A Rainstorm: A short story

A Rainstorm

He stepped out onto the porch and found her, finally.

Helena was standing there, in the pouring rain, her red hair drenched and her curls matted against her back and cheeks as raindrop after raindrop pelted her face, arms, neck, shoulders, hands, legs. Her eyes were closed, and her arms were spread away from her gently, palms facing up and fingers curled towards the sky.

“Helena?” Kenneth called. Her white cotton blouse was sticking against her like a second skin and her jeans were several shades darker than they were when dry. “You should come inside. You’ll become ill.”

“I won’t become ill,” she told him, her mouth widening into a smile of pure joy as her eyes remained closed.

“You can’t know that,” he told her sternly. “You need to be careful now, remember?”

This had become an old argument by now, and he waited for the usual reply—that she couldn’t live life afraid of everything, that locking herself in a safe little box was worse than any fate that might result from failing to do so—but to his surprise, this time, she simply said nothing.

“What are you doing out there, anyway?” he tried again.

She took several deep, reverent breaths. “Being,” she answered.

He never quite knew what to do when she entered this sort of flight of fancy.

“You can ‘be’ just as well inside,” he offered.

She lifted her eyelashes, and as she looked at him her eyes twinkled, as though she knew some delicious secret that he did not.

“Yes, I can,” she agreed, but she made no move to step out of the rain.

Kenneth wished that he knew how to reason with her.

Helena held out her hand to him invitingly. “Come and join me.”

He shook his head. “I have no intention of getting soaked to the bone. This is madness. Please come inside.”

Helena lowered her voice conspiratorially. “If you let it, the rain will whisper the secrets of life, of love, of pleasure and pain onto your skin, and it will sink into your soul.”

He wondered, with a sudden pang of alarm, if perhaps Helena had lost her tender grip on reality, had finally gone insane.

“Are you sure you’re feeling okay?” he asked.

She laughed a tinkling wind chime in a leisurely summer breeze. “I’m better than okay. I’m better than amazing. I’m not crazy, Kenneth, I promise. I think maybe I’m saner than I’ve ever been before. Everything’s clear now. I can’t believe how simple it is. I understand.”

“What do you understand, then?” he asked.

Her eyes shone and she beckoned to him. “Come here with me and I’ll tell you,” she whispered, so softly that he could barely hear her voice over the roar of the rain on the roof and the wooden deck.

He reluctantly stepped through the doorway into the downpour. She took his hand and squeezed it. “It’s going to be okay,” she promised him. “We don’t have to worry anymore.”

“So you’ve decided what you’re going to do?” he asked as he suppressed a slight shiver. Even in the tropics, the air was chilly during a storm.

She giggled and shook her head. One of the curls held back in her hairclip fell past her shoulder. For some reason, Kenneth found himself transfixed by that curl, and he focused his eyes on it instead of on the woman in front of him. Despite the heavy rain, the lock of hair was dripping slowly, almost methodically. It reminded him of the hospital room, of the IV.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

His own hair had been thoroughly pounded by the rain by now, and it stuck to his forehead and neck as he felt water trickling down his ear.

“But you said everything was clear,” he reminded her. “You must know what you’re going to do.”

“That’s just it!” she cried, grabbing his other hand as well. “You see now, don’t you? You feel it too. I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m going to do, or where I’m going to go, or what’s going to happen next. It could be anything. Isn’t it beautiful?”

She leaned in closer to him as she spoke. Her hands tightened around his, and when she looked into his eyes, she was so radiant, her eyes were so filled with the conviction that whatever she felt was the answer, that shining beacon of universal meaning they’d been searching for, that Kenneth did not have the heart to tell her that all he felt was cold, and wet, and rained upon.