Rain hopped back up the stage steps and pushed aside one of the screen doors. The patio was broad and welcoming with the garage doors up. Tarps covered well-preserved wrought iron furniture. A fire-pit and chimney stood, detached, at the patio's edge. Though years of weather had blown and iced and rained into it, Rain could still detect ash at the base of the hearth. As she took a stretch and a deep breath of country air, Rain turned and took in the view toward the beautiful old brick-faced factory building down the dirt road. Highland Morrow and its strange and haunted chief. It was near enough to add a picturesque sense of company, but far enough to feel apart.
On her way back in, she noticed another black tarp against the house. A sculpture maybe? She lifted a corner. Powder-blue enamel. Chrome. A wheel. It was the Vespa she'd seen in her father's pictures. Faded, pale blue and cream. Flat tires. Dirty. But no rust.
All at once, Rain felt a terrible mix of excitement and anguish. She sat down at the end of the porch looking at the Vespa through tears of a pure, Christmas-morning, greedy joy mingled oddly with a bitter feeling that she'd missed out on something. Even before she had gone to boarding school when she was fourteen, her father had moved them through several different apartments in the city, always casting off excess belongings. Though she had never acknowledged it, their impermanent transience had untethered her. Whatever longing for a more stable family life she might have harbored, this was not for the daughter of John Ray Morton. They were supposed to be quite above such conventional desires. But this house, though merely her father's storage facility, carried vast chunks of his past and hers, too.
Giving in to the tears, Rain tried to sort out this strange cocktail of feelings. We treat grief so delicately, not wanting to disturb the wasp's nest that it is. Others approach us gingerly and even when we “give in” to it, we're somehow throwing ourselves upon only a single aspect. The lonely howl. But in reality, grief is messy and boisterous, crowded with the accordion shaped collapse of time that a life's end creates. All of her father's life and her time with him seemed suddenly to carry equal weight, so that what she got from him in her daily life no longer outweighed the past. “The Past,” which John Ray Morton very literally and literarily always put down as “merely a construct of the mind,” as if events once passed weren't real anymore, as if we could choose to empty them of significance and only apply onto them that which our clearest thinking and most logical brain could concoct.
Rain could still feel that familiar sense of being cast adrift. But the house, this Vespa, the heaps of photographs in the boxes and just being locked to a piece of the earth made her feel ruddered and thrillingly in control. She still couldn't shake off that inappropriate Christmas feeling, like she had been given a gift she'd never even hoped to wish for. She felt resentful and angry at the one person she'd give anything to see again. How could she be unearthing anger now? When he was alive, she had felt nothing but gratitude toward him.
This realization threw her into a new eruption of tears. Out of which she immediately let out a self-conscious laugh, realizing that if anyone walked up the road and saw her, sitting there patting a dirty old moped and gasping with these hiccupping sobs, they would probably think she was having a seizure or arguing with some unseen adversary through a locked door. She was in conversation with herself, and Rain felt for the first time in years that she was waking up, that she was feeling her own emotions. That there was a Rain Morton Madlin, not just daughter-of, wife-of.
She shook her head at herself, wiping the tears from her face with her tee-shirt. What the hell kind of backwards person was she? She never conceived of herself as anything lesser or overly connected to her dad or to Karl, but a huge smile spread across her face as she stood savoring the realization that she was at HER cabin with HER stuff.
Back in the cabin, Rain fell heavily onto the couch and pulled a box of pictures she'd been sorting through toward her with her foot.
John with various vintage celebrities, John at the cabin looking tanned and windblown, John with friends, John fishing, John sailing, John hiking, John with those same friends. The woman in some of the pictures was dark haired and clear eyed and had a familiar look about her.
Rain flipped the photo. “Alice, 1975” was written on the back.
Rain tossed it back into the box and grabbed her old leather rucksack. She stuffed it with her camera, a water bottle and a small sketchbook, grabbed her iPod out of its dock and plugged into it, shoving it into the bag, which she swung onto her back.
Straight off the porch and past the Vespa, Rain didn't bother to close up the cabin behind her. She took to the narrow wooded trail as if she were bicycling, churning her gait from her first steps like she was riding through the woods.
