Free One Hundred Days of Rain by Carellin Brooks Page B

meeting, try again, try one more time, give up. No! Giving up isn’t allowed.
    In the office they are packing boxes. Outside rain falls on the alley, muffling in its effect. The phone rings: it’s M. Now that the criminal aspect has been decided, M can call anytime. And does. M wants to discuss some detail of the child’s rota of pickups and drop-offs. Some question M’s decided needs clarification.
    I’ll tell you if there’s a change in the schedule. Goodbye, she says, and hangs up before M can reply.
    Are you so desperate to talk to me, she wishes she’d said, to make up all these excuses to call? So many things M could do, to start making amends for her monstrous wrongs. Set the record straight. Admit her culpability. Calling her at work nowhere on the list. Why infuriate her needlessly when she is the one ensuring M’s visits, ensuring the child has time with M – she who honours the child’s wishes, to a point at least? Oh how noble. Please.
    She thrills at the prospect of speaking her mind to M, even in fancy. But mostly she’s astounded at herself. How is it, this far from their abrupt division, that M’s voice still moves her to trembling fury? That she loses her powers of speech in rage?
    Rain can be all these different things, she tells her co-worker Romany.
    Nah, says Romany. Rain is rain.

65.
    Surprise. A process server lurks outside the door to the alleyway. Rage & violation. Another set of documents. Requisition, affidavit, writ of summons, notice of motion: she hardly knows, and reading won’t enlighten her, experience has taught, only panic. Something to do with her separation, with the child’s visits, no doubt. Her finances yet again, a few pieces of paper discovered missing in the reams she’s passed over. Why the bundle has to be given to her this way, like a drug or a secret, cash in a sack, another legal mystery.
    But she takes the papers as she’s supposed to, shoves them in her bag for later, when her chest will slow its twitter and thrum. Time enough to read them, then, and puzzle out what they are telling her. Such a nice man, the process server, for someone nobody ever wants to see.
    The rain continues. All day there is a solid wall of it wherever she turns, rain hemming her in. Too wet to bike. Too wet to do anything but try and stay out of it, behind the windows of the bus.
    The thin man who lives next door to her son’s father gets on the bus. He embraces her as she’s reading the papers. M’s requesting more time with her son, this time confirmed by the court. M proposes a complicated schedule which, as she reads it, reveals itself as an increase in the time M will have with him. M’s suggesting a report by a qualified psychologist who will spend time with them all and interview the child. Who will make a recommendation regarding custody and access. She remembers how she and M fought fiercely against the possibility of this same report, in court, when her son’s father wanted one. How bitterly M railed against the possibility of intrusion.
    Everything will work out, the thin man says. You’re the mom.
    If only everyone understood this. If only she could be so sure. Break the surface for a moment, rise above the undertow. Instructions she wants to give. Her own: trust self. Trust things to work out. To M: give it up. Give thanks for what you’ve got. Stop bothering me.

66.
    Finally even she begins to talk about weather.
    This rain is killing me, she says.
    Four of them are sitting at a long table with a view of the harbour. Outside the port glows with harsh orange light and outsize painted machinery. Humming helicopters skim angular towards the heliport. Cutting rain into mist. Below, where she can’t see unless she walks to the window itself, boxcars painted brown & orange clash on rows of rusty tracks. Everyone nods at her words.
    How are you, she asks the woman at the tea store. They talked so