apologies for the rain

If he’d known the storm would last all afternoon, he would’ve taken the early train. By the time he learned of cancellations due to flooding, the last one had departed the station, leaving him soaked in the road outside of the restaurant. Not the impression he’d hoped to make after two years, but if he was stuck here, he ought to make the best of things, and he hadn’t packed another suit. At least his watch was waterproof. 

Maybe he ought to look for a hotel instead and catch up on sleep. It’s not like the visit was planned. Or he could take the ferry while it was still running and bang on Aaris’s door, hoping he’d let him stay another night. Probably, since it was raining. He still called after major storms.

Saira had recently moved to the outskirts of the town. Since he was headed that way, he might as well look for something in that direction. Officials had cars here, but besides the train, there was no public transportation. The rain was falling straight, striking his neck and running down his back. After one block his socks were wet and he wished he’d stayed at the restaurant for another drink. They’d paved the streets since the last time he’d been out this way, which made the walk easier except where rainwater pooled around the storm drains. He avoided someone barreling toward him with their head down and misstepped into a puddle, flooding his shoes.

When he came upon a guest house, a sign in the window indicated no available rooms, but he ducked inside to ask and gratefully accepted a towel to dry his head.

“Visiting the area?” asked a wiry woman behind the desk.

“Yes, I’ve got friends who live here. I was supposed to take the train later today, but they’ve shut the lines down because of the weather.”

“With that suit, you look like you’re from the city.”

“Yes, ma’am. I represent the seventh ward.”

“We won’t have any rooms available until this afternoon. You’re welcome to stay in the lobby until one opens. It’s been warm, so I don’t have it on, but I can light the fire.”

She motioned across the room. Ren followed the motion of her hand to a wood bench in front of a stone hearth.

“I’m supposed to visit someone now. Her house isn’t too far from here. Could I borrow an umbrella?”

The innkeeper found one for him behind the desk and passed it to him with a smile.

“Another guest left this behind. What name should I put in the ledger?”

---

He’d been surprised to get the letter from Saira. After the travel restrictions were abolished, she’d moved east with her uncles, craftsmen who had set up shop along the new train line. Friends was the wrong word for what they had been. The situation hadn’t allowed for that, but he believed they could have been friends if they had met differently, if he’d had another vocation and she hadn’t spent her childhood behind glass.

He hadn’t expected that she’d want to see him again, but the letter had been friendly. With so many people moving out this way, her uncles’ business was thriving. Their furniture was even being imported back into the city, although they refused to go back themselves. She had assisted them for the first year, she’d written, sharpening skills that had dulled after years in a cell, and saved enough for a place of her own closer to the border. 

The letter included her address. It ended, “Come and visit.”

He’d replied to say he’d be out this way in the spring. If she’d received the letter, she hadn’t written back and he didn’t have her ID to message about his arrival. Her address wasn’t listed in the system.

The house wasn’t marked with numbers or a name. On first pass, he walked right by the path leading to her door and continued along the street, which tapered into a muddy trail to the woods. On seeing no houses, he turned around and retraced his flooded steps, returning to what looked to be an overgrown footpath. Rain drummed on the umbrella as he squinted through the downpour, trying to spot where the path led. In the distance he thought he could make out a wood structure. Pushing aside a low-hanging branch, he stepped onto the path, which widened a few steps into the woods. He followed it to a single-story house built among the trees. A well-crafted chair waited beside the door. 

He raised his hand to knock.

A minute passed but no one came to the door. Disappointed that he had caught her out. He searched his pockets for something to write a note but came up empty. What now? He could go back to town, buy a change of clothes in one of the stores, and wait in the guest house lobby until a room came available. If he called Aaris to say he’d been delayed, they would bring the boat for him, although they might all be stranded if the waves became too strong and prevented a return trip. No, he’d sprint back to town. Exhausted from the walk and chilled to his skin, Ren rested for a moment beneath the eave.

“Can I help you?”

The door beside him had opened and she was looking out, face fuller than the last time he’d seen her. Her once-long hair was sheared to her shoulders and tucked behind one ear but still as dark, and she wore a sleeveless black dress that touched the floor. The pleading he had sometimes noticed in her expression was gone, but that he should’ve expected. They were not the people they had been back then.

He straightened his back and brushed the wet hair back from his eyes.

“It’s Ren.” Voice lost against the rain, he cleared his throat and spoke louder. “I would’ve let you know I was coming, but I didn’t know how to contact you.”

“You’re soaked.”

“Ah, yeah. I got caught in the storm.” He held up the umbrella. “I didn’t get this until too late.”