Her iPod blasted the pace, the rhythm pumping through her head as she pounded through the forest, hitting one spectacular view of the Hudson valley after another. Bull Hill here, Storm King over a bend in the river there, the train tracks of the Hudson Line chugging past Little Stony Point and into the tunnel under Breakneck Ridge.
Rain stood, watching a train scream past, watching the river keeping its steady flow behind it. Tears streamed down her cheeks and she abruptly took off again along the trail.
Vanderkill didn't have much of a town center. No traffic lights, not even a stop sign along Route 9D, the road iterating the river's curves coursing through the highlands. It did, however, have its own post office and one small gas station with antique pumps that rolled the numbers inside little windows, slotmachine style. And it had Vanderkill Market, a tiny coffee and take-out shop, sparsely stocked with sundries but which drew an impressive breakfast crowd. Rain pulled up in front on the shiny, newly refurbished Vespa and parked it between a silver Hummer and a matching silver Prius. The front windows were crowded with flyers for music, theater and art events in the area. It was morning, so the place was heavy with baked goods and gourmet bits and pieces, cellophane wrappers twinkling under the perpetually lit Christmas lights. Customers gathered and hitched themselves up to the front window-sill bar to catch up and sort through their mail.
As Rain ordered her coffee, the woman behind the counter noticed her paint-stained hands. “You new at the factory?”
“Excuse me?”
“Sorry. I'm Chassie, own the place.” She was tall with choppy, blonde hair and thick hands. “Couldn't help but notice paint on your hands. You new over at Highland Morrow?”
“The paints? No, I'm⦠I paint. Messily⦠I'm in the little cabin right next to it, though.”
Chassie said, “Right there and you're a painter?” She shook her head and took her time fitting the little cardboard belt onto the cup.
“Well, nobody buys them,” Rain said awkwardly.
“Yet!” Chassie slammed the cup down in front of Rain and pointed up to the left. “No modesty allowed in here. I've got a sign up⦔ She did. MODESTY-FREE ZONE it said right alongside the one that said, UNACCOMPANIED CHILDREN WILL BE SOLD.
Chassie stopped pretending to serve her and asked, “You take the tour?”
“First day here, actually. I just pulled into town and went straight to the factory.”
“Smart girl,” Chassie said. “You're lucky actually. He's been cutting back the tours. Used to be once a season, then once a year. Now you never know.”
Chassie pounded the empty cup in front of Rain for emphasis. “Speak of the devils! Here's Alvaro and Anne.”
Rain shook hands. “Oh, Alvaro from Highland Morrow.”
“And this is Anne,” Alvaro said. “My wife, Anne Donohue.”
“Nice to meet you. I'm Rain. Rain Morton Madlin.”
“Rain-rain Morton Madlin, Alvaro and A-anne,” Chassie chanted the names like a children's rhyme.
“Justâ¦too much, isn't it?” Rain smiled with embarrassment.
“She loves to give people crap about names!” Anne said. She was pretty and pale with snow-white coloring, dark hair and bright lipstick. Her manner was enthusiastic and down to earth at the same time. Like she either didn't know how pretty she was, or she'd had to get used to making people feel at ease about it. She leaned in, meeting Rain's eyes. “We were at a party last week and she finds this woman Cat and this other lady Kitty and she just has to drag them together and do a whole Uma-Oprah thing on them.” Anne smiled sidelong at Chassie. “And it was just as not funny that time.”
“It was funny!” Chassie insisted. “You should hear what people do with my name!”
“We love you, Chassie, darling,” Anne said. And then to Rain, “Did I hear you're a painter?”
