The rain started Friday afternoon. The news predicted a two-day storm, a real gully-washer, with snow falling that night north in Flagstaff. So Jess and her mother went to the store, pulling up the hoods on their jackets and scurrying inside, where the bread and milk were already sparse on the shelves. As Jess pushed a cart down the aisle, its front wheel wobbling, she saw someone ducking around the aisle. Dani. Jess let go of the cart and ran after her, her mother calling out behind her.
She hit the corner and almost ran into a display of cereal boxes, knocking two loose from the stack. She tossed them on the stack and then walked fast past the packaged meats and deli, scanning the aisles for Dani. But she couldn’t see her. When she reached the front of the store and peered out, she spotted a dark-haired girl dashing through the rain to a car parked behind a cluster of shopping carts. Jess couldn’t tell if it was her. She’d started to run out into the rain when her mom grabbed her elbow.
All Saturday it rained, and Jess and her mom stayed indoors, playing pinochle and drinking hot cocoa, the windows foggy with the steam of their breath. Throughout the night, the rain drummed the roof, sneaking into Jess’s dreams and startling her awake every hour or so with a sense of unease, a question at the back of her throat: Who’s there?
Early Sunday, bleary from her restless night, she brewed a pot of coffee and decided to make buttermilk pancakes for her mother, frying them in butter in the skillet and heating the syrup bottle in a warm pan like her mother did. When her mom woke, she said, “Okay, who died?” and then laughed, ruffling Jess’s hair. Jess ate three and a half, slathered with butter and syrup. Queasy, she loaded the dishwasher. Starting over. Back on the road to normality.
The rest of the afternoon, her mother napped on the living room sofa with the TV blaring news and reruns of cop shows. Jess stayed in her room. Cold and damp, she put on one of her dad’s wool sweaters she’d buried deep in the closet, and it hung down to her thighs. She pulled his cards from the desk drawer and spread them across the bed before bundling them up again. She took a shower, the extra-hot water scalding her skin and scalp red. By late afternoon, she sat at the desk and watched the rain pummel the driveway, bend the branches of the jacaranda. The flat, gray sky muddled her sense of time, and she began to feel as if she were waiting for someone, listening for the sound of arrival. The hair on her neck rose. Not a welcome arrival. A sense of threat. Someone or something coming to get her.
Jess hunched in the desk chair, feeling the weight of herself, her breath feathery in her throat. She wrote:
The first day of winter
You wait in the dark
for what lies in wait
Wait, wait, don’t tell me:
You feel the full weight of your decisions
Waiting for a weight off your mind
Well, don’t wait up
Wait, I’m not finished.
Wait, is this what I ordered?
Waiter, there’s a fly in my soup.
Just wait till your father gets home.
Wait a minute: how heavy is
the weight of the world?
How much weight can you bear?
I’ll wait for your reply
Then she scratched it out with ink, line by line, until it was illegible.
She jumped up and ran into the living room. Her mom was still asleep on the sofa, her arm dangling off the side, the cordless phone and a plate with crackers and cheese at her fingertips. Jess picked up both, putting the phone in the charger, the plate in the sink. She took deep breaths and paced in the kitchen. The oven clock ticked to 4:35, and the sense of foreboding swelled. She gripped the oven handle. She needed to go out, take a walk.
In the bedroom, she pulled her puffy coat from the closet, and tore a piece of paper from her notebook.
She wrote,
Mom,
I’m going out for a walk (it’s about 4:45). I need to clear my head. I’ll be back in a couple hours. Don’t worry.
Love, J-bird
After taping the note on the coffee table under the remote, she shrugged on her coat, stuck her notebook inside against her chest, and zipped up. The bottom of the sweater hung like a skirt over her jeans. She leaned over her mother, picked up her dangling hand, and rested it across her chest. She unfolded a quilt and covered her. Her mother sighed, her eyelids fluttering, and Jess tiptoed backward. From the front closet, she dug out an umbrella—her father’s, she realized, a black one with a heavy plastic handle—and she slipped outside.
She ran down Roadrunner Lane, her canvas shoes soaked within minutes. The rain, strong as a summer deluge, stung with winter ice. Running helped warm her, but her hand holding the umbrella ached, and she cursed herself for not grabbing gloves. With each splashing step, though, the glaze of dread began to slough off and fall away from her shoulders.
When she reached the first dip in the road, she paused. Water rushed across it, but the stream wasn’t too wide, maybe three or four feet. She stepped a few feet back to get momentum, ran forward, and jumped, her heel clearing the water with inches to spare. She laughed, glad for once of her height and long legs and muscle memory, at the long-ingrained instinct to leap.