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After the Rain By Luna Veluti
 
Never in her entire life had she so powerfully sensed that she was about to meet her destiny. Firm belief and wishful thinking had gotten her pretty close a couple of times - only to prove themselves hopelessly wrong;    But, this - this had to be it.  It didn't just give off some kind of aura or strike up that inner spark; it infused her whole being, melting on her tongue, whispering her name, wafting up her nose, tingling on her fingertips. Fingertips.  She checked the stove-top one more time, cautiously feeling the elements and then, after a count of three, tugged on the dials to make sure they were really off. Now, focus: they really do say OFF.  She hated that last part because it meant that she didn't do it quite right and would have to do it again at least twice more. But today, if she got bogged down, she was going to run late and really couldn't; so she just closed her eyes tight and put her hands square on the elements. No heat. "OK I HAVE to go.." 
 
She didn't know whether it was excitement or anxiety that was making her sweat like this. Not that it really ever made a difference. She never could tell one from the other.  What made a difference to her right now was whether it was going to ruin her immaculate face.  She had spent a good hour trying to look not too excited and not too anxious.  Shadow here, blush there, gloss this over. Just so.  Her two year old son had perched himself on the toilet to better aim his curious stare at her every step of the way.  Something extraordinary must be happening, he must have thought. And there was.  He had never seen his mother do so much for herself, or to herself. Now, it seemed, all that work was going to go to waste if she didn't calm down. She put Casey in his car seat, forcing herself through a quick version of the one-tug-two-tug-three-tug of the buckles, closed the passenger door and lit up a cigarette.  
 
She'd met him while she was married to Casey's dad, Len.  Len was a travelling salesman and was away a lot of the time; but that is not why she had had the affair.  She wasn't like that at all. She liked, even cherished the idea of being faithful especially through the tough parts.  No, she hadn't done it out of boredom, or out of lust, or even out of resentment. She had done it because it was the only way she knew how she might somehow get him back.  Back for what he had done to her.  For all that he had done to her.  She hadn't had their son yet, so all his rage, all his damage, had a pretty nasty and regular habit of unloading on her alone.  That, she had gotten used to over the years; she had even come to find a perverse sense of accomplishment in it, like she was serving the vital, and very wifely, she thought, role of being the gauze that cleaned out his wounds.  But this had been the last straw.  She had begged and begged him, for the last few months especially, to have a night out - you know, like dinner and a movie, or just going out for drinks or something - and he had either flat out refused, or made some poor excuse for an excuse about money being tight, or not feeling well, or maybe just not wanting to take her out until she put some meat on her bones.  Now, he told her, he was going to go down to Vegas with the guys for a few nights to get away from "all the crap at home" and maybe get lucky too.   He had made sure that the way that last bit came out left it open to interpretation. OUtrage. Forked Tongue Devil. Just a f***ing movie. Beelzebub. A cocktail of boiling blood and chopped word salad went surging up and through her aching brain and made it swell like a balloon on the verge of pop.  What would normally take every ounce of her courage to spit out, she now unstoppably spewed right out.  All her objections, all her hurts, all her neglected, dismissed, or worse, counter-met needs, came rumbling and crashing out of her tiny soul. Crash. He always won. Look at you. You think I wanna be seen with you out in public? Why don't you eat something? You're a fucking skeleton. And a lazy one at that. LAZY - BONES. That's you in the dictionary. Why don't you put all that piss and vinegar into cleaning the house once in while maybe, huh? Screw this. I gotta ride to catch. See ya -- you fucking psycho.  That was her, fucking psycho, the only stain on the spotless floor.
 
HIM. Chris. She could recall her first impressions of him as someone she could maybe befriend.  He seemed kind and safe.  She wasn't particularly attracted to him. Not in that way. But there was something about him that drew her to him. Intensely.  They had met quite by chance, at the local library, where she had offered to help him find his contact lens after watching him search in desperate blindness.  I have extremely sharp vision -- just for finding little things on the floor, though -- otherwise I am blind as a bat..too.. like coke-bottle glasses...she'd gone on rather awkwardly, blushing like a crushing kid sister.  He had chatted back charmingly - despite the more pressing matter of quickly finding the missing, fast-shrinking sight-saver - wearing a warm sincere smile through the whole exchange and oozing something wholly like sainthood out of the depth of his eyes.  That alone had made her feel the need to know him better.  She had waited for them to have just a few more casual encounters of the same kind, meanwhile trying not to too much rehearse her approach, and then she had asked him if they might have some coffee together sometime. Maybe she could give him the name of her optician. Hard to find an honest optician.  Hard to find honesty. He'd agreed. And for the next few months of what had started as a true, wonderful friendship, it was Chris' honesty that struck her most, time and time again; and it was that that finally carried her into his inevitably wholesome bed. 
 
