Page 55 of Praying for Rain

The clang vibrates through my arms and into my chest and rattles a cough from my smoke-stained lungs. When the silence falls back around me, it comes with a strange sense of calm.

The man is gone.

I don’t know who I am without him, but I feel lighter. Younger. Freer. I no longer have anything to fear because every bad thing that could possibly happen to me has already happened. Because of him.

And, now, he’s locked away for good.

I pick up Rain’s backpack, noting how heavy it is. As my feet begin to move, my strides feel too long. My point of view unusually high. I’m a kid again, in a grown-up’s body, walking home with a backpack full of food scored from the dumpster behind Burger Palace like I did every afternoon.

The trail is wider than I remember. Muddier, too. But the birds are singing the same songs they always have, and the trees smell just as piney. I almost expect Mama and Lily to be waiting for me when I get home. Mama will probably be passed out on the couch with that thing in her arm or arguing with her “friend” in the bedroom. Lily will probably be screaming in her crib. Her little face will light up when I walk in the room, but she’ll start crying again after a minute or two. Mama said babies do that. They just “cry all the damn time.”

When I cut through the Garrisons’ backyard, I notice that their swing set is gone. I used to spend hours playing on that thing with their son, Benji. The Patels’ house, next door, looks like it hasn’t been lived in for years. The grass comes past my knees, and a few windows are broken out. Junk cars line the road, which is littered with broken television sets, glass vases, dishes—anything that the big kids might like to smash. I let my feet carry me across the destruction, but with every crunch of my boots, it becomes more and more apparent that the squat beige house at the end of the street isn’t my home anymore.

And it hasn’t been for a long, long time.

“Four-five-seven Prior Street,” I told the woman on the phone when I called 911 like they’d taught me at school.

“What’s your emergency?”

“My baby sister stopped crying.”

“Son, is this a prank phone call?”

“No, ma’am. She … she won’t wake up. She’s all blue, and she won’t wake up.”

“Where is your mommy?”

“She won’t wake up either.”

The mailbox still says 457, but the house looks nothing like I remember. For starters, it’s been painted—light gray with bright white trim—and the shutters, well, it has some. The rotten front steps that used to wobble when I ran down them, always on the verge of missing the bus, have been replaced, and hanging from the side of the porch, where the giant wasp’s nest used to be, is a blue-and-red plastic baby swing.

My chest constricts as I instinctively listen for the sound of crying.

But there’s only silence.

I run to the porch, clearing all four steps in a single leap, and press my face to one of the windows on either side of the freshly painted front door. “Hello?” I bang on the door with my fist before trying to get a better view in through one of the other windows. “Hello!” I pound on the glass with my open palm.

Even though the framed photos hanging on the wall above the couch show a family of smiling strangers, I can’t help but picture my mom and my sister the way I found them that day. One passed out and dead to the world, the other …

Before I know it, I’m grasping the sides of the doorframe and kicking the motherfucker in. Wood splinters around the deadbolt as the door swings open violently. I burst into the living room and realize immediately that the place doesn’t smell like cigarette smoke and sour, spilled milk anymore. The walls inside have been painted a light gray as well, and the furniture is simple and clean.

“Hello?” I move more cautiously into the hallway, my heart chugging like a freight train.

When I peek into the first room, my old room, I don’t find a mattress on the floor, surrounded by a collection of flashlights in case the power went out. I find a computer desk and two matching bookcases filled with books.

Lily’s crib was in my mom’s room because the extra bedroom had a padlock on it. She never told me what was in there, but now, the door is wide open.

Adrenaline pushes me forward as my eyes land on a white crib, positioned against the far wall with rays of late afternoon sunlight hitting it sideways from the window. The zoo animals hanging from the mobile watch me approach, holding their breath along with me as I relive that day with every step.

I remember the relief I felt that she’d stopped crying, followed by the realization that her skin wasn’t the right color. That her open eyes were fixed on nothing. That her once-chubby cheeks were sunken, her knuckles raw from incessant chewing.

But when I look into this crib, it’s as if I’m experiencing that day in reverse. First comes the dread and then the relief.

There is no Lily. No death. No failure. Only a fitted sheet covered in pink giraffes and gray elephants and a tiny pillow embroidered with three simple words.

You are loved.

I pick it up and read it again, blinking away the sudden, stinging tears blurring my vision.

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