A Rainy Day Folie-à-Deux

The rain went on until I thought I’d go mad.

Adrienne had her last day of seventh grade, in a gray drizzle. The cat sulked on the porch, glaring at the sloppy overgrown grass. The guinea pig sulked in her cage, because she couldn’t go out to nibble the clover.  Jimmy the Mechanic had to put off the repairs and maintenance he’d planned on Sacre Bleu, which meant the air conditioning didn’t work properly, but that hardly mattered because it was so cold.

The Artful Dodgers had no school to look after them, so they kept dropping in on me. Whenever there was a break in the rain, and sometimes right in the middle of a deluge, they’d squish through the puddles for a visit. Sometimes the five-year-old, the one I call The Mandrake, would burst in without knocking while I was in the shower or trying to work, and sometimes she’d bring the toddler with her before her mother noticed he was gone. Once in awhile I met the mother herself, panting for breath and terrified she’d have to call the police when she realized the toddler had fled again. One day, the landlord ought to fix that gap in the fence.

“Will you put us in your car and take us to the beach this summer?” asked the eight-year-old, whom I call The Sylph, during a thirty-minute pause in the showers as I ran out to pick strawberries.

“Do you even have car seats for everyone?”

“I don’t believe in car seats. You’re going to miss me this summer, because I’m going to stay with my aunt in Mingo! I’m going to do chores at her house for money, and walk to the store for treats, and swim in the pool!”

“Sounds like a great summer,” I lied. It’s a testament to how poor the Dodgers are, that the prospect of a summer just south of here in the village of Mingo Junction sounds like a vacation.

“You’d better make us a strawberry shortcake tonight,” she hinted, “because I’ll be gone tomorrow and won’t see you for weeks!”

But she was back on the porch the next day, trying to feed the cat a slice of old bologna.

“Why, Sylph! I thought you were with your aunt in Mingo!”

The Sylph tried to hide the lunchmeat. “Oh. Well, I didn’t know that she was lying!”

“I’m sorry she lied. Well, you can come in and play with Legos if you’re quiet– but wash your hands first, so they don’t end up smelling like bologna.”

She played with the toys for an hour. Then I said I’d better walk her home, so I had enough time to take Michael to his evening shift at the restaurant.

“I’m not going home! I’m going to Jessica’s.”

“Jessica? Where does she live?”

“It’s kinda far away, down that way.”

I couldn’t quite place which of the revolving cast of neighborhood characters Jessica was. There are a huge number of noisy children in this part of LaBelle, children whose mothers let them run around the block and play at friends’ houses until the street lamps come on. Most are as poor as the Dodgers. Some come from loving homes and some are less fortunate. About half are Black and half are White. Half are quiet and polite, and half are so chaotic I cringe when I see them coming. My mind’s eye pictured Jessica as a synthesis of these: a mixed race girl in a worn purple sweatshirt, courteous but also mischievous, living in one of those bungalow houses on Wellesley Avenue. My brain always conjures up an image for me, when I’m given a name I don’t recognize. I think it’s because of my autism. As soon as I’d settled on this mental image of Jessica, I decided I must have met her before and forgotten.

“Well then, I’ll walk you to Jessica’s house. But we have to hurry! I’ve got to take Michael to work!”

“That’s okay. I know a shortcut!”

The shortcut was down the alley, past where Charlie the cat had been teasing a neighbor’s dog. We both stopped to pet Charlie as we walked by. Next, she led me between her house and the derelict wreck next door– a murderous-looking tangle of wild mint, thistles, and burdock. The weeds were tall enough that I wouldn’t be able to see a broken bottle or a rusty nail before my ankle grazed against it.

“Don’t step on the bird’s head!” said the Sylph as we skirted a nasty patch of poison ivy.

I looked down, but I couldn’t see a bird’s head. “Why is there a bird’s head?”

“Oh, you know that bird you tried to hide from us? I found him and brought him back! We were taking care of him on the porch. But then a stray cat came by, and–” she snarled in a nasty way, curling her fingers like claws.

“Poor thing! That’s why you leave birds alone. Now, I really need to drive Mr. Pezzulo to work. Are we almost at Jessica’s house?”

“Down here, I’ll show you!”

We walked to the end of that block and up by that boarded-up building that used to be a grocery shop. I don’t like walking next to it, because the stray cats like to climb in the old coal chute window, and it smells. Then she took me around to the next alley over, just as it started to rain much harder.

“Look, a haunted house!” said the Sylph.

It was an abandoned garage with an X of plywood nailed over the door. “There are a lot of those around here.”

The Sylph began babbling about the time she went inside another such abandoned garage, and heard the moaning of spirits. She said that when she brought the Mandrake back the next day, all the furniture stored in the garage had been moved around by ghosts.

“You have to be careful about trespassing in people’s garages!” I chided, as I stepped through a pothole puddle and got  soaked up past my ankles. I wondered if Jessica’s mother was home, and if I could borrow one of her towels. “Even if they’re just abandoned property, there could be rats. Are we almost there? I need to get back quickly and drive Mr. Pezzulo to work!”

The Sylph led me down that alley and around to the next block, still going on and on about haunted houses. We finally got to Carnegie Street, just at the spot where a wayward driver once hit a telephone pole and knocked out the power for the whole neighborhood. I thought, perhaps, that Jessica lived in the rowhouses just by the dip of Wellesley before it goes down through the woods to the main road. I hoped I could borrow an umbrella before I left.

“Are we almost there?”

“Just a little longer now!” she started to scamper down yet another alley, past the oldest house in LaBelle and down to Kendall Avenue where I used to live.

The potholes in this alley were worse still. The crime in LaBelle is not as severe as people sometimes pretend, but this particular part doesn’t have a good reputation. A lake of muddy water much deeper than the one I’d already stepped in stretched out before me like the Red Sea, in between garages. And it was getting colder all the time.

I addressed her sternly by her real name. “We’re almost out of LaBelle entirely. We’re almost to Woodlawn Avenue. I know you’re not allowed to walk this far by yourself. Where does Jessica live? Tell me the name of the street.”

The Sylph smiled coyly, as she’d done when talking about her aunt in Mingo.

“There is no Jessica, is there?”

She shook her head.

“I’m taking you back to your house.”

As we trudged back, she started in on another story. “There’s a SKINWALKER living in my basement! Sometimes, I hear him dragging his claws across the floor at night!” and then she glanced at me, apologetic. “This is a made-up story this time.”

I took a deep breath. “I love your imagination. You’re a very good story teller, and I hope you write books some day.”

We swapped scary stories all the way back to our street. She told me about the Skinwalker in her basement. I told her about the giant prehistoric ground sloth, from an illustration in a coffee table science text, that my siblings used to pretend haunted our own basement growing up.

I was just in time to take Michael to work.

The rain may finally stop this week.

Maybe I’ll go to the beach.