Chapter 6: Red in the Rain

The rain came down in sheets and the boy in the red coat went along the middle of the road with his head down.

He could not lift his feet. He sent the message down and something in his legs took it and did nothing with it, so he dragged instead, right and left and right, and the coat dragged behind him, heavy as a wet rug, red gone darker where the water had soaked in, the hem swinging lower and heavier with every step. It was a coat for a stage. It had no business out in weather.

The water in the gutter ran to the drains and the drains took it and it kept coming. Somewhere north of him the thunder went off, one long roll. The shops along the street had their windows dark, and the wet road ran black under him and stayed black.

Cold came up through his feet into the rest of him, and then it was all of him.

And the noise.

It had been going since before the street. He had both hands pressed over his ears and it made no difference, because it was on the inside: it talked, all of it at once, one voice laid over another, and not one word of it his.

“Shut up,” he said. “All of you. Shut up.”

His voice went out over the wet road and came back off the building fronts, small and flat, and the noise went on.

He did not know what he was called.

“I have a name,” he said.

The noise did not care.

He got four more steps. Then his foot came down on something that was not flat, and he went over sideways, and his shoulder hit the road first and his head after it.

Water in his mouth. Water in his ear. Iron.

He lay still and let the rain have him. Blood was warm in the cold, running out of his eyebrow and into his eye, and he shut that eye and stayed where he was and let the rain hit him in the face.

The word came up out of the noise.

“Elliot.”

Everything that belonged to it came with it, all at once, and shoved the noise back far enough that he could hear himself think. A stage. A house with people in it. Twenty-eight years, nine of them spent getting a room full of people to look at the same spot at the same time.

The last night. The show had closed and he had stayed after it, alone, walking the blocking with the script rolled up in his hand and the ghost light burning downstage and the seats empty behind him. Then the floor had moved under his feet, and something in the dark overhead had come down and hit him. A pipe. That was his best guess; one of the pipes the lights hang from. After that there was nothing at all, and then there was this.

His head hurt in a way that had a shape to it. He looked up the road at the corner and knew, before he could see it, that there was a hydrant on it. He knew there was a clinic with a green door four blocks over. He knew the house at the end of Winter Street had a porch on it, and where the spare key was kept.

He lay in the road a moment longer than he had to. Then he got his hands under him and pushed, and his body rose slow, the way it did after four or five days of putting a show together, when there was nothing left in him to lift with.

The coat hung off him and dripped. Rain went down the back of his collar.

From the clinic it was two or three minutes to the house. It took him a long time. He counted the corners to keep himself moving. Four. Then three.

The way he knew went past the clinic. His brother was in the clinic. He should have gone today. He had not gone today. He carried that a while and then set it down.

Every window on the block was dark but one.

That one was at the end of the street, behind glass, low and yellow and steady, and it was the only light left anywhere; the storm had taken the rest off the block. The porch below it was dark, and when he saw the lamp his shoulders went down about an inch.

He went up the steps. His pockets had no keys in them. While he was still working out what to do about that, his hands went to the mailbox nailed up beside the door, and under it there was a flat tin box hanging off a nail, and the lid lifted off, and the key was in it.

The lock turned. The door swung back and warm air came out at him, and he stood in the doorway with his eyes shut and let it have him.

It smelled like wet wool and kerosene and food that had gone cold.

The lamp was on the table. Glass chimney, brass, flame the size of a thumbnail, and it moved everything it touched.

There were two of them at the table, one at each side, and a plate in front of each of them, and the food on the plates had stiffened where it sat. Neither of them had a fork in hand.

They had been crying. That was the first thing. Their eyes were red and their faces were the wrong color, and they were looking at him, and he thought: they waited. They sat here with the plates in front of them and waited for him, and the food went cold.

Neither of them said anything. The lamp leaned and stood up again and leaned.

“Mom,” he said. “Dad. I’m home.”

The man’s chair went back and stopped. He got half up out of it and put one hand flat on the table. “You—“

That was all of it. His throat moved.

The woman did not get up at all. Her hand was on the back of her chair, and her mouth was open, and her lips made the shape of the first sound of his name, and nothing got out of her.

He bent to get his shoes off.

His hand went down to his heel and closed on skin. No leather, no laces, nothing between his fingers but wet. He tried the other one. The other one was the same.

He looked behind him. The floor had two black prints on it, one in front of the other, and they were already going dry at the edges.

“Mom. I got mud on your floor.” He straightened up. “I’ll clean it up tomorrow, all right? Is there water? I’m so thirsty.”

His father’s hand came up, palm out. He went past it, and the red sleeve went past it too, and then he was in the kitchen.

The kitchen was dark. He found the counter with one hand and the cooler with the other. The cooler stood in the corner with the five-gallon jug on top of it, and he got both hands around the neck of the jug and lifted it off the stand.