Red Weather

18. The Rainy Season

122 18 TheRainySeason It rained every afternoon. It was nothing like the rain in the States. For two hours, everything was dark green and black; then trees, lawns, houses—it all turned to pale green, to yellowish green, especially where the sunlight broke through the dense trees. Green as a forest. And when the rain stopped, the air was fresh, crisp as autumn in Alabama. Now there was mud everywhere instead of the gritty yellow dust Neva used to wash off her desktop every Monday morning. She wore skirts instead of pants, carried an extra pair of sandals, a hat instead of an umbrella—a useless item when even the air seemed to be made of water. It rained, but no one missed the dry season, when it was hot and dusty, when the water was dirty and anything could make you sick to your stomach. With the rains, Neva stopped wondering about Tomás. She had—without realizing it at first—walked through a door into a different world, where the light was so different he might as well have been an actor in a film she saw one afternoon, a character in a dream someone narrated over the lunch table. She thought: All I wanted was to escape. All I wanted was to live. To come home and lie down in a bed no one would drag me out of. To wake up to a face marked only by sleep and dreaming. I never really thought I would find them. That I would find out what happened. She returned to wanting only what she wanted before. She rearranged her room so that the light woke her in the morning. When she came home in the afternoons, she made a pot of tea and drank it instead of beer. She sat in the kitchen grading papers, surprised that these were the same students whose awkward sentences she had so struggled with a few months before. She never planned the future, but little by little she began to piece together the past, to try to figure out when it happened—the moment 123 she began to go under. She thought about that Neva in the third person. She remembered when Miriam’s five-year-old niece Neva, who had never met anyone with the same name as herself, started referring to her as “that other kind of Neva.” In the dark green forest of the rainy season, she began to think about that “other kind” of Neva, lost in the dry world. The broken, cracked-open world on the other side of the forest. A Neva who could be remembered with regret and tenderness, but never rescued. She wanted to be the clever girl in the fairy tale, who took a gold ring, a tiny wooden chair, and a lock of her dead mother’s golden hair on her journey. Who night after night wove a jacket of stinging nettles, though her hands burned and though she was not allowed to speak. The girl who solved the riddle, who outlasted the witch’s impossible task. She wanted to guess the secret name of the little man, who spun straw into gold, who wanted to take something precious and irreplaceable from her. The clever girl who waved a cutoff finger at her robber bridegroom, not the one searching for her shadow, which had slipped away one day when she wasn’t paying attention. That “other kind” of Neva could not be rescued. She was lost in the ogre’s castle, in the giant’s lair. There was no secret wardrobe, no rope of hair out of the tower, no underground tunnel. Maybe she had known all along that her search was futile. Maybe it had just been an excuse. In a distant room, someone was reading that story aloud, but she could no longer hear the ending. Her brother called. He and Rhonda, his girlfriend, were talking about getting a house together when the estate was settled and wondered if Neva might want to live with them for a while. “I don’t want to go back,” Neva told him, her words echoing back to her as if she were sending them down a dark well instead of across a continent. He knew what she meant. He knew she didn’t mean she didn’t want to come back to the States. “I don’t either,” Harker said. “But that would be the point, wouldn’t it? To stop waiting for...