at bath time, which happens on the kitchen table, waiting to sprinkle the Johnson’s baby powder on him once dry.

“Go easy,” Ruth says. “He’s not a cake.”

Margaret bustles about asking where things are, how William likes his chops, grilled or crumbed, and what was interesting at school today, Kimberley?

“She needs to know she’s still important,” Margaret says to William. “I’ve seen this kind of thing before.”

Ruth can’t imagine where. TV, probably. Margaret is forty, single, a shop assistant in the soft-furnishings section of a large department store, and lives at home with her elderly mother.

Kimmy doesn’t want to talk about school; she only wants to know about bubby: When is he going to talk? When is he going to eat food? What’s that soft spot on top of his head called again? When the baby pees, squirting a little jet of urine clear out of the bath and onto the floor, Ruth and Kimmy laugh so hard they cry. They are united in their devotion to Bernie. Margaret and William can’t compete. Ruth feels that, in her daughter’s eyes, she is worth adoring too. She has a chance to be a good mother, as she once was.

Stubborn. Insolent. Lazy. She has the misfortune of having not one, but two unruly children. Will they pick up their belongings? No. Will they stop using their beds as trampolines? No. Will they eat the food that she’s prepared for them? Kimmy, a stick-thin ten-year-old, has become so finicky in what she’ll eat and what she won’t, that Ruth has all but given up.

“Have another bloody Vegemite sandwich then,” she says. “But don’t think I’m going to make it for you.”

Every damn night.

And Bernie, a sweet three-year-old during the day, obsessed with Matchbox cars and finding lizards in the garden, turns into a demon once the word “bed” is uttered. He can sit for an hour in the bath if allowed, and he often is. The door is kept open and Ruth pops her head in as she passes, warning him not to put his fingers in the tap, or put all the cars in the water. Eventually, she sits on the edge of the bath while he presses a washer to his eyes, and tips a cup of water over his head to rinse out the shampoo.

“It stings,” he complains.

“Almost done,” she says.

She sighs and thinks of her other boy, who’d be six now. He stands beside her, chattering about school, or she looks at the back of his head as he brushes his teeth. How slender he is. Outside, she can hear Kimmy arguing with William about homework: Is it done? Yes. Show me. Here. That’s not finished. I’ve got another day. Turn off the TV this minute.

Stubborn girl.

Under the shower for the first time, Kimmy—a stout toddler and brown as an almond—squealed and shouted, “Rain! Rain!”

“It’s a shower,” Ruth said, mindful of the child slipping and cracking her head on the bathtub in her excitement. “Shower.”

“Rain,” Kimmy insisted.

“Alright then,” Ruth replied wearily. “Rain. Let’s call it rain.”

It was exhausting.

“Rain,” Kimmy said, satisfied that she’d bent the world to her command yet again.

Father O’Reilly, a great one for trying to simplify complex theology for his parishioners, one day says that limbo is no longer a notion upheld by the church. Those poor souls, he says, unbaptised through no fault of their loving parents and exiled from their place in heaven, should be named and remembered as children of God.

Ruth is aghast—all this time she could’ve named him? She reaches for William’s hand, and he squeezes it. She doesn’t tell him she feels betrayed by the church and its arbitrary rules about who gets in and who doesn’t. She can barely bring herself to admit it.

She calls him Robert.

Years later, when Kimmy is Kim, a young woman, and they’re being kind to one another after a period of estrangement, she tells her.

“Robert,” Kim repeats and looks down. “Sorry.”

Ruth sees something pass over her daughter’s face. It isn’t sympathy. Sorrow, perhaps.

I hope it never happens to you, Ruth wants to say, but knows it’s not the worst thing that can happen to a woman.

Sue Brennan lives in New South Wales. She is working on a novel and a collection of short stories