Rain, feeling a bit cornered, said, “I don't really have a gallery yet, but I've got some bites and I'm working really hard on getting my first show.” Rain looked self-consciously at the empty paper cup Chassie was holding, wondering why she was telling them this. It was both more certain and less certain than she was making it sound. It had been so long, college probably, since she'd had to meet new people and explain herself with external facts: major, dorm, hometown. And now, here, though some things were clear already, city transplant, for example, there were these other externals that could be told or skipped: job, marital status, financial situation, famous father. Rain knew how people reacted to this last, and never particularly enjoyed the kind of fawning even the most reasonably sophisticated people would then throw her way. It was such an awkward danceâanything genuine from them amounted to a lot of outsized praise that Rain then had to heft graciously on his behalf, the few cagier ones often shooting looks at her the rest of the time, which let on their own mix of feelings about celebrity and status, our American hierarchy, or maybe it was that they didn't give a damn. She hated the whole rigmarole, which was why she had taken Karl's name. But her own name still popped to her lips unbidden, even after so many years.
Chassie finally poured a cup for Rain. “First cup's on the house,” she said, shooing her aside to take Alvaro's order.
“That's fantastic!” Anne was saying.
“Do youâ¦?” Rain asked, stopping herself.
Rain walked with Alvaro and Anne over to the fixings counter where they added their various milks and sugars and packets of sweeteners.
“I mean do you makeâ¦?” Somehow the question seemed too intimate. Are you an artist. In Rain's personal lexicon it was kind of like
are you in the game
? Or
do you think you're important
or something equally judgmental and inappropriately statussy.
“No, no,” Anne laughed. “I am hopelessly non-artistic, no.” She laughed and batted Alvaro's arm. “Alvaro's a musician and that's about all the art our lives can take.”
The man was beautiful. Rain had noticed him at the factory. Pretty almost. And everything about him, the way he moved and held himselfâit all broadcasted his devotion to his wife. He seemed like the kind of find a woman of very specific tastes would land upon. Uncommonly attractive, yet uniquely devoted.
Alvaro gave his wife a warm glance and a touch on her arm. “Anne is a big shot in the city,” he said playfully.
“Stop!” Anne said, looking pleased.
“Anne runs all the marketing for a group of very large department stores. That's all I'm gonna say.”
“Wow,” said Rain. “That's impressive.”
“I just love to shop,” Anne whispered conspiratorially. “I'd love to see your paintings sometime, though.”
“Oh, I⦔ Rain wasn't sure why she felt so nervous suddenly. This woman was just like the princesses in the cartoons she had loved as a little girl. Warm, generous, gorgeous and sisterly in a fairy-tale way. Rain never had good luck with women friends. Her college roommate was hugely introverted and while it worked smoothly for them as roommates, she never actually thought of Marie as a friend. Marie was the one who had been so intimidated by her father. Her best friends were Stan and Quinn. Straight guys who were more brothers to her than boyfriend material.
Rain wasn't one of those women other women didn't like, but she just didn't know how to go about girl talk. In a way, Gwen was her closest woman friend, but there was a firm, safe distance between them that kept her from the full-out, giggly closeness that she saw depicted in movies and on TV.
But this Anne made Rain feel buoyed and hopeful. “Yeah, let's do that! Thanks!” she called to Chassie at the counter, raising her coffee up high.
Autumn was just beginning to touch the Hudson Valley. The season marked the region's ridiculous, gilded-lily, high point. Too perfect, too beautiful, too thoroughly scene-set. The historic villages filled with tourists who strolled down the middle of busy little side streets with their heads leisurely swiveling as if what they were seeing were set up for show. And you couldn't really blame them. The beautifully maintained little cottages with American flags sailing out front. The prolific bunchings of cornstalks, haystacks and other charming country fall-dom. And the highland mountains rising picturesquely above, deepening as the season progressed into those reds and golds and looming straight above the mighty Hudson, all made the place postcard ready.
When the leaves were in full glory, however, the colors were outrageous and almost mocking. Each tree a further degree of impossible fire from the last. Aglow with white gold through neon orange to cherry red, along with remaining bits of glowing bright green, all set in the most obvious layering to show off their depth and complement and deepen each other.
Rain was out discovering trails through the highlands every day for hours at a time, making photographs. She told herself it was just a hobby, a blowing off of steam. She was drawn toward those landscapes, framing shots by climbing around to get the perfect view, then tilting down, catching the tracks low next to the river, shooting montages with dozens of photos focused on one view.