She didn’t say anything, only opened the door wider and went into the house.

He followed, stopping just inside the door on a mat already mud streaked. The pants stuck to his thighs. His shoes would take days to dry if they weren’t ruined. He stood helpless at the door waiting for her to return.

“Sorry to show up unannounced,” he half-shouted over the constant drum of rain on the metal roof. “I got your letter, but I don’t know if you received my reply. I sent it a few weeks ago. They stopped the trains because of the storm. I have a hotel in town if today isn’t convenient. Maybe we can get something for breakfast before I head back to the city tomorrow.”

She wasn’t in sight. He faced a sitting room that opened to a covered porch overlooking the forest. There were two doors to his right, another across from him. The second one on the right opened and she came toward him with a stack of clothes.

“These are Dolan’s, so they’ll be too large, but they’re dry.”

Ren tried to recall the name. Her uncle, an inmate in Central. Big, sturdy guy. Quiet. Good behavior. Regularly consulted for a shady antiques dealer with ties to the former governor. Ren accepted the clothes and set them on a chair as he peeled the wet jacket from his arms. She took it from him and went to the far door. He got a glimpse of plumbing when she opened it and hopped out of his pants, but she was faster than he anticipated. He whipped around out of modesty.

“I’ll make tea,” she said, a laugh in her voice.

She went into the last room. He pulled on pants that would have slid off of his hips if not for a thick drawstring knotted securely at his navel. With the cuffs rolled up, he was able to walk and went into the living area.

“Sit wherever you like,” she said.

He chose a wood bench. It was well-made, nicer than anything in his apartment. He ran his hand down the tight parallel lines of the grain. Her handiwork? The bench faced the windows. Rain streamed from the roof and obscured the view of the forest.

“So. How are your uncles?” he asked.

“Happy. I got tired of hearing them in the bedroom and thought it was time to find my own place.”

She approached and set a steaming mug on the bench beside him. Ren laughed.

“I don’t like staying with Aaris for the same reason, although in his case, he does it on purpose.”

“I’m surprised you were out in the storm. I remember you don’t like rain. Why is that?”

She hadn’t spoken much in the prison, but none of the inmates had spoken much, at least not to him or the other guards. And he had always been careful, between regulations and lingering prejudice, to avoid revealing too much about himself. Even though years had passed and he was now a guest in her home, he struggled against the instinct to stay quiet.

“My siblings and I lived with our parents until I was seven. This was in the Belt area outside of the city. It wasn’t as built up back then. My folks had a little restaurant, so they met people of all kinds from the city and farther east, people visiting from down the coast. This was before they tightened the borders. Coming into contact with that many people, they caught something. We never learned what it was, but Toma—that’s my older brother—thinks it was the illness that took out the first colony. The three of us didn’t catch it. We finished quarantine and stayed in the house until the food ran out. Toma was going to send me and Emma to live with relatives, my mom’s sister and her husband, but when Emma found out, she cried so hard that he agreed we wouldn’t go.”

Ren took a breath. He’d never told the full story to anyone before, and wondered if he was saying too much in one go. But he owed her the honesty. He believed that. And he believed that she wanted it too, otherwise why had she written?

“Toma was old enough to work and promised we’d go east instead, just the three of us. Heard it was cheaper out this way. We left the night before my aunt was gonna collect us. The plan was to take the train to the border and go on foot. They hadn’t run the lines this far east yet. But when we got to the station, the tracks were shut down because of an approaching storm, just like today, and we couldn’t go home because they were looking for us. Toma said we’d wait it out under the platform, but it was one of those immense coastal storms, winds like I’d never seen. We were the only three stupid enough to be outside in it. Toma should’ve dragged my ass to my aunt’s, but I was defiant, said I wasn’t going. We found shelter. It kept most of the rain off and we didn’t get hit by debris, but I didn’t sleep that night. Come morning, the sun came up and Emma cried that she wanted to go home, so Toma said he was taking us to our aunt. I haven’t been good with rain since.”

When he glanced at her, she had a pleasant expression on her face just shy of a smile. She was looking not at him but at the rain streaming off of the roof.

“I slept outside the night I broke out,” she said, bringing a cup of tea to her lips. She took a long sip. “Direct coastal strike. I thought I would die.”

In his chest, something tight formed that he had to swallow down. Struggling for words, he frowned at his lap. “Saira, I…I wish that…”

“I know.” Her voice was perfectly level. She glanced at him. “How did you end up in that job, anyway?”

