Page 181 of As the Rain Falls
Angelina: I’m done after lunch.
Me: Pick you two up at 3.30.
Tony can you wait for Ang to come out?
Tony: Sure.
I’ll Get Some Work Done In The Meantime.
After so much shit being said about Lucia, it’s starting to become easy to forget who she really was. It’s how Angelina, Antony, and I find ourselves rummaging through Lucia’s things together, looking for comfort in each other, and pretending we’re not suffocating under the weight of hating everyone around us.
“I mean, can youbelieveher?” Angelina huffs, practically attacking my sister’s closet as she tries to reorganize her things. A beach hat falls to the ground, landing on her feet, and she kicks at it.
“No, I cannot,” I mumble back.
She ignores me entirely, “Alice put her hands on me like I’m some kind ofobjectshe can just pick up and put back down. Who thehelldoes she think she is?”
“Right,” Antony agrees carefully, throwing me a desperate look. “But do we have to hear this speech all over again?”
“She thinks she’s the new Lucia.”
“Troca o disco, Angelina.”
“Ah, Tony. Vá se foder!”she snaps right back, angrily folding a shirt now. “I am allowed to complain, okay? This is the free complaints room! If you want to be all happy-go-lucky, then you go do that somewhere else!”
“Okay, okay. No fighting between my two stubborn children.” Now that the light bulb was fixed, the room is back to life, fully functional again. “I like having you both here a lot better when you get along.”
Angelina mutters random curses as she grabs some kind of box and yanks it out of Lucia’s closet. She flips it open aggressively; meanwhile, I turn to Antony, motioning for my toolbox.
Lucia’s bedside drawers won’t fully close, and she always asked me to fix it before, but I never did. I’m doing it now as a way to soothe my consciousness.
If there’s an afterlife up there, maybe she’s watching, rolling her eyes at me, and cursing my name by yelling,Fucking finally.
“Can you give me the…” I start, hoping to ask him to hand me a smaller nail, but I’m interrupted by a loud sound coming from the other side of the room.
“No way!” the tall girl gasps. “I found it! I finally found it!”
“What did you find?” Antony asks as he hands me the tools.
Angelina makes a tiny jump, her eyes widening as she clutches some yellow-paged book to her chest.
“Her diary!” she spins around, holding it up in the air like it’s a winning lottery ticket.
I trail off. “What in the…”
“Can I keep it? Beckett, I don’t want anything else! Anything at all! Please, please, please!” Angelina cracks it open, reading the first page out loud.“This diary belongs to LucilleElodie Evans.”
I shrug, assuming the diary must be all about boys, dating, and gossip. I have no interest in that. If anything, my sister’spersonal life belongs in the hands of her most trusted friend, and that’s exactly who Angelina was.
“You can keep it. I don’t mind,” I thank Antony silently, walking up to Lucia’s bedside table and starting to empty it out. “Anything interesting you want to know about her?” I joke, finding it funny that she’s so enthusiastic about unveiling my sister’s innermost secrets.
“Oh my God, no! I don’t care about the gossip. It’s really not about that.”
Angelina sits on the floor, legs crossed. Her voice is quiet, and when I spare her a glance, I see hints of happy tears at the corners of her eyes.
“I dropped my phone in the toilet back at the hospital. My cloud backup wasn’t working right. I lost most of our conversations,” she swallows hard, the words weighing on her. “There’s barely anything left of it. I mean, I even lost our pictures together. The ones we took for my birthday?”
“I still have them on mine.” I throw her a quick glance. “I can send them to you.”