By the time she finished her cigarette, she could feel the full tonic effect of sweet memory on her chopped nerves.  She checked Casey's buckles again and got herself into the driver's seat flipping down the vanity mirror.  Her make-up was still pretty much intact and her hair hadn't frizzed out. She didn't look all that different, she thought.  A little older to be sure; that was alright though. What she didn't really like was how the chemo had taken the brightness out of her eyes and the warmth from her skin tone. She reminded herself that she was not ugly. The one who called you ugly was ugly; you're not ugly.  And with that little mantra she was off.  She couldn't wait to see Chris again after nearly ten years.  He had sounded really excited on the phone too.  He said he couldn't believe that it was actually her calling, out of nowhere, all of a sudden, after all this time.  He said that he was making TV commercials for some big outfit in the city and that he was the single dad of a little boy too.  Wow, really, that's amazing;  what's his name?  Casey... Casey Rayne.  For a moment, when she first heard that, she had thought, somebody, somehow must be playing some kind of weird joke on her.  How, on God's green earth, could Chris' son possibly have the exact first and second name as HER son?  She literally could not believe the ears on her spinning head. That's impossible...I mean...that's so weird..really?.. that's MY son's name. I mean both names...Casey Rayne...What??? are you serious??... And so on. What may have seemed like a extraordinary, even strange, coincidence to some, had struck her as nothing less than her undeniable arrival at destiny's doorstep. She wanted to run, tackle, let it swallow her whole.  This time she would not make the same mistake. This time, she would never let him go. 
 
 
She greedily reaches for her coffee cup before the switchboard lights up again.  The little gulp does its wonders smoldering down her throat and jolting every cell awake along the way. All morning it's been going crazy up front and, of course, as her luck would have it, it's also been the kind of morning where the sugar goes in the ashtray and the ashes go in the cup.  Shouldn't have stayed up so late last night, she keeps scolding herself every time she screws up some little detail that would normally take her no thought at all.  But then a warm glow takes over from the guilt as she thinks of the fullness of every moment with Chris that has added up to this sleep deficit; and then she feels no lack - of any thing.  She feels the inquisitive stare of a passing co-worker and takes the full grin down a notch.  Besides, the phones are going ape again.  The calls are coming in about twenty at a time; and while she usually relishes the robotic focus it takes to tames this chaos, today she is seriously sweating it.  The next time she comes up for air, she can't believe her eyes.  Right in front of her, an apparition of torturous confusion.  What are you doing here, Len? She says in distinct syllables parched from the struggle up the back of her clenching throat. Len flashes a brilliant smile. One of those ones that she really really likes.  They start up slow from pursed lips that are somehow already smiling and speed up to a full million as the perfect lips gild the perfect frame for the perfect teeth.  Irresistible.  She can't hear what he's saying with his mouth; he has a talent for making her read from his eyes.  He just wants to talk to her. The flowers are for the birthday he just missed.  A dozen roses. She doesn't like roses; she likes daisies; but it doesn't matter. He never remembers and they are still so beautiful.  She meets him after work, which doesn't last very long because she keeps screwing up even worse than before he showed up. She leaves behind palimpsests of spilt coffee, broken china, smeared rouge and shaken resolve. 
 
Chris? Len is back.  Yes, Len.  I mean he's come back from Vegas.  I know he took off on me for six months.  No I am not with him right now.  I am at the public phone..outside our... my place.  Yes, he's at my place.  No, I am.. I .. I don't know, Chris. I have to think.  I am just calling because I felt like I had to tell you right away. Give me some time to think. I don't know what I am thinking.  It keeps running on a loop through her head, the prologue to the biggest mistake of her life, she is sure.  Her mind has lost the will to traverse the plot line of the seven more years spent with Len.  All she recalls now are just feelings, of misery, fear, disgust, and regret.  The only memories from that era that exist in rich, and treasured, detail are the ones surrounding the birth of her little boy; but then, that was well after Len had gone for good.  Exactly five months after she had found out she was pregnant, he had picked a huge fight over her lovingly, dutifully, reminding him not to scratch his eczema while they were in bed, throwing up the sheets in a rage, stomping out of the bedroom and eventually into the car, never to be seen or heard from again.  Just like that.  Some months later, just before Casey's birth, when the news about her tumor had made her desperately want to find Len, mutual friends had told her that he had gone back to Vegas and settled down there with some showgirl they'd heard mention of when he'd first come back those seven years ago. They were having a baby too.  
 