“Oh. Turns out raising kids was more expensive than my aunt and uncle realized. Repopulation was still going on at the time and they got me a spot in the program. Guaranteed food, medical care, government job once I got out. I was nine, I think, and Toma was working most of the time, so I was acting out. I said I’d go thinking he would put a stop to it, but he thought it was a great idea. Aaris and I ended up rooming together. We both wanted Patrol, but they shut down the division before we reached that point. He ended up in politics with his mother, and I was offered corrections.”

“Where is he now?”

“They’ve got a place in this cove that’s a pain in the ass to reach, but it keeps people from bothering them. There were a lot of questions after his mother resigned.”

“Dolan says you’re in politics now.”

“Ah, yeah. I hadn’t planned on going back to the city, but after the resignation, I thought maybe there was something I could do.”

She’d turned her eyes to the window again. For most of a minute neither of them said a word. Saira took a deep breath, settling in her chair, rounding out her spine. She slumped lower, as if they were casual friends who had tea together every weekend. He glimpsed the inside of her left arm, a pattern he had never seen: seven circular points at uneven intervals connected by a thin black line. It began near the branching veins on her wrist. Halfway to her elbow, the line backtracked to pick up a point before plunging to the curve of her arm.

“Is that a tattoo?”

“Dolan has one too, and Praxis.”

Ren frowned. “That antiques dealer is your other uncle? But he was an elite. I thought he must’ve fled with the governor.”

She smiled. “He maintained a public friendship with her right up until the fall. It gave him prisoner access under the guise of information—artifact authentication, that sort of thing. He claimed to have plundered what was left of our village, but he’d actually preserved it, and it meant they got to see each other every few months while Dolan was inside. He says Praxis was waiting in front of Central for hours the morning of the release. He cried, apparently, although I can’t imagine that.”

She rotated her arm so that her wrist was further exposed.

“They couldn’t risk rings back then. Praxis was from the city. He’d been Patrol once—that’s actually how they met, a long time ago—but they’d been children then, so he didn’t shoot and Dolan didn’t attack him. He used to come and visit us when he could. It was acceptable because of his work with antiques. The sweeps had stopped and more people went in and out of the city. Dolan wanted to get married in our tradition, but a ring would’ve been conspicuous within the storm walls, so they each bear this design instead—small versions on the inside of their fourth fingers. Mine’s new.”

“What does it mean?”

She touched the highest point on her wrist. “This is the origin, the one who first received the gift. And these…” trailing her fingertip along the string of stars “…are the others who traveled with him into the mountains. They brought it back for the rest of us. When they passed, they were honored with a place in the sky. Even now, centuries later, some believe you can still feel the original connection. These stars protect those who share a bond. As my uncles’ daughter, they allow me to share in it.”

“Oh, so they’re—” He caught himself before the slur came out. Say a word enough times and it loses meaning, but with practice he’d learned to stop. Fear had taken longer to unlearn. The ones born with the virus—ones like her—could kill him if they got close enough, but that was true of anyone when you thought about it. “They’re both carriers?”

“Praxis by choice. And they wear rings now.” She smiled again and gestured toward the sky. “The stars won’t be visible until the rain clears. Stay for dinner. I’ll show them to you.”

“Oh, I took a room in town.”

“Sleep here.”

Ren understood the tone in her voice and swallowed hard. “Saira, we really shouldn’t.”

“What do you like to eat? I have mostly grains and vegetables, but I was thinking about grilling a fish.”

Grateful for the change in topic, he cleared his throat. “Fish sounds great. Thanks.”

His watch lit up with Aaris’s ID. “Excuse me,” he said and stepped out onto the covered porch, into the privacy of the rain to take the call. “Hey.”

“I heard the lines are down. Where are you?”

“Saira’s.”

“Should we come for you?”

“No, but thanks.”

“Alright.” A pause. “Come back sooner next time.”

He hung up and Ren laughed to himself about how soft he’d become. His watch battery was below half. He’d left the charger in his bag at the boarding house. 

“Can I borrow your charging bank?” he asked, coming back inside.

“I don’t own a watch.”

“How do you keep in touch with your uncles?”

She motioned to an old-fashioned monitor he hadn’t noticed in the corner, probably removed from a public terminal that had been upgraded. The screen was dark and free of smudges. 

“I was fine without one but Dolan insisted. I don’t actually know how to use it.”

Ren resumed his seat and pressed his lips together. She’d been imprisoned when the technology became widespread.

“I can show you, if you want.”

“Later.”

He smiled awkwardly, fishing for anything to say, anything but apologies. His fingers again found the grain of the wood bench. 

“This is beautiful. Did you make it?”

She nodded. “Would you like to see the workshop?”

