Read Online Clearly Now, the Rain by Eli Hastings - Free Book Online

waiting for me in the pillows.
    You are right, doing the right thing. There is no shame in your struggle, no shame in the pain that you feel. You did not do this to Samar. You did not do anything wrong. She is putting things on you that no one can take off because you are holding onto her through them. But those things are not yours and your love for her will hold its own, you don’t have to fill up that place with the guilt she’s putting there. That place in you where you love her is still pure and good, and she is taking the dirt from her heart that covered up the sweet y’all had, and putting it on your heart. Don’t take it, don’t let it cover the purity of what was there, because it still is there, and it won’t leave. You don’t even have to hold onto that place, it will always be there. And when she puts it there, you have to let go of it, let the wind of this storm blow it out. I promise that wind can’t blow the good things out.
    The Five Star: a Route 66 dive of red vinyl booths, strong drinks, and smoke you had to wave away to see others. It was a place where a friend would have his car cordoned off in the lot for twenty-four hours while a murder was investigated. It was a blessedly dim place, relatively empty in the early hours. A couple of ruddy-faced barflies always hunched at the bar holding cocktails as if they might try to get away. Sad, mellow blues tunes rasped from the jukebox.
    If the outline of the events that haunted Serala was slowly fleshing out, the things that remained mysterious haunted Monty. I recall the way that he looked sometimes in the Five Star when his eyes were glassy, his hands wrapped around a cocktail. I know there was a dead mother and half-told stories of witnessing violence. His father, some kind of international aid baron, had dragged him around to bastions of third world “development” as a child and I don’t think that Monty always saw the pretty side. I think, actually, that whatever it was he had seen may have glazed him into the suit of cynicism and drugs that I first knew him in.
    One particular night in that glorious dive, Serala is off peeing or getting high or something, and I catch that look on Monty’s face, in the way distance has filled up his gaze, and I say something like:
Hey, so I appreciate y’all kind of taking me in. I can always give you more space if you want it, you know.
    And he comes back to the present and blinks, spins his glass and tells me:
No, it’s okay, man. She—we—really mean it, really want you around, to take care of you. It’s hard times.
    Late that night, in the Batcave, she’s off again on some kind of wandering. Monty puts his finger to his lips and digs a black bottle with a rubber stopper out of her closet, opens it—
oops
—then goes to put it back. But before he can, I snatch it and look into the tarry bottom, smell, for the first time, junk—that balm of hers, that acrid mystery that I will never know. I grimace at the sting of the poison in my nostrils and turn away, not wanting to see where the bottle lives in the Spartan closet.
    So Monty pulls out the jar he’d intended to, and takes a snort. His big pale face jerks skyward with a smile that looks like it has been put there by a hammer, and he hands it over. I do the same—and reel several feet to flop on the bed. I see shimmering lines and hear only a glorious ringing, like heaven’s trumpets. I laugh hysterically till I come down in what turns out to be about ninety seconds.
    Don’t tell her,
he says with a wink that takes three seconds to effect.
    I suppose I didn’t. I don’t even know what it was.
    That is to say that despite his transgressions with her, he was good to me in the ways he knew how and he respected me, I believe. And so there was a particular moment when guilt cranked up high in me . . .
    I’m at a kickboxing exam for my third belt. I hold onto this