While she is ordering the drinks, she can see Chris coming into the cafe from the corner of her eye; but she doesn't react yet, just to give herself some time to pull it together.  He's two or three customers behind her now and she can feel his eyes burning through her frame.  When she's done at the counter, she casually turns herself and Casey around and lets her eyes meet his. This way, she thinks, her initial smile won't look too crazy.  Her heart is racing so fast she feels a hum instead of a beat.  Despite the conscious delay, she can feel her whole being light up as soon as she sees the the beam of recognition on his face. It's an awkward hug instead of a deep embrace; but that's only to be expected, she justifies to herself.  He wears crow's feet and a little grey, footprints of the last ten years; but otherwise he looks just the same, except he wears glasses.  No more contact lenses.  If the shoe doesn't fit, do not wear it.  It must be because of the glasses, she keeps telling herself, that she can't quite get a good picture of his eyes, a good view, as it were, into his soul.  They seem to keep wandering away into some distance he knows he cannot possibly reach, frustrating her search for a place to anchor.  It strikes her with some poignancy, that the last time they met, it was he who was struggling to pinpoint her restless eyes. She, trying to ply him (and herself) with reasons for going back to her husband, he trying desperately to dissuade her. Then her soul sinks.  For the first time, she fathoms the extent of the hurt she must have caused him; she can now plainly see it as some ghost in the engine behind his fluttering gaze.  But her damages are only half of his ten year story.  Why would any woman - any woman in her right mind - leave him? She is sure that whatever intangible quality she senses missing from his old charm is just varnish eaten off by the acidity of heartbreak.  She is sure that he would have been a model husband and father. And yet left him his wife did, just announcing, one day out of the blue, that she was going to change her life by moving to Turkey; to take advantage of 'opportunities' which, as it turned out, amounted to her chasing the undoubtedly empty promises of some rich old Internet sugar daddy she had never even met.  Chris paints a much more charitable picture than this; but the pain in his face tells an infinitely fouler version choking back screams and profanities.  She listens carefully to word and body, to how the love and the hatred, each and both together, struggle to heal.  She loves him even more than ever before; and partly, because they share a most basic mode of survival.  "But for the sake of my son..."  They laugh at how often the phrase has come up in the last hour and joke about how it is their version of "but for the grace of God..." It is both the most profound theme of their recent existence and a most natural segue to the burning matter of their most certainly destined future.  She can hardly wait to delve into the topic of their children's identical names.  She proceeds cautiously, terrified that he might not share her ardour; but then, thinks, is there really any need?  the coincidence is too uncanny, too serendipitous. He cannot possibly feel differently. She has never felt so confident in her life. She begins to wax on. A half-smile lifts his face.  He agrees. It is an amazing coincidence.  No, No it's not just some weird coincidence.  It's fate. It has to be. 
 
Do you remember when we met it was the beginning of September.  And it had been a long glorious Summer; particularly hot and dry for these parts and everyone was just amazed at how it was lasting into the Fall. And then it just kept going like that, still like Summer, well into mid-November.  Do you remember how on the first day that it rained after that long dry-spell...it was on your birthday -  November sixteenth - remember?  - outside the library - we had our very first kiss.  Remember, we were both wearing summer clothes like everybody else but seemed to be the only ones out there to have missed the downpour and were joking about how everyone had got caught in the rain but us and that we had missed the chance to be caught up in the passion of the moment with some unlucky soul?  You said, well maybe not, maybe we can pretend it's still raining and grabbed me and kissed me so long I thought my head would spin off its axis? I remember looking up from that kiss and the first thing I saw were the words 'Casey James Memorial Library' going in and out of focus. Like my mind was trying to take a picture of where I was when I ...felt that way. I never missed one of your birthdays in the all the years I lost contact with you; and did you notice how it rained on every single one of them?  I remember that where ever I was I would take a moment to look outside and watch the rain as I secretly wished you a happy birthday. When my son was born, I didn't have much trouble coming up with the fondest memory of my life to name him after. After you. And now, now you are telling me that your son has the exact same first and second name as my son, and it just can't be a mere coincidence. It's just too strange; too perfect...
 
His eyes never stop shifting.  Until now.  It takes him some time to gather up what it takes to tell her what he needs to say.  He says her name twice, just to make sure that he has her full attention. He pauses to see if he has it.  He has it.  "It was her. She picked the names. Casey - Casey is her grandmother's maiden name; and Rayne, I don't know, I really don't know where she got that. I think she just, must have just made it up.. but it was her. It was her.  My ex. My wife." 
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Tag der Veröffentlichung: 14.10.2009

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