He agreed and followed her out the front door, staying close to the house to avoid the spray of rain. At the corner of the house, the porch turned. They followed it through a breezeway to a second, smaller building behind the house. Inside, the beat of rain was almost deafening.

“I wanted it separate because of the dust,” she shouted over the din, tilting open sections of the walls to let in the daylight. It released the trapped sound and revealed a long workbench against the wall, smooth broadleaf planks leaned together, an assortment of wood and metal tools hanging from pegs. Two unfinished chairs faced each other in the middle of the room.

Ren knelt down to look at them more closely. The seats curved, arcing into smooth backs.

“It’s an experiment,” she said. “It’s taken me a while to get used to the feel of wood again.”

How long were they going to ignore what neither of them would say out loud? Ren bent his head.

“Does your uncle know you wrote me?”

“He knows that you got me out.”

“That’s not the same thing. By all rights, you ought to hate me. How many times did I put you back into that cell? Hundreds?” 

He covered his mouth.

“Did you enjoy it?” she asked.

“What, seeing people locked up. I don’t know, maybe at first when I thought we were doing something righteous.”

“I enjoyed killing the other guards when I broke out. Do you hate me for that?”

He’d gone through training with the ones who’d died. Some he’d considered friends. Anger, no. Guilt, yes, on waking in the hospital to the sound of his brother crying.

“I was glad you got out. Felt sick when I heard you’d been recaptured. But our situations weren’t the same, not even close.”

She came to where he was standing and touched the back of the chair. “I don’t want to think about that anymore. We’re both here. Isn’t that more important?”

“You want to forget how we met?”

“I accept it.”

He looked at her and at the chair and at the sawdust under his feet. No amount of talking could erase the past, nothing could set it right. They could continue talking in circles around each other until it was time for him to leave and probably never meet again, or he could accept this peace offering. She probably shouldn’t offer it and he probably shouldn’t accept, but it had been years and he hadn’t gotten her off of his mind. From the way she was looking at him, it had been the same for her.

After a while, he nodded. Took her hand, got to his feet. They trailed sawdust into the house that he left on the doormat.

---

She grilled the fish with more spice than he was used to. It made his eyes water but the flavor was good. Better than the food he made for himself. 

“It won’t keep,” she said when he refused seconds.

Was he pitying her? 

He accepted the plate, complimented her cooking. Watched the time. He’d have no trouble finding his way to the guest house in the dark, but the later he stayed, the harder it would be to leave. The more validity it gave to the nebulous, wrong thing connecting them. 

He couldn’t bring himself to stand up after the plate was cleared away. Saira opened the glass door separating the room where they sat from the covered porch. With her back to him, she lowered onto a chair that faced the darkening forest. The door between them remained open, letting in the sound of rain.

He didn’t leave like he should have. He watched her silhouette. She sat at an angle with one hand holding a glass of something dark. Periodically, she brought it to her lips. A second glass waited beside an unmarked bottle. She’d left it on the table in front of him.

One drink couldn’t hurt. He owed her that. He owed her apologies he couldn’t articulate. Words stuck in his throat. The bottle held some type of liquor with a woodsy, unfamiliar scent. He poured more than he should have and went out to her, sat on a second chair. There were three. Ren thought of Dolan’s thick hands and swallowed a huge, burning sip. 

They didn’t speak again until their glasses were empty. She poured them each another. He was no stranger to drinking, but the stuff went straight to his head, blurred the stars coming into view as night rose over them. The rain that had been falling since that morning thinned to drops.

Without the drumming to fill the silence, he grew aware of it. He’d never been good at sitting with his own thoughts.

“Which…” He cleared his throat, wagging a finger at the sky, at the stars that were visible now, a great swath of them against the black. He didn’t know their names. Until this moment, he’d seen no point in learning them. They watched from their height, eyes of the past. He tried to match them to the pattern on her arm. “Which ones are they?”

“They’re already behind the mountain.”

“Ah.” Disappointment hit like a wall and a heaviness descended. His arms and legs felt like weights. The stars blurred, or maybe it was his eyes that blurred the stars. He so rarely cried. “Guess I’ll have to see them next time.”

“How long from now will that be?”

He met her eyes, difficult to see in starlight, a strange lavender hue he’d never forgotten. They came closer. She’d stood, hovered over his chair, dark hair framing her face. When she reached for his, he turned his head, kissed the first star on her wrist, the one beneath it, following the line to the bend of her arm that slid around his neck. Her weight settled across his legs.

“Are you in my head?” he whispered.

“I wouldn’t do that.”

He didn’t say I’m sorry and he didn’t say I want you or we can’t. He didn’t leave but broke like a storm, unrestrained. Raised his wet face to hers.