This Week's Story
The Storm Child
The house was empty, but then she thought it would be. She pushed open the back door, stepped into the kitchen and dropped her backpack on the floor. The room was cold and dark. A high oak table sat in the middle surrounded by stools with wrought-iron backs and wooden seats. In the middle of the table stood seven white candles, each a different size. A note was pinned to one.
‘Car’, it read, ‘sorry we missed you. Had to make our flight. Have a good week. Love mom.’
Cantara pulled open a drawer in one side of the table, took out a package of matches and lit the candles. Then she heaved up her backpack and walked into the hall. It was too dark to see the end. She dragged the backpack with one hand and felt along the wall with the other until she reached the light-switch. The front door windows reflected the lit hallway, she could not see outside. The weather forecast had said rain tonight, but there had been no clouds in the sky when she had left school. It was now past ten as she struggled upstairs and dumped her backpack in the first room on her left. She pushed open the window. Cool autumn air flowed in bringing with it a burnt smoky odour. She stood for a moment and then lowered the sash, leaving it open just a bit, but closing the curtains. In a few minutes, she was asleep.
It was raining when she woke. A loud crack of thunder, followed by a brilliant flash of light and another burst of thunder shook her from sleep. She leapt from the bed and ran to shut the window. The curtains were blowing and the floor was wet. Outside, the yard was obscured by a milky sheet of rain. She closed the window and settled back into bed. The small travel clock on the bedside table read two-thirty. She stared at the ceiling. There was something she had forgotten. In a moment, she jumped out of bed and tripped on the rug. She stood up, ran downstairs and into the kitchen. The candles had dripped wax over the table; two smaller ones had burnt down completely and hardened into a pool around the others. The dim light relaxed her; nothing had burnt. There was food in the fridge, bread, cheese, peppers, onions, milk and a couple cookies in the cookie jar. Cantara sat down, after finding a blanket to wrap around her shoulders, and contemplated her food. The wakefulness that had brought her this far was quickly waning and she thought she might return to bed and eat in the morning. She was just deciding to stand up and blow out the candles when something hit the back door. It sounded like someone throwing pebbles against the wood, over and over. She peered out the window, no one was there, but still the noise insisted.
When she opened the door, a slender grey child was standing, her fist full of pebbles, half on the porch half down the step. When she saw her, she tossed the stones to the ground and walked to the door.
“Let me in.”
Cantara held the door close to her side.
“Who are you, what do you want? Are you lost?” She leaned out into the darkness to get a better look.
She did not seem dangerous, small, with greyish, but not old looking, hair. She didn’t look older then the kids Cantara babysat for, eight or nine. Her face was oval with a tiny pointed chin on fat high cheeks crowding into her dark eyes. She stood, as if she had all the time in the world to spend on this back porch, looking at Cantara. One thing was certain Cantara thought, she could not turn her away in the storm if she was lost. Despite an inner voice pleading with her to return to the warmth of bed, she pulled open the door. The girl scampered in and climbed to the table. Immediately she grabbed a cookie and began nibbled around the chocolate chips. Cantara instantly disliked her, or yet, not quite as fierce as dislike, some vague uncomfortableness, stranger than the shock of finding a lost child on your doorstep in the middle of a storm.
“That was my food.”
“I thought you were going back to bed.”
“Whether I was or not is not your business. I never told you anyway what I was going to do. Where are you from and why are you out in this weather?” She lifted the curtain to look out the window. The lightening had moved away but the rain had not lessened.
“I don’t like these dark things. Don’t you have any gingerbread?”
“Listen, you shouldn’t be worried about cookies now. I’m going to call the police and find out if anyone has reported a lost child.”
“Don’t,” she began, dropping the cookie, “I love you.”
Cantara jumped as if touched by a snake. “What?”
“I love you.”
Her stomach rolled, threatening to disengage. What was she saying? She stared at her and picked up the phone.
The child dropped the cookie, flung herself to the floor and began to sob.
With one eye on the girl Cantara lifted the phone to her ear and clicked the receiver, the line was dead.
“Shit,” she murmured. The girl had stopped crying but lay still with her head down. Her breathing was slow and regular, she thought she fell asleep. Once more she tried the phone, but the lines must have come down in the storm. She was a small girl. Not very strong looking, but with obvious emotional problems. Cantara stepped toward her and began to lay the blanket on her. She sat up.
“You didn’t use it?” her eyes were dry.
“No, I might later, but…now…the line is down.”, the truth came out, unbidden.
“Good.” She jumped up, grabbed Cantara’s hands and pulled her into the living room.
Faint music wafted through the room. Cantara looked around, searching for the source. Pulling her in a circle the girl began to jump and dance. The music grew louder; it was like nothing she had heard before. An old music, maybe, but for the young. Light and proud, joyful and regal. Cantara pulled back, trying to reach for the light. The music confused her, she could not find the wall, and it grew louder around her. It swelled, eclipsing the house and the storm until Cantara could not avoid it, was sucked into it and, before she realised what was happening, she was dancing with the strange girl. She spun in a circle, clutching her hands, her feet swept off the ground. She tilted her head back and the ceiling spun with her, the crack in the corner she remembered from childhood, stretched out, widening until she could glimpse the sky overhead. And then the sky, ignoring convention, slipped a bright finger of light through the clouds and ripped them apart; the darkness went on forever. The world split before her like a ripe fruit, like the crack in the ceiling, doing something it shouldn’t. The faster the girl twirled the more she felt herself splitting open, slipping into the chasm above. With a great effort, before she slipped and fell forever, she wrenched her hands back and stepped away. For a few moments the room whirled and twisted on itself. Then it slowed and she could see the girl standing in the middle, for the first time she looked a lost. The music faded.
“I don’t know what you think you are doing, but you had better stop.”, the words poured out of her before she could catch her breath. The girl did not answer but stared straight ahead. She seemed to be in a trance. Cantara waved her hand in front of her face, she didn’t flinch. She sat down, staring at her. In a moment, the girl began to shake and she stepped forward, as if from a dark room into a light one.
“Why did you leave?”, she asked.
Cantara’s hands were sweating and she wiped them on her pyjamas.
“I didn’t leave. I didn’t want to throw myself around the room like a crazy person. It’s three o’clock in the morning, you have to tell me where you are from. I should call your parents and tell them you are all right.”
The girl sank to her knees.
“Don’t you like me?”, her voice trembled.
Cantara looked at her hands. Her fingernails, freshly polished two days ago were chipped, one tip had ripped to the quick. She hadn’t felt it at all.
“Oh, of course I like you”, she said irritably, “But why can’t you understand, people are probably worried about you?”
She did not answer but sat on the floor. Cantara felt there was something she should say, but nothing came to mind. She rose and tried the phone again but the line was still empty. She looked out the back door, the rain had lessened and the thunder was far away. She counted, two, three, four, five, six from a flash of lightening to the rolling boom in the distance.
Cantara turned. The girl was talking, her back to her. Her words were strange, they flowed like smoke from her mouth, for a brief moment she thought she could see a heat shimmering from her head up to the ceiling. She couldn’t understand the language, but as the girl spoke it arranged itself into something she could understand. It happened slowly, at first she did not even realise it was happening, but a word here and there broke through the surface, like bubbles in gently simmering water, until she recognised so many words she could grasp the sentences, and in the sentences the meaning. Her heart began to pound painfully hard.
“I didn’t think it would be this difficult. I loved her right away, with the first flash of light from the sky, I knew. I never occurred to me that she would feel any different. What can I do?”
She walked over to her, wanting to speak, to break the silence of her one-sided conversation. But she thought even if she did speak, she wouldn’t answer. Maybe she couldn’t even hear her now. That was ridiculous; they were in the same room.
“That is the way it is. You see someone, you love them and it is as right as rain. They learn of your love, you tell them, and they respond with a yes or a no. But to dance with someone and then pull away…”
Slowly, painfully, she realised that she would not return to bed for a long while. Even more slowly, more painfully and with much more resistance, it crept into her consciousness that the girl was not quite a girl, nor quite a woman. Her chin was a little too sharp, her eyes a little to free. And her hair, the grey of her hair. Her hands were cold from the inside out and a fine sheen of sweat covered her palms.
“I am at a loss. I give myself to her and she does not say yes or no. She asks stupid questions and talks of other things, things I care nothing about. What is her purpose? She is not of the storm, so people warned me. It happened with Floin, he was never the same. But how can you stop love, you do not choose the thing that you love, whether it is worthy or not. Whether it accepts or not. You must give, or it will kill you.”
Cantara walked around her and sat on the couch. She pulled a blanket around her shoulders, protecting herself from the small figure on the floor, sitting with her head on her chin, talking.
Suddenly she stopped and looked up. The rain was almost finished.
“I must go. We are leaving. I will return. Someday”, and her voice grew soft while her eyes grew hard, “you will love me also.”
She turned and ran out the door, but there was no noise, and when Cantara went into the kitchen the door was firmly shut. She lay down on the couch and was troubled by dreams until morning.
***
It was late autumn. The sky was blue, scatter with swathes of bright clouds when she pulled into the driveway with the last-minute groceries. He mother bustled out the back door, carrying a dish of water which she set on the ground and then hurried to the car.
“Did you find everything?”, she called as she stopped to flick a smudge of dirt back onto the lawn.
“Yeah.”
“Good. Are you hungry? The turkey won’t be done for a few more hours. The Lindenmyers might stop by for drinks sometime. We had a great trip with them you know, the Lindenmyers. At first, I thought we might not enjoy ourselves for two whole weeks together, but you know how you father is. And it worked out fine in the end.”
Cantara rode the wave of her mother’s voice into the house.
It was dark when the rain began.
“I don’t know”, her mother began, as soon as the first drops hit the pavement, “The weather this year is incredible. Do you remember that storm in July, honey?” Cantara’s father glanced up from the paper. “Outrageous. And that cold spell we had at the end of August. The frost was early this year.”
After dinner, Cantara lay on her bed and looked out the window. Electricity crackled in the sky, shooting fire to the earth. She flipped through a book she had read and reread. Her mother stuck her head in the room, saying goodnight, reminding her where the extra blankets were and that her sisters would arrive soon, one from college and the other married with her husband, and they would go for a walk in the woods if she would like to come. Her father called goodnight through the door and then it was quiet, except for the lash of rain against the window.
It was not long before she woke. The luminous hands of the clock showed eleven. The rain was still pounding outside. It hit the window with a tinging noise. As she lay and listened, Cantara realised it was not just the rain making noise. Someone was throwing something against her window. She lay still and slowed her breathing. It occurred to her that if she were quiet she would not know she was here and would go away. But the noise continued and to break the tension settling in her body she rose and raised the sash.
From somewhere in the thick darkness the girl leapt up onto the sill. She grinned at her and brushed into the room. She was taller, almost to Cantara’s chin, and her grey hair, not old grey but grey like the wing of a dove, like a fog, like the colour of the rain when it obliterates the world, was plastered wet to her head.
“You came back.” She had not believed it, though many times in the past few months she had hoped and feared that she would.
“Of course.” She shook and the water seemed to evaporate from her body. Cantara crawled
back onto the bed and wedged herself into the corner, pulling the blankets over her feet.
“So”, she began, hating the trembling in her voice, “What do you want?”
The girl looked at her and cocked her head. The air had grown warm and Cantara wished to open the window but her feet too heavy to move. She did not seem like a child anymore.
“I want to take you with me.”
“Where?”, she whispered.
“Home.” She pointed to the window, carelessly. With the flip of her hand droplets of water flew from the tips of her fingers and landed on Cantara’s cheek. They were icy cold. Where they touched, her skin tingled. The smell of fresh wet grass and electricity drifted past her nose. Suddenly her world came rushing in, insufferably cramped, stuffed tight into a square of sunlight and buildings and work and air. Trim packages; family, friends, work, a building for each of them and all in their place. Thousands of everyday things, bits of her life, pieces neatly divided, crowded down on her, multiplying over and over until she felt she would suffocate under the weight.
The rain had picked up. Wind threw it against the window and pulled it out again into the night. There was a brilliant flash of light and a great crackling boom above the house. Cantara tensed, waiting for her parents to wake and come running. The house was silent. Outside, the wind cried and moaned and threw itself against the window. The sheer strength of it swept over Cantara; the resplendent sensation of being uprooted, the falling, and wet on her face and hands. She was tumbling, lifted, tossed and torn, her heart in her mouth, her limbs splayed out. But still, and yet. The girl looked at her smiling.
“It would be glorious.”, she whispered. Cantara twitched at a thread in the quilt. She tossed back her hair and tilted her head.
“Were do you live?”
It was difficult to look directly at her, for she shone gently, almost shimmering, light gleaming from her face and clothes. At times, she caught a glimpse of something familiar, not human, feral, and perhaps dangerous, something she could place in a story or fairy tale.
“I live in the storm.”
Cantara pondered this and asked,
“What do you do when it isn’t storming out?”
The girl laughed.
“It’s always storming.”
And, Cantara realised, it was. Always somewhere, the clouds were racing, rolling over themselves in grey and black, heavy with rain and tingling with electricity. She pictured the girl, and, she realised, many others like her, rolling in the thunder, jumping out of the way of lightening and laughing, like children jumping out of the way of a red rubber ball.
“What do you eat?”
“Oh, anything. We eat human food sometimes. Your mother leaves food out. When we visit, we take some.”
Cantara sat back.
“She leaves out cat food!”
The girl frowned and tilted her head.
“It isn’t the best, but if we are hungry, we eat what is there. I do like gingerbread though.” She looked at her almost beggingly. Cantara didn’t notice, her face turned toward the window.
“I couldn’t go with you.”, she announced finally.
The girl nodded. She sat, her chin on her knees, and waited, staring at her until, finally, Cantara stopped her wandering gaze and looked back. Her eyes were grey now, shifting like the clouds in the sky, sometimes flashing blue and sometimes black, and every so often a deep green like the colour of the sea under a darkened sky. She tried not to look but they grew so large she found herself peering into them, waiting for the clouds and the rain and the thunder. She reached out her hand and touched her knee.
“You could.”, the girl whispered.
“Just once?”, she asked.
Cantara nodded slowly. She took her hand.
***
The woods were wet. She walked in front of her parents. Her sisters had arrived earlier than expected and walked with them. Every so often a chattering of conversation began and slowly subsided. She could hear her brother-in-law arguing about politics, and her younger sister scuffling over the path. The trees were bare, the last of the leaves having been washed off in the storm. She did not make any noise as she walked and her family forgot she was with them. At first everyone had tried to engage her in conversation until her mother said she was tired and to leave her alone. She walked on ahead. The water dripped on her from the trees, her socks were slightly damp above her boots. In the sky the clouds were heavy, hanging low with rain and electricity. Every so often Cantara looked up, murmuring to herself.
She kept her hands in her pockets. Running through her fingers were two silver chains, charmed with tiny glass baubles. Each of the translucent spheres contained a cloud. Some had rain and lightning flashing. Some were solid grey. A couple were broken through with bits of blue and bright bright light. She twisted them through her fingers and thought of clasping them round her ankles and walking in the clouds.
Dinner was noisy. The day had passed in warm activity until after the meal and then everyone slept. In the quiet of the afternoon Cantara walked, almost tip-toed, out the back door, taking the dog with her and headed to the woods. She let her off the leash and she raced into the trees. A fine mist began to fall. She walked until her feet hurt, passing over the same path again and again. She thought she saw a glimmer of grey, a subtle shape in the mist, but it ran away whenever she turned to face it. It was dark when she returned. The premature dusk of winter, even more so because of the clouds. Everyone was in the television room when she came in. Plates with hot turkey piled on bread, soaked in gravy, lay on the side tables. The noise from the football game, the aftermath of the parades, sounded tinny and far away. Cantara sat, ate a sandwich and went to her room.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with her”, her mother’s voice followed her to the kitchen, “I think something happened while we were gone in August. Don’t you think so honey?” She heard the rustle of the paper held in her father’s hands.
After everyone had settled into bed, she opened her window and looked at the sky. The wind was blowing high in the trees, their naked limbs lashed back and forth in the air. It was almost warm. Cantara leaned out the window, her arms stretched before her. The wind blew her hair. Her eyes were changing, from brown to grey, now almost black or deep green like the sea under a darkened sky. Colour roiled through them like clouds riding the sky. She lifted her face and cried out in joy as the first wet drops touched